William McFee

“ Some thirty feet long, this engine-room, bulkhead to bulkhead, and, save for a recess or two extending to the ship’s skin, penned in between bunkers. Twelve hundred tons of coal, distributed like a thick wall round us, make the place warm in the tropics. Forward, the stokeholds, dimly enough lit save when a furnace door opens and a fiery glow illuminates the bent back and soot-blurred face of some cosmopolitan fireman. Overhead, each lit by a single lamp, are the water-gauges—green glass tubes in which the water ebbs and flows with the motion of the ship. ”

“ To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may seem a very horrible sort of end to a promising life. But, as I sit by my window on the Walk, while the tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the blue evening mist comes down over the river, transforming dingy wharf and factory into fairy palace and phantom battlement, it seems to me that my friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, recking little that the love he thought secure had passed irrevocably from him, but never swerving in fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his friend. ”

“ The sea is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. ”

“ A full moon, blood-red and enormous, hangs just above the eastern sky-line. In the west still burns the glow of the vanishing sun, and the pale sky is twinkling with innumerable stars. The regular throb of the engines drives the ship forward again, a sailor is hauling down the red ensign from the poop, and another moves to and fro, silhouetted against the southern sky, on the foc’sle-head. Just ahead of the bridge two more sailors sit busily sewing. The Old Man stands by the chart-house door talking to the Mate. The dogs lie quietly on the lower deck, their heads between their paws. ”

“ Old friend, these gods seem very impotent sometimes. They seem impotent, as when, for instance, my first gauge-glass burst. Pacing up and down in front of my engines, there is a hiss and a roar, and one of my firemen rushes into the engine-room, his right hand clasping the left shoulder convulsively. He has been cut to the bone with a piece of the flying glass. Men of thirty years’ sea-time tell me they never have got used to a glass failing. And then the fight with the water and steam in the darkness, the frenzied groping for the wires to shut the cocks, the ceaseless roar of water and steam! ”

“ Chelsea is a cosmos. Cheyne Walk is a world, a world abandoned by genius to the cheap purveyors of second-hand clap-trap and imitators of original minds.
Let us go upstairs.
Miss Flaherty is one of those women who appear from time to time in the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly inaccuracy. ”

“ Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding a collier’s helm in a gale on a lee shore, or whirling white-hot metal at a furnace mouth, is not the same man at the end of his day, or night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. ”

“ A few minutes’ swift toil, a hurried wash, and we climb up on deck again into the moonlight. A white, silent world of waters is about us as we join the crew going aft to the poop. The awning has been partly folded back, and we see the Skipper resting his book on the tiller-gear, while the Steward stands by with a lantern. I look curiously into the faces I know so well, seeking, in the presence of death, a little more knowledge of life. ”

“ I shall not prattle of the beauties of Nature, for the prattle is at your elbow in books. But I shall—nay, must, for it is my use and habit—tell you about myself and the things in my heart. I shall be, not a hero talking about men, but a man talking about heroes, as well as the astonishing beings who go down to the sea in ships, and have their business in great waters. ”

“ How can one feel and act rightly towards women when one is young, yet compelled to live a life of alternate celibacy and licence? How can one love nature, even the sea, when the engine-room temperature is normally 90° F., and often 120° F., when the soul cries out against the endless rolling miles? Wise of the world, give answer! We two poor rough toilers sit at your feet and wait upon your words.
You will see, now, why I want George the Fourth to fall in love. But with whom is he to fall in love? Who courts the society of a sailor in a foreign port? Seamen’s bethels? ”

“ One night, one star-light night, when the dark blue heaven, slashed across with the pale immensity of the Milky Way, watched me with its million winking eyes, I stole out on the poop with some stories in my hand, and dropped them into the creamy rush of the wake. As the poor little bits of paper swayed and eddied and drowned in the foaming vortex, I felt, deep down in that heart which some say I do not possess, a vague tremor of unrest. I felt, somehow, close to Eternity. And then, as I went below once more, I wondered, “Will they all go like that?” “Shall I live to do any good work?” ”

“ This is appalling to a laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact, the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast, solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. ”

“ We love Sport, do we who sneer at Frenchmen because they cannot play football—we love it from the closely packed amphitheatres of the race-course and footer-field, as spectators. We love War—with a penny flag and a yell in front of the Mansion House. We love Children, for we leave them to dwell in slums. And we love Music [Pg 47] with all our hearts, because we were told that we did, and the wise repeat that it elevates and refines the soul. ”

