From Edinburgh to India & Burmah Part 2

The cafe, Ba.s.so and Bregaillon, has a "vue splendide" (in the daytime), so the bill says. What you see at night is a well lit quay with the cafe lights s.h.i.+ning out across the dark water in the dock on to some white steam yachts. After getting rid of a uniformed interpreter, whose one idea was to give us an "Engleesh dinner, very good, very sheep," we made up our own order. Of course bouillabaisse et soupe de poissons was the first item. I am not sure how to eat this, with a spoon or fork--two dishes are set down at once, one with half an inch of saffron-coloured soup, made of, I think, sh.e.l.l-fish, and with great slices of bread in it--certainly a spoon is not very suitable; the other dish has a perfect aquarium of little fish and bits of bigger fish beautifully arranged in a pyramid with similar soup round it--there are bits of red mullet, crab, green fish, and white fish, and all sorts of odds and ends. Why do we not make dishes like this at home? I get just such oddities any time I lift my trammel net, but they are thrown away as "trash." But the French are artists in every line of life, in cooking, in dress, and I believe they put art into the way they heave the coal on board. We feel much inclined to stay here a little and see more of these Southern French. I love their jolly abandon of manner, their kindness and "honesty," and their gasconade. So here's to you Cyrano and Daudet, D'Artagnan and Tartarin, not forgetting M. le President.

Who do you think sat beside us within arm's length but Rejane! There were only six or seven people in the cafe and none of them were aware of the presence of their distinguished compatriot till we whispered her name to the waiter, and he whispered it to them and their eyes opened! I came to G.'s side of the table so that I might see the great actress in mufti, and I would have liked to have made a sketch of her as she talked to her companion, but it would have been too obvious--you know the way she speaks, a little out of the corner of her eye and mouth, with hand on hip. She is great! We saw her only a year ago with Coquelin in "La Mantansier."

This is the head of the Serang; I took it when he was not looking. He runs the lascars on board; acts pretty much as bo'sun. This face is brown and beard died rusty red, and he wears a lovely boatswains silver whistle on a silver chain, and has an air of command and the appearance of deepest intelligence.

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CHAPTER V

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There is a frightful crush on board. It would take years to consider all the faces. Numbers of ladies are going out to join their husbands after having taken their children home in spring. By the afternoon all the new comers look much refreshed; they have washed off the travel stains of that dusty journey across France, have tidied up, eaten, and slept a little, and have perhaps met friends of the road. You hear, "Hillo--hillo--you here again! met in Simla last, didn't we--wasn't it cold last night?" "By Jingo it was--rummy spell of cold--coming over all western Europe so suddenly," and they talk of "Cold weathers," and "Rains," and "Monsoons," and places you think you heard about in school days and have forgotten; and you realise something of what there is ahead to learn.

Meantime I watch the lascars taking off the effect of the coaling last night; how blue and sharp the reflections of the sky are on the wet deck and their dark feet. It is my business to paint things, not to write, about them, still, both occupations dissipate the time wonderfully. They are scrubbing down the waist, was.h.i.+ng the decks with brushes and squeejees and las.h.i.+ns of blue Mediterranean; they wear dungaree tunics, and trousers of dark blue and faded pale blues, with red cloth round their straw skull-caps, and are all in shadow--that colourful, melting, warm shade you have in the South in the afternoon.

27th Evening.--To what shall I liken this evening on deck? You know a railway carriage on Bank Holiday, and you have heard perhaps of a Newfoundland sealing s.h.i.+p, the crew head and tail and three deep in the bunks, and all about the deck and along the bulwarks for want of room--well, it's worse here, at the price! In the smoking-room there is not an inch to sit on; men lean against the pillars, others against the side of the bar or against each other. A few have got seats for bridge, others sit on sofas round the side, the rest have to stand. There were more pa.s.sengers when we left Tilbury than allowed any free movement on deck; we made light of that. Now, people are jammed beside each other all the way up the side of the deck that is sheltered from the sweep of the wind, others sit on the rail; those who want to move have to pick a devious and careful course between the lines of chairs. And this is to be to-night, and to-morrow, till we get to India! And it will yet be worse than it is just now, for many pa.s.sengers from Ma.r.s.eilles are still below, waiting for baths and arranging their crowded cabins.

