An Ocean Tramp Part 14

"Same old yarn. Oh, Mr. McAlnwick, are there not queer things come in with the tide? Now listen, while I tell ye. 'Tis what they all do.

They dangle round bars, all at loose ends, they get their master's tickets, and they marry barmaids. Then when the command comes along, the woman keeps the man down in the mud. 'Twas with me, too. I was engaged to a Nova Scotia girl--two Nova Scotia girls--different times.

I'd roll round town, givin' 'em to understand I was master, take 'em out drivin' in a buggy Sunday evenin', makin' a fool o' meself fine.

When the crash came--oh, Mr. McAlnwick, make use of your advantages now yer're at sea!--when the crash came, we were just ready to sail, an' I stayed by the s.h.i.+p. But next time 'twould be the same. I couldn't be acquainted with a girl for a week without proposin'

matrimony! Mr. McAlnwick, ye mustn't laugh. 'Tis the truth. Even now--but why talk? Ye know my sympathetic nature. But this seems to be serious. So she's the barmaid at the Stormy Petrel, is she? Humph!"

"His brains must be addled," I observe, "not to see----"

"Ah! but ye're young, Mr. McAlnwick! _That's_ no hindrance in the worrld to--to such as him. _Oh_, dear no!"

"Then such as he have a very low standard of morality."

"Mr. McAlnwick, now listen. When ye've been sent to sea at twelve year old as apprentice, an' ploughed the oceans of the worrld for five years in the foc'sle, when ye've been bullied an' d.a.m.ned by fifty different skippers on fifty different trades as third and second mate, when ye've split yer head studyin' for yer ticket, when ye've got it and ye're glad to go second mate at seven pounds ten a month, when ye see men o' less merit promoted because they marry skippers' daughters while you are walkin' the bridge--what 'ud ye do?"

"I don't know, mister." I am taken aback by the velocity of the question, by the Mate's earnestness.

"Ye'd turn callous or religious, or go mad! Ye see, Mr. McAlnwick, there's a lot ye miss, though ye won't admit it. Ye come to sea and ye meet the cloth, but ye don't realise their trainin'. Ye laugh at us for our queer ways, such as never walkin' on the p.o.o.p over the Skipper's head, never askin' for another helpin', never arguin' the point, an' such like. But consider that man's trainin'! Ye cannot?

Ye've been brought up ash.o.r.e, ye've had opportunities for studyin' and conversin' with edyecated people, an' ye're frettin' for some young lady, as I can see--don't deny it, I saw Postie bring the letter--and ye wouldn't touch the likes o' _this_ with a pair o' tongs. But with Mr. Hammerton 'tis different, do ye not see?"

"Yes, I see, a little. But you yourself, now----"

"Me? Oh, 'twas a special providence preserved me, Mr. McAlnwick. I was waitin' for a command at the time, and I was unable to get out o' the bargain. But ye know my wife."

Now, there is no doubt in my mind, after some thought, that the Chief Officer was right in insisting on the unspanned gulf between the old style officer and the men of our sphere. Heavenly powers! What have I not seen, now that the Mate has reminded me? The fatuous ignorance, the bigoted conceit, the nauseous truckling to "the Old Man," the debased intellect. And yet the Second Officer does not always lie in drunken stupor on the galley bench. I call to mind a time when he took a violin and played to me as the sun went down across the foam-flecked sea. Let us remember him by that rather than by his present state, and leave the rest to G.o.d.

x.x.xII

It is, I think, an inestimable privilege to claim the friends.h.i.+p of a man whose life and letters are a perpetual stimulus to action, an invariable provocative of thought. I have just had a letter from my friend, telling me that he is in despair of the stage. His play is a thing of the past, and he vows that he has done with dramatic art for ever.

