Harbours of memory

Front matter

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Dedication

My dear Chris:

At last the moment is come when I can sit down and address you in the full consciousness of a perfect milieu. The ship is at rest in a tropical port, all the passengers are ashore enjoying their brief respite from steam-heated apartments, solidly packed subways, and an atrocious city government controlled by a corrupt oligarchy of professional politicians (by the way, why should an amateur politician be considered an angel of Hght and a professional a son of Belial?) We have not yet reached the critical period of the voyage, when the festive banana comes aboard and causes us much more anxiety than you or any other cheerful consumer of it ever imagines. I myself have dined, and the door of my cabin is locked, to convey the impression to the careless caller that I am ashore. I have, in honour of the occasion, assimilated an immense high-ball, not merely because I was thirsty and needed a drink, but as a part of the significant ritual of dedication. In the immortal words of the London mechanic who used to rise in the old *Tree-and-easy" forerunner of the modern music-hall, to propose the toast of viii DEDICATION

some already half-inebriated guest, "I looks toward you, and I likewise cops your eye."

Contents

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Harbours of Memory i

The City of Enchantment 68

II

I COME back to the engine room, to find Mr. Ferguson descending the engine-room ladder, in a white singlet, khaki short pants, striped socks with red suspenders, and tennis shoes. The inevitable cigarette is in his mouth, and his cap, the white cover of which is stained a chrome yellow with oil-splashes, is over one eye in a negligent and rakish manner. He is a tall strong figure of thirty-odd, his face freckled, his nose twisted, his hair of an Irish flamered. His voice is stupendously frank and genial, and he disarms criticism with the wealth of his confessions. He is one of the world's unfortunates, he will inform you gaily. (You are bound to meet him.)

Just now he is making a specialty of courtsmartial. He is continually being court-martialled. He belongs to an obscure and elusive subdivision of the Navy known as the M. F. A., which is, being interpreted. Merchant Fleet Auxiliary, though Mr. Ferguson asserts with racial satire that the initials stand for Merely FooHng Around. This indicates one of his main difficulties, which is to realize that he is subject to naval discipline. It is to him an intolerable state of aflTairs, when he becomes pleasantly jingled ashore in Arab-town, and flings a wine bottle at a native, that he should be apprehended by a silent and formidable posse of bluejackets with hangers at their sides and police brassards on their arms. It is still more intolerable when, after joyously beating up said posse and being carried by main force to the cells in the barracks, he is informed by typed letter that, having been guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer, he will be tried by court-martial on such-and-such a date. He seems unable to comprehend the sudden change in the attitude of the naval authorities. Only a few weeks previously he had been one of the crew of a trawler which had, more by luck than cunning, caught an enemy submarine recharging her depleted batteries, and methodically pounded her to pieces until she filled and sank. Mr. Ferguson's part in the drama was to stand on the bottom rung of his little engine-room ladder, with his head just above the scuttle, and remark after each salvo, with keen enjoyment, **Good again! Hit her up, boys!" for which he duly received in cold cash five hundred dollars of prize-money. Mr. Ferguson's interviews with sums over a hundred dollars have been fleeting, shadowy episodes of coruscating and evanescent brilliancy. It was even so on this occasion. The native world that hives and swarms adown the narrow and filth-cluttered alleys of Arab-town profited vastly at Mr. Ferguson's expense. He was regal in his largess. His method of flinging money abroad and kicking the recipients appealed to their Oriental instincts. In two days he had cleaned up the town, from can-can dances to hashish parties in the disused mosque behind the wall of the Jewish cemetery; and he was samphng for the third time the exquisite transmigrations which befall the soul when steeped in Turkish gin, as the posse already mentioned broke into Ali Ben Farag's Constantinople Divan for Officers Only, and bore him back to barracks under the quiet eyes of the Syrian stars.

