Ocean echoes; an autobiography

Front matter

ARTH Vjfc- MASON ■ . WILL!

ILLIMYM^FIE

Class _..

Preface

I have been asked to write my biography. Other people have written of their lives, lives of greater value to the world than mine ; though possibly mine, too, has not been without value in some little ways. Lives have been written so interesting in the telling, that skeptical readers have condemned them as adorned.

My story is, I believe, not lacking in excitement, but it shall be told simply, and as swiftly and truly as though the years were crossing the paper — crowding, as they have crowded my youth away, and the desire for adventure.

There may be glued leaves in the volume of my life, but I shall steam them apart, trying to piece out a pattern that is not as much smudged as the background would lead one to believe.

There will be in the pattern success and failure; heart-cheer and heart-break, as in all our lives — such philosophy, too, as would result from the thinking my life has led me to do. But vi PREFACE

that there is love to the very end, and will be, as long as I live, speaks not so well for me (for if ever anyone knows the rough-and-tumble of life I should know it) as it does for human nature.

Surely I may claim to know people, the good of them and the bad ; yet I think loving thoughts, and incline to loving deeds, and I do believe that good is uppermost, and will remain uppermost to the last.

Arthur Mason.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface v

Introduction by William McFee .... ix I. Concerning Who's Who and Why — Things

Introduction

In this autobiography the reader is confronted with a situation sufficiently novel to invite more than a moment's consideration. Here is a man who may be described as a true romantic. At the end of a life devoted to wanderings which took him nowhere and adventures which have gotten him neither fame nor wealth, he sits down to write, convinced that nothing like this had ever happened to a man before.

"And so I yarn along," he says, "and think of past things, and write them down, partly as a sailor who knew all that was hard and rough, and partly as a man recently come to writing who is intoxicated with the new-found use of words to evoke old scenes."

Here is the secret source of his magic. Like the gentleman in the play who finds he has been speaking prose all his life, our author has suddenly perceived that he has been doing the romantic things men write of in books, and the exquisite emotions attendant upon the dis-

ix x INTRODUCTION

covery have had a distinct influence upon his diction. There is an elvish irresponsibility in his narrative that only an Irish sailor could accomplish without foundering. In the early part of the book, indeed, he is continually bewildered by the sharp differences between himself and the conventional Irishman of whom he has heard and read. Yet he perseveres courageously, and soon the stage Irishman is forgotten in the contemplation of his own matchless personality. He is one of those picturesque beings who erupt from the calm surface of literature at long intervals, articulate romantics, like Trelawney with his "Memoirs of a Younger Son," Broome whose "Log of a Eolling Stone" is already forgotten, and even Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Byronic rebel who found solace for his indignant spirit in galloping about the Australian bush. For it should be borne in mind that these romantics are sharply contrasted in mentality with men of the type of Vambery, passionately wandering through Central Asia slaking his thirst for languages and the ultimate roots of human speech; of Burton, the trained traveler who held in contempt the people of his own time and race; of

INTRODUCTION xi

Speke, the authentic explorer, consumed with a hard, practical rage for annexation, standing with cool insolence before kings, and berating savage despots like children. All these men, in their various ways, were equipped to do their work, as were those more essential builders of empires, Rhodes, Clive and Gordon. They were the masters of their fates in so far as determining their direction could achieve this. They were leaders, and perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of such men in their intercourse with others is their utter inability to permit anyone else to take the lead, no matter how trivial the enterprise.

But the true romantic has no such urge to assume the purple buskins of leadership. There is nothing in him of the old conquistador breed, those men who landed upon terrifying coasts, and seem to have had a demon within them, so astounding are the feats of endurance recorded of them. The true romantic wanders as does the gypsy? as did Borrow, but not always with Borrow's command of observed incident and knowledge of the human heart. The true romantic is a Peer Gynt, Emperor of Himself, lord of the xii INTRODUCTION

illimitable lost empire of Egomania, condemned to wander in a world of astute swindlers, shrewd executives and a sentimental proletariat. He sees himself always the clear-eyed victim of rascally circumstances, and broods upon the bizarre destiny which condemns him to be forever on the move. Yet of all things he dreads stagnation. The gently shining placidity of bourgeois existence lures him while he struggles desperately to ship once more. He grows pensive as the years pass and find him without hearth and home, outward bound to distant ports where dwell the girls enshrined in the glamour of youthful voyages. He runs away from his ship, and crosses deserts and inland plains in eager hurry to reach a ship. In the streets of heartless cities he sees with luminous clarity the tufted palms waving in the night wind while the riding lights in the harbour twinkle and the guitars twang to soft voices. And you will discover him on any South American water-front, planning a return to some country from which he will immediately depart.