Now being, like Goldsmith, a person who spends much time in taverns and coffee-houses, where one can study every conceivable shade of character, I took my friend's letter up town with me, and sat down to muse over it and a tankard of ale. It was a cosy bar, cosier than the Ches.h.i.+re Cheese, if more modern; I sank back in a deep lounge and watched the world go round.

To commence, I thought to myself, these people here const.i.tute a potential public for a play. Therefore, supposing it were _my_ play, my att.i.tude towards them is a factor in the dramatic problem. What is my definition, my a.n.a.lysis of this potential public?

Well, they are all engaged in a terrific struggle for _safety_. They have no social instinct apart from the instinct to combine for _safety_. Their ideal is a tradesman, a pedlar, who has acc.u.mulated sufficient wealth to be safe from poverty. Their ideal of religion is one which guarantees safety from h.e.l.l. They do not believe, and they tell you bluntly they do not believe, any man who claims to be an altruist. They do not believe any man who protests that he does not wors.h.i.+p wealth--_i.e._, safety.

By this time I was puzzled to know how to answer my friend's complaints. All I knew was that, to strike one blow on the metal and drop the hammer because it jarred his fingers, argues sloth, not the "artistic temperament." Oh, _mon ami_, that "artistic temperament."

"Is this all? Up again!" If you are discouraged I can only suggest a course of reading in the lives of dramatists. I recall a few offhand--Lessing, Moliere, Scribe, Wagner, Ibsen, these will suffice.

When did _they_ stop and fold their hands in despair? As for the Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights, their facility of invention, their exuberance under difficulties is devastating. That, however, is not your problem. Your drama of to-day is an old bottle with no wine in it. You fail because words have ceased to have any definite meaning. The words in a man's mouth bear as little relation to his emotions as the architecture of his house bears to his ideas. Words like Love, G.o.d, Faith, and Soul are mere coloured balloons floating about the modern West End stage. It is easy to be horrified at such a view, but men like me, who deal with _things_, are not to be humbugged. You put a man in a commonplace predicament, and you make him say tragically, "The die is cast," or "I will see him hanged first," or "All is over between us." That is not drama; it is nonsense. Dies are rarely cast nowadays, public hangings have been abolished, and salaries rule too low to risk breach of promise actions. There's your dilemma. Write me a play in which every word is _meant_--the drama will look after itself. But, if you will allow a young man to suggest a point, I say that you are all working in the dark; you are groping blindly forward when you might rejoice in the sunlight. And now, with my colleagues as texts, I shall read a homily on the conditions of modern dramatic art.

The division of biped mammalia into merely men and women is of comparatively recent date. In very early times, however, when wisdom was commoner than now, the cla.s.sification began with G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, heroes, men and women, with lower types like fauns and satyrs. I venture to think that this nomenclature might with advantage be revived. From time to time, in the history of the human mind since _Anno Domini_, one sees efforts to differentiate, generally with scant success. The Roman Catholic Church, with her elaborate canonising machinery, stands as the most prosperous example of this, though with the vital fault of postponing the sanctifying till after death. She, again, is responsible for another attempt, viz., the infallibility of her ministers, a promising enough plan, but ill regulated. The Stuart _regime_, urging with unpleasant vigour the divinity of kings.h.i.+p and the corresponding caddishness (or decadence) of much of the rest of mankind, is a signal example of how my plan should not be carried out.

Carlyle's heroes are mostly supermen; individuals, not types.

Now, I suggest to you that we agree to cla.s.sify my colleagues, the masters of the mighty vapour, the beings who are the real cloud-compellers of our day, as heroes. If I mistake not, I have a prior claim to the word, too, in that Hero's engine is the type of all our modern prime movers, the supreme type to which we are ever striving to approximate. Masters of the vapour-driven sphere! Not men, but heroes, having their own thoughts, their own joys and sorrows, their own G.o.ds; more than men, in that they need less than men, less than G.o.ds, in that they owe allegiance to them.

