From Edinburgh to India & Burmah

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

As we get south nearer Aden the sand spits tail out south and slope off inland like wide glaciers, through which appear dark coloured rocky islets.

… We had rather bad luck yesterday and to-day; the iron wind catcher put out at our port to make a draught caught a sea, and threw it all over our cabin. G.'s maid had just opened my overland trunk to give the contents an airing, and now my collars are pulp and rose pink from the lining of the collar box, so I must call on the barber who runs a shop on board. We had the carpet taken up and our clothes hung up to dry, but they won't, for the air is so hot and damp—with the least exertion you steam! Imagine the joy of having to dress for dinner in such cramped space and heat—you drop a stud and a year of your life in finding it! I think most people realise that their feelings under these circumstances cannot be exactly described in decorous language, so they set their teeth in grim silence; and after all there is something laughable about all the trouble—we needn't go in for white shirts and black coats and trousers in the tropics unless we like. Everyone feels them horribly uncomfortable and unsuitable, but no one dares to be so utterly radical as come to dinner in anything else. If a flannel shirt and shorts were the fashion, if only for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, how many valued lives would be prolonged. The penance in India is not so bad; there your Boy hunts your stud whilst you sit and cool.

A number of passengers sleep on deck now; I suppose three and four in a cabin is intolerable. They have their mattresses brought up on deck by their cabin steward, and he chalks their number on the deck at their feet; you can thus sleep in a strong wet draught under the officers' deck. There is a great deal of pleasure in sleeping in the open, but you should have nothing but stars overhead and a shelter to windward, if it is only a swelling in the ground or a sod or two. The ladies have a part of the deck reserved, and the floor of the music room round the well that opens into the dining-saloon below. Their part of the deck is defended at night by a zereba of deck chairs, piled three or four feet high; it suggests privacy!

We had our port open last night again—my fault—and just as G. came to my end of the cabin to tell me the waves were getting near the port, in one came! So we spent the small hot hours rearranging things, shut the port and slept the sleep of the weary, and awakened more dead than alive from too little air and too much water.

Yesterday the ship went on fire. It started on the woodwork of the companion way, where there was a place for stationery; there was a mighty mess of water and smell of smoke and a panel or two burned, and no great damage done, as far as I can hear. I am surprised we don't go on fire every day with so many smokers chucking cigarette ends overboard. The wind-catchers sticking out of the ports of course catch these, and they blow into the berths. Yesterday, however, to prevent this, two or three buckets with sand in them were put down on deck in which cigarette ends are to be buried and pipes knocked out, so there's a chance for us all yet!

This morning I made a water-colour for my engineer friend, as a return for the wine vase he gave me. I thought he'd like a sketch of a Highland burn in spate—thought it would be cooling. How it came about I cannot explain, but I did him a recollection of a burn within five to seven miles, by sea, of his birthplace in Jura! I'd put him down as coming from the Clyde.

The biggest event for me in this day's reckoning was the discovery that the distinguished judge I observed contemplating the blue waves for some minutes, was an artist before he took to Law! You might have knocked me down with a feather—five years in Lauren's studio in Paris, and three pictures on the line the year he was called to the bar and two of them sold! We had a great talk about art and all the rest of it. He and Jacomb Hood and others were fellow students, and he and Jacomb Hood and this writer, and various artists and newspaper men are to meet at his board in Calcutta and have a right good Bohemian evening as in days of yore.

Is it not curiously sanguine this belief, to which I've seen quite old men clinging—that you can repeat a good time. It is possible we will have a good evening, and talk lots of shop, for we all know far more about it now, than we did then; but it was what we did not know, that gave the charm to student days.

We talk art and technique pretty hard, but I can't quite get over the shock—an artist—become a judge—A Quartier Latin Art Student—a Judge of the High Court—with a fixed income, and on his way to Calcutta, perhaps to hang folk!