"Did I stare?" she said. "I'm sorry."

"We all stared," I returned. "Anyone would."

The telephone rang and Mac went to answer it. We could hear his voice plainly on the staircase.

"Hello! Who is it? Oh, good evening, Miss Fraenkel—yes, do. We're not going out to-night. How long will you be? Right. Good-bye."

"She'll be up in half an hour," he said, going back to his easel.

I was by no means certain that Miss Fraenkel would be able to help us to forecast accurately the future instalments of the Carville history. Of course if we could induce her to assume that the painter-cousin's strange companion was Mr. Carville's brother, she might begin to treat the subject with the necessary seriousness. But I had no hope of this. I was too conscious of the extreme subtlety of Mr. Carville's art (we may grant him that now in advance) to think that we could transmit its fascination to Miss Fraenkel. She would probably be astonished at the continuance of our curiosity.

She was. She began, the moment she arrived, to tell us the vicissitudes of a cause to which she had been rapidly and earnestly converted, the cause of female suffrage. It was evident that her reason for calling was to "let off steam," as Mac irreverently phrased it afterwards. A number of millionaires' daughters had drawn upon themselves the eyes of the world by tramping on foot to Washington to plead for the vote. Miss Fraenkel's eyes dilated as she told us. We had seen the account of what the New York Daily News called "The Hike of the Golden Girls," but our eyes had not dilated. We had even acrimoniously hinted that the millionaires' daughters were seeking notoriety rather than a relief for civil disabilities by this undignified tramp across New Jersey and Maryland. But to Miss Fraenkel we said nothing of this. Even if we had been averse to Miss Fraenkel having a vote, we would have said nothing. Only Bill suggested with a smile that the leading "hiker" need not have offered to kiss the President when he good-humouredly granted them an interview. Miss Fraenkel could not see it. There was no divinity that she knew of to hedge a President from a kiss.

"What about the President's wife?" asked Bill.

"Why, she's one of us!" cried Miss Fraenkel. "She approves!"

"Of kissing her husband?" asked Bill.

But Miss Fraenkel's mind was fashioned in water-tight compartments. She could not switch her enthusiasm from the vote long enough to appreciate this lapse from good taste. Her mind did not work that way. We would have to begin at the beginning and lead up to kissing as a moral or immoral act, before she could give it any serious attention. And when she asked Bill to join the local league I interposed, lest the harmony of the evening should be violated.

"We want your vote on another question," I said, and recounted the events of the afternoon. She listened with apparent attention, playing with a string of beads that hung round her neck. Long before I finished I saw she was ready to speak.

"I'll go right in and ask her if she'll join!" she said.

"They've gone to Newark," said Mac.

"To-morrow, then."

"Well," said Bill. "Come up here to-morrow. He's coming in to tell us some more. You'll meet him first and he can introduce you to his wife."

"That'll do first rate! I'm just crazy to get all the members I can."

The conversation rambled on irrelevantly after that, and we realized that for Miss Fraenkel at least, the story of Mr. Carville's life was not absorbingly attractive. We enjoyed her visit, as we always did, but her influence, in her present preoccupation, was feverish and to a certain slight degree disturbing.

The problem that presented itself when I retired that night was immaterial, perhaps, but new. I wondered quietly in what manner Mr. Carville would regard Miss Fraenkel. Doubtless I was over-exacting, but I desired to discover, in our neighbour's attitude towards the lady, some clue to his attitude towards us. I felt vaguely that his candour was not at all a mere casual fit of communicativeness of which we "just happened" to be the recipients. If this were the case, it would infallibly appear in his manner towards our voteless friend. It would be ... but no. My vanity did not carry me that far. The vanity of a man of forty is generally a steed broken to harness; it will not prance far into the unknown. I decided to wait until Mr. Carville decided the matter for himself.

* * * * *

The spectacle, while I was shaving next morning, of Mr. Carville proceeding sedately down Van Diemen's Avenue with his children, gave a fresh vagueness to his image in my mind. It was as though a hand had been passed over the picture, smudging the outlines and rendering the whole thing of dubious value. A model father! In my bewilderment I nearly cut myself. And yet, supposing, as I had been supposing, that Mr. Carville had set out with the definite object of contrasting himself vividly with his prodigal brother, would he not eventually take up the role of dutiful parentage? The extraordinary thing was that the model father should be also the artist.

I determined to abandon the Carville problem for an hour or two after breakfast in favour of Maupassant. It is my custom to read once a year at least, the chief works of that incomparable writer. The forenoon of our Sunday has this peculiarity: no moral obligation to work is imposed by our unwritten laws. If, on Sunday morning, I am discovered by Bill leisurely turning over a pile of old magazines, or reading a story, I am not greeted with "Do you call that work?" On the contrary, she will probably sit down beside me and indulge in what may be charitably described as gossip. Mac, too, will leave his palette and boards in peace, will lie luxuriantly in the big rocker, or, spade on shoulder, disappear among the shrubs at the lower end of the estate. We neglect collars and appear brazenly at breakfast in shirt-sleeves on Sunday mornings. It is for us a day of rest from the insistent badgering of ideas. Our minds go into neglige; we forget editors and advertising-managers for a while. Imagine then our dismay when I reported my view of Mr. Carville in his brushed blue serge and Derby hat, his glazed linen collar and dark green tie, passing sedately down the Avenue, a neat child in each hand. There seemed to be no rift in this man's armour of respectability. He seemed determined to maintain a great and terrible contrast between his inner and outer life. O supreme artist! I stretched myself on my sofa and opened Maupassant:

"Monsieur," I read. "Doctor James Ferdinand does not exist, but the man whose eyes you saw does, and you will certainly recognize his eyes. This man has committed two crimes, for which he does not feel any remorse, but, as a psychologist, he is afraid of some day yielding to the irresistible temptation of confessing his crimes."

I laid down the book, drawn by the aptness of the text to my problem. Had Maupassant given me the key of the whole enigma? Was this astonishing genius, who had so wrought upon our imaginations, was he a criminal irresistibly driven to tell us the story of his evil life? Were the police of Europe and America even now scouring the surface of the globe for him? That brother, that dare-devil gentleman of the painter-cousin's letter, was a fitting accomplice for him, the quiet, unobtrusive, impeccable "seaman." He had a number, what was it? Three-nine-(fool not to write it down!) three-nine-something. Was that his number during his last imprisonment? Had he spoken in terrific hyperbole when he admitted that no doubt it was "a picturesque life"? Good God! How blind we had been! And Miss Fraenkel's shot in the dark, was it after all the truth? Had he really been "held for something"?

I let my pipe go out, so possessed was I, temporarily, with the diabolical possibility. A double knock at the door sent the blood to my heart. I rose, and passing into the front room opened the door. Mr. Carville stood in the porch in an attitude of profound meditation. The sight of him, phlegmatic and isolated from all emotion, restored the balance of my mind somewhat. We shook hands and he still stood there, trying to remember something.

