This work lasted several days. I was mixing paint on deck, one afternoon, when the chief mate, strolled by, sauntered back, turned to look away across the harbor as though he had not seen me within five feet of him, and muttered as to himself, “We’re going out to-night, homeward bound for Boston. The company don’t allow us any too many men. If some of these painters was found stowed away on ’er after the pilot left ’er, I don’t suppose the old man would do a hell of a lot o’ kicking.” Then he turned until he could glance at me out of the tail of his eye, looked off across the harbor once more, swung round on his heel, and marched aft.
If the ship had been eastward bound, the mate’s hint would have fallen on fertile soil. Several painters disappeared during the afternoon and they did not go ashore. I took supper with the crew when the day was done, watched from the pier-head as the newly-painted vessel turned her prow to the open sea, and hurried back to the dwelling of the boarding master. “Dutch” was indeed wrathy—especially as I had called for two and a half francs that he had considered safe in his pocket. When I opened the door of his wine-shop, he stared at me from behind a dense cloud of smoke and a tall bottle of greenish contents for several moments. Then with a roar that only Portuguese Pete of all Marseilles could have equaled, he burst out, “Why, you damn fool, why in hell didn’t you stow away on that tub? Didn’t you know she was Boston bound?”
“Aye,” I answered. “But I told you, you remember, I’m not homeward bound.”
Several ships bound for Egypt signed on a man or two during the next few days, but they were all “boarding-house stiffs.” When the mate of the P & O yacht Vectis sent to the Home for an English quartermaster, I fancied my time had come, as there was not another English-speaking sailor “on the beach” after the arrest of the deserters. But the P & O ships only Britons. The next day my first acquaintance was released from the hospital and secured the berth.
The last day of November, a month after my arrival in Marseilles, found me still gazing out upon the Château d’If and up at the ship’s ball on the summit of Notre Dame de la Garde, and still tramping sorrowfully up and down the breakwater and the endless wharves. But with the new month my luck changed. The Warwickshire of the Bibby Line, plying between England and Burma, put in at Marseilles to await her overland passengers and sent out a call for a sailor. I was the first man on board, displayed my discharge from the cattle boat, and was called into the cabin.
“It don’t tell in this discharge whether you are an A. B. or not,” said the mate. “Are you?”
“I am an A. B.,” I replied, though I meant quite a different sort of A. B. from what the mate understood by my answer. I was signed on at once, and the next day I watched the familiar harbor of Marseilles grow smaller and smaller until it faded away on the horizon.
CHAPTER VI
THE ARAB WORLD
On a placid sea the Warwickshire sped eastward, sighting the mountain ranges of Corsica and Sardinia, and sweeping through the straits of Messina so close to the Sicilian shore that we could make out plainly, from the deck, the evening strollers on the brightly-lighted promenade. The crew was East Indian. The white quartermasters with whom I messed were gorged with such food as only a French chef can cook, and valiantly I struggled to make up for those famished days in the dismal streets of Marseilles. My official duties were largely confined to “polishin’ ’er brasses,” and, with all due modesty, I assert that the ship was the brighter for my presence. The Bibby Line scorned to carry any but first-class passengers. I took my “watch below” within easy hailing distance of the promenade deck and those belinened voyagers to whom the custom of tipping for every possible service had become second nature, and picked up many a franc and six-pence among them.
On the morning of the fifth day out the brasses were pronounced in a satisfactory condition, and I was ordered into the hold, with a score of the native crew, to send up the trunks of Egyptian travelers. The weather grew perceptibly warmer with every throb of the engines. When I climbed on deck after the last chest, the deep blue of the ocean had turned to a shabby brown, but the horizon was still unbroken. Suddenly there rose from the sea, on our starboard bow, as a marionette bobs up in a puppet-show, a flat-topped building, then another and another, until a whole village, the houses of which seemed to sit like gulls on the ruddy sea, spread out before us. It was Port Saïd. The pilot-boat had swung alongside and the statue of de Lesseps was plainly visible before we caught the first glimpse of land, a narrow stretch of reddish desert sand beyond the town. Slowly the Warwickshire nosed her way into the canal, the anchor ran out with a rattle and roar of cable, and there swarmed upon our decks a countless multitude of humans, that seemed the denizens of some remote and unknown sphere.