The valuable feature of this book of Adven-

INTRODUCTION xiii

tures is the expression of this mood of the true romantic. Listen to him as he recounts his vicissitudes ashore:

"It was time to commence to build castles, for six months more would give us substantial money. My castle took the form of a cozy little farm, and included a cozy little wife, too, for I was becoming enamoured of a red-haired lassie whose father raised strawberries. She liked me in spite of my clothes and the way I had of talking to my pigs. . . .

"Nevertheless, I kissed her one day through the fence — a barbed wire fence at that — and a thrill went through me ; the like of which I had never known before. I began to long for the* complementary companionship of her, and I thought of her sharing my days, and bringing my lunch to me at the plow.

"How full of nothingness are dreams! They are but fading specters on a wasteless sea — the closer you sail to them the farther they are away. Two days after my kiss, the hog farm was in mourning. Every last one of the hogs died from hog cholera."

xiv INTRODUCTION

Here, then, you have the essential value of this extraordinary narrative. It is the work of a true romantic, oblivious of the tremendous issues of civilization and race. And yarning along, as he says, a man "recently come to writing, who is intoxicated with the new-found use of words to evoke old scenes." This is a valuable confession. It is the key to a small yet inimitable department of literature. It is the peep-hole through which we see something very astonishing indeed — an authentic character out of some fabulous novel shouldering the ghostly author aside, and writing the tale himself.

William McFbb.

S. S. Carrillo

CHAPTER I Concerning Who's Who and Why — Things My Mother Taught Me

ONE often wonders whether the desire to wander is not something more than the fidgeting of a restless soul. I shall not even try to analyse this thing — better leave it to the mystery-writers who are sure of their occult settings, and to the theorists who have never smelled the salt. Nevertheless, there is within me something which says that to halt is to decay.

Although my hair is graying and my stride shortening, my sympathy with adventure is as fresh within me as was the spirit to dare the day I capsized a sail-boat in a squall, and the doctor was called to give aid to my mother. She had fainted at the sight of me sitting on the bottom of the overturned boat. When I was finally rescued my father whipped me, the schoolmaster whipped me, and the good Padre gave much wise counsel to a bitter little boy.

I was then, in the year 1885, ten years old, and that is close on forty years ago.

That day was a never-to-be-forgotten one. Then, for the first time, I experienced the joys of isolation and the dangers that make adventure romantic. The sea and I have been friends; we have understood each other's thoughts. The sullen moods, the tranquil, and the boisterous, each in its own tone, have blended together in harmony, so that the Soul of the Sea is forever en rapport with the heart of its lover. I love the sea, and shall continue to, as long as I have eyes to see its indigo and emerald coloring, and ears to hear its rumbling echoes on crest and crag.

My life, until I was eighteen years old, was spent on my father's large farm on the shores of Strangford Lough, in the northeastern part of Ireland. The last of the eighteen years were happy for me, but sad enough for family and friends. I was wild, if that conveys anything to the reader — I mean wild in the sense of seeking danger. My mother was constantly praying for me, while my father laid heavy the lash.

There was another to be reckoned with — the

CONCERNING WHO'S WHO 5

village schoolmaster. Short and stubby he was, with a black beard and a pug nose, and eyes that were always searching for the bad that might be in a boy. I branded him one time with a glass ink-bottle over his heathery eyebrows. He's dead now, and I suppose I've forgiven him for the welts he made on my young hide.

There were four in our family, two boys and two girls. My brother was older than I by two years. He was a quiet and unassuming boy, always with his head deep in some book. He was never much of an adventurer. I mean that when the hounds and huntsmen went scurrying after a fox or a deer, he would be self-contained with his lessons, while I would jump through the school-room window and run all day with the horses and dogs.

The family, I thought, loved him far better than they did me. They were always holding him up to me as the model of behavior; and surely he was to be admired, for he took adventure like a gentleman, as he did everything; and was a midshipman in Her Majesty's navy when I was a wildling on the high seas. He died while still in his youth, in South America, and his death has ever remained a grief to me, for I loved him quite as much as the others did.