“ But, mon ami, I am a man—a very irregularly balanced man, too, I often think—and there rises from my soul an exceeding bitter cry sometimes. You see here my life—barmaid society, ship’s tittle-tattle, unending rough toil. To have but one hold, one haven, one star to guide—canst blame me, mon ami, if I hold desperately to a tiny hope? ”

“ We find a great difficulty in keeping our minds on the problems set down. Outside is a blue sky, the roar of traffic at the confluence of four great thoroughfares, and the call of London, a very siren among cities, when one knows! Over yonder, a cigarette in his mouth, his head on his hand and his elbow asprawl on the desk, making idle marks with a pencil, is a youth who is nursing a grievance against the government. ”

“ Six or seven hundred tons of coal per day is flung into her dozens of furnaces, against our twenty-five tons. Think of the twenty-odd engineers who scarcely see their bunks from the Elbe to the Hudson. And, in that cool, grey, pearly dawn, think of those passengers sleeping in their palatial state-rooms, with never a thought of the slaves who drive that monstrous ship across the Atlantic at such an appalling speed. ”

“ There is a period in the life of the literary artist, unhappily not permanent, when the surface of his mind may be described as absorbent of emotional influences, a period which results in the accumulation of vast quantities of data concerning women without to any degree destroying the authentic simplicity of his heart. And when the point of saturation is reached, to use an engineer’s phrase, the artist, still preserving his own innocence, begins to produce. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had come from Italy, where I had wandered through churches and galleries, and had seen the supreme excellence of a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as [Pg 19] we came up that stately firth and discovered a generation as supreme in their art as the Italians of the sixteenth century were in theirs, I held my breath.
From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour of hammers and the thunder of mechanism. Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by beam, there grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred ships. ”

“ Every character, male and female, is “passionately fond of music.” Which means? That the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a lover of music. ”

“ I have been wondering why this is—I think it is money, or rather business. Have you noticed how business dehumanises men? I count over in my mind dozens of men whom I know, men of age, experience, and wealth, who almost demand that I should envy them by the very way they walk the city streets. They are prosperous, they imagine. I, strolling idly through those same city streets, looking at the show, studying their faces, defied them, and said to myself, “You gentlemen are not human beings—you are business men.” ”

“ But it should on no account be assumed from the above truthful estimate of their mentality that these men are to be dismissed as mere factory hands or negligible land-failures. The sea has her own way of making men, and informs them, as the years and miles go by, with a species of differential intuition, a flexible mental mechanism which calibrates and registers with astonishing accuracy and speed. They become profound judges of human character within the rough walls of their experience, and for women they betray a highly specialized esteem.... ”

“ The world seems to have an invincible prejudice against men who see the romance in the work they are doing. The footballing, cigarette-smoking clerk, who lives at Hornsey or Tufnell Park, works in an office in Queen Victoria Street, lunches at Lyons’s, and plays football at Shepherd’s Bush, sees no romance in his own life, which is in reality thrilling with adventure, but thinks Captain Kettle the hero of an ideal existence. ”

“ Life for us moderns has its difficulties at times, life being, as it were, anything but modern. We have so many gods, not all of them false, either; but the Voice of the Dweller in the Innermost brings their temples crashing about our ears, and we are homeless, godless, atheists indeed.
I do not think this problem has been solved for us yet. It is all very well for the orthodox to say sneeringly, “Why not believe, like us? Why stand outside the pearly gates, while Love and Lovers pace beneath the trees that grow by the River of Life? ”

“ I only want to explain that there is, in our day, a race of beings, half-man, half-god, who correspond, in all broad characteristics, to those rather indecent heroes of early imaginative literature. They do with ease those deeds which would have appalled the mailed monsters of chivalry; they regard the other sex as being created solely for their use in port; they love life dearly, but they leave the saving of it, like the heroes of old, to the gods.
[Pg 39]
One has only to listen (in the galley) to their nonchalantly narrated tales of mystery and horror to realize the truth of that argument. ”

“ But I cannot go on in this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not see him again.
To those men who have wedded early I can never hope to explain the deep-rootedness of such a friendship as ours. It was, to me, as though my own youth [Pg liv] were renewed in more perfect design. Never again shall I experience that exquisite delight with which one sees a youth reach post after post along the ways of life and thought, reach out eagerly to field on field of knowledge, through which one has tramped or scampered so many years before. ”

“ Wiesbaden! God! Let them come below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I did not know I was alive. Do they, I wonder?
Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of foul city air. Very much in the same way I was affected by a remark made to me by my friend the Mate. “Where I live,” said he, “one child won’t play with another if its father gets five shillings a week more’n t’other’s father.” ”