"Another fine day," I said. "I saw you out early this morning."

He nodded absently, and then his face lightened.

Somewhat to my surprise, if any further surprise was possible, he lifted his steady grey-blue eyes to mine, raised his right hand as high as his shoulder and began to recite.

"When that the Knight had thus his tale i-told, In al the route was ther young ne old That he ne seyde it was a noble story, And worthy to be drawen to memory."

And extending a finger he pointed to the little brass Canterbury Pilgrim that served us for a knocker. "They told stories too, eh?" he said, smiling.

"You read Chaucer?" I murmured, staggering to a chair in the porch.

"Why, sure!" he said, "don't you?" And he took out his pipe.

I did not pursue the subject, even when I had recovered my poise. The clever application of the Chaucerian verse to his own case was crushing. I said nothing of it to Mac when he appeared with a pair of shears intended for the borders.

"Hullo, Mr. Carville," he said. "Come to finish the story? Wait till I tell the wife."

"Now where's the hurry?" said our neighbour, deprecatingly, and sitting down he began to cut up some tobacco. I looked across at New York, still surrounded in diaphanous mist, and endeavoured to adjust my mind to the immediate business. Since dinner the night before I had been indulging in somewhat frothy speculation. It was only fair that Mr. Carville should have the floor and speak for himself. Bill came out and nodded brightly. None of us suggested waiting for Miss Fraenkel. I think we were anxious to hear a little more of Mr. Carville before Miss Fraenkel arrived; a sort of presentiment, if you like.

"Do tell us about your brother, Mr. Carville," said Bill. "What happened to him?"

Mr. Carville struck a match and puffed away in the conscientious manner demanded by a corn-cob.

"Why, of course," he said, carefully expelling a jet of smoke from the corner of his closed lips, "he came back, my brother did."

Bill looked at him in tragic annoyance.



CHAPTER VIII

HE CONTINUES HIS TALE

"It was like this," he went on. "Apart from a general dislike of doing things that boys consider 'bad form' my brother had no scruples at all. For instance, if a stranger cheeks you, you feel as if you'd like to hit him. My young brother did hit him. What was still more to his advantage he gave people the impression that he was always ready to jump over the table at them. My impression is that the old Head didn't dare flog him and had been glad to find an excuse to get rid of him. It didn't occur to the old chap that my brother wouldn't come home. He little knew my brother!

"Several days passed and we began to get anxious. My mother telegraphed the Head and the railway company. No good. Now it's all very well for well-meaning people to say tell the police,' but when you are up against a private disgrace, you think pretty hard before you walk into a police station. My brother was fifteen and big for his age. Why, he might disguise himself anyhow. The week-end came before we made up our minds that the police would have to be notified. I went to Scotland Yard on the Saturday afternoon with a reward and description. I don't pretend that I felt very anxious about him. He had never sought either my friendship or my protection, and we looked at life from totally different angles. To me there was something common and dirty about an intrigue with a school-slavey. My brother, I thought, should have been above that sort of thing. But he wasn't and he never has been. With him a woman is just a woman. He raises his hand and they come running, and apologizing if they're late. So after I had been to Scotland Yard, I stayed down West, went to a theatre and looked in at El Vino for a glass of port afterwards. El Vino in those days had a curious reputation, quite different from the Continental or the Leicester Lounge. No one would ever suggest you were a loose fish because you drank a dock-glass in El Vino, though there were women there every night. Just as I was lifting the glass some one gave me a slap on the back. It was my young brother.

"'Hullo, Charley!' he says. 'Fancy you here.'

"'What are you doing here?' I asked him. I realized he was as tall as I was. 'Why aren't you at home?'

"'I'm coming home with you, Charley boy,' he says, looking round at the girls. 'All the old talent here, you see!'

"I own frankly I was disgusted. I was so disgusted I never went into that place again. We got the 12.20 at King's Cross and it was a quarter past one in the morning before we arrived at our house. Here was a nice state of things; the elder son finding his fifteen-year-old brother in El Vino, and coming home with the milk. That was my brother's way all along. He made everything I do seem a black sin. I left him to tell his own story and turned in.

"The next morning he went on the carpet. My mother gave him a pretty hot talking to. She told him he was a disgrace to the name of Carville, that he'd begun bad and would go to worse. She asked him how she was ever to get him into a position if he left school like that and for such a reason. He took out a cigarette-case and helped himself. 'No need to worry, mater,' says he, 'I've got a position already.'

"And so he had! He'd gone into the city and got a position in a big wholesale house as a clerk. Ask me how he did it and all I can say is 'Personality.' He could do anything with anybody. There he was, fifteen, with a guinea a week to start. And I was twenty-two and only getting a few shillings more.

"After the first shock my mother resigned herself to the inevitable and hoped for the best. And for a couple of years we managed to rub along without any scandals. In our several ways, my brother and I were busy with life, as far as we knew it. He went up to the city every day, and played football and cricket, but the serious business of his life was girls. He seemed to have hundreds. If I saw him in the Strand, on Saturday, he would be with three or four. If I met him on Hadley Common, on Sunday, he would have three or four there, but fresh ones. He had them in the trains, he lunched with them in the city. Barring the few hours he spent in our house at night he lived chiefly on girls. There were a score or so in the house where he worked, a wholesale business in Wood Street. It was a mania, you might say; but it was the girls who had the mania, not he. He spent all his money as he got it on them, he borrowed more and spent that. One thing particularly annoyed me just about this time, and that was his free way of borrowing my clothes when they fitted him. Vests and ties especially. You may think it a trivial matter, but to me there was something exasperating in seeing one's brother on a park seat in the dusk, with his girl's head leaning on one's own fancy vest! He would just shy whatever he had borrowed on the bed and leave me to pick the hair off it. What they call a Superman, I believe, nowadays. I had another name for him.

"Apart from these annoyances, I was sliding along a well-oiled groove in life. It generally happens that a young man in such a position as mine marries and settles down for good. Now it may have been that my brother's wholesale dealings with girls threw me to the other extreme. I don't think that had much to do with it. I think, now, that I had a natural bend towards Culture.

"Don't misunderstand me," said Mr. Carville. "I use that word without any doubt of what it means. I know George Du Maurier's sneers. Culture means an instinct for the best. I had that. I have it now.

"I don't say that culture is opposed to marriage. That would be nonsense. But it may seriously interfere with marriage. A young man in the twenties has no irresistible desire for matrimony. As a rule I mean. And if sport or business or, as in my case, study, takes up his attention, he will put it off for a while. That's what happened to me. I had access to books. I had an easy job and no great responsibility. I knew nothing about the world really; I only read about it in books. It seemed to me a splendid thing to be a learned man. I became a book-worm, reading several hours a day. What was I aiming at? Upon my soul I can't say. It was just blind instinct leading me on to read the books that since then have become part of me.