I have to write letters and sketch on a dining-saloon table amongst waiters clearing dishes. There are four small tables on deck in what I think is called the music room, and they are fully occupied with ladies writing and bridge players, and round them every seat in the room is occupied. It is a crowd of people of the most gentle manners and breeding, or it would be horrible beyond words.

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28th.--I suppose there were not more than fifty men in the smoking-room late last night when it became sufficiently empty to allow me to see separate faces. There were civilians, judges, and one or two men of business, but the majority were soldiers of middle age. I confess I am much impressed by the general type and the expression of quiet strength and capability of these men of the Indian Services. They have finely modelled heads on powerful figures, better, I think, than any type of the ancients. Their manners are cheery and kindly, but always in repose the lines show strongly across the brow; faces and lines seem to me to spell D-U-T-Y emphatically. For a _nouveau_ it is difficult to follow their talk, it changes so quickly from the man to his horse, to his seat and powers as cavalry leader or the like, perhaps to his family, his marriage, or his death, and whenever the family interest comes in, there is a note of genuine kindness as if brothers were telling or asking about other brothers and their wives and belongings. They speak rather quickly and cheerily, and then in repose the lines come again, not that they look over-worn; on the contrary they look fit, tremendously and are very abstemious. One speaks near me--"You knew so and so? Good horseman--wasn't he? Curious seat--do you remember the way he rode with his toes out?" "Yes, yes--ha, ha!--it was funny! He led a column with me at Abu La.s.sin. Very sad his death, poor fellow--never got over the last war--heart always suffered--nice wife." "Yes, yes--gave him pretty bad time though--oughtn't to have married. Where is his boy--Sandhurst? No, he's left--he's coming out next month in a troop s.h.i.+p, I hear." These are the older soldiers, and there are also many young officers, and two judges of the High Courts, one with nimble tongue and expression, the other the reverse. And there are business men with concentrated and perhaps rather narrower expressions than the others--Irish, Scots, and English. As they are all in the same black and white kit in the evening it is easier then to compare the various faces; in the daytime the variety of costume, flannels, and coloured ties and tweeds prevent one doing it so easily; I'd like to make a sketch of each, and superimpose these, and get the average, the type of the thousands who follow this road year after year.

... As usual, these Bayards, in dressing gowns of various cuts and colours, stood outside the bathrooms this morning and waited their turn, and if the atmosphere was not murky with swear words, it was not to the P. & O.'s credit. To most men tub time is the jolliest in the day; here it is one of evil temper, for after you have waited say twenty minutes in a pa.s.sage for your chance, you get into a little wet steamy place over the engines, with possibly no port and poorly ventilated, and have your tub in a hurry for you know other fellows are waiting outside, and instead of gaily carolling your morning song you feel angry and cuss cusses, not loud, but profound as Tuscarora Deep. "Oh! Mummie, do come and see all the men waiting for their baths," said a little angel this morning, as she pointed at the solemn row of bare-footed men holding on to their towels and sponge-bags and tempers--we actually grinned. Like some others I give up the attempt to get a morning tub, and trust to sneak one in during the day; better to have no bath than to start the day cross--"better to smash your d.a.m.ned clubs than to lose your d.a.m.ned temper," as the golfer in a bunker was overheard muttering as he broke each club across his knee. The ladies, some hundreds, have I think five baths between them, and they wait for these a great part of the day. If you pa.s.s their waiting-room you get a glimpse of wonderful morning toilettes of every tint, muslins, laces, a black boy with red turbash bustling about to get the bath ready makes rather a good note of colour.

... Notwithstanding all the above grievance we hadn't such a bad day yesterday; it was calm and not too cold, with a soft pigeon grey sea and sky.... Put in a long day's painting in the corner of the after-well, and overhauling sketches done so far on the road--they are mounting up now, and I feel fortunate in having my apology for existence in such a handy shape as a paint box.

