CHAPTER II
RANDOM MEMORIES
So very minutely have I detailed in four different books the various happenings in my life that I am confined to two periods for recollections, but those two embrace what to me at any rate were full of interest. The first of these was my officer time at sea, and the second the period since my emancipation from the desk until now. It is true that I have touched upon events in the first period in With Christ at Sea, but very lightly, and there are many reminiscences unconnected with that book which rush to the mind now.
For instance, there is a little matter connected with my visit to Noumea, New Caledonia, when I was mate of a colonial barque, that for some queer reason has been persistent in my memory lately. I’m sure I wonder that I haven’t used it before, for it has all the elements of a good story in it. It must be remembered that Noumea is a French convict settlement, and while I say nothing about the treatment of the convicts, I need not labour the point that any attempt to escape means the shortest possible shrift to the escapee if caught in the act. Now at the time of which I write there were five warships in the harbour, a few schooners, my own barque and a French convict ship. I had been ashore and found on coming down to the beach that I had, as we say, “lost my passage,” i.e. my boat had gone without me.
Now I had a great dread of staying ashore at night in a foreign port (oh, yes, I know that proves me to have been any opprobrious sort of thing you like, but we’ll take that as read), and so it never even occurred to me to go back to the hotel—at least that’s what they called it. Nor did I dare to shout, for though the night was still we were a long way out, and I was afraid of bringing the gendarmes down upon me. But in the clear darkness I saw about a dozen boats moored some hundred feet or so off the beach, and without thinking I waded in and swam off to the nearest one. She was fastened at the bows by a chain passing through a ring in the stern inside, and I started to unreeve that chain. How many fathoms of it I hauled up I can’t imagine, or why the rattle of it didn’t rouse all Noumea; but I came to the end at last, and it wouldn’t pass the ring.
Obviously I had hauled in the wrong end and the whole dreary, noisy process had to be reversed; but after hours of labour I got that big boat adrift, and aroused nobody. She was down by the head with the weight of chain, and there was much water in her, but the chief fact evident to me when I got fairly adrift was that there were no oars! I hadn’t thought of that before. So I got a bottom board and did the best I could with that in the direction I supposed my ship to lie. Presently a shadowy hulk loomed up ahead and a hoarse Qui va là? greeted me. Need I say that I did not reply. But I sweated hugely, expecting every moment to be shot. Three ships I passed, the sentry hailing me like that, and never an answer from me. And then, with the nyctalopic eyesight of the sailor, I saw my ship ahead. I forgot the feeble tides of the South Seas, and worked like a beaver to gain the gangway. I did, and (I have grieved over the act ever since, but what was I to do?) sent the boat adrift as I triumphantly climbed the side ladder and sought my bunk. I have only to add that no echo of that night’s exploit ever reached me, and I had to come to the conclusion that the occasional escapes of convicts was comparatively easy when the escapees were prepared to risk their lives in the operation.
Another adventure which was good to laugh at afterwards but very unpleasant at the time befell me on the beach at Tamatave, Madagascar. I was mate of a pretty little brig and went ashore one night to fetch the captain, who was dining with somebody. It was a glorious night with a full moon, but very late, and I do not know what prompted me to go with the two good fellows who rowed. We were soon ashore and, the time hanging heavily, we all decided on a bathe. A most enjoyable swim and wallow in the tepid water followed, and we emerged to dress in our two garments which lay on the beach near by. But as we came ashore a troop of huge ferocious dogs such as then infested Tamatave suddenly rushed at us, and we made for the first place of refuge that presented itself, a huge pyramid of beef bones which lay near the sea, white under the moon-rays. We fled up that pyramid, shedding blood and bad words at every stumbling stride, but we gained the summit without a dog bite, and from that eminence turned on our foes and bombarded them with bones.