The fact is, Mr. Ferguson is temperamentally averse to discipline. He is one of those to whom the war is of no moment whatever. His patriotism is more a postulated abstraction than a glowing inspiration. He is one of those rootless organisms which float hither and yon over the world, indigenous nowhere, at home everywhere. They fall into no categories of wisdom or virtue, for they have the active yet passionless inconclusiveness of inteUigent lower animals. They bear no malice and suffer no regret. They leave a memory without making a name. They resolve their personal belongings to the irreducible minimum of a battered and padlocked sea-bag. Their cabins contain neither curios nor conveniences, neither photographs nor tokens of feminine affection. They have a far look in their pale eyes, and one wonders what distant and delightful haven they are already visualizing. For them there is no continuing city. They must on — on! pressing forward in blind ardour toward a retreating paradise whence, even were they to arrive, they would immediately prepare to depart. They are the true romantics of our age. Grimy, dissolute, and incompetent, they pass gaily through our orderly and discipHned crowds of unimaginative reahsts who do the work of the world, and brush off upon us stray threads of golden fancy, fallen from the clouds of tarnished glory which they trail behind them.

Having reached the starting platform, Mr. Ferguson halts and collects his apparently scattered faculties. Although under what is known in the Navy as **open arrest," he has contrived to get ashore by means of one of those preposterous yet plausible excuses which only the romantic can devise. He is now in the no-man's land between intoxication and sobriety, and stands with his tennis shoes wide apart, the muscles of his legs distending the scarlet straps of his garters, and his stony stare fixed upon Mr. de Courcy, who patrols the platform in front of the engines.

No man can gaze for long upon Mr. de Courcy 's refined and genteel physiognomy without perceiving the fundamental absurdity of the universe. Mr. de Courcy is a gentleman of good family who, by some mysterious dispensation, evaded the normal destiny of his type; for, instead of entering him for holy orders, his family, who I understand are **county," shipped him to a Central American oil field, where for some years he occupied an obscure position on the engine-room staff. My own impression is that he would be better in the Church, in business, in the House of Lords, in the Army — anywhere save in a ship's engine room. He has the ineradicable predisposition of his class to treat the actual performance of a job of work as derogatory to his dignity. He assures me that in the Navy, by which he means regular men-of-war, he was not required to do the unpleasant things that I regard as his daily portion. His delicately chiselled features flush faintly behind the veil of cigarette smoke as he regrets the violence of my language and the wild impropriety of my metaphors. Nothing, however, can ruflie the eternal and hereditary conviction in which he reposes, that he and his like are of finer clay, that race and gentility are adequate substitutes for achievement.

Whether Mr. Ferguson focuses the precise and piquant differences between himself and Mr. de Courcy it would be difl&cult to discover; but as he gazes, the stony stare softens, the drawn Hnes of his reddish freckled face crinkle into laughter, and the bony ridge of his twisted nose glistens humorously. He is finding himself. None of the stimulants of Western civihzation has much power over Mr. Ferguson. They only dim his brightness for a brief period, and not even the most corrosive of cocktails can permanently affect the hard lustre of his inconsequent optimism. With a short laugh, like a dog's bark, he swings past me and dives round behind the engines, and, liftmg a movable plate in the platform, investigates hurriedly among divers cocks and valves, as if he had suddenly remembered a buried treasure, and was reassuring himself as to its exact whereabouts.

Ill

In the meantime we are standing by. From above comes the blast of the first lieutenant's whistle, as he presides over the doings of his minions. It is, for all the lateness of the season, intensely hot. The armies in Palestine report a heat-wave of unparalleled length and temperature. And even here, with a breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean, the thermometer remains at 90 degrees all day, and our rooms are hke ovens until the small hours.

Mr. de Courcy goes into the stoke-hold, to get a breath of fresh air. The oiler slowly descends from above and moves in and out among the engines on the middle grating, filHng lubricators, adjusting siphon-wicks and pausing for a well-earned spell under the after ventilator. As I make a gesture indicating the astern guide-bars he replies with a slight raising of his left hand (with a cigarette in the fingers), which may be interpreted somewhat on these lines: "Have no fear. I have attended to the lubrication of the astern guides, and am not likely, at my time of life, to neglect so trifling a precaution. Rest easy. I was doing this when you were a boy.''