"My work was, as I said, light. The firm I was with were specialists in certain machinery, and I was assistant to the London manager. I had to plan out and make estimates for various plants, and travel about the south of England getting orders and superintending erection. I can tell you it just suited me, those journeys by train. I always had my book with me, and as soon as I had been over a job, I forgot all about contracts and went back to Pater, or Gibbon or Flaubert or Emerson, whoever I happened to be reading. In the evenings I used to try and imitate what I had read.

"But what could I write? What did I know? Nothing! I had never been anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the traditions of the genteel professional class. Of course, in a dim way I knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked up.

"My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five shillings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only held his tongue and let her pay the forty shillings fine and costs. No! he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it.

"I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds, would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him the regulation forty shillings and several pounds cost. But as I said, this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cashiered him the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to my mother.

"The first I saw of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. 'The Seamy Side' they called it. When I got home my brother and my mother were having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted. Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be damned if he went to Canada. He was sick of clerking. What did he want to do? I asked him. He said he was going in for engineering. I smiled at this, and he rounded on me. 'Oh I don't mean your engineering,' he says. 'I mean something that's worth while.' Very sneering he was.

"Well, do you know what he did? He got fifty pounds out of my mother to start with and disappeared. That's all. Simply vanished without a word. In a way it was a relief. We gave out that he had gone to Canada and the scandal died down. A month later my uncle wrote and mentioned that Frank had called on him and borrowed fifty pounds to go to New Zealand with. I don't know how he managed to do it, for my uncle doesn't let go easy at all. He has had to work for his money too hard. Personality, I suppose. If my brother had had a five-minute personal interview with the Lord Mayor I daresay he would have got the old chap to pay the fine for him.

"After this little brush-up my mother and I jogged along for a few years as quiet as before. I was still in my job as manager's assistant, and still reading away into the classics. I was about twenty-five when all my ideas and prejudices slid away over side and I found I had got the disease we call love. It nearly killed me."

Mr. Carville paused and leaned over to knock his pipe against the geranium-tub. We did not interrogate him. There was something numbing to me in the thought of this quiet ordinary little man telling us in a quiet matter-of-fact tone that love had nearly killed him. We had no comment worthy of the fact. He looked across the valley for a moment as though lost in retrospection.

"She came home from a convent in Brussels," he continued, feeling for his little brass box, "and to use the slang of our professional class, her people knew my people. That was the way we talked. If a thing was good, we called it 'ripping.' If it was unpleasant, we said it was 'beastly.' I believe the slang has changed since then, but the silly artificial spirit of it will never change. Why can't educated people speak English?

"She came home from a convent in Brussels. Her home was about a mile off, a big house in East Barnet, and she called with her mother one day when I happened to come home from a journey early. She gave me a look....

"You see, she wasn't beautiful. She was well-dressed and well-mannered and she had grey eyes. Beyond that I haven't any distinct memory of what she was like. And the astounding thing to me, when I look back on that business, is the utter lack of any common interests. How could I expect her to take any notice of me? I was a book-worm. I couldn't do any of the social tricks she admired. I knew as much about music as a cow, and considered tennis a bore. And yet I wanted her. I wanted that eighteen-year-old girl as I've never wanted anything since. I made myself a door-mat for her feet, I took her impudence and said nothing, I waited for her and made no complaint when she forgot to keep an appointment. My mother saw it and did her best to help me (though it wasn't much), for she wanted me to get married. This would have been a good match, for it so happened that 'her people' were in a position to advance me in my profession, as I called it.

"And strange to say, my persistence did make some impression. I did make some headway. I chucked my books to one side, went in for tennis, and even took girls up the river to Kingston and Bourne End, she being one of them. It made a hole in the little bank account I had started, but I suppose it was worth it. I met a lot of pretty girls; but I was not after a pretty girl; I was after her. The river was a lot in my favour, I believe. It so happened that Belvoir's young brother, a Charterhouse boy, whom I knew slightly, nearly ran our punt down one Saturday with his launch. It made a big impression on Gladys, my knowing young Belvoir. You see she had been at school with Belvoir's cousin, so it all worked in. In a way I suppose I was happy ... yes, it's a wonderful thing, a tremendous thing to be in love; but all the same, I wouldn't like to go through it again!

"So it stood, when one day in the autumn, the whole thing capsized. My brother came back.

"He didn't come back like any other prodigal I ever heard of. No, he came back in his own way, like a conquering hero, which he was. He came back on an automobile.

"You laugh? But you must remember that in those days there weren't fifty automobiles in England. When my brother came up the London Road with a whiz and a bang, a long trail of blue stench coming out of the back of the machine, I really think that was the third or fourth time I had ever seen such a thing. Well, there he was, a great big chap with a hooked nose and flashing black eyes behind the goggles. Where had he been? Neither to Canada nor to New Zealand. He'd been to France. He'd gone there and learned the motor-car business in one of the first shops ever built. Picked it up you may say, as he picked everything up, but he got it none the less. He'd seen the possibilities of the thing, and here he was appointed London agent for the French firm at three hundred a year. He, laughed when he saw me. 'Hullo, Charley!, he sneers. 'How's the puff-puffs?' He sneered at everything about me. I had learned to read French pretty well and knew my classics in the original, but here was my young brother sneering at me in French argot which he knew I couldn't resent because I couldn't understand it.

"He would come down to the tennis club that evening, though I didn't want him. Somehow I dreaded introducing him to Gladys. There was no need for me to worry. He introduced himself. In another five minutes he was talking French with her, and she was screaming with laughter at the stories he told her. He saw her home....

"You can understand that the next day I was in a bad condition for work. And it so happened that I had a job that needed all the concentration I could give it. I don't remember a single detail of it. I had been neglecting my work then, like all young chaps in love, but on this occasion I made a costly mistake. I marked the driving pulley on a line-shaft a foot too small. The aggravating part was I sent it to the head office in Yorkshire without revising it and they got on to my boss. He took the bit in his teeth and went for me. He gave me a week to find another job. I was 'down and out.'

"I was paralyzed for a while. I didn't know where to turn. The bottom had dropped out of my world for good and all. Another job! Why, I knew men in that employ who had held their jobs for forty years.

"I said nothing about it at home. My brother, with his three hundred a year and his French argot, made home unbearable and I thought of clearing out of it. But where could I go? You see, if you work for some specialist for a number of years, the only job you can move to is a position with another specialist of the same line. And this business I was in was run by about six big firms.

"Still, the thought of clearing out held me. I saw that if my brother was going to live at home, I'd have to go. And Saturday came round and found me wondering what to do.

"At times I used to go over to my uncle's at Surbiton. It was my duty to pay respects, so to speak. His family had a grudge against my mother, because if my father hadn't married her, they would have inherited his money, so that there was not much love lost between them. But occasionally my old uncle would ring me up and ask me to go down with him. He did this Saturday I speak of, and as there was no one else in my office at the time I told him my trouble. And he laughed! Humph!