But how dull this log-writing becomes! How on earth can I find an incident to pad up this journal; what is there to write about in a route so monotonously first cla.s.s! Here is absolutely the most risque exciting story I have heard for days; I must say the lady who told it has such an infectious laugh, that at the time I really thought it was very amusing.

You know the cabins on the P. & O. steamers are all exactly like each other, except the number above each door. So once upon a time she related, a certain lady tripped along to her cabin as she thought, to hurry up her husband for dinner and found him pulling on a s.h.i.+rt; she plumped into a seat, saying, "John, John, you are always too late for dinner, and there's no use trying to struggle into your s.h.i.+rt with the studs fastened?" Whereon the neck stud flew and revealed an astonished face--and it was not "John's." After lunch I told this to my barrister acquaintance; he smiled gently and said he had always thought it such an amusing story.

How I wish I was back at sea again on a whaler, with a swinging hammock, a tow net, and microscope, and opportunities any day to study the fairy beauties in drops of sea water, and with human interest too, so much more varied than on this P. & O. Hotel; there, would be all kinds of men, jolly, devil-may-care fellows, and even disreputable characters, mixed with canny, pawky, canting Scotties, and talk of all the corners of the world; ranting rollicking Balzacian yarns, rich in language, in poetry, and tenderness; any minute in the day amongst such people you might strike a yarn that would bear publication; the picturesque interest of life does not seem to be on the high plains, or low levels, but as it were between wind and water, where plain meets mountain, the poor the rich, between happiness and sorrow, and light and shade; and the fun of painting between one colour and the next. It is all very respectably drab here, and we talk of intellectual and proper things.

For an hour to-day--no, two hours I am sure--I laboured at Indian sociology and history and Vedas and things, with the barrister, and I was tired! The barrister knows many books on these subjects, and recommends me to read Sir W. W. Hunter's "History of India" in its abridged form of only 700 pages; I suppose I must!--told my cousin I'd been trying to talk Indian sociology and he shouted: said he knew a man who had lived in India and studied the native life for twenty-eight years, and confessed he knew as little about it at the end as at the beginning; but R. admitted that whenever he had a knotty question of native affairs to settle he always went to this man, and the decision was invariably right. R. has qualified admiration for the Indians honesty. Once, he said, he had to leave his house at a moment's notice, to take home a sick relation, and left all standing, and on coming back months after found every single stick of furniture just as he left it, and not a single article stolen, except one door-mat; his night watchman had taken it with him to another situation, leaving a humble message to the effect that he had got so accustomed to it that he couldn't sleep without it! Their honesty must run in grooves for R. gave a heavy overcoat to one of his men in a cold station, and when he and his servants went to a very hot station, he noticed this man still wearing the thick coat and sweating like anything, so he asked him why he did so, and the man replied that he dared not put it off for a minute or it would be stolen.

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We had quite an audience for the fiddles this Sat.u.r.day--there are two lady violinists now, both very good players--but we had only a short spell of music in the music room on account of a choir practise, for to-morrow; the parson came and took our musicians down to the dining-room to sing over hymns and psalms, verse by verse. I heard the wheeze of the harmonium, and got back to my own chest-lid (sailor term for my own business)--"Every man to his own chest-lid and the cook to the foresheet," is it not a suggestive saying? To every man his prerogative, his chest-lid, and his duties, and the same for the cook and the least bit more! It is now getting pa.s.sably mild, and we can sit out on deck at night. It was supposed to be hot enough for the punkahs in the saloon; one is hung over the length of each of the five tables, to port and starboard, and there are others the whole length of the table that runs up the middle of the saloon. I have long wished to see a punkah, now I wish I may never see another! On this s.h.i.+p they are narrow velvet rugs hung on edge from horizontal bars, this is swung by two ropes from the roof, and they are all guyed together with cords, so that one pull, from a lascar outside the cabin, sets them all into violent commotion. They hit your face when you stand, and sitting, their lowest edge stirs up your hair. These velvet rugs have white cotton covers on them now that they are being used, so the general effect at dinner-time is of a huge laundry in a gale, with beautiful laundresses in low dresses sitting at table under a world of wildly flapping linen; with the lamps lit, and our black coats for a foil, the colours are really extremely pretty, though the discomfort is great. Men and women are all getting a little brown with the sea air, and the ladies have a little of the blush of spring now, instead of the pallor of winter with which they came on board.