What mystifies me about all these men of mine is the new lease of life they have taken since the orders for steam came. They take a fresh interest in everything. They had become slack, lackadaisical, and ^ ^eoccupied with ridiculous grievances. They went ashore and brought back tales of all disasters told them by the motley-clad survivors of torpedoed ships. They muttered openly in my hearing that they desired to be shifted to a ship that went to sea. And now, so far are they from appreciating the heroic, that their attitude by no means resembles the gladiators of old, with their lugubrious "Hail, Caesar! we who are about to die salute thee." Nothing is farther from their thoughts than dying, though two submarines broke into our sweepers four miles outside last night and sank three of them. Their attitude is much better rendered as "Hail, Caesar! we who are about to get busy salute thee.'' They come down on the stroke of eight bells, watch after watch, and pursue the even tenor of their ways, cigarette in mouth and oil can or shovel in hand, and seem never to visualize the oncoming destruction that may be ripping through the dark water outside. Pooh! Such anticipations are foreign to their nature, which seems to have been toughened into an admirable closeness of texture by the frightful climate of their native islands and the indurating labour of the sea.

So we pause, waiting at our allotted stations for the orders, which come at last with a clash and jingle of gongs; the telegraph-pointer swings to and fro and comes to rest at "Stand by.'' Mr. de Courcy immediately replies with an elegant manipulation of the handle, and records the time on a little blackboard at his elbow. The Chief, a tall, lank young man in a soiled white uniform, ripples half way down the upper ladder and catches my eye, raising his eyebrows the while. I nod, and he makes a slow circular gesture. I nod again. I ask Mr. Ferguson if he is ready. He straightens up where he stands by the main feed-pumps, waves his hand with a magnificent air, and says "Let her go, Gallagher!"

Assisted by Mr. de Courcy, I let her go. The immense limbs of the triple-expansion engines flourish back and forth, and come to rest as I close the manoeuvring-valve. Mr. Ferguson prances to and fro in front of the pumps, starting-lever in hand, his head twisted round to observe the behaviour of the automatic control. He lays the lever over his shoulder like a weapon, and in the dim twilight he reminds me, with his bare white calves crossed by the scarlet garter-straps, of some Roman legionary on guard. Faithful unto

But Mr. Ferguson would deprecate the suggestion. He had never been faithful unto anything. Loyalty is not his metier. His digressions from the path of righteousness usually provide him with a free pass to the great outdoors, the wide free world in which he is a joyous and insolvent pilgrim. He is puzzled at this novel attitude of the Navy, which, instead of firing him without a reference, oppresses him with typed forms and a periodical court-martial, which sentences him to be "dismissed his ship." He will never realize that to those who are brought up within the charmed circle of the officer-class, such a sentence is tantamount to a death warrant. Heh! Give him his pay and he'll quit. Yes, sir! He didn't know he was marrying the darned business. What's eating them anyway .^^ There's a war on? Nobody'd think it, to hear those popinjays talk about conduct unbecoming an officer. Huh! It's a dog's life, sure.

Now the fact is that when, hereafter, you meet Mr. Ferguson, shaking the dust of the Nevada copper mines from his feet in disgust, or hustling about the levees at New Orleans in search of a job as an oiler, or lounging on the water-front at Port Limon, waiting for a chance to stow away on a fruiter, he will speak of his Hfe in the British Navy, with a break in his voice and his pale eyes full of happy tears. Ah, those were the days! he will tell you. A man was treated as a man there. And so on.

This is the mark of the true romantic. It must be a fascinating existence. One feels a perfect Pecksniff in the presence of beings whose imaginations are for ever ahead of their experience. They are but strangers here: heaven is their home. One has the impression, while driving them to their appointed tasks amid the humid heat and noisy chaffering ot an engine room, of employing shackled angels whose wings have been cHpped close and who have had their tail-feathers pulled out. And they certainly regard one as a demon with an inexplicable passion for toil, a creature without vision and without hope beyond the immediate accomplishment of senseless labour, a slave-driver owing allegiance to a secret and sinister authority which they generally call Capitahsm.

Mr. Ferguson is eloquent on the subject of capitalists. This, he assures me, is a capitalists' war. Look, he cries, at the poor simps being butchered in France, all to fill the capitalists' bags with gold! Even their own children have to go. Nothing is sacred to a capitalist save his *'bags of gold." It is the mark of the true romantic to be preoccupied with symbols, and Mr. Ferguson is partial to the gorgeous imagery of modern anarchism.