What I regret infinitely in my life is the worry I caused my mother. I feel that I was responsible for the gray in her hair, that for many years longer should have been black as an eclipsed thunder-cloud. She was the one, when I had been out hunting ducks in the bogs all night, to open the door at three or four o'clock in the morning, whispering softly: "Don't wake your father. He thinks that you went to bed early." That was the mother who stayed by me then, as her memory ever has, kind, loving, and most long-suffering. The principles of forbearance which she taught me are cruel enough when one has to tackle, as I did, a world of selfish and intolerant people, who laugh when you laugh, and when the bumper is empty, yawn, and long for another day when the sea may break a prize more worthy. Nevertheless, they have stayed in my heart from her example, and I do not think that I am unkind, unloving, or impatient, beyond my Celtic nature and the training of the sea.

CONCERNING WHO'S WHO 7

Mother didn't know that a world existed outside the County Down. She's dead, now, these many years, and I wonder if her soul's imagination has not, from its infinite viewpoint, seen the world somewhat as I see it. If I am at fault she'll forgive, yes, she'll forgive as she did when I turned the boat over, and carried the gun without a license. Mothers always forgive, on, I think, into the Beyond. As I drift with the current of tide and time, I can see in every man the generative forces for good left there by his mother. Without them the world's highways would crowd with wrecks of debauchery, and hulks of men would pile high the ocean shores where kelp once grew.

Our home overlooked the sea, and, within easy view, ships passed on their way to lands beyond the horizon. To a boy of ten with a romantic soul, those strange visitors with white sails and dark hulls spoke their message as they glided by on into haze and adventure. Left on the beach, I gazed with desire into a nothingness of lonesomeness, and longed to be a man that I might wrestle with the Devil or the Deep, and defy each. But I had to await the passing of slowly rolling years, which brought me a good that I did not appreciate — a well-nourished, strongly-proportioned young frame, fit for fighting and endurance, an eye more than usually steady, and an unusual knowledge of that most difficult seamanship, navigation of small boats along a rocky coast.

I often long for a glimpse of my old home. I mean some day to go back there when Ireland is more as I remember it; and yet my memories seem but as those of yesterday, fleeting like scud across my story, leaving pictures of startling brightness here and there. Land glimpses, often, of horses and cows, of flax and grist-mills, hawthorn hedges blooming, hogs and wild ducks. Particularly of two dogs whose instincts were super-animal, who shared my joys and sorrows, and were whipped when I was whipped, dragging in with me late at night, after I had worn out their poor little legs trailing me through the bogs hour after hour without food.

There are pictures, too, of a loving little boy combing his mother's hair, making her tea for her when she was sick, and waiting on her like a woman; then the wheatfield, when the wheat

CONCERNING WHO'S WHO 9

was in flower and the hawthorn blossoms open to the bumble-bee, and the thrush and the meadow lark alternated their song for the day; then "Paddy," the Irish hunter, whose soft, nimble lips could fumble any gate until it opened, and whose horse-conscience allowed much gleaning in forbidden pastures, in defiance of our stupidity.

Paddy died from old age, and not from lack of care. My father may not have had all the fatherly instincts, but his animals were royally entertained, and woe betide the groom who neglected the many variations of their diet, or failed to give them a light clean bed of the proper depth!

While I remained at home my father's main worry was to keep me out of sail-boats. In this he was never successful. He was afraid of the sea, and had a horror that he would be drowned some day while trying to rescue me.

Father, too, is resting in a little crowded graveyard, beside those of his own, and the many who played together when he and they were boys.

Chapter II

An Event Which Makes My Hand Still Shake As I Write. — Hounded

I WAS fourteen when I cut the schoolmaster over the eye. There was a hunt on. The red-coated huntsmen came in swarms, the beagle hounds yelped viciously as they passed the country school. The schoolmaster must have known of the hunt in advance. The windows were down and locked with a trigger-catch. The front door was locked.

The back door opened into a yard that had a high wall around it, and the iron gate that gave on the country road was hasped fast with an iron padlock. To get in or out of the school a boy must have a quick mind and a ladder. I had the presence of mind, and a step-ladder leaned against the wall to the right of a large blackboard.

The pupils were excited as they worked. The master knitted his brows as he gazed at the

HOUNDED 11

beautifully garbed ladies who rode in the hunt. I raised my hand and spoke pleadingly:

"Please, sir, may I go out?"

Turning to me he said, in his most conquering brogue : "There'll be no leave till the hunt goes by."

The better-disciplined boys looked at me and grinned.

I have often thought, in reading of the various mystical cults, that sometime in the back ages I may have been a dog. The dog instinct was certainly strong in me that day. When the hunting horn sounded I was as instantly responsive as the swiftest beagle that led the hounds. I jumped for the step-ladder, and rushed for the back door. In my haste I knocked down a few of the boys. There was a general uproar, and I, heedless of everything and the consequences, slammed the ladder against the back wall, mounted the steps, and emerged into freedom.