"The inhuman old shell-back laughed! And yet, if you'll believe me, when I heard the old chap rumbling at the other end of the wire, it cheered me up. I began to think, 'Why, he may have influence. He may get me a job.' You see the vicious state of mind of the professional class! When I mentioned the possibility to him, he said, 'I can get you a job all right. How'd you like to go to sea?'

"I nearly dropped the receiver when he said that. Go to sea! People in residential suburbs didn't go to sea!

"'Eh?' I said. 'What d'you mean?'

"'What I said,' he bellows. 'Go to sea,'

"'I'll come round and talk to you,' I said.

"I went round and found him in the office. He was a fierce old chap, burnt black with sun, and with hair grey as the sea. He was enjoying his life apparently, bossing things in that office. But he told me at once that he could do no more than give me a chance to start at the bottom. I must work up and pass the Board of Trade tests for each grade. I give him credit for painting the picture as dark as he could. He even suggested I should try and get another draughtsman's job if I was afraid of going through the mill. But I didn't know enough to be afraid, and asked him off-hand when he would need me.

"'We don't need you,' he said, as if surprised. 'We can get a couple of thousand young fellows to-morrow if we want them. It's up to you.'

"That was the first slap in the face. I sat there in that great gloomy vault of an office in Fenchurch Street, looking at the half-models of ships and a map of the docks at Monte Video on the walls, and wondering what I should do. I was not hesitating, you understand, because of pride. No, that was gone. My brother, when he saw Gladys home, had done for that. It was more like a fear gripping at me. I was scared at letting go of my professional easy-going life. I'd never been on a ship since I'd been born on one. I knew nothing about marine engineering. I hesitated because I was afraid.

"'When shall I start?' I asked after a while.

"'The Corydon's in the river now,' said my uncle. 'They want a Fourth: can you get down to-night?'

"'To-night!' I said. 'I've not given notice yet!'

"'Phone from here,' he says.

"'But I've nothing packed,' I whimpered. And he laughed.

"I know now why he laughed. Partly because a landsman is always rather a comic figure to a sailor, partly because he knew how I had been brought up. He had never agreed with the theory of gentility which had taken such a hold of my mother. He was as out of place in his Surbiton home as a bear in a back-yard. His daughters, my cousins, couldn't make him see the importance, in England, of gentility. When he and my father and all the rest of them had been boys on that New England farm, they had had to clear stones off the land. No stones, no dinner. And now he had a house in Surbiton, and was laughing at me, who had never lifted a stone in my life. Even in the works where I was a pupil we had always had a little private lavatory to wash and change in. He laughed at me. He believed one trip would be enough for me. He didn't believe for a minute that I would stick to it.

"But I was making up my mind. Somehow or other, in spite of my twenty-five years in cotton-wool, I had imagination enough to see in my uncle's weather-beaten old face something that was not in the city faces I saw every day. He had come into London out of an alien world. Then, I argued, there are other worlds beside this one! I had not realized it before! All the time I was snug in my little job in Victoria Street men were out on the sea, out in the heat and cold and wet, living in a totally different world to mine. You may think it a foolish and common enough idea, but to me it was dazzling, blinding. It took hold of me. I could think of nothing else. I said, 'I'll go, but I can't go to-night, I've nothing to wear.' So my uncle told me to go to Cardiff and meet the Corydon at Barry Dock.

"'What's she like?' I said, standing up. He took me into another office, and showed me a beautiful model of a steamer.

"'There she is,' he says. 'That's the old Corydon. I commanded her for three years.' I can tell you I was pleased to think I was going to sea in such a fine ship. Humph!

"I went home and had a talk with my mother. All her ideas were capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable elder son, out of employment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly. 'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done the very same thing I was to do, long ago; broken out of her life and made a fresh start—on the sea.

"And what had happened to me? You'll think I was a pretty cheap sort of a lover to let my brother cut me out so easy as that. You'll say I never really loved her. Who can tell that? Who can say how much or how little he loves? Yes, yes, I loved her. But what, I ask you, is the use of a man mooning his life away for a girl who has never given him a minute's thought? It is a waste of time and energy and life. When that view of worlds outside of mine broke on me the love-trance broke. I said to myself: 'I am young; I will go out and see things.' Well, I went out and I saw things, and I don't regret it. But there's one thing we never see again, and that's the illusion of first love.

"I begged my mother to say nothing to Frank about me until I was gone, and a day or two later I slipped away to Paddington with a couple of grips and took the train to Barry Docks. It will give you an idea of the quiet life I had led when I tell you this was my first long journey. I had been to places within one hundred and fifty miles of London, but never farther. I felt lost when they turned me out on the platform at Barry in the rain and dark. A seaport is not a very attractive place to a landsman.

"The next twenty-four hours were strenuous for me. More than once I wondered if I could live through it. When I got to the dock I walked up and down looking for a ship that resembled the model of the Corydon. There weren't any. I asked a man in a blue frock-coat if the Corydon had come in.

"'Aye,' says he. 'Here she is, just abaft of ye,' and he pointed to a rusty, dirty old tub with a battered funnel and a bridge all blocked with hatches. That the beautiful shiny Corydon? There was the name on her stern—Corydon, London. She was loading coal from a big elevator. Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the rain, my gloves all black with the coal on the ladder, my nice mackintosh barred with it, and my boots slipping on the iron plates. No one took any notice of me. Men went to and fro in oilskins and shouted, but they didn't seem to see me. Just for a moment I thought of bolting! Humph!

"Finally I spoke to one of the men, saying I had a letter for the chief engineer. He took me round into a dark alleyway under the bridge-deck aft and shouted down: 'Here comes the Second,' he says. 'He'll fix ye.'

"Well, he came up, that Second did, not very pleased at being disturbed. 'What is it?' he says. He was grease from head to foot, as though some one had been rolling him in a sewer.

"'I'm the Fourth Engineer,' I said. 'Oh, are ye,' says he, 'I thought ye were comin' this mornin'. Better get a boiler-suit on and give a hand. We're goin' to sea to-morrow noon.'

"He took me along the alleyway and unlocked a door. 'There,' says he, 'there's your room. Ye share wi' the Third.' It was a smelly little hole, and so dark I could scarcely make out the bunks.

"'I haven't a boiler-suit with me,' I said, and he looked at me. He was a younger man than I was, and I felt it would be strange to have to take orders from him. 'Oh,' he says, 'you're about my size, I'll lend you one.' I couldn't help thinking as he went into his berth next to ours, that if he was the Second and I was the Fourth, what on earth would I be like when we got to sea?

"And then he took me down below.

"That was my introduction to my new career. No handshakes, no good night's rest—nothing. I got into the Second's boiler-suit and followed him down. We had to work all night. The Third was down there all the time under the boilers. He was an old chap; must have been sixty, with a moustache that was dirty brown at the tips and grey at the roots, and a crease down each of his cheeks that was always twitching while he chewed. He was lying on his side in a puddle of water, a slush lamp close to his head, working a ratchet-drill into the shell of the boiler. I had to crawl in alongside of him and help him. Me! And I'd been writing 'fitters' instructions' in the office for three years. It was a come-down.