However, it must not be assumed that Mr. Ferguson and I are deadly enemies because of the incompatibility of our ideals. He is graciously pleased to overlook what he calls my funny ideas, and rewards me with thumbnail sketches of episodes in his career. It was so on this occasion as we sailed out to join the squadron off Askalon. Mr. de Courcy having gone up to get his supper, and the telegraph having rung **full ahead," Mr. Ferguson fell into a vein of reminiscence, and told me tales of '*the happy days that are no more." With one eye on the revolution telegraph and the other on the steam- and air-gauges, I listen to his Odyssey. For there is a streak of poetry in him, as I have endeavoured to adumbrate. All unconsciously, and with a far look in his pale blue eyes, he beholds a picture. From the hell of the Present he sees a happy Past and a heavenly Future. He can communicate atmosphere, and when he remarks that once, in Liverpool, it came over him that he ought to settle down and be respectable, I am alert at once. I could see it **coming over him" — the footsore, jaded wanderer treading the bright dirty streets; the smart pretty landlady's daughter leading him by swift short stages to see how desirable was a small house at Sefton Park or Garston; the patient search for employment, ending in a job on the shore-gang of the White Star Line. For a fortnight all went well. He was thinking of getting engaged.

To my disappointment, he slides all too easily from this momentous and interesting subject to a whimsical description of his adventures on the rriammoth liners on which he was employed. He tells how, while working in the low-pressure valve-chest of the Gigantic's port engine, he slipped and fell through the exhaust-pipe into the main condenser. He pictures the consternation of his helper, who had gone for a tool, when he found his mate vanished; the efforts to locate his muffled shouts; the tappings of hammers, the footsteps, the hoarse murmurs broken by an occasional *'Hi! where areyer, mate?"

and his replies, stifled by his own laughter. It is perfectly plain that this sort of thing was more to Mr. Ferguson's taste than humdrum industry. When he was finally fished out at the end of a coil of rope, the leading hand threatened him with dismissal if it occurred again; for the leading hand was not romantic, only a soul besotted with efficiency.

And on the Oceanic again these two fell foul of each other, for Mr. Ferguson lost his way on the boiler-tops. He asserts that there were hundreds of boilers on that ship, all alike, and thousands of ladders. He grew fascinated with the problem as he groped up and down, through cross-bunkers, in and out of fan-rooms, for ever encountering fresh boilers, but never the one where he had been working. But the third time that leading hand found him far from his job he became explosive and personal, led Mr. Ferguson firmly by the arm through interminable corridors, until his boiler stood dimly revealed through a manhole, and informed him that it was his last chance. Mr. Ferguson grew resentful. As if he could help it! Silly, he calls it, to get in a rage over a little thing like that. However, that's the sort of man he was. Only got himself disliked. And just out of petty spite, he orders him, Mr. Ferguson to wit, to work all night overtime on a rush job.

Mr. Ferguson has strong views on night work, as I can testify. He imagines the capitalists ought to be satisfied when they have spoiled a man's day, without gouging into the hours of rest. Hurrying to his lodgings, he had his tea, and the landlady's daughter made him up a packet of sandwiches and a can of cocoa, to be warmed on a steampipe when he needed it. You can see them there, slogging away through the night, stripping an auxiliary engine and erecting the new one, pausing about midnight for a snack and a smoke. And while the engineer on watch is having forty winks, one of the gang becomes confidential with Mr. Ferguson and reveals a discovery. One of the storerooms where electrical gear is kept has been left open. And he knows a scrap-metal merchant who and so on.

Mr. Ferguson becomes vague just here. Well, I know how it is, he suggests. One thing leads to another. You can easily pack a lot of sheet rubber round you and nobody be any the wiser. Nobody was, apparently, until a day or so later. Mr. Ferguson arrived home for a late supper, having been standing treat to the boys after a boxing tournament, when Maggie — that was his girl, you see — met him at the door with wide serious eyes. Two men had called to see him, she said, and she knew one of them was a detective — she'd seen him before when she'd been to the station about having had her pocket picked. What had he done?

