"'Fancy that!' said Mr. Hank in some contempt. 'Because I told her he was the doctor of the ship when Rosa was born, she thinks he's the father and goes up to the Hotel Robinson and wants money. Clever woman!'
"'Well,' said Rebecca, 'you didn't have any more luck with your Mrs. James. You got a flea in your ear there, didn't you? You had a great idea she was Rosa's mother.'
"'If you'd listened to what I told you, you'd never have run away with the idea there was any money in the doctor for you. There was some sense in what I did, because it would have cut both ways. But you would interfere. You look surprised, Mister,' he said to me, chuckling.
"Of course, I was surprised. I sat there open-mouthed. It is extraordinary how a man may become suddenly aware of unsuspected heights and depths in human life. It may be that I have always been less sophisticated than most. I am continually overlooking the shabbiness and rascality of the world, I find, in spite of the early apprenticeship which I served among business friends. I have often envied men this alertness of mind, this ever-present consciousness of the obliquity of human nature. And yet, I am not certain it is an enviable quality. I have a suspicion that those who have it envy us who lack it. They seem to have for us a half-contemptuous, half-respectful liking. So with Rebecca. She patted my arm and said to her husband:
"'Let him alone. He's all right, is Rosa's sweetheart.'
"At that moment Rosa came in dressed to go out with me. She had a white boa, I remember, and a white felt hat with a broad brim. She looked from one to the other and then back at me. 'What's the matter?' she said.
"'Nothing; only saying we ought to think about getting settled soon,' I said, laughing, and we all laughed. And then, as we two passed into the narrow, twisted staircase to go down to the street, I heard Rebecca say quietly, 'Did you hear what he said, Oscar? Did you, eh?'
"But, you know, I wanted to get clear of it all. I was more than ever set upon it. I understood better than ever Rosa's vague dislike of a life spent among the people she had known. It was nothing to me that Rebecca and her husband were potential blackmailers or that little Mr. Sachs, 'representing Babbolini's,' also represented a possible life-long neighbour if we lived at Sampierdarena. It was Rosa who felt the impossibility of it, and the subtle antagonisms of her environment. She knew, though she had no words for it, that there was a fuller life for us somewhere else. She would read an Italian translation of some English book, Barnaby Rudge or The Old Curiosity Shop, and when I came back to her she would ask me about my country. I was often astonished to find how little I knew about it! What I did know was out of books. Humph!
"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels. A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all. Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb cathedral—they were no kin of the men who built it or the men who prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle out of their souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used to wonder what it was. Only at the football matches did it seem to lift at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry, living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a continuous stampede from saloon to junction and from junction to saloon. I couldn't understand it at first, for the mate was a decent, wide-open sort of chap, and fairly sober considering he had once been master and so had an inducement to drown dull care. But I discovered that his wife wouldn't have it in the house, and he was fortifying himself against a 'dry week-end.' It certainly was dry to me. The house, partly paid for when he had a collision and lost his job in the Fort Line, was still called Fort William after his ship, and I could see that the name-plate had been carved out of teak by the carpenter to please 'the old man.' How were the mighty fallen! You know, there was something pathetic to me in that man's drop from master to mate. To him it was more than pathetic, it was the next thing to the end of the world. He was just an average seaman. He had no culture, no art, no religion, no philosophy to support him or act as a substitute in such a misfortune. Even his children did not seem to compensate him. Rather they aggravated the case. They could no longer be referred to as Captain Tateham's children. He was only plain Mr. Tateham now, Fred to us; and when the Corydon was going out through the dock-gates to make the tide, anybody who wanted might see Mr. Tateham on her forecastle head, standing glumly in the rain amid a tangle of ropes and half-boozed sailors and wisps of steam from the windlass. Here was the same thing over again as occurred in our own case. The root of it all was pride, the cursed pride that makes each class ape and envy the one above it, and stamp on the faces of the one below. Here it was, and it was England. This man had a grand little wife and three beautiful clever children winning scholarships at the grammar-school. He had a microscopic home partly paid for and a safe-enough competency. Yet, because he had slipped a cog he was damnably unhappy. His pride was bruised. Fate had given him a nasty knock. He shook his head when I spoke hopefully of him getting a command in our company. His wife said nothing. Of course, although I didn't know it then, for, as I have said, I do not naturally suspect men, the fact was she knew and the owners knew and the underwriters knew why he had had a collision. She had her reasons for keeping liquor out of the house. It was not a very happy week-end for me, for the sight of those two straight, intelligent lads and their charming, golden-haired sister turning and turning inside that tiny house just because it was Sunday and a visitor was present, got on my mind. I saw away ahead, and wondered if they would have any luck in their fight with gentility! Humph!
"No, I was not enamoured of what I saw of England. And I found I was reluctant to go to my own home. I suppose it had so many regrettable memories. Anyhow, voyage after voyage I put off my visit, and so one trip, coming home to Tyne Dock, I found I had put it off once too often. My mother, who had been living at Brighton, was dead. It is curious how the sea seems to sterilize the emotions in some natures. Perhaps I am wrong, and judge the general from the particular. Perhaps we are deficient in power to express grief. Perhaps we don't feel it. I don't know. I have known men at sea who raved about their parents' perfections and I was unable to sympathize and regale them with anecdotes about my 'old lady.' I couldn't. I don't remember ever talking to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant, however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging sea.