"And yet, something inside of me responded to the call. Say it was romance if you like, say it was sentiment, say it was just foolishness. Something inside of me answered to the call. We worked all that night, patching that bad plate on the boiler. The other boilers were under steam, so you can believe it was hot down under there. My hands were all soft with office work, and in the first few hours I got cuts all over them, and the salt of the boiler-seams got into them and made them raw. What a time it was! It wasn't long before I was as dirty as the rest of them. I forgot all about time or food or sleep; just fetched and carried as I was told. Once the Second, who was screwing the holes we drilled, asked me if I had been to sea before. I said 'No,' and both of them said 'Oh Lord!' I can't blame them now. I've said it myself since, when I've found a new starter on my hands.

"The Chief came down about three o'clock in the morning and looked through the hole in the boiler casing. He was a little man with a glass eye. 'Is the Fourth there?' he says, sucking at his pipe. 'Yes,' I said, and he raps out, 'Yes what?' Humph!

"When the patch was on we had to get the boiler filled and the fires away as soon as we could. I tried to get some information out of the old Third, but he just chewed and spat. When I asked the Second he says, 'Oh Hell, I can't stop to show ye now. Take a hand-lamp and go and see the run o' the pipes yerself.' I was nearly dropping for sheer sleepiness, but I made up my mind I would not give in. At breakfast time the Chief said we'd missed a tide and couldn't get away till midnight, and I thanked God. But it's a funny thing about a steamer, that the more time you have the more work there is to do. We had stores to get stowed away, and as soon as that was done a steam-pipe split on the fore-deck and we had to go in the rain and patch it. I didn't know where things were; I didn't know the names of things; I didn't know how they should be done. I'd been a gentleman for six years, never soiling my hands except to clean my bicycle. When the Second said to me at tea-time, 'You'd better knock off and turn in. You'll be on watch to-night,' I began to realize what I was in for. I sat on the settee in our room and tried to think. No wonder my old shell-back uncle had laughed. My clothes were lying all round. I had no bedding, nor sea-gear, and I didn't know where to get it. Suddenly the door opened and the Chief came in.

"'Haven't you a letter for me?' he says. I gave it to him. 'Captain Carville's nephew, I see. Coming for a trip, or are you going to stick to it?' I looked at him.

"'I'm going to stick to it if it kills me,' I said. 'I'm here for keeps.' He nodded. He liked that.

"'Got any gear?' he says. I said, 'I've got nothing except an extra suit and some pyjamas.'

"He told me to get washed and go ashore and buy some bedding. 'I don't know how you'll get on with that old Third,' he says. 'The last Fourth left because of him.'

"'I'm not going to leave, sir,' I said. I wasn't going back for anybody. I was going to find out something about life, right away from everybody I'd ever known.

"'Bully for you,' says he, and with that he went away. I went ashore and bought myself some gear, and by the time I got back it was eight o'clock by my watch.

"Never shall I forget that night. I'd meant to write my mother and uncle and tell them I was all right, but I was too tired and worried. The old Third came aboard at ten o'clock with a skinful, and the Second was rushing round cursing me because there was nobody else to curse. The firemen were drunk and the donkey-man was drunk. And at eleven-fifteen the gong sounded for slow-astern. I stood by the telegraph and worked the handle, and do what I would I kept shutting my eyes. My God! I thought, shall I ever sleep again? The old Third stood near me, his eyes all bloodshot, the crease in his cheek working, his dyed moustache all draggled, his breath—Humph! He was cunning enough to pretend he was all right, helping the Second with the reversing gear. Now and again the Chief would come down and give an order, his glass eye fixing me in a queer way. I never got used to that glass eye. It wasn't part of him, so to speak, and it distracted one's attention. The Chief himself would be talking quite friendly to you, when you would suddenly catch sight of that glass eye glaring at you, full of undying and unreasonable hate. He would be roaring with laughter at some joke, while all the time the glass eye seemed to be calculating a cold-blooded murder. It was strange enough in its socket; but I tell you, when I ran up to call him for a hot bearing one night and he looked across at me with one bright blue eye and the other bloody-red and sunken, and I saw the glass thing staring at me from the dressing table—Humph!

"At last, about one o'clock in the morning, we were outside, and he sent me up to see if the pilot had gone. Just as I stumbled up on the bridge-deck I saw the pilot going over the side, down a rope ladder. Oh, didn't I wish I was going with him! She was beginning to roll, you see.

"And yet, though I was in the depths, so to speak, up to the eyes in it, as I stood there in the rain and wind, the sweat bitter cold on my body, I saw the coast-wise lights, and realized with a sudden jump of the heart what I was doing. I was out at sea. And I'd been born at sea. Twenty-six years in cotton-wool! Can you realize what I had done? Somewhere inside of me there was something answering the call. I was going back through toil and sorrow to my own. I was away at last. I went down again into the engine-room and told them that the pilot was gone. The Second says, 'Get yourself turned in, then.'

"I could have put my head on his shoulder and cried for joy!

"Well, I've said enough to give you an idea of the sudden turn in my fortunes. A week ago I was in love, and comfortably tucked away inside a cozy corner of the professional class. My brother was a mysterious prodigal. Suddenly he butts in, and all is changed. He's snug and safe in a good berth, he's taken up the tale of his girls just where he left off, and I'm out at sea, Fourth Engineer of a rusty old freighter bound for a place I'd never heard of: Port Duluth, British Namaqualand. Well, let him marry her and be hanged! I thought; I'm out of that world. I was resolved not to go near London town till I'd worked out my probation on the Corydon. I saw that I was back in the Third Form at school again. I saw that my shipmates knew nothing about culture or public schools or art or gentility. I saw they knew their business, and if I would be willing and quick to jump, they would teach it to me. My only real trouble was that old Third. If he'd only been a little cleaner in his habits! He would lie on the settee when he was off watch, the creases in his cheeks twisting, his bloodshot old eyes fixed on the toes of his red slippers and then—biff!—he would spit on the floor. But even that I could have stood if he'd been more cheerful. He never smiled, only creased his cheeks a little deeper. In time I learned why the last Fourth, a gay young spark of twenty-two, had fled out of the ship. This old Third, old Croasan his name was, didn't care what happened to him. His children were grown up and run away; he was too ignorant to get a certificate, and he was just waiting for a ship to go to the bottom and take him with her. When the Second told me that I didn't believe him. I held, as most people hold, that even a man a hundred years of age will fight like a tom-cat for his life. But I found that the Second was right!

