The steward likewise visited me here, and sympathized. The old fellow talked to me much as if I had known him all my life; he being known well enough, indeed, to the company for whom he was going to sea in his old age. A scarred nose distinguished him for a time. He complained, with a sort of personal visualization of the sea’s boorishness, that while attending to some stores he had been blown off a case into a barrel of flour.
Having therefore spent the best part of my first two days at sea in my cabin, which offered no great variety in itself, I was much pleased to find myself able to arise, manfully, the third day. But I avoided breakfast. The morning looked inviting, the black funnel gleaming even richly in the sun, so presently I took the air. First, I had found some difficulty in shaving, even with a safety razor; but it was accomplished.
We were still in the Bay of Biscay, and the Bonadventure had not done lurching and wallowing. To my naïve eye, the sea was in considerable commotion. Like ever-changing rocky coasts, the horizon rose and fell. As unsteady as that, the day left behind its sunny comfort and brought clouds and chillier air. I saw the navigators passing on their business, but I could not emulate their equipoise; I attached myself to a rail or fixture to watch them, this one coiling a rope, that trailing a coco-nut mat in the sea–a capital cleanser; to watch the gulls also, so easily keeping up with the plunging brows, amid all their side-shows of wheeling and darting flights. Inured, I presently joined in at dinner in the saloon; ate, and had no serious trouble. A framework, which was described as a “fiddle,” covered the table and checked the more mobile crockery; but it could not prevent an accident in the steward’s own department, which caused his tone of private feud with Neptune to sound clearly in the apostrophe, “Break ’em all, then, so we shall have none for the fine weather.” But fine weather was expected now.
V
My prospect brightened with the weather. “Things are looking bad,” observed the chief engineer with an anxious glance at me. “Why?” I said more anxiously. “There’s three teaspoons missing,” he answered, satisfied at having played his joke. The morning, though the wind blew hard against us, was sunny and cheerful; the light blue sky flying here and there the streamer of a shining cloud, the moon going down ahead of us, the drove of gulls still pleasing themselves in glistening whims of flight among the waves. Warmer it was, but not yet warm enough for me: and going out on the deck I often sheltered behind the cabins with fingers as of old turning waxen for want of blood. I found the ancient sea a new pleasure in its aspects: I liked to see the wave-tops suddenly become crystalline with a clear green glow. Such a greenness immediately associated itself with, and, I even thought, comprehended, the curious emanation of the old mermaid stories. It is a light wherein the sudden arising of a supernatural might seem natural.
Aboard, less remote interests revealed themselves. The cook, that lean aproned figure, walked slowly between the stores and his stronghold the galley, carrying perhaps a couple of large onions; and the smell of cooking might rise above that of the Atlantic. The tawny firemen emptied their buckets of cinders in long series through the iron chute over the side; or found, by request, work for an oilcan round the funnel. Everything said, in its manner, “No blind hurry, no delay.”
Hosea invited me to his ampler room for daily conversations over the friendly glass; we talked much, but not about the sea. His active mind, after searching through the files of recent newspapers saved up during his stay in port, had many an opinion on affairs less adjacent; and he had a curious miscellany of reading at his service. Sir Edwin Arnold was one of his few poets, and for him he spoke out most generously. Here I was obliged to watch my behaviour. As a person engaged in literature, I could not precisely admit the ignorance of the Light of Asia which I have always enjoyed; and I wished I had read it. The conversation should have run upon the sharks, the hula hula, typhoon and the submarine barrage, by rights; not upon the history in blank verse of the founder of Buddhism. It was some relief to find Hosea turning to Tennyson, whose works he had upon his desk. Shakespeare, he said, he had been advised by old captains to leave alone until he had turned forty.
From his book cupboard he lent me several books, of which I only failed to master one. This was The Lone Star Ranger, by Zane Grey; a fiction in which beauty was reached through blood, but not in this world. Far more romantic was a large official treatise styled North Atlantic Directory, reading which, I determined never again to leave any book about ships and the sea in the threepenny tub.
Meals, the important thing in the trenches, began to impress me as furnishing the incidents of seafaring life. They seldom came too soon. Their atmosphere puzzled me in a minor way, until I was acclimatized to the habits of the saloon. Little would be said at them for a long time; then some one would quietly mention some occurrence of technical bearings in the first place, and so educed, a few anecdotes would follow. Phillips, the chief engineer, with his seasoned air and dry ironical ease of speech, was perhaps the narrator of the saloon. I remember his first tale that I heard: it was simple, yet picturesque. “Once we were running in the banana trade. We went to Labrador for some fish. The captain was putting in to Cape Sidney, and he didn’t like the look of some of the lights. So he went down to the bottle and got blotto. The second mate–a little Greek, he was–was on the bridge, and he found the captain was blotto, and he’d never been to Cape Sidney before, and he was worried out of his wits. So he came down and asked me what he should do. ‘I can’t tell you,’ I said. ‘But if I were you, I should bring her round in circles outside here until daylight comes.’ And there he stayed, steering round in circles all night.”