My friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too picturesque to be printable. We had travelled together all the way from Noumea, and made friends before the St. Antoine had left the wharf. We had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. I never travelled with a better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world I hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during that evil time.
I have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship.
I had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won education and culture of a sort disappeared, and I found myself thinking the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’ boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse, blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. The man who is found out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of such was our conversation on the St. Antoine and the St. Louis; not exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true description of men and things.
On the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at North Head, I said to him:
“Well, I’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into civilisation again.”
“I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and I had had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory.
The Quarantine Station, North Head, Sydney.
For nearly a month we had been living on food that a Kaffir in the Kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on board the St. Louis we had eaten dirt of many French descriptions. Everything was dirty. Not even the insides of the loaves were clean. The galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of a starving man. The cook was to match. The steward who waited on us was willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself and his crockery. The chief steward on French ships is called maître d’hôtel, and by this title we addressed him. On shore we should have said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the St. Louis he was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was open to judicious bribery.