"We struck bad weather as soon as we got into the Bay. The Corydon was loaded to her summer draught and here was a westerly gale coming on her bow, and later on her beam. She rolled day and night, shipping big seas all the time. This rolling washed the bilge water up on the plates in the stoke hold and lifted them, so that the small Welsh coal, like the Lehigh stuff you get here, was washed into the limber and choked the pump suctions. Very soon the bilge began to fill. The old ship was leaking like a basket any way, and she took a heavy list to port. All my watch that night, from eight o'clock till twelve, I was on those bilge-pumps trying to make them draw, while the Chief looked after the engines. It was no joke, with her listed over like that, the platform under water and green seas coming down through the skylights. I thought of my pleasant home at Oakleigh Park then, the quiet autumn streets, the bright fire in the dining-room and the cosy warm bed. Oh yes, I thought of it, but not with regret. I was out to win through, and all hell wouldn't have made me desert!

"At twelve o'clock it was pretty serious. The Chief had the Second out to help with the pumps and sent me to call the old Third. It was his watch on the main engines, you see, twelve to four. Our berth was flooded. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor, and at every sea the water flew through the leaky joints of the dead-lights, all over old Croasan. To and fro on the floor my slippers were floating and a torn magazine swam into the room from the alleyway as I opened the door. The oil from the lamp was dripping on to the drawer tops, and every time she gave a deeper roll the light flared. I put the magazine under it to catch the drip, and as I did so I caught sight of a picture in it, a picture of two men standing on the deck of a ship in a storm. Underneath were the words, 'I think she's sinking.' Curious, wasn't it? That's just what I thought. I turned to old Croasan. He lay in his bunk just as he had come off watch at six o'clock, his dungarees shining with grease, his tattooed arms grey with dirt. He looked eighty years old as he lay there with his bald head against the bottle rack, the pouches under his eyes marking dark shadows on his creased cheeks. I shook him, and he opened his eyes for a second. I hardly knew what I was doing, I was so crazy with sickness and bruises and incessant toil. 'Mr. Croasan,' I shouted at him. 'Eh!' says he, without opening his eyes. 'Oh,' I said, 'I—I think she's sinking.' He opened his eyes for about two seconds and then said to me in a terrible voice just as a big sea crashed over our heads and the ports spurted, 'Let her sink and be damned!' he says and never stirred. I left him there. I ran back to the engine room. I felt I couldn't stay and argue the point with a man who would not make a fight for us, for himself.

"The Chief decided to cut holes in the suction pipe just under the water-line. Then when the pumps sucked them clear, we bound them up with jointing and cut more holes lower down. Oh! it was grand! For fourteen hours we went on doing that, up to our shoulders in the bilge, the grease caking on us in a fresh layer every time we climbed out to get something in the store. The weather eased a little off Finisterre and we got her righted. We went up to the Chief's room to have a nip of whisky.

"'Ye see,' said the Second. 'Ye see, mister, there's some as dinna care.'

"Old Croasan came out of the bunk when the trouble was over. I felt too proud of what I'd been through to be hard on the poor old chap, proud of being in the thick of it. I was seeing life at last. This was what I'd come for. 'Ah,' says the Chief, his glass eye fixing me over his whisky glass, 'you'll be marked if you stay on the Corydon.'

"I was. It took that old box of misfortune thirty-two days to make Port Duluth. Every day we had some breakdown or other. She was like a good many other ships that fly the Red Ensign, worn out. But did I grumble? Not a bit of it. I looked at it as any man will who's got sand in him. It was a fight. There was no fighting in Victoria Street; it was simply riding through life on rubber tyres. Books, art, comfort, philosophy, all these things are well enough; but the Corydon, the rusty, leaking, treacherous old Corydon, with her starting rivets and banging old engines, she was the real thing, the thing to mark a man and teach him what he's made of.

"I don't suppose any of you people have ever heard of Port Duluth. I certainly hadn't. When I asked where it was, the others told me it was 'up a creek.' In England this would have meant very little; but I had learned from my mother to call even the Thames a creek, and so I was able to swallow the apparent paradox of a seven-thousand-ton ship insinuating herself up to what was known locally as 'a railhead.' When I persisted and wanted to know the name of the creek, nobody knew, but they said it was one of the channels of the Niger River. Then, I argued in my bookish way, Port Duluth must be in Nigeria. But this wasn't so certain at all. I became acquainted with the ragged edge of the British Empire. I gathered that the boundaries were not entirely settled, but that when the railway was carried along some watershed into the interior, it would link up with another system and our sphere of influence would automatically extend to include Port Duluth. And when I kept on at my shipmates and wanted to know what made the sphere of influence so very precious I received the staggering answer that it was nuts. We were building battle-ships and recruiting armies and building railways and bridges and harbours, for nuts. To me, walking to and fro on the after-deck in the glow of a tropical sunset, it seemed absurd. You see, I knew nothing of raw products. Until I went to sea I didn't know how far the common things come. I didn't know that Yorkshire pig-iron was smelted from Tunisian and Ionian ore, or that the sugar in my tea had gone from Java to New York and from there to Liverpool. I didn't know where things came from nor where they went. The geography at school had some of it no doubt. I can recall some few vague facts about flax at Belfast and jute at Dundee. Humph! That trip to Port Duluth was worth a million geography lessons.

"To begin with, I learned much about rivers. In England a river is something easily comprehended. You can see along it, and across it, and it is locked, bolted and barred with towns and bridges and weirs and tow-paths. It is no more like an African river than a tame cat is like a leopard. Yet on the map the only difference is that perhaps the large river will have two mouths, and several tributaries running into it, exactly like a branch running into a tree. It wasn't like that at all. I had an atlas with me and when we reached the mouths of the great river I tried to find out where we were on the map. But it was hopeless. Where the map showed one channel there were hundreds on the chart. And the chart was out-of-date. It seemed a dream to me. I was under the impression that navigation nowadays was a humdrum affair of making points, steering on a ruled pencil line on the chart, so much for currents, so much for tides and so on. So it is, no doubt, in a great measure; but we can hardly realize how much of it is sheer skill and gallant daring. Even the men who do it don't realize it because they are always doing it. That first voyage to Port Duluth was a revelation to me in several ways. I had my own private troubles you may be sure. I was as green as grass. My hands blistered and my heart sickened many a time. But I am glad to think I could see other things as well. To me it was thrilling to look out across the oily blue glitter and see a hazy line which was the Ivory Coast. There was the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast—the words had a new significance now! And when I came up out of that awful engine-room and saw the land close in, the eternal grey-green line of mangrove swamp holding up the blazing vault of the sky, I forgot my troubles. I said to myself in a whisper, 'This is what I came for. This is the world!'

