"I went home and had a talk with my mother. All her ideas were capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable elder son, out of employment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly. 'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done the very same thing I was to do, long ago; broken out of her life and made a fresh start—on the sea.
"And what had happened to me? You'll think I was a pretty cheap sort of a lover to let my brother cut me out so easy as that. You'll say I never really loved her. Who can tell that? Who can say how much or how little he loves? Yes, yes, I loved her. But what, I ask you, is the use of a man mooning his life away for a girl who has never given him a minute's thought? It is a waste of time and energy and life. When that view of worlds outside of mine broke on me the love-trance broke. I said to myself: 'I am young; I will go out and see things.' Well, I went out and I saw things, and I don't regret it. But there's one thing we never see again, and that's the illusion of first love.
"I begged my mother to say nothing to Frank about me until I was gone, and a day or two later I slipped away to Paddington with a couple of grips and took the train to Barry Docks. It will give you an idea of the quiet life I had led when I tell you this was my first long journey. I had been to places within one hundred and fifty miles of London, but never farther. I felt lost when they turned me out on the platform at Barry in the rain and dark. A seaport is not a very attractive place to a landsman.
"The next twenty-four hours were strenuous for me. More than once I wondered if I could live through it. When I got to the dock I walked up and down looking for a ship that resembled the model of the Corydon. There weren't any. I asked a man in a blue frock-coat if the Corydon had come in.
"'Aye,' says he. 'Here she is, just abaft of ye,' and he pointed to a rusty, dirty old tub with a battered funnel and a bridge all blocked with hatches. That the beautiful shiny Corydon? There was the name on her stern—Corydon, London. She was loading coal from a big elevator. Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the rain, my gloves all black with the coal on the ladder, my nice mackintosh barred with it, and my boots slipping on the iron plates. No one took any notice of me. Men went to and fro in oilskins and shouted, but they didn't seem to see me. Just for a moment I thought of bolting! Humph!
"Finally I spoke to one of the men, saying I had a letter for the chief engineer. He took me round into a dark alleyway under the bridge-deck aft and shouted down: 'Here comes the Second,' he says. 'He'll fix ye.'
"Well, he came up, that Second did, not very pleased at being disturbed. 'What is it?' he says. He was grease from head to foot, as though some one had been rolling him in a sewer.
"'I'm the Fourth Engineer,' I said. 'Oh, are ye,' says he, 'I thought ye were comin' this mornin'. Better get a boiler-suit on and give a hand. We're goin' to sea to-morrow noon.'
"He took me along the alleyway and unlocked a door. 'There,' says he, 'there's your room. Ye share wi' the Third.' It was a smelly little hole, and so dark I could scarcely make out the bunks.
"'I haven't a boiler-suit with me,' I said, and he looked at me. He was a younger man than I was, and I felt it would be strange to have to take orders from him. 'Oh,' he says, 'you're about my size, I'll lend you one.' I couldn't help thinking as he went into his berth next to ours, that if he was the Second and I was the Fourth, what on earth would I be like when we got to sea?