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Egypt in sight, and this morning we tubbed in the water of the river that floated Moses, and that has been bathed in and drunk since by such a number of people we know, or have read about. Sea and Nile are meeting in blue, and green, and brownish stripes, blending to a general absinthe colour as we get closer to the flat delta; little level rows of cloud throw purple shadows across the crisp small waves, and over the horizon there's a flight of white lateen sails.

What a bustle there is on board to-day; people running up and down stairs with letters hurriedly finished, addressed and stamped to the children at home. No use writing to the man who waits out there, for we carry the mail. It is touching, the wife looking forward and back at the same time--the bull must pa.s.s--and the young girl too, leaving the old life for the new married life in a new country; it must take courage.

My notes at Port Said seem to have disappeared, possibly I did not write any. I remember that there was so much to see in the morning; and the change of colour in the water, the absinthe colour of the Nile with pale blue reflections winding in currents in distinct streams into the sea, would, with the blue ocean, need very subtile painting. I remember the fearful jabber, which I suppose has gone on and always will, since Port Said was invented. I got a glimpse of Lesseps's statue at lunch through the port-hole; he points with right hand twice life size up the harbour with a heroic expression, and seems to say to the steamers that come in from the sea, "Higher up there S.V.P.--try a little higher up." We watched the often described black men coaling in black dust, singing and working, the sun's rays making shafts of light stream through the clouds of black coal dust; and the same pandemonium at night in the flare of lights, when the scene is generally admitted to be like the nether regions.

I know we went ash.o.r.e somehow or other, and that we could hardly see for the shouting and yelling! We felt fortunate in having a Mrs Deputy-Commissioner for a companion, for she was bubbling over with humour and anecdote. She and G. promptly began shopping, and certainly succeeded in getting two rather becoming topees, flatter and prettier than any I have yet seen--you might call them Romney topees; one may appear in sketches further on. I sketched of course--always keep "screeb, screeb, screebling all day long," as an irate German lady once put it to me, "screebled" a cafe scene; on the left you see a native, who calls himself Jock Furgusson, trying to pa.s.s off a "Genuine Egyptian Scarab" to a tourist. Jock Furgusson is infinitely more wonderful and artistic to me than the pyramids, for he can imitate accents so as to make you gasp; he spots anyone's nationality instantaneously--before you have opened your lips he knows your county! I believe he can distinguish between the English of a Lowland Scot and a Highlander, which is more than '_Punch_' does after all these years of practice. "Ah'm, Jock Furgusson frae Auchtermurrchty and Achterlony, longest maun in the forty twa," he begins--but somebody help me--I've forgotten how he goes on, a long rigmarole in broadest Doric; the words and intonation so perfect, you can so little believe your eyes that you are landed with a scarab or a string of beads before you have recovered, and he is off to another pa.s.senger, clippin' 'is g's and r's and puttin' in h's to some Englishmen.

The inhabitants of Port Said, we are told, represent the scourings of the Levant; too bad for Cairo, and black-balled for h.e.l.l. All the same G. and I went ash.o.r.e by ourselves after dinner, rather proud of our courage, for several pa.s.sengers said it wasn't safe. It used not to be safe, I know, but I asked the Chief-Engineer what he thought, and he took his right hand in his left, all but the very tip of the little finger which he measured off with his left thumb nail, and said, "a black maun's heart's no as big as that." So we went ash.o.r.e and had no adventures at all, but sat in a balcony and listened to pretty good music, and noted the few drowsy figures in the side streets, the glow of lamp or brazier on their heavy draperies, contrasting with the starlight and the deep velvety shadows--moth-like colouring, and intense repose, after the glittering, howling day.

