And here my doggerel I ended.... Horrors on horrors! Could I believe my eyes? There, looking down from the promenade deck, in long ulsters and jaunty velour hats, were the three Misses Chumley Grace. They were laughing happily, and looking right at me. Could anything, I wonder, have equalled the rapidity of my retreat? As rabbit dives into its burrow, as otter into its pool, so dived I, down, down to the dark hole they called my cabin, where I collapsed disgustedly on my bunk.
And there for five days I remained.
It may be assumed (so much are we the creatures of an artificial environment) that it is only in the more acute phases of life we realise our truer selves. As a woman in the dental chair, as a fat man coaxing a bed down a narrow stairway, as both sexes in the clutches of mal-de-mer, are for the moment stripped of all paltering pretence, so in the days that followed I had many illuminating glimpses of my inner nature. Never was a man more rent, racked, ravaged by the torments of sea-sickness. But let me read you an extract from my diary:
“Eight hundred Italians on board, and we are packed like sardines in a keg. Our wedge-shaped cabin is innocent of ventilation. The bunks are three tiers high and three abreast; so that, as I have an outer one, a hulky Dago ascends and descends me a hundred times a day. Also I am on the lower row, and as both the men above me are violently sick, my situation may be imagined. The sourly stinking floors are swilled out every morning. My only comfort is that I am too calloused with misery to care about anything.
“It’s the awful, brutal sinking that fixes me; as if I were suddenly being let down the elevator shaft of the Singer Building at full speed, ten thousand times a day, then as suddenly yanked up again. By the dim light I can see hundreds of cockroaches crawling everywhere around me, elongated, coffee-coloured cockroaches, big ones, middle-sized ones, tiny baby ones. They wander to and fro, fearless and apparently aimless. But perhaps I am wrong about this. Perhaps they are moved by a purpose; perhaps they are even in the midst of a celebration—following the mazes of a cockroach cotillion. As I lie watching them I speculate on this. What they live on may be guessed at. And as if to mock me on my bed of woe all the rollicking, frolicking sea-songs I have ever heard keep up a devilish concert in my head, singing the praises of this fiendish and insatiable sea.”
For nine-tenths of his time the artist lives the lives of other men more vividly than his own; for the other tenth, his own ten times more vividly than other men. Of such transcendent tenths creation comes. It was then from the very poignancy of my sufferings that I began to evolve a paper on the pangs of mal-de-mer. It was to be the final expression of the psychology of sea-sickness. Even as I lay squirming in that sour, viscid gloom I rejoiced in the rapture of creation. It seemed, I thought, the best thing I had ever done. Though I had not put pen to paper, there it was, clearly written in my brain, every word sure of its election, every sentence ringing true. I longed to see it staring me from the printed page.
And on the morning of the sixth day I arose and regarded my shaving mirror. My face had peaked and paled, and was covered with fluffy hair, so that I looked like a pre-Raphaelite Christ. Indeed, so æsthetic was my appearance I had to restrain myself from speaking in blank verse.
How glorious was the clear, sweet air again! | With every breath of it I felt new life. | The sea was very amiable now, | and playing children paved the sunlit deck. | A score of babies punctuated the picturesque confusion. On the decks above the plebeian seconds and the patrician firsts presented two tiers of amused faces. They were like curious spectators looking down into a bear pit.
Then suddenly did I realise my severance from my class, and, strange to say, it aroused in me a kind of defiant rage. For the first time democracy inspired me. For five days I had starved and suffered—or was it five years? Anyway, the life of luxury and ease seemed far away. Goaded by the gay shouts of the shuffle-boarders on the upper deck, I felt to the full the resentment of the under-dog; yea, ready to raise the red flag of revolt behind blood-boltered barricades of hate.
But all at once I became conscious of another sensation equally exorbitant. It was the first pang of a hunger such as never in my life had I endured. In imagination I saw myself at Sherry’s, conning the bill of fare. With what an undreamt-of gusto I made a selection! How I revelled in a dazzling vision of delicate dishes served with sympathy! It was a gourmet’s dream, the exquisite conception of a modern Lucullus. I almost drooled as I dictated it to a reverent head-waiter. Yea, I was half hunger-mad. When, oh when, would lunch-time come?