"'To get a drink.'
"It seemed a contemptible diversion for a person inspiring such awe politically. I don't say, mind you, that such was his object. My shipmates may have been as much in error about his motives as they were about his power. I was too tired, too full of aches and humiliations of my own, to investigate. He passed across my field of vision, and being the first of his kind, left an ineffaceable impression. The sun went down suddenly soon after, and the coppery glow vanished from the water, leaving it a grey blur.
"'In the middle of all the atrocities'! The flashy, bombastic phraseology came back to me with grim insistence that night when I went down at eight o'clock to look after the boilers and pumps and to make, with entirely inadequate means, those brass screws for the dynamo-engine. The engine-room was in darkness save for the hand-lamp that hung over the vice-bench. The fat cotton-wick smoked and crackled, the light draught swirling it towards my head at times, singeing my hair and making my eyes water. Behind me the silent, heated engines stood up, stark and ominous like some emblem of my destiny watching me. The white faces of the gauges over the starting handles stared blankly. From the stokehold came the occasional clink of a shovel or the hollow clang of a fire-door flung to. And I worked. I fought with the greasy brass and the broken, worn-out tools. I made wasters and started again. The sweat poured off me, and I drank thirstily the warm water in the can that hung over my head in the ventilator. It was ten o'clock when I realized I had made but one screw. The fireman on duty came through, and remarking that he thought the wind had gone round, climbed the ladder to change the ventilators. I heard the groan of the cowl as he pulled at it and then my lamp flared gustily in a light breeze that came down. Light as it was it was a blessed relief. It was more. It was a message. There was a strange smell about it that gave a new turn to my thoughts. A smell of the land, of the dark forests and fragrant plantations. Another stock phrase came to me—'spicy breezes.' Working there at my miserable task, I wondered if these were the 'spicy breezes' of the hymn-books. Of a sudden I threw down my tools and went up the ladder to look round. All day there had been in my mind a sort of undertow of resentment at the tacit decision that I ought not to want to go ashore. I did want to. It seemed to me an outrage to come so far and remain a prisoner in bondage on the ship. I leaned on the rail by the gangway and looked along the wooden wharf to where a few lights twinkled in the distance. Higher up, beyond the cutting for the railway, the dark mass of a big shed loomed up against the lights of what I supposed was Port Duluth. And from where I stood I could hear a steady rhythmic throb, the unmistakable sound of an engine. I wondered what it could be. Was it one of those weird affairs I remembered in our catalogues, colonial engines with grotesque fireboxes and elaborate funnels, for burning wood instead of coal? I looked round. Nobody in sight. Everybody was below. The Chief and Second were asleep, old Croasan was in his room with a bottle of gin, drinking steadily. In another moment I had gone down the gangway and was making for the shed. Just then I felt if I didn't speak to somebody who wasn't under the spell of the Corydon, I would go crazy. I slipped into an excavation and skinned my knees. I fell over some stacked rails and barked my shins. I heard something scuttling in the darkness. I saw the night-watchman on the Corydon standing at the galley door, looking out. And then, looking again towards my objective, I saw an open door in the shed with a short, broad figure showing up sharply against a brightly illuminated interior. I scrambled up the little incline and found a path.
"I was suddenly conscious I had no particular reason for calling upon this unknown person in the middle of the night. It is one of the tragedies of human life that while we do most things by instinct or intuition we have to clamp some 'particular reason' on our actions before we can secure the approbation either of others or of ourselves. Some men, like my young brother, never trouble themselves about it. But all my life I have found myself hesitating upon the edge of actions that might be heroic or fantastic or original or simply desirable, just because I couldn't square them with a particular reason. It was so in this instance. I came into the light of that doorway, and hesitated. But the short, broad figure was not like me. In the most matter-of-fact fashion he nodded his head and said in a clear voice with a strong foreign accent, 'Good evening. How are you?' And I answered at once that I was very well. He gave the cue, the cue which the Corydon had temporarily obliterated from my mind! He stood to one side and let me see into his domain. A large central-draft oil lamp hung in the centre of the roof of a small chamber. There was a door at the back, leading, I surmised, to the boiler room, for in one corner stood the machine that had attracted me from the ship, a curious hunched affair with a violently working apparatus in front and pipes covered with snow curving up and disappearing into the top of it. A small foot-lathe stood by a bench, and on the bench itself was clamped a fret-work table and a partly completed fret-work corner bracket. I wiped my face with my sweat-rag and turned to get a good look at the owner of this variegated display. It seemed to me I was having experiences after all.
