This master of a ship I remember first
as a slim lad, with a shy smile, and large hands that
were lonely beyond his outgrown reefer jacket.
His cap was always too small for him, and the soiled
frontal badge of his line became a coloured button
beyond his forelock. He used to come home occasionally and
it was always when we were on the point of forgetting
him altogether. He came with a huge bolster in
a cab, as though out of the past and nowhere.
There is a tradition, a book tradition, that the
boy apprenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, and
a self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak
extreme the very thought of which horrifies those
who are lawful and cautious. They know better
who live where the ships are. He used to bring
his young shipmates to see us, and they were like
himself. Their eyes were downcast. They
showed no self-reliance. Their shyness and politeness,
when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate
even with modesty. Their sisters, not nearly
so polite, used to mock them.
As our own shy lad was never with
us for long, his departure being as abrupt and unannounced
as his appearance, we could willingly endure him.
But he was extraneous to the household. He had
the impeding nature of a new and superfluous piece
of furniture which is in the way, yet never knows
it, and placidly stays where it is, in its wooden
manner, till it is placed elsewhere. There was
a morning when, as he was leaving the house, during
one of his brief visits to his home, I noticed to
my astonishment that he had grown taller than myself.
How had that happened? And where? I had
followed him to the door that morning because, looking
down at his cap which he was nervously handling, he
had told me he was going then to an examination.
About a week later he announced, in a casual way,
that he had got his masters ticket. After the
first shock of surprise, caused by the fact that this
information was an unexpected warning of our advance
in years, we were amused, and we congratulated him.
Naturally he had got his certificate as master mariner.
Why not? Nearly all the mates we knew got it,
sooner or later. That was bound to come.
But very soon after that he gave us a genuine surprise,
and made us anxious. He informed us, as casually,
that he had been appointed master to a ship; a very
different matter from merely possessing the licence
to command.
We were even alarmed. This was
serious. He could not do it. He was not
the man to make a command for anything. A fellow
who, not so long ago, used to walk a mile with a telegram
because he had not the strength of character to face
the lady clerk in the post office round the corner,
was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard characters
gathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialize them,
and direct them successfully in subduing the conflicting
elements of a difficult enterprise. Not he.
But we said nothing to discourage him.
Of course, he was a delightful fellow.
He often amused us, and he did not always know why.
He was frank, he was gentle, but that large vacancy,
the sea, where he had spent most of his young life,
had made him well, slow. You know
what I mean. He was curiously innocent of those
dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because
we know they are there. Yet he was always on
the alert for thieves and parasites. I think
he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipresence
ashore. Proud of his alert and knowing intelligence,
he would relate a long story of the way he had not
only frustrated an artful shark, but had enjoyed the
process in perfect safety. That we, who rarely
went out of London, never had such adventures, did
not strike him as worth a thought or two. He
never paused in his merriment to consider the strange
fact that to him, alone of our household, such wayside
adventures fell. With a shrewd air he would inform
us that he was about to put the savings of a voyage
into an advertised trap which a country parson would
have stepped over without a second contemptuous glance,
He took his ship away. The affair
was not discussed at home, though each of us gave
it some private despondency. We followed him
silently, apprehensively, through the reports in the
Shipping Gazette. He made point after
point safely St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez,
Aden after him we went across to Colombo,
Singapore, and at length we learned that he was safe
at Batavia. He had got that steamer out all right.
He got her home again, too. After his first
adventure as master he made voyage after voyage with
no more excitement in them than you would find in
Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain luck;
or else navigation and seamanship were greatly overrated
arts.
A day came when he invited me to go
with him part of his voyage. I could leave the
ship at Bordeaux. I went. You must remember
that we had never seen his ship. And there he
was, walking with me to the dock from a Welsh railway
station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with an umbrella
I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper
parcel. He was appropriately crowned with a bowler
hat several sizes too small for him. Glancing
up at his profile, I actually wondered whether the
turmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession
which now he was bound to make; that he was not the
master of a ship, and never had been.
There she was, a bulky modern freighter,
full of derricks and time-saving appliances, and her
funnel lording it over the neighbourhood. The
man with the parcel under his arm led me up the gangway.
I was not yet convinced. I was, indeed, less
sure than ever that he could be the master of this
huge community of engines and men. He did not
accord with it.
We were no sooner on deck than a man
in uniform, grey-haired, with a seamed and resolute
face, which any one would have recognized at once
as a sailor’s, approached us. He was introduced
as the chief officer. He had a tale of woe:
trouble with the dockmaster, with the stevedores,
with the cargo, with many things. He did not
appear to know what to do with them. He was
asking this boy of ours.
The skipper began to speak.
At that moment I was gazing at the funnel, trying
to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice,
rapid and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving
doubts, and making the crooked straight. It
was the man with the brown paper parcel. That
was still under his arm in fact, the parcel
contained pink pyjamas, and there was hardly enough
paper. The respect of the mate was not lessened
by this.
The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway.
He walked to the other side of the ship, and inspected
something there. Conned her length, called up
in a friendly but authoritative way to an engineer
standing by an amid-ship rail above. He came
back to the mate, and with an easy precision directed
his will on others, through his deputy, up to the
time of sailing. He beckoned to me, who also,
apparently, was under his august orders, and turned,
as though perfectly aware that in this place I should
follow him meekly, in full obedience.
Our steamer moved out at midnight,
in a drive of wind and rain. There were bewildering
and unrelated lights about us. Peremptory challenges
were shouted to us from nowhere. Sirens blared
out of dark voids. And there was the skipper
on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement at
home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and
an immense insentient mass moving with him at his
will; and he had his hands in his pockets, and turned
to tell me what a cold night it was. The pier-head
searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his
brows knitted in a little frown, and his underlip
projecting as the sign of the pride of those who look
direct into the eyes of an opponent, and care not
at all. In my berth that night I searched for
a moral for this narrative, but went to sleep before
I found it.