The village school was soon in the distance. I could run then, through stubble-fields and thorn hedges, over pillared gates and steppingstiles. I overtook the hunt, passed the fat, stubby, gouty riders, and, knowing the cutoffs, was soon in the midst of the baying beagles. I ran with them till the sun went down.

The stag that made merry the chase took to the ocean for safety. He was later rescued by boatmen, only to lead the hunt another day. The disappointed hounds and I, weary and empty, turned homeward; they to be caressed and fed, and I to be beaten and humiliated. So the hunt broke up on the beach. Red-coated huntsmen and beagles went each to his own home, and each with his own thoughts of the day and the morrow. My visions of what awaited me from an angry father that night and from a heavy-handed schoolmaster the next day made light of my empty stomach and tired body.

I didn't skulk about. I went home to take my medicine. What was a whipping compared with a day with the hounds? My two dogs met me about a mile from the house. I knew by their big melancholy eyes that they were sorry for me. After jumping and frisking around and licking my hands they dropped behind at a respectful distance. It was never safe for them while I was getting punished, for we shared each other's crimes. So I got my whipping, and one

HOUNDED 13

that I have never forgotten. Even supper, saved for me, could not heal my sense of aching injuries, in spite of all the plenty of the Irish way of living in those years. But I was consoled by the thought that I should soon be a man. In fact, not long after, when my father attempted to beat me one day, I warned him that I was unwilling to be punished again, and that if he tried to, he would do it at his own risk. That was the last.

As I went to school next day, I could hear the boys whisper :

"He's going to get it to-day."

They were right. I did get it. I entered the school as innocently as the kindergarten children. I noticed that the master, as he looked at me, grew venomous, and buttoned his frocktailed coat. But everything went well till rollcall, and I had hopes that he had given me up as a bad job. I was sadly mistaken. When he called my name :

"Present, sir," I shouted.

"Come up here to the desk," he roared.

Then I knew that the price of the hunt had to be paid. He called the school to attention, and, fixing his fiery eyes on me, said:

"I'm going to make an example of you. I'm going to teach you that I am the master here and have to be obeyed." As he slung his epithets his voice grew fierce, and his frame shook with anger.

"You'll never amount to anything," he roared, "you,— you,— "

I had a bitter enemy in school — Thomas Coulter by name. I could hear him snicker behind his hands. The master stepped down from his desk with the cane in his hands.

"Hold out your hand!" he shouted. "Twelve slaps with the cane for you."

Four were considered a serious punishment, but twelve were out of the question. I held out my hands and took six, three on each. The welts were too painful for any more. When I refused and said that I had had enough, he sprang at me like a tiger, knocked me down, put his knee on my breast, and almost drove the wind out of me. Then he lost control of his temper and beat me unmercifully. As I lay there on the school-room floor groaning with pain, he stood over me like a madman. Then, realizing

HOUNDED 15

that he had done his job, he took a glass of water, and resumed the work of the school.

I crawled to my seat, but not like a whipped cur by any means; rather with the determination to get even with that black-eyed brute. Half an hour later my chance came. I grabbed a glass ink-bottle, and being good at throwing cobble-stones, I struck him over the eye, laying bare the bone.

With blood dripping down his shirt he tumbled down from his high-topped desk to the platform. I, weak and bruised, feeling that my job was done, but sick at the sight of it, crawled out of the school and staggered home.

I was not sent to that school again.

The parish people were terribly upset over my crime, but never a word did they say against the schoolmaster for what he had done to me. Strange to say, my father openly took my side. He was willing to abuse me himself, but when it came to public punishment I at once became a son of his, and as such was entitled to consideration. My mother, being the village diplomat, had to smooth the troubled waters, which she was well qualified to do.

CHAPTER III I Conquer My Enemy — Irish Anne. — The Bandmaster

I WAS sent to another school in another village, but my time there was short also; for the hounds and the huntsmen passed that way, too, and I had learned nothing from my former experience. I rode a donkey to and from that school. The distance was far, although you could count the Irish miles on three fingers of the left hand.

One afternoon I was coming home feeling happy. I had been promoted to a higher grade and was beginning to like the school. My young enemy of the other school, Thomas Coulter, who had laughed when the master whipped me, was also riding a donkey that afternoon. The two animals met in the road, head on. They stopped and exchanged sniffs of greeting. Thomas and I growled at each other like two strange bulldogs, and, without a word, dismounted, pulled

I CONQUER MY ENEMY 17

off our coats, and flew at each other's throats.

