The Liverpool waterside at least had not changed since James’s day: “The black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, windiest light”;-even the colour was the same, “the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext “
THE CARGO SHIP
The cargo ship lay right outside the Mersey in the Irish Sea; a cold January wind blew across the tender; people sat crammed together below deck saying goodbye, bored, embarrassed and bonhomous, like parents at a railway station the first day of term, while England slipped away from the porthole, a stone stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the glass.
Madeira
MY cousin and I had five fellow-passengers in the cargo ship: two shipping agents, a traveller for an engineering firm, a doctor on his way to the Coast with anti-yellow-fever serum, and a woman joining her husband at Bathurst. All except the woman and the traveller knew the Coast; they knew the same people; they had a common technique of living enforced by common conditions. The daily dose of quinine, mosquito netting over all the portholes: diese to them were as natural as the table-cloth at meals.
It is a condition favourable to the growth of legend. Legend belongs naturally to primitive communities where minds are so little differentiated, by work or play or education, that a story can move quickly from brain to brain uncriticized. But sometimes these conditions arise artificially. A common danger, purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy differences of intellect and class; then you get the angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.
“Yeslittle’ they were saying in the smoking-room, “you won’t find a tougher man than Captain W.” They all knew of him because they all belonged to the Coast: the captain, the doctor, the shipper.
“If he ran into a broken bottle,” the doctor said, “his face wouldn’t look any different.”
“He’d take a tug round the world as soon as look at you.”
“He doesn’t insure his cargo. He bears the risk himself. That’s why his freight-rates are so cheap.”
“Will people take the risk?”
“His word’s as good as an insurance company’s.”
“But when he loses a cargo?”
“He hasn’t lost one yet.”
In the wireless room on a Saturday night the young agent waited hour after hour for the League results. He and the wireless officer shared an esoteric gossip of the sea : how this or that man had quarrelled with the Old Man and joined another line. The bulbs flickered overhead; tubes hummed in the little cabin with its rows of discs and bulbs, as mechanised as was the engine-room below, a great black polished cliff” pipes tied up at the joints in blue, yellow or scarlet bags like hot-water bottles, a solitary negro with a polishing rag in all the glittering desert of brass and iron.
Coming in from the bulbs and gossip and the dusk I overheard the Captain talking to the doctor in the smoking-room. “Four hundred and sixteen people at Dakar,” he was saying. The subject came up again at breakfast: plague at Dakar, yellow fever at Bathurst, outbreaks hushed up on the French coast, never reported on the Liberian: one was seldom allowed to escape the subject of fever. One could begin a conversation with religion, politics, books; it always ended with malaria, plague, yellow fever. As long as one was at sea it was a joke, like somebody else’s vicious wife; when one was on land it was like a grim story intended to make the flesh creep, but one became conscious then of people who wouldn’t play, who preferred something comforting.
Something like A Village in a Valley by Mr. Beverley Nichols, which was in the small library. One reads strange books in a ship, books one would never dream of reading at home: like Lady Eleanor Smith’s Tzigane, and the novels of Warwick Deeping and W. B. Maxwell : a lot of books, written without truth, without compulsion, one dull word following another, books to read while you wait for the bus, while you strap-hang, in between the Boss’s dictations, while you eat your A. B. C. lunch; a whole industry founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness.
At Madeira it was raining. The touts were out at ten in the morning in the shabby notorious town. One drank sweet wine at the Golden Gates, and the rain dripped off the curious phallic hats hanging outside the shops. The touts wore straw hats with Cambridge ribbons; they kept at one’s elbow all the way round Funchal; they weren’t a bit discouraged because it was raining, because it was only just after breakfast. “Luxe,” they kept on saying, and “Sex” and something about dancing girls. Their industry, like Mr. Beverley Nichols’s, was founded on a want of leisure and a want of happiness. Quick, quick, you are only on shore for half an hour, you are only vigorous for a few more years, have another girl before it’s too late, you aren’t happy with the one you’ve got, try another. The women sold violets and lilies and roses in the rain, the phallic hats dripped, the touts couldn’t understand that one didn’t want a girl just after breakfast on a wet day. There were other ways of filling up time, one could drink sweet wine at the Golden Gates, one could go back on board and read Lady Eleanor Smith or Mr. Beverley Nichols.
A young German artist and his wife came on board at Funchal as deck passengers and were given the little hospital to sleep in. He was a thick spotty man in a velvet jacket; he had known D. H. Lawrence at Taos and Mabel Dodge Luhan. It hadn’t made any difference, he wasn’t going to write a book about it. In the little hospital he put out his canvases, crude realistic landscapes and die baked faces of Mexican Indians; it grew dark; and everyone drank bad Madeira out of the bottle and he talked about Art and Sport and the Body Beautiful, and his wife, small and curved and lovely and complaisant, was quiet and seasick. He believed in Hitler and Nationalism and swimming and love, he liked the pictures of Orpen and De Laszlo, but Munke’s pictures left him dissatisfied. They left out the Soul, he said, they were materialist; not that he disbelieved in the Body, the Body Beautiful and in physical Love. He agreed to come to Africa too, and illustrate this book; an artist was at home anywhere-but after dinner he changed his mind; and his sweet complaisant nubile
wife said, Yes, she wouldn’t mind coming to Africa, and after dinner she changed her mind too. He was a bad artist, but he wasn’t a bogus one. He lived on almost nothing; he believed in himself and in his hazy Teutonic ideas; and there was a sensual beauty in their relationship. The two lived in a kind of continuous intimacy, she had no ideas but his, no vitality but his; he supplied all the life for both of them and she supplied a warm friendly sensual death; they shared the universe between them All the time, in the cabin, at dinner, at a cafι table, they gave the impression of having only just risen from bed.
By dinner-time everyone was drunk on bad Madeira and the pink gin they called Coasters. The shipping agent sang The Old Homeland and The Floral Dance and little shot an Arrow into the Air and the fat traveller called Younger said, “Pass me some more eau de cow,” spilling his coffee. The aliens went to their cabin, picking their way across the lower deck and up the iron stairs into the stern; she was seasick, but it only made her quieter; it didn’t alter her beautiful sensuous receptivity. The agent sang The Old Homeland again-“Far across the sea, I wonder will they pray for me”-and everyone felt English and exiled and wistful, everyone except Younger, who climbed carefully up the stairs, clinging to the banister: “Fm going home by rail.” He was more English than any of them; the north country was in his heart; he was firmly local and unsentimental and bawdy and honest. He drank because he needed a holiday, because he had heavy work before him on the Coast, because he loved his wife and had desperate anxieties. He had more cause to drink than anyone. The boom years were in his heavy flesh and his three chins; one couldn’t at first sight tell how the depression lay like lead in his stomach. If one were to paint his portrait in the old style of tiny landscapes and Tuscan towns, one would have given him as background an abandoned blast furnace or the girders of a great bridge left a perch for birds.