"He was young and had never shaved the down which grew on his cheeks and the points of his chin. Young as he was he had the lines of half a century scored under his eyes and on his temples, thin lines on clear, yellow skin. The whites of his eyes were yellow too, as though he had suffered from jaundice. Which he had, as I learned very soon after he opened upon me in a clear, sonorous voice that rolled the r's and beat like a flail on the labials and diphthongs. He wore a blue dungaree boiler-suit, which is a combination affair, you know, and on his head he had an old, greasy, red fez. It seemed to me a preposterous piece of fancy dress up a creek on the Niger River. But I found later, to my astonishment, that Moslems were common enough there; that they had soaked through from the Mediterranean littoral and the head-waters of the Nile generations ago. Not that this gentleman had soaked through, or was a Moslem either. He had, as he informed me, been all over the world. But it was not his fez, or his jaundiced complexion, or his fret-work, or his languages, or his travels that marked him out for me at the time. It was the simple fact that he was my first foreigner. In spite of my having come in upon him, forced myself upon him as it were, he gave me the impression of being the aggressor. I felt myself throwing up defences against him. It is popular to gibe at the Englishman's taciturnity abroad. There is a reason. The foreigner, not the best nor the aristocratic foreigner perhaps, but the common run of him, act like amiable invaders. They take possession of us, of our language, our idioms, our games, our clothes, our machinery, ideas, everything. They nod and smile and say knowingly 'How are you. All right, eh?' and assume an intimacy you don't permit with your own family. This young chap in the fez had other points, but at the outset I had the most extraordinary sensation of leaning against the door of my soul, trying to keep him out. I don't suppose it struck him that way. I dare say he thought me rather subdued and untidy. He was very hospitable, asking me to 'take a seat' at his bench, and showing me his fret-work. He told me he never wasted any time, as that was the way to succeed. 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,' he sang with the accents all on the wrong syllables. He was very proud of this aphorism, evidently thinking it the secret of our imperial race. And he told me his history. He was born in Damascus, he said, so he knew Arabic. His father emigrated to Bolivia, so he spoke Spanish. Then they pulled up stakes and went to New Zealand, where he learned English. For some mysterious reason they again took ship and came to the Cameroons, where he learned German. His family was now in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any language they really know, which language do they think in? They always seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless to the end. They never seem to do anything with their marvelous accumulation of languages and knowledge of the world. Perhaps I wrong them. They may have spiritual experiences transcending their gifts of speech. I don't know.
"At that time, too, I was not seeking spiritual communion. The moment I had caught sight of that little lathe I wanted to ask if he could make screws. I wanted screws, brass ones with flat heads. As soon as I could I explained this to him. Yes, he replied, with his smile of supreme intelligence, he could make screws. How many? And the washer, could he make that? Had he the material? I had the dimensions of that washer burned into my brain and I made a little sketch of it on the bench. But his education hadn't run to scale drawings, so I drew it in perspective and repeated the figures with many gestures indicating roundness and thickness and other properties. He began to make the screws, copying the one I had made laboriously by hand. I offered to assist by putting my foot on the treadle, but he said it was not necessary. 'Too many cooks spoil the broth,' he added, and I felt disconcerted. He didn't mean anything offensive, you know; he was only proud of his English. So I sat watching him, or walked over to the little refrigerating plant thundering away in the corner, with its shining oil cups and its pipes covered with snow or glazed with ice. And while I stood looking at it, a tall, bony native, a dirty loin-cloth wrapped about his middle, his ribs and back all gashed with tribal scars and scaly with skin trouble, came in and laid his corrugated forehead for a moment against the snow on the pipes. He made an astonishing picture, with his thin arms outstretched in support, as though he were supplicating the white man's god. It must have been a confusing phenomenon to his simple mind, that fierce, hot, galloping devil that made ice. And then he gathered a little of the soft snow in his fingers and rubbed it over his face and lips and limped out again. And every little while he or another bony