“The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.” Perhaps one may judge of a man’s power by his reception of that aphorism. For me, at any rate, there is but unconditional assent. To live dangerously! How nauseous to me is the maternal anxiety of some of my friends. They are so anxious for me. It is such a dangerous trade. And so on.
I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly settling the world’s politics and religion to his own satisfaction, each taking his daily dram of news from the same still. I look into my own copy and read on one page of a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So and the Hon. Alicia So-and-So “presided over a very tasteful stall of dwarf myrtle-trees,” etc.
In another column I am informed that some person or other, of whom I have never heard, has gone to Wiesbaden. The leading article is devoted to a eulogium of some football team, the special article asks, “Can we live on twopence a day?” You cannot imagine how unutterably turbid all this appears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is Sunday, and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in one of the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great green rollers came up from the south, and the boat rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How I would like to have had some of those city folk with me in that up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold sea water and scarred with the line as it ran through their fingers to the pull of a fourteen-pounder. Dwarf myrtle-trees! Wiesbaden! God! Let them come below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I did not know I was alive. Do they, I wonder?
Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of foul city air. Very much in the same way I was affected by a remark made to me by my friend the Mate. “Where I live,” said he, “one child won’t play with another if its father gets five shillings a week more’n t’other’s father.” We were talking Socialism, if I remember rightly, and that was his argument against its feasibility. I did not notice the argument; I fell to thinking how odd it must be to live in such an atmosphere. How is it we never have it in Chelsea? I have never been the less welcome because my host or hostess has as many pounds a week as I have a year. My old friend of my ’prentice days—dear old Tom, the foreman, and Jack Williams, the slinger, they get no colder welcome from us because they live in Hammersmith or Whitechapel. Have we ourselves not seen in our rooms rich and poor, artist and mechanic, writer and labourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk and Chinese aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely the utter antithesis of “home” is that same “dangerous life.” These young men who economise and grow stingy in their desperate endeavour to establish a “home nest,” some “Acacia Villa” in Wood Green or Croydon—what can they know of living dangerously? Their whole existence is a fleeing from danger. Safe callings, safe investments, safe drainage, safe transit, safe morality, safe in the arms of Jesus. Is it lack of imagination?
XVI
So we, who foregathered yesterday afternoon in the shipping office, are lashed together for another four months. A motley group, my friend. Outside I stood, note-book in hand, trying to find a spare fireman who wanted a job. A mob of touts, sharks, and pimps crowded round me, hustling each other, and then turning away from my call, “Any firemen here?” In despair I go over to the “Federation Office,” where all seamen are registered in the books of life insurance, where they pay their premiums, and await possible engineers. I consult with the grave, elderly man in the office, and he asks for firemen in the bare, cold waiting-room. One man comes up, a pale, nervous chap, clean-shaven and quiet. I take his “Continuous Discharge” book, flick it open at the last entry—trawling! The last foreign-going voyage is dated 1902, “S. Africa,” “Voyage not completed.” I hand it back. “Won’t do,” I remark shortly, and look round for others. The man looks at the grave, elderly person, who takes the book. “Give him a chance,” says the latter, in his low, official voice. “Look—S. Africa. The man’s been serving his country. Give him a chance.” “I would if he’d promise not to get enteric when we reach port,” I say. “Never ’ad it yet, sir,” says the man, and I take his book. “Benvenuto. Hurry up. She’s signing on now.” He runs across the road, and I follow.
When I reach the shipping office they are waiting for me. Behind the counter and seated beside the clerk is the Captain, writing our “advance notes.” The clerk asks if all are present; we shuffle up closer, and he begins to read the articles to which we subscribe—signing our death-warrants, we call it. No one listens to him—he himself is paring his nails, or arranging some other papers as he intones the sentences which are more familiar to him and to us than the Lord’s Prayer to a clergyman. Then, when he has finished, each one comes up for catechism—carpenter, sailors, donkeyman, fireman, all in due order. Then the officers. “Donkeyman!” calls the clerk. A huge, muscular figure with a red handkerchief round his bull throat ceases arguing with a fireman, plunges forward, and seizes the pen. He is my friend of the last voyage, the mighty Norseman.
“What is your name?”
“Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen.”