Well, by now, Mr. Ferguson knew well enough what he had done, and it is not in the nature of true romantics to deny anything. With Maggie's eyes searching his face and Maggie's hands clutching his coat, he backed against the Uttle near-mahogany hall stand and admitted that it might be awkward if they came back again, as they would when they couldn't find him elsewhere. They stood there, those two — the girl in an agony of sorrow and fear, with a maternal desire to shield the big silly, he devising some way of quitting. And as they stood there, they heard footsteps at the end of the silent street. Mr. Ferguson must have stiffened. He says, in his Celtic way, that he felt his hair move. Maggie stuck his cap on and dragged him through the kitchen into the scullery. She opened the door softly, pushed him out, and followed him into the tiny yard. Quick, over the wall at the bottom, into the next garden! The house is empty; go through and out of the front door into the side street. Run !

Yes, write and she'd tell him run! And she

darted into the house to face the future alone.

Mr. Ferguson followed her instructions. I am convinced that he enjoyed himself immensely that evening. He dropped over the wall and put his foot through a cucumber-frame, it is true, but the light crash and jingle only set off two cats at frantic speed. He also fell over something in the hall of the empty house and skinned his knuckles. He says he has often wondered what it was. Once in the quiet suburban street, with two lovers saying good-night under a lamp-post far down on the other side, he walked unobtrusively away. It was characteristic of him that he didn't write, and therefore never heard any more of the affair. He rode on a trolley car away out into the suburbs of Liverpool, and then took a train a little way farther. It was autumn, and he began to walk through England.

We are interrupted by a youthful sailor, who comes down with a chit from the bridge, a chit which informs me that, having joined the other vessels of the squadron, we are ordered to proceed at ten knots, and the commander will appreciate it if we can maintain the revolutions at fifty, so as to keep station. Mr. Ferguson laughs satirically, and says the old feller ought to boil his head. This after the youthful sailor has gone up again. I agree that a ship forty years old is a problem when it comes to "keeping station." "There you are!" says Mr. Ferguson, and conceives his animus against all constituted authority to be only too well founded. "And here comes Pinhead Percy," he mutters, as Mr. de Courcy descends, a gold-tipped cigarette in his lips, and with an engaging smile. Leaving him to carry on, we go up to dinner.

IV

It is a quarter to four next morning when the wardroom steward on night duty brings me a cup of tea and a bloater-paste sandwich.

"Anything doing?" I inquire, rolling over to reach the cup.

He murmurs that he thinks we're going half speed and the airmen are all dressing.

"See anything yet?"

"Oh, yes, you can see artillery at it ashore," he observes casually.

I sit up. It has not been my lot to behold artillery at it ashore, so I swallow the tea, dress hurriedly, and go out on deck. It is still dark, but away to starboard hangs a peculiar faint glow. At intervals this glow brightens and quivers, and the brightening and quivering is followed by a sound like the distant closing of a heavy door. Ahead and astern of us are ships keeping station, black blots in the indeterminate mingling of sky and sea. At intervals one can make out smaller blots moving restlessly hither and yon, passing and repassing, turning and gliding with silent and enigmatic persistence toward unknown goals.

I yawn, conclude that these small craft are saving us the fatigue of zigzagging, and go below. Mr. Ferguson is descending the ladder just in front of me. Mr. de Courcy, a slender wraith in white overalls, appears at the other door of the engine room, and follows. Eight faint strokes sound on the bell-bar below, very faint, out of consideration for enemy underwater craft who may be, and in fact are, listening in tense vigilance not far away. It is four o'clock.

The engineer going off watch hands me a chit from the Chief to the effect that the planes will be launched at daybreak, when I am to call him. Good enough! We carry on, and presently the revolution-gongs begin to clatter, now more, now less, and through the skylight one can see the sky beginning to lighten.

Mr. Ferguson lounges to and fro, as I stand by the manoeuvring-valve, and whistles "I wanter go back, I wanter go back, to the place where I was born." It occurs to me that this is an engaging fiction. I doubt very much if he would care to bo back there — somewhere on the western edge of Ulster. He once said his adventures might go into a book. What he ought to have said was that his adventures might have come out of a book; for, though he is communicative, he says very little about himself. It is the adventure which interests him, not the biography of the adventurer. He has the happy love of incognito which is the mark of your true romantic. It happened to him, certainly. Well, it was this way And off he goes.