Well, then, here is your dramatic problem. Until you recognise the fact that such beings as I have indicated do actually inhabit the earth and cover the sea with their handiwork, until you consider the tremendous fact that your world's work is done by heroes, and not by politicians and commercial travellers, that, in short, your intellectual Frankensteins have made a million-brained monster whom you cannot, dare not destroy, your drama will not be a living force. I hold out no hope that the problem is easy of solution; I only know it exists. You will first of all become as little children, and learn, as best you may, what makes the wheels go round. Learn, that you may teach, by your creative art. Above all, remember, when you rise to protest that I am forgetting Nature, that together with "the way of an eagle in the air, and the way of a serpent upon a rock," the Hebrew poet has joined "the way of a s.h.i.+p in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man with a maid."

x.x.xIII

I have been up town "to meeting," as my father used to say. The air was clear and warm when my friend the Mate appeared on deck in all the splendour of "sh.o.r.e gear." He affects a material which never wears out. "Mr. McAlnwick, these here are the pants I was married in!" He reserves his serious thoughts for underwear, of which he carries a portentous quant.i.ty to last a voyage. Smart young cadets, who never wear the same collar twice, and sport white s.h.i.+rts and soiled souls in seamen's missions, are the Mate's aversion. He has severe censures for "gallivantin'" and "dressin' for show." He approves of my own staid habits of life, after the fas.h.i.+on of those elderly folk who admire in others what they so sadly lacked in their own spring-time. He forgets that perhaps even I have trembled with rage because there was a spot on my collar, that even I may have spent precious moments folding and pressing a favourite pair of trousers.

The Mate does not often go ash.o.r.e nowadays, even to missions, and so the lavendery smell which exhales from the historic pants scarcely has time to dissipate before they are back in the chest. Different now, from his young days, when the vessel lay alongside the _Quai de la Bourse_ in Rouen City, and my friend stepped across each evening to the Cafe Victor to drink _creme de menthe_ and feel that listening to the band was rather wicked and altogether Continental. Indeed, his attachment to the s.h.i.+p is now proverbial, the prevailing feeling having been brilliantly epitomised by himself. "If I wash me face,"

he snapped to me one day; "If I wash me face, they think I'm goin'

ash.o.r.e!" But now the decent double-breasted blue serge, the trim beard and black bowler hat are in evidence; my friend the Mate is about to attend divine service at the Seamen's Mission. My own appearance in _mufti_ causes excitement.

"Ye're comin', Mr. McAlnwick?"

"As far as the door," I reply.

The Chief Officer's blue eyes glint as he wrinkles his nose.

"'Tis my opinion, Mr. McAlnwick, that ye've a young woman in the town yerself."

And we go forth into the town. At the door of the Mission I bid the Mate farewell, and I catch a last glimpse of him as he removes his hat and wipes his boots with the diffidence apparently interwoven in the fibre of all mariners ash.o.r.e. He is not of a proselytising disposition. Strong Orangeman, an Ulster Protestant, and--the rest.

So, thinking of him, I fare onward, watching the show. Men and maidens idly saunter along, or hasten to the house of G.o.d. Why, I wonder, do girls of religious disposition allow themselves so little time to dress? Two or three have pa.s.sed me; one had a b.u.t.ton loose at the back of her dress; another's "stole" of equivocal lace was unsymmetrically adjusted to her shoulders; and so on. I know that G.o.d looketh not on the outward semblance, but I am also painfully aware that young men are not fas.h.i.+oned after their Creator in that respect, and my desire to see everybody married is outraged by these omissions. And looking into the faces of my fellow-pa.s.sengers this Sunday evening, I am led to think that, as a cla.s.s, girls are not very beautiful objects when they lack refinement. I see much raw material around me which might possibly be hewn into lovely shape--but----To my friend, with his intellectual Toryism, this hiatus is quite reasonable. These lower cla.s.ses, he will observe sublimely, have their functions; refinement is not for all. And the _St. James's Gazette_ rustles comfortably as he sinks back into the saddle-bags again!