It was very cold to our naked bodies, and the dogs looked horribly fierce down there, but every now and then we rejoiced to hear a well-aimed shin bone go bang against some mangy hide, and the following yells were music to our ears. Our shying redoubled, and after a few minutes we were able to descend from our captivity and chase the brutes away. We had suffered many things to our bare feet and legs from the jagged bones, but we took those bones on board for cargo, and I often shuddered afterwards to think what our feelings would have been had we then known that every hollow contained a centipede, a scorpion, or a tarantula. Ugh! they furnished our ship for us, those beastly bones, with these lethal vermin, and we had spent nearly a quarter of an hour among that magazine of venom, naked.
Since, while I was mate of that vessel, the fever smote down every member of the ship’s company except the bos’un and myself, and we carried on the work of the ship in Zanzibar with slaves, there would reasonably seem to be many opportunities for adventure. And that was certainly the case; but the whole life was so strange and exotic, so full of differences from the ordered life of our civilisation, that I feel it impossible to select from it any salient incidents. Especially as these are recollections, not inventions, and I don’t recall any scenes of bloodshed on board. Only I once had the temerity to go ashore on a Sunday at Zanzibar, when a wild mêlée was raging and crowds of naked blacks were yelling at the pitch of their voices while slashing furiously about them with their long butcher knives whose edges were keen as razors.
I afterwards commented upon what I had seen to Ali, our Suahili cook, who immediately waxed enthusiastic upon the joys of the English Sunday, when, as he put it:—
“All mans plenty get dlunk, plenty fight, plenty play knife.” Yes, he called it play: with a smile like a huge white gash across his ebony face, he showed me his scars; my conscience, the fellow must have been cut to ribbons in his time. One particularly ghastly scar he had on his right thigh. It was a whitish knotted lump almost as big as a shut fist. I enquired about it, and he nonchalantly informed me that it was got one Sunday morning when the boys were playing.
“And what did you do to the man who gave it you?”
“Oh, I cut ’im belly orf,” with the most careless air.
“What happened to you then?” I enquired.
“Two year prison; s’pose kill man, Sultan make work in gaol two year.”
That was all, but it will be no matter for surprise that I sequestrated the knives of both Sa’adi and Ali, our cook and steward, as well as a particularly fine dagger belonging to the former. But one of those Sunday morning “plays” must be seen to be believed possible.
And now I must make a long “fleet,” as we call it, to a time more understandable by my readers, a time when I began to realise that money might be earned by writing, not, that is, in the service of the Government, but for myself. It was a wonderful discovery, for I made it at a time when I sorely needed a little extra money. Not that I might belong to two or three West End clubs, rent an expensive flat, and entertain folks at restaurants where the bills were of fabulous amounts, but for sheer necessities. That this is no figure of speech may be understood from the fact that I wrote my first stories on my shop counter while waiting for customers. Now I’m not going to ape the usual conventional lie and say, “Ah, but they were happy days!” They weren’t. They were very wretched days, full of trouble and apprehension of trouble, even worse. It may be that the full story of that time will never be told, but I have given as much of it to the world as I could in the Confessions of a Tradesman, a book better reviewed than any I have written; a book about which I have received double the number of eulogistic letters evoked by any other of my books, but which has sold, so my publishers tell me, less than 400 copies, and has now gone out of print.
But I look back to that time with gratitude and joy because of the new kind world to which it gave me entrance. Not all at once, that could hardly be expected, but with far less preliminary than might have been expected. And in spite of all that has been said about the poor rewards of literature as a profession, most of which is, I believe, quite true, I make bold to say that I do not believe there is any other profession where the rewards are so immensely greater than the merit in the majority of cases. There are dozens of writers now eating the fat and drinking the sweet, lying soft and riding swift, who as far as any merit in themselves is concerned, are worth exactly 0. They have caught the public ear, that is all. True there are some, thank God, who have attained a grand income by sheer gigantic merit, but they are few and, alas! when they have made a fortune it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it from the clutch of the dishonest company promoter.