Off he went as I inquired where he walked when he started away through England. Well, his boots wore out first, being his thin patents, and he bought a pair of heavy country shoes, with soles all hobnails and great horseshoe-shaped flangings on the heels. Once he had suppled them, they were fine walking-gear. And he went on into Yorkshire and down through Lincolnshire, doing a job of work here and a chore or two there for the cxDuntry-folk, and marvelhng how empty England seemed. Almost as empty as the sea, he remarks. But of course he was taking a line that took him past the big cities. He slept in sheds and under hay-ricks.

Once he strolled into the huge garage of a huntinghotel in Leicestershire, and got into a palatial limousine in a far corner, and slept like a duke. Note the metaphor. Your true romantic preserves the faith in fairyland, for all his gross ineptitudes and tawdry sociological taradiddles. Mr. Ferguson slept like a duke. Don't imagine, however, that he is ignorant of dukes. He knows more of them than either you or I, who have never seen one, and who are unfamiliar with the habits of the species.

Mr. Ferguson has told me the pathetic story of his efforts to make a fresh start in life when he had exhausted the resources and the patience of his native hamlet. As usual, he was vague at points, but I imagine it was the old poaching business that induced the irate Bench to lock him up. And when he emerged, a pale, lathy emblem of repentance, it was decreed by an outraged parent that he should emigrate to England, said parent having a brother who was a locomotive-driver on a branch line. The idea was to interest Master Ferguson in locomotives, and in the sylvan loveliness of East Anglia set his feet in the paths of virtue.

So it fell out, and Mr. Ferguson found himself cleaning freight engines in a barn at the end of a branch hne. It was a branch on a branch — almost a twig line in fact, he impHes, whimsically. It seems that his uncle was a driver distinguished far above other drivers, inasmuch as he hauled the train which was appointed to stop on occasion at the duke's private station on the twig line. And the duke in question often availed himself of the well-known eccentricity of the ducal classes by riding on the foot-plate instead of in his reserved compartment. This sounds far-fetched, no doubt, to democrats, but it is quite credible. Dukes have more sense than many people give them credit for. Possibly, too, this particular duke was a true romantic himself, and was only realizing in his maturity what every boy desires — to ride on the foot-plate. And hence it turned out that Mr. Ferguson found himself in possession of a relative who knew a duke.

The pity of it was that Mr. Ferguson could not be induced to display any particular aptitude or mark of genius which would justify any one in bringing him to the notice of the family liege lord.

One gets a glimpse of feudal England while listening to Mr. Ferguson's account of that happy valley, with its twig line of railway, rabbits and hares and pheasants visible on the single track during the long hours between the twig trains, the vast ducal seat showing its high turrets and gold-leaf windowframes among the ancestral trees, the little village.

snuggled along the ducal fence, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the romantic foot-plate rider, and wrapped in immemorial quiet. All except Mr. Ferguson. He was Hvely when he was young, he admits, and apt to be a bit wild. A game-keeper spoke with unwonted feeling to the uncle one evening at the Cow Roast Inn on the subject of slaying game birds with stones. Mr. Ferguson, attacked by ennuiy had sauntered down the track one day and done this frightful deed, visible to an indignant game-keeper concealed in a neighbouring copse. A lad with an eye good enough to hit a bird with a stone at thirty yards or so ought to be playing county cricket or serving in the Army, he observed, wiping his mouth. His lordship wasn't as stern as he rnight be on the subject of preserving. Indeed, I have a notion, born of Mr. Ferguson's fugitive hints, that this particular lordship had certain rudimentary views on the importance of preserving other things besides game — humanity, for instance, and kindhness and Christian charity and a sense of humour. Anyhow, when the incident came to his ears, he expressed a desire to do something for the youth beyond sending him to jail. Riding up the twig line on the foot-plate to join the express for London, he ordered his henchman to bring the guilty nephew before him for interrogation. So it was done, and one day Mr. Ferguson, a gawky hobbledehoy with wild red hair standing every which-way on his turbulent head, was ushered into one of the vast chambers of the ducal mansion — ushered in and left alone. His acute misery was rendered almost unendurable by the fact that an expanse of shimmering parquetry separated him from the nearest chair. For a moment he had a wild notion of crossing this precarious floor on his hands and knees. For yet another moment he thought of flight. Even the marble steps up which he had ascended from the side entrance was preferable to this dark shining mirror in which he could see the room upside down and his own scared face.