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Looking back over these notes, and the Orient and Pacific Guide Book, and the Acts of the Apostles, I observe that I have made no note about Corsica and Sardinia, Lipari Islands, and Stromboli, or of the Straits of Messina and Etna--have barely mentioned Crete! In the Lipari Islands we saw lights ash.o.r.e, and down the Straits of Messina; and Stromboli we discovered easily enough by the glow of hot red up in the sky, and a sloping line of red that went glittering downwards. It was too dark to distinguish anything more.

We saw Crete, enough to swear by, the white top of Mount Ida, and realized where Fair Haven and Phenice and Clauda must lie, and that we were actually in the seas where the Apostle Paul was caught in the Euroclydon. By the way what is a Euroclydon; is it a Levanter?

Was there ever a voyage so vividly described, in more concentrated and pithy words? In eight verses you have a complete dramatic account of a tragedy at sea, from a pa.s.senger's point of view. It would be curious and interesting to learn what the owner thought, and said, when the prisoner suggested that he, and his sailing master, and the Centurion, were all wrong in a question of navigation; and how it came about that shortly after this difference of opinion the prisoner was master of the commissariat, and how, after heavy weather and fasting fourteen days on a rocky coast, 276 souls were saved on bits of wreckage without the loss of one life! The Board of Trade and Life Saving Societies might enquire into this, and report.

CHAPTER VI

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The Ca.n.a.l.--If I had not seen Mr Talbot Kelly's book on Egypt I could hardly have believed it possible that the delicate schemes of colour we see in the desert as we pa.s.s through the ca.n.a.l could be painted and reproduced in colour in a book. He has got the very bloom of the desert, and the beauty of Egypt without its ugliness; the heat and sparkle and brightness in his pictures are so vivid one can almost breathe the exhilarating desert air--and smell the Bazaars! But Egypt is ugly a pin's p.r.i.c.k beneath its beauty. It is so old and covered with bones and decayed ideas. The Nile is a.s.sociated with Moses, and it is long it is true, but it is also very narrow and shallow, and its banks are monotonous to a degree; a mile or so of green crop on either side, then stones, sand, bits of crockery, human bones and rags, then desert sand--a cross between a cemetery and a kitchen garden. The ruins are _awfully_ ugly! "Think of their age!" people say, and you look at the exquisite spirals of sh.e.l.ls in the lime stones with which these heaps are made! But the saddest thing in Egypt is the fine art debased in the temples, in these ponderous monuments of their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertis.e.m.e.nts in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue ca.n.a.l strung with lakes through its sand is very pretty and interesting all the way. We come to a swing bridge. It is open and our modern hotel and modern people slowly steam right through the middle of a Biblical caravan of Arabs on camels; some have crossed into the Egyptian side, the remainder are waiting on the Arabian side, their camels are feeding on the grey-green bushes. The pa.s.sengers just give them a glance and go on with their books. Have we not seen it all long ago in nursery books on Sundays. But, in the nursery in our Sunday books we did not see or feel the glitter and heat of the day, some of which, children to-day can get in Mr Kelly's book.

I dared not sketch the desert scenes; it was in too high a key for me, but I made so bold as to do this sketch of a scene on deck at night: an effect I have not heard described, though it must be familiar to those who go this road. I am sorry it is not reproduced here in colour.

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The searchlight on the bow plays on the sandbanks and desert beyond, and makes the land like a snow-field, and the slow movement of the white light intensifies the darkness and silence of the desert. In contrast to the cold blue light and snow-white sand, is the group of figures on deck in bright dresses, dancing. It made quite an _evident_ subject. The figure leaning on the rail is not ill. It is only a little j.a.panese maid thinking of home perhaps.

Suez was a few lights in the darkness over the glow of our pipes, then bed, and in the morning we were sailing down the top, west branch, of the Red Sea, otherwise the Gulf of Suez, with a fresh north wind behind us.

It is extremely charming and refres.h.i.+ng, as I've already remarked, to look out of a port in the morning and see the glittering, tumbling, blue sea alongside. On this occasion the blue is capped with many soft white horses chasing south, and the serrated barren hills of Egypt are slipping away north. They are coloured various tints of pale, faded leather, light buff, and light red, and the sun glares brilliantly over all, "drying up the blue Red Sea at the rate of twenty three feet per year," this from the Orient-Pacific Guide; you can yourself almost fancy you hear the sea fizzling with the heat. The Arabian sh.o.r.e is almost the same as the Egyptian, with a larger margin of swelling stretches of sand between the sea and the foot of the hills.