But to return. I am grateful to literature because it did for me what no other form of money-getting could do save Charity, which, always hateful, is usually utterly inadequate to the needs. But most of all, it saved me from the Office. Here I must refrain, because otherwise I could fall a-cursing like a very drab when I remember that place and all that I endured there. I was forty-two years of age; I had four children, and I had not a penny at my back; yet such was my horror of the Office and all its works that as soon as I received an offer from a London newspaper of a year’s engagement at £2 per week with six months’ notice on either side, I joyfully accepted it, and at once resigned the situation I had endured so long. If this be not a measure of my hatred of that place I do not know what is, and yet I am sure that many such employments, though the salary be small, are as pleasant to the workers as any occupation can be in this world. It entirely rests with the superiors (sic).
But this is not anecdote, although it certainly is recollection. Now and from henceforth my two avocations ran concurrently, lecturing and writing, and I suppose I worked very hard. Looking back at those years I am inclined to think so; most people who knew me and what I was doing seemed to think so too; but I, accustomed to the most strenuous physical life and breasting a stormy sea of worry at the same time, felt that it was all play. I think I should have been entirely happy but for the sad fact that I had no home. I was essentially a home-lover, yet I had no home in the true sense of the word. More than that I cannot say, except that one day I awoke to the fact that at last and at great cost I had achieved a home and was about to enjoy life as I had never done before. It is true that I was rapidly nearing my jubilee, and that my health was permanently impaired, but—and oh! what a huge but it is—I had emerged into the sunshine and, though that I could not know, ten years of placid joy lay before me.
I had taken a house in the country about fifty miles from London, an ideal place as I thought, the rent being low, £40 a year, for which I had a good eight-roomed house and nearly two acres of land well laid out as orchard, kitchen garden, flower garden, lawn, and plenty of outbuildings. Oh, it was altogether charming, although I afterwards found that the soil was cold and hungry. But that did not matter to me; I was not farming, and I am not going to say a word in dispraise of the place where I spent ten happy years. I must say, however, that they would not have been so happy but that I gave explicit instructions that none of the village talk was to be told me, nor did I do any visiting whatever. You will say that I must have lived like a hermit. Oh no, I had plenty of visitors from town; I often had to go away myself, so that I did not feel at all isolated, and in any case I could never have endured the venomous, slanderous small talk which is the mental pabulum of most English village folk. Poor people, I can hardly blame them. Talk is their only recreation, and it has been very wisely told us that a “multitude of words wanteth not sin.”
However, before I had more than sampled the beauties of the place, and when I had only tasted, as it were, the joys of the “harvest bugs” of summer which made the place almost unbearable, I received an invitation from the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company to be their guest, bringing with me a secretary if I wished, for their West Indian and Central American trip. At first I demurred, for a sea trip has long lost its charms for me; but the offer was enhanced by the promise of a large sum of money if I would write an account of my trip, so I immediately set about finding a secretary. A young lady who did my typing agreed to come, the facilities being so royal, a four-berth cabin each and another cabin for an office, and we sailed from Southampton on what I must always regard as the pleasantest voyage of my life. It is a very long time since I have had any communication with the Royal Mail, and I am never likely to meet Sir Owen Phillips again, therefore I am the more free to say that in the Company’s treatment of me and my secretary the adjective I have used above is the only adequate one.
We went all over the loyal island of Barbados, up to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, up to the capital of Costa Rica, where the climate is of heaven and the death rate was then the highest in the world, for reasons that I may not dwell upon; all along the line of the Panama Canal from Colon to Panama and back, from La Guayra to Caracas, President Castro’s stronghold, and to the pearl fisheries of Margharita Porlomar. Yes, you may say, but surely you must have had many adventures during such a trip as that. True, we did; and I have recorded them all in a book now out of print, I believe, called Back to Sunny Seas. The fine flavour of it all is there, but sitting here in the sunny evenings I often think of those halcyon days and smile, a pleasant happy smile, there was so little that called for anything but happiness.