"I asked where we had anchored, seeing no sign of life ashore, and they told me it was the Bar. We must wait for high water. Away ahead was the bar buoy, a white blob on the water. I stood leaning against a stanchion trying to sense the atmosphere of the place until the Second called me, for there was something to do. There was always something to do in that terrible old ship. I went down, and together we wrestled with the dynamo-engine, a cheap contraption with a closed crank chamber full of muddy oil which was supposed to splash into all the bearings, and didn't. We needed a washer, a special sort of thing. The old one was worn out. We needed screws, too, to fasten it with, small brass screws with flat heads that sank in out of sight. When I asked where these were coming from if we hadn't got them on the ship, the Second said with some asperity, that it would be my job to make them on my anchor watch that night. I was surprised at this and made some remark about getting them from ashore, and it so tickled the poor over-worked Second that he stood up suddenly, spun round towards the reversing engine and broke into peals of hysterical laughter. I shall never forget the sight of him as he stood there in his sodden, filthy singlet and dungarees, his arms knotted and burned and bruised, his common little face twisted into an expression of super-human scorn. For a single moment he was sublime, lifted out of himself, with the mere effort of pouring contempt upon my ignorance. He tried to put it into words, and sputtered. He looked as though in a trance and some stormy spirit was struggling within him. The sweat ran off us in streams as we stood there in the light of a couple of slush-lamps flaring in the draught from the stokehold door. Then he abruptly abandoned his search for vitriolic language and rushed into the store for a piece of brass rod. It was a curious performance. I was impressed. I realized in a dim way that there was no longer a hardware shop round the corner. The making of those screws was nothing in itself, but it was the principle behind it, the principle of never being stumped. And these rough, uncultured, north-countrymen were my teachers. The Chief fixed me with his one good eye at lunch. 'We don't get things from ashore in this employ,' he observed, and left me to soak it in.

"I suppose I ought to have been downhearted at being so ignorant and dirty and tired, but I wasn't in the least. It was too interesting. There was a grim irony, to me, in the appalling contrast between the behaviour of that worn-out dynamo and the smug theory in the text-books and trade catalogues I had been used to so long. I had read of the way to detect faults in a circuit, but it seemed to me there was no need to look for faults on the Corydon; it was the virtues, the sound places, that needed looking for. And yet, strange to say, out of her decrepitude loyalty was born. I found it growing on me day by day, a jealous regard for her, the pity that becomes a sort of cantankerous affection.

"But to go on with that day, we crossed the bar. It was high water at four in the afternoon and I had to go down again to stand by the telegraph. With my head against the reversing engine wheel I could feel the slow vibration of the anchor coming up, and hear the sough of the exhaust coming back from the windlass. The Second and old Croasan stood near by, their faces blank with waiting and fatigue, like the faces of dead men. Old Croasan's eyelid would flicker now and then and the tip of his tongue would move stealthily round the inside of his lips. He hadn't shaved for several days and his face was vague and venerable, glistening grey bristles. When he leaned gently against the vice-bench and folding his arms, closed his eyes, he looked like a hundred-years'-old corpse. He closed his eyes. It was not interesting to him, this crossing of the bar.

"Suddenly we got an order, and we started. I went along the tunnel to see the bearings were all oiled, and while I stood in the dark gloom at the far end, with my hand on the dribbling stern-gland, there came a sudden thump and a grinding shock. The turning shaft shook and chattered before my eyes, the propeller outside caught in something, shuddered, broke clear and beat like a flail. Then the ship lifted bodily and fell, bump, bump, bump. I stood there transfixed. What could it be? I looked along the dark tunnel to where the lights of the engine-room showed in a pale glint and I could have sworn I saw the whole bag of tricks move slowly up and subside as the keel floundered across that ridge of mud and soft rock. She must be breaking in half, I thought. I had heard of such things. I gathered myself up and hurried back to the engine-room, where I found everybody perfectly calm. The ship, it appeared, was now on the bar and it was our business to keep the engines going at full speed until she was gradually urged over. At intervals she bumped. Some mass of rock or clay on which she rested would collapse and immediately the propeller would shove her a little further over. Our vacuum almost disappeared, for the injection pipe got blocked with mud. This meant more work for me in starting the ballast pump, and when that got choked too, I had to open it up and clean the valve-boxes. It didn't seem to matter what happened, there was a new job for me. I wondered with a sort of temporary bitterness whether they would miss me if I dropped suddenly dead. And I was obliged to admit to myself that in all probability they wouldn't. They would just go ahead and do the job themselves and bury me when they got through.

"And this, mind you, was no breakdown, no emergency, but just the ordinary day's work. If the owners didn't want to risk breaking the ship's back on the bar there were plenty of others who would. It was like putting a horse at a dyke, getting his fore-feet across, and then lashing him furiously until he had kicked a lot of earth away and finally got himself over. When I had put the doors on the ballast pump again I noticed the main engines were running normal once more. We were over. We had crossed the bar. My mind was running on the romantic nature of this performance when I went up to get my tea. I recalled Tennyson's poem and wondered what he would have thought of the old Corydon and her undignified scramble across the bar. The others caught something of this in my face, I suppose, for the Second said to the Chief, 'I suppose the Fourth'll be for the beach to-night, eh?' and they laughed. 'Don't you go ashore here then?' I asked, and they laughed again. 'No, there's nothing to go ashore for,' said the Chief, and he fixed me with his eye. 'Why,' he added, 'don't you know where you are? You're in the middle of all the atrocities here.' The others nodded 'That's right. Any amount of atrocities—round here.' It seemed a silly way of putting it. Here we'd come thousands of miles just to get into the middle of atrocities! For a moment the word conveyed nothing to me. I had been getting into the way of thinking the Corydon was by way of being something of an atrocity, but I knew that was not what my shipmates meant. I'm not sure even now that there ever had been any atrocities in that part of the world. I read about them in a book once; but the things that get into books have always eluded me. Already I had laid hold of that cardinal fact in my new life. The old ideas, the old conventional phrases and assumptions, were cumbersome, inadequate or untrue. Take that word 'atrocity.' Well enough in a radical leading article; but what core of real truth was there in it when it was used by a living man at a railhead up the Niger River? To anyone with imagination it was comic. But my shipmates were not given to much imagination. In the business of their lives they were alive and original and racy. They used phrases and turns of thought that sometimes thrilled me with their vivid power. But outside of that narrow channel they had nothing but newspaper phrases, like 'atrocities,' mere catchwords that chill one's soul with their bald, withered and bloodless pretensions. The Chief gave me an example of this after tea that night. For a brief spell, by some unforeseen miracle of good fortune, there was nothing to do for the moment, and the four of us, in clean singlets and dungarees, were leaning on the off rail of the after well-deck smoking. Port Duluth was behind us. In front lay a broad, placid sheet of copper-tinted, forest-rimmed water, the confluence of a number of stagnant creeks and back-streams, a sort of knot in the interminable loops and windings of the delta. Here and there in the line of tree-tops was a gap showing where some waterway came through. Here and there, too, I could descry a tiny beach of mud a yard or two wide, with a hut and a canoe tied to the mangrove roots, and black, naked people crouched on their hams in the shadows cast by the forest, engaged in their—to me—mysterious business of living. They were far-away and more or less picturesque. So, too, were the fishermen a mile away on the shining water silhouetted in solid black against the western glow. At the time I was so full of new impressions that I regarded the scene very much as one turns over the pages of a 'book of views' in a friend's drawing room. I couldn't take it in. That needs time, and also one must have the Key. I was musing upon the apparent meaninglessness of a life that had thrown me up for a moment at a place I'd never heard of before, thrown me up there to assist in the astonishing job of transporting nuts, when the Chief remarked, pointing with the stem of his pipe, 'Here's a chief coming.' I looked round, expecting to see another stout, middle-aged man in singlet and dungarees, with perhaps an old uniform patrol jacket whose brass buttons were green with verdigris. But it was not so. He was indicating a large canoe emerging rapidly from the waterway astern of us. As it came more into our angle of vision I watched with extraordinary expectancy. I was dazed, not only by the spectacle, but by the aplomb with which my shipmates took these things. Here was a savage chief sitting under an immense parasol in the stern of his state canoe, propelled by a score of naked, black paddlers in white loin-cloths and scarlet cricket-caps, coming to call on us. This was evidently his intention, for the accommodation ladder went down with a rattle, and the canoe with her twenty spear-shaped paddles swung alongside like a naval pinnace, and a fat old chap, dressed in a vast white flannel nightgown with a sort of dress-shirt front pleated on it in blue thread, came slowly up the ladder. Came up and walked past with a heavy, flat-footed tread, and disappeared into the saloon with the Old Man. I was too astonished to speak for some time. That old fellow's face behind its broad benevolence and its confusing tattooings and mutilations, had an expression of power. It was an expression you do not find in London suburbs. You do not find it in the faces of men who sit at a desk and hire you and fire you. The momentary glimpse I had of that chief's face made clear to me many passages in history, many things in literature, many dark and tortuous riddles in the adventures of my own little tinpot soul. And in the light of this discovery I heard the Chief, our chief, saying, 'Yes, these chaps have power of life and death over their people, power of life and death.'