"Gaunt and dreary run the mountains, With black gorges up the land Up to where the lonely desert Spreads her burning, dreary sand."

There are occasions when circ.u.mstances make it really a pleasure to be an artist, to-day for example; the air is so full of colour, the sea deepest turquoise, with emerald showing when the crests burst white and mix with the blue, and there is a glint of reddish colour reflected from the Arabian sand, and the shadows in the clefts in the sand-hills to the north are as blue as the sea. I was trying to put this down when my friend from the West Country, who helps the engines, told me he had got me one of these exquisite cla.s.sic earthenware vases from Port Said, which he decorates with cigar labels and blue and gold enamel. I had a chat with him in his rather nice cabin--made a study of the flagon, _i.e._ drew its cork. It was full of deep purple Italian wine, like Lacrima Christie or Episcopio Rosso; the wine was good enough, but its deep rose colour with the bright blue reflected on it through the port was splendid. He didn't like it himself, said "it drew his mouth," and he gave me both the bottle and the wine as a present because of our love for Dalriada, and I have to give him a "wee bit sketch" for his cabin.

I will smuggle the jar under our table--G. and I both like Italian wine--and we will use it as a water bottle afterwards, for we have only one decanter at our table amongst eleven thirsty people.

It was just such dark red wine as this, I suppose, that Ulysses and his friends in these seas took in skinfuls to wash down venison, an excellent menu I must say, but it would have been more seamanlike if they had slept off the effects on board, instead of lying out all night on the beach; then, when Morning the rosy-fingered turned up, they'd have been quicker getting under way, and would have got home sooner in the end. How much superior were the Fingalian heroes; they would sail and fight all day and pa.s.s round the uisquebaugh in the evening at the feast of sh.e.l.ls, and never get fuddled and never feared anything under water or above land, and were beholden to neither G.o.ds nor men.

But I did once know a descendant of theirs, in their own country who was overcome by red wine. "It was perfectly excusable," he said, for he had never tasted it before--or since! He was a fine, tall man called Callum Bhouie, from his yellow hair when he was a youth; he was old when I knew him--six feet two and thin as a rake and strong, with the face of Wellington and an eye like a hawk. He and his friend were going home to his croft from their occupations one morning early, round the little Carsaig Bay opposite Jura, where he had a still up a little burn there, and they fell in with a cask on the sand and there was red wine in it, port or Burgundy, I do not know. Callum said he knew all about it and it was but weak stuff, so they took bowls and saucers and drank the weak stuff more and more. I think it must have been port; and they lay where they were on the sand and slept till the morning after. When dawn, the rosy-fingered, found them she must have thought them quite h.e.l.lenic; and the minister followed later, and I would not think it right to repeat what he thought it right to say. The sands and the bay and the burn are there to-day, and, as they say in the old tales, if Callum were not dead he would be alive to prove the truth of the story. The still I've never seen, but Callum I knew, and his croft; alas the roof of it fell in a few years ago; and it was the last inhabited house of a Carsaig clachan.

You see the land is "improved" now, for sheep, and it's all in one big farm instead of small crofts, and little greasy, black-faced sheep climb the loose stone walls and nibble the green gra.s.s short as a carpet where Callum and his wife lived so long.

May I go on to the end of Callum's story; though it is rather a far cry from this hot Red Sea to the cool Sound of Jura?

He and his wife were to be taken to the poor house in winter, and on the long drive across Kintyre they were told that they would be separated, and there was then and there such a crying and fighting on the road that they were both driven back to the croft--and I was not surprised, for where Callum Bhouie was fighting there would not be a stronger man of his age. So they lived on in the but-and-ben, with the lonely, tall ash standing over it, and the view of Jura, the sweetest I know, in front, and he died very old indeed, and his wife followed him in two or three days, so they were not separated even by death for long.