creature very like him would come in and go through the same performance. My friend at the lathe never looked up, not caring to waste any of his precious time, I suppose, but he observed, when I spoke of it, that the 'ignorant animals liked the taste of snow.' I went back to the bench again and looked at his fret-work. Goodness only knows why he was doing it. It was a meaningless design of dots and wriggles. When I asked him he said he was doing it for a Christmas present for his mother in Pernambuco. He added that she was a Maltese and he had learned Italian from her. I was so oppressed by this amazing knowledge of languages that I couldn't say a word in any language. It seemed silly for us to spend years scraping together a few French words at school when a foreigner like this could gather a dozen tongues in less time. And yet, when you go about the world you will find such people by the score, and you will find them working for and being governed by Englishmen who know no language but their own and not always a great deal of that. I sat there running my fingers over the fret-work bracket that was designed for the Maltese lady in Pernambuco and trying to focus all these novel and conflicting ideas when I suddenly recollected I was on watch. What if something went wrong? I was new to watch-keeping then and had no subconscious sense of responsibility to keep me on the alert. The sudden recollection was like an electric shock. I jumped up, and saying 'I'll be back in a minute,' ran down to the ship and so into the engine room, my heart in my mouth. It was half-past eleven! But there was nothing wrong. I looked at the gauge-glasses on the boilers, peered into the bilges, and found the fireman at his post in the stokehold. And then I took the old washer and went back to my friend in the fez. Mister George, he called himself. 'My name is English,' he boomed in his reverberating voice. 'George, Mister George.' I never knew his other name, if he had one. There you had the invading quality I have spoken of. He seemed to think he was raised above the common herd of foreigners by having an English name. Mister George had made my screws, with one extra in case of need. And he found a piece of brass that had in it a possible washer. I stood like one in a trance watching him as he fixed it in his little lathe and adjusted the tool-rest and took the first harsh chattering cuts. He was wonderfully efficient. An English mechanic would have jeered at his crazy machine and contemptible bits of tools, and he had an amateurish, ladylike air of flinching from the chips. But he did it much more quickly than I could have done it, I felt humbly. I only wished he would not smile in such a detestable fashion and suddenly assault me with 'How are you now? All right, eh?' I suppose he was practising his English. And as the finishing touch was put on the washer with a thin, snaky file, he asked suddenly if I had any books.
"'Books!' I repeated, surprised; 'what kind of books?' I had an idea he could take no interest in anything save grammars and dictionaries. Somehow, in spite of all his acquirements, one didn't associate that transitory creature with books at all. 'Eh?' he said, harshly, 'I don't understand. You understand, I wish for books.' 'Yes, what sort?' I asked again. 'It doesn't matter,' he muttered, calmly, taking the finished article from the lathe and putting it beside the screws, 'all books are the same. It doesn't matter at all. You have books, eh?' I said I had one or two, but I needed them. As a matter of fact, I had only brought one or two engineering works with me and a funny old leather-bound Norie's Navigation of my father's. My mother didn't know whether I'd need it or not. I didn't. I had plenty to do without going into navigation. It was a queer old thing, though, designed for men of the old school who came aft from the forecastle and had to learn the three Rs. 'You need them, eh? Ah, well, that is all right. I read many books, yes. Plenty English books.' I saw light all at once. 'How much for these?' I asked Mister George. He turned to look at the gauges of the freezing plant and then glanced back at me over his shoulder. 'I care nothing for money,' he said. 'It is the root of evil. But books! Knowledge is power, yes.'
"It was confusing. Here was another victim of words, words he didn't even clearly understand. He lived apparently in a copy-book world, full of shining maxims and idiotic generalities. For an instant I had a queer feeling of talking to one of those automatons one sees on the stage—figures with gramaphones in their interiors, and who utter strange, disconcerting sounds.
"'I will give you a book,' I said at last, taking up the things, 'and many thanks for these. They said we couldn't get them made here, but you see they were wrong.'
"He didn't understand a word of this explanation, I believe. He smiled, moved his fez round and round his head as if on a socket, and remarked, 'Yes, you all right now, eh?'