"And for once the hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really was a potential African despot. In the midst of my reflections I heard another newspaper phrase, 'Not long ago the rivers ran blood.' This was the Second, who was fond of stories inside comic supplements, and who was recalling a bygone 'atrocity,' I suppose. But it was curious to me, to notice how abruptly they all dropped the journalist jargon the moment they spoke of something they really understood. They regaled me with 'atrocities,' with 'rivers running blood' and 'gold in the forests that no white man had ever penetrated,' with 'power of life and death' and so on, but when I inquired anxiously what this omnipotent monarch had come aboard of us for, they replied without any hesitation,

"'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?'

"'Yes,' I said, patiently, 'but if you want a book on navigation, mathematics and so on, I can let you have it.'

"He nodded, but I don't think he followed me. So I took my screws and washer, and telling him I would return, hurried back to the ship. You know, I felt triumphant. I had scored, not only over my shipmates, but over him, over Africa, over the whole of the universe that wasn't Me, myself. I had taken a step forward. It is curious how difficult it is to describe the simplest evolutions of the soul. But I was no longer oppressed by Mister George and his languages. I had accomplished something far beyond the most abstruse philologies—I had got what I wanted.

"And I took him his book, a big obsolete tome bound in hide. He was rapturous, wiping his hands on some waste and opening it upside down. 'Ah, yes, very good, very good!' he said. 'I read plenty English books, yes. Thank you, I am very much obliged. Knowledge is power, eh?' I smiled, I suppose, for he leaned toward me eagerly. 'No? You think not, eh? Ah, when I had the jaundice, I read many books.' He waved his arms to indicate long galleries of libraries. 'Plenty, plenty, books. Oh, yes.' Once again I had the feeling of listening to an automaton. It seemed so futile talking to such a being. Indeed, that is why I tell you about him. He was my first foreigner. I had always been able to get into some sort of touch with the people I had met. I knew how they lived and loved and thought. But him! He had dressed his mind up in the showy rags and remnants of our speech as a savage will dress his body in incongruous clothing, and of what he was, inside, I could form no conjecture. Between us was an impassable barrier. I was trying to realize what made me so silent before his volubility, when the bell on the forecastle of the Corydon struck eight times. It was midnight and my watch was over. I said good-bye. 'I will visit your ship,' said my friend, Mister George. 'I have been on plenty ships. Oh, yes, plenty....'

"I ran away at last. I daresay he would have practised his English on me till daybreak if I hadn't run away. I went down and found things all quiet, and then I came up and roused old Croasan. He was lying on the settee and the gin-bottle stood on the chest-of-drawers, empty. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at me gloomily. I was so glad to get back and talk to a real human being, drunk as he was, that I patted him on the shoulder and told him we would have the dynamos fixed up in the morning. He blinked, and fell back exhausted. I hoisted him up again and he looked round resentfully. 'Aren't you going to turn out?' I asked him. 'Come on, Mister.' 'Is she all right?' he growled. 'Yes, of course!' I answered, rashly, and he promptly lay down again and declined to move. I was in a hole, but not downhearted. I couldn't turn in unless he turned out, you know. I walked along the alleyway with a crazy idea of calling the Chief half formed in my mind. But that seemed to clash with the school-boy code that forbids sneaking. Poor old chap! I thought. And yet I couldn't keep his watch. I had to get my sleep if I was to be any good next day. I went back and lifted him, snoring, to his feet. 'Come on, Mister,' I said, 'it's your watch.' And I heaved him gently through the doorway and along the alleyway. I was nearly carrying him. I don't know what my intention really was, whether I had a notion the outside air would brace him up or whether I was going to tumble him down the engine-room ladder. Anyhow, we were staggering about the dark alleyway when we both fell with a crash against the Chief's door. It was the most effectual thing I could have contrived. There was a growl of 'what's that?' from the Chief and he suddenly sprang out in his pyjamas. Seeing only me, he shouted, 'What you making all this row about?' And then he stumbled over old Croasan. I laughed. I couldn't help it. All the while I was explaining to that indignant Chief how we came to be there I was uttering cries of joy in my heart over the rich humanity of it all. It was sordid and silly and wrong, but it was real. The Chief lit his lamp and I saw his one bright eye and the empty, blood-red socket glittering in the radiance. To think that I had been mad enough to feel sick of the Corydon! I felt as if I had suddenly got home again. And, just as suddenly, old Croasan had vanished. I looked at the Chief in bewilderment. He eyed me solemnly, but without disfavour, and strode along to our cabin. Throwing the empty bottle through the port-hole, he said briefly, 'Get yourself turned in, Mister,' and went back to his own room. I turned in quick, you can imagine. It had been a great day for me. You may think it strange, but I look back at it as one of the happiest in my life. Work! Work! It is the only thing that keeps us sane when we're young. All else is only bladder—nonsense. Work and the knowledge of it, and the planning of it. Work, and its failures, its bitter anxieties, its gleams of inspiration, its mellow accomplishment, and then the blessed oblivion!