And yet, in pursuance of Pope’s profound maxim that “Man never is, but always to be, blest,” I often yearned for home and wondered, wondered how things were going there. And when at last, after nearly four months’ joy, we sighted Plymouth one morning at dawn, I could only point and use my handkerchief, for the dear land ahead took away from me the power of speech. It was so when I was a child on my first return to England—see The Log of a Sea Waif (passim)—and it has grown with the years. It was so good to get home again. It had been very good to visit those strange exotic countries en prince, very good to give much simple pleasure to another; but I have always felt and always shall feel, I suppose, that the chief, the choicest charm of a holiday is returning. I think that is how it ought to be. It may be necessary to go, but it should be most delightful to return.
And, as should be the case, all had been well during my absence. Nothing untoward had happened. So that I could sit down now to the finishing of the book with a light heart, with the lecturing season still some months ahead. Happy! happiness had only just come to me, and I felt full of it. I had realised before that such fullness of life as was vouchsafed to other men, though they did not seem to appreciate it as I thought they should, was not for me, and upon the principle of the Spanish proverb, “The best thing to do when it is raining, is to let it rain!” I had “let on” to be content. But my word, the true test of contentment, I am sure, is that the contentee won’t change his condition. And I had never been in such a position. Now, however, I felt that all was so well with me that it could never be better. That I was blest above, far, far above my deserts. All that had ever gone before was just drivel compared with the large joy that was now mine.
And thinking of those happy days, coming as they did after so much storm and stress, I still hold the same opinion. I know that many wise folk with their flats in town and their nightly symposia at the club will sneer at me, but let them. I was getting closely on for fifty and I had never known joy; now it lay all about me, and though my income was never very much, I had the priceless reputation in the village of “the gen’l’man as allus pays everybody soon’s they asks him.” My heavenly Father, I would rather that were engraved upon my tomb than that I had commanded troops that conquered half the world.
My friends knew where to come, and they always found open house, they never wore out their welcome. How could they? I had known the want of welcome, they never should. And I know to-day that none of them that are alive will refuse me the meed of being a hospitable fellow, nor did I do my hospitality at any poor tradesman’s expense.
I have said that the soil was a cold and hungry one. Well, so it was, and my old gardener toiled over it in vain very often; but it did produce many things, and especially did it bring forth the two things I liked best in the way of eatables—green peas and new potatoes. Food as a rule is to me an appalling nuisance. I don’t know which is worse, taking it in or the process of assimilation, but I must make an exception in favour of green peas and new potatoes and mint. And these we had at Millfield in such profusion as I have never seen before or since. True, I paid top price for seed, true, I spared nothing in their production, but here in Bournemouth to-day I must needs pay more directly, and never, no never get anything like the satisfaction that I did then. Oh ye fat and greasy citizens, know ye the joy of gathering green peas that ye have watched from the germination? Know ye the delight of shelling them and of passing them into the kitchen (with appropriate comments anent the cooking), and then the supreme joy of digging the spoon down deep in the piled-up dish and ladling them out to your chums with much dish gravy—not hot water? Then you know nothing at all of the joy of the table; and as for the Frenchman and his petits pois and butter, etc., bah! I’ve no patience, he doesn’t know anything about it. I speak an alien tongue to him.
But the garden was a perennial delight. I could not do any gardening, I couldn’t stoop, though of the thinnest, because my constitutional ailment of the lungs wouldn’t let me, but I was death on superintending; also I loved to patrol the garden and the hedges before breakfast in the morning and watch the birds at their work, as well as the little things growing. Oh yes, I have no pretensions to scholarship; I cannot express myself like the late R.L.S., but I did enjoy that most blessed time. And when I come to die I hope I shall remember it just as well, for indeed we should all think gratefully of the happiest time in our lives. If I wanted to fill many pages I could easily do so with happenings down there that have never been noted before—how could they? I dare say the village annals contain them, but they are not published, thank God—none of my friends have written them down—they were too happy to do more than enjoy. And if they ever missed me, and they sometimes did when an article was due, one of them would say, “Oh, he’s gone to write another novel, don’t disturb him. Let’s have another.” And so the happy hours wore on.
But now I come to the point when I must confine myself more strictly to the lecture reminiscences and leave my beloved Millfield for a while. Though I would have you remember that every return was but a renewal of ancient delights.