Thomas was older and heavier, and, as usual, he blackened both my eyes and made my nose bleed. I rode home, horrible to look at. My mother bathed my face and washed the blood off, saying, in her gallant way:

"Oh, how I wish that sometime you could whip that boy."

She cooked me two eggs, and had me drink a pitcher of fresh buttermilk. Then she asked me where Thomas was. I told her up by the Four Roads. I knew that she wanted me to go back and see if I couldn't get even with him. Mother was prudent, but her actions carried meaning.

"Go out to the bog," said she, "and bring me four leeches. I must have your eyes fixed up before school to-morrow."

I didn't go near the bogs. Up to the Four Roads I strode, and met Thomas, the boss of the village boys.

"Come on," I said, "I'm going to whip you this time."

He was whipped, and well whipped. I have often wondered since whether my success was due to the eggs and buttermilk, or to my mother's daring words : "I wish that sometime you could whip that boy."

When I was twelve years old I had a childish fondness for girls of my age. I liked to be with them, to play with them, caress them, and — which often happened — to fight with them.

One girl in particular, Anne Bailey, interested me. Dressed in starched aprons and polished shoes, she would meet me at the stile and swing with me on the gate. I would carry her books from school, and fight her fights, which were many. Anne, for a child of thirteen years, had a terrible temper. Few boys in the village had any use for her. I liked her because she fought for what she thought was right. The smaller children always had a square deal where Anne was concerned, even if she had to trim a boy to get it.

My fondness for her, I suppose, grew out of the fact that she never lost a fight. If she got into a tight place where she couldn't win with her fists, she would resort to cobble-stones, and Anne could throw those gray granite, ragged stones, so common on the country roads in

I CONQUER MY ENEMY 19

Ireland, with unerring accuracy. Her enemies would run before her for the cover of the hawthorn hedges. Yet she had characteristics that belong to her sex. She admired well-dressed boys. On Sunday mornings she would give me her most coquettish smile, for then I was togged in my best.

When I was fifteen, mother had me join a band, and while I remained at home I learned to play the cornet, clarionet, and flute. Music develops imagination in the imaginative. In me, perhaps because I was over-imaginative, music wrought agonies of adventurousness and rainbow-tinted, velvet harmonies of the sights and sounds that lay beyond my ken — over there, north, south, east, and west; over there beyond the sea. Only a few rolling green waves to cross, in that winged ship, flitting through the gauzy haze, and strange lands would emerge from the horizon, lands of color and music. So different, so much more beautiful than my world. Surely I was a strange boy — at once bad and harmless, and full, as I have always been, of the spirit of poetry. Others I have known like myself, fighters of wave and man, also full of the essence of poetry — many of them, unbelievably many.

I was soon to test the beauties of that other world of my yearning. By the time I reached it, hardship had relegated the poetry of my nature to the safest confines of my heart, and my surface sentiment was not easily hurt, as sometimes is the case with others. I loved every phase of the sea-going life, and longed for more. Now it lives on in my thoughts.

I . often think of the bandmaster, and how different he was from my first schoolmaster. What a sense of humor he had, and what pains he took to teach me! What long rides he took on his old white mule! He came on Thursday evenings. His breath was always strong with whiskey, but he seemed none the worse on that account in his teaching.

Our maids, at home, were with us so long that they were part of the household. Only the dairymaid was changed from time to time, for her position seemed to be one that inevitably led to matrimony. There would be a great discussion as to the next one to fill the place, on these occasions. But Maggie, the cook, never

I CONQUER MY ENEMY 21

changed. She had been with us for years and years. She ruled our goings-out and our comings-in, and woe betide us if we did not do justice to the good things that were set before us; no mean task when one considers the three hearty meals and the three between-meals that punctuated the Irish farmer's day.

Maggie thought a great deal of the musicmaster, perhaps because he was good to me, who was her prime favorite, perhaps because he ate most unsparingly of everything that she placed before him on those hungry Thursday nights, perhaps because her soul was also full of music, surcharged with the ceaseless din of pots and pans.

The bandmaster was always kind and smiling, and made light of our mistakes, sticking his fingers into his ears most comically to listen for discords. For the life of me I could not see how that process could facilitate his perception, but he seemed to locate discords with unerring accuracy.

Surely he had a difficult task teaching us county boys to play together, but he did, and rode his mule over twenty miles of cobble-stones once a week to do it. How excited and happy the old fellow was, when, at last, after four months of practice and effort, we played "The Minstrel Boy" without a hitch. That was his favorite piece, and he felt that if a band could play that, it could master anything in music.