Well, let me be honest in this matter. My mind is still in a fluid state concerning theories of society. I can only generalise. I believe, with Emerson, that the world exists ultimately for the weal of souls; I believe, also, the spiritually correlative truth, the ultimate probity of those same souls, but--I have not yet discovered why I abhor contact with those who hold the same political faith. Am I misanthropic? Or unsocial? Why, when I sit resolutely down to hear my own beliefs preached, do I silently contest each point, adopt the contrary view? Why do I avoid "active propaganda," "working for the cause," and such like? Is it because I disbelieve utterly in preaching? I do that, anyway. I often think how much farther ahead we should be if no one ever preached. I do not condemn lecturing by any means. I dislike the packed audience of the conventional preacher, socialistic or otherwise. My ideal is the heterogeneous a.s.sembly, hearkening to the words of a man skilled in oratory, profound in thought, a genius in the art of the suggestive phrase. The audience in all probability would be far from clear as to his intentions; they would grow clearer as time went on and the suggestions ripened into independent speculation. If they could understand at once what he intends, they would stand in no need of his ministry.

You will perceive how unfitted I was for the meeting I attended to-night. The uppermost thought in mind as I left was, "I do not believe in bloodless revolutions." You cannot have a revolution of society without turning part of it upside down. And I am half afraid that a good deal of what I value most in this world will be turned upside down by a socialistic revolution. Add the sad, indisputable fact that if everyone were a Socialist I should, by natural law, be a Tory, and you will see, more or less accurately, how I stand. You will see, too, the cause of my belief in heroes and G.o.ds, which latter you call natural laws. I look upon myself as a man working among G.o.ds and heroes, and I am beginning to think that the question of revolutions rests always ultimately with them, while I, a man, can but look on and marvel.

Well, I am tired with my jaunt. One's feet are not inured to walking after months at sea. And I hear my friend the Mate overhead.

"Mr. McAlnwick, ye should have been there! The _elite_ o' the Mission was on show. An' we had an anthem. 'Twas good!"

I slip ash.o.r.e with my letter before turning in.

x.x.xIV

Though I had no intention of buying many books, the dreary loneliness of the tavern where I supped drove me out upon the streets, and insensibly I drifted towards my favourite second-hand book-shop, where the little maiden behind the mountains of Welsh theology reminds me of someone I know. My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright-winged above the dust-clouds of old literature, with clear grey eyes and nervous mouth. Not "the heir of all the ages," I fear, though the potentiality in her must be infinite and beyond my ken. "What do you, oh, young man?" So I seem to read the query in her eyes. "Are you only a hodman in this book-yard, then? Where is _she_? What is _she_? Who is _she_?" As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of corpses, I feel her gaze upon me. Quite inarticulate, both of us, you understand--I as shy as she.

I must seem extraordinarily sensitive to you, I think. Merely the presence of this child stirs my soul to n.o.bler ideals. I feel invigorated and refreshed. So my lady stirs me; so even the mere presence of some men we know. In like manner, I imagine, is my friend influenced by superb music. They affect me like an essay by Pater, a Watts portrait, or a Dulwich Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a pa.s.sionate intellectualism, a loosening of corporeal enc.u.mbrances. My friend will not carp because I seem to place my love for my mistress in a category with a Dutch landscape and an aesthetic essay--he will understand.

I have no desire to be proud, but I confess I have never appreciated that amorousness which prompts the lovers to exchange hats as well as vows. Indeed, I scarcely understand what the older poets mean by vows even. What are these vows? By whom are they kept? Of what avail are they when they are most needed? Nearly as useless as marriage vows, these of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up your hands in horror at this, not because you disagree, but because of my audacity in applying general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of people who pose as advanced thinkers and remain as conventional as ever. We have outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is--restraint.

I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan ranted well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian conception of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very latest thing in ideals.

Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably puts it, a pa.s.sionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type.