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The trip on the
Pellerin
was no exception. I was counting seconds, not hours, by the tenth day out of Plymouth. And yet when the last night came, on this, as on every other trip that I have ever taken, I found myself limply surrendering to the conventional sentimental wistfulness.

§

I have read much and seen a little of the genuine pathos of last nights on board when the brief but deep friendships of a fortnight's passage are sundered in all human probability for ever. But on the
Pellerin,
during those twelve days of discomfort and discontent, such contacts as had come to us had been superficial. Yet all the same, as the last day closed and the sudden tropic night with its train of unfamiliar stars swept statelily over the calming waters, Eldred and I found ourselves growing sad and silent.

What was it? The surrender simply to a facile uprush of obvious emotions? “We never,” said De Quincey, “do anything consciously for the last time without regret.” Like
trees we take root where we are planted. And I fancy that our instinctive sadness at these moments of uprooting is something more than a false idealising of the past simply because it is the past; that the psychologist would detect in it a recognition subconsciously of the symbol in our brief sojourning of the sojourning only relatively less brief of all mortality; that in this loss of things and faces that have grown familiar we are abandoning a series of amulets, of reassurances in a continuity that possibly does not exist; that this sudden last-hour friendliness for a number of persons with whom we have little if anything in common and whose acquaintance, were it made in the customary routine of life, we should never bother to follow up, is based upon genuine sentiment.

It may be. But be it how it may, the phenomenon remains that whether the voyage has been long or short, grey or pleasant; whether its end is to mean the opening of a new and entrancing chapter of fresh experience, or a return made grudgingly to conditions from which we can only temporarily escape; always there rises on that last night a clouded mood of melancholia. People to whom you have scarcely spoken during the voyage come up to you after dinner. “What, going to-morrow?” they say, “that's sad. We shall be a less cheerful party.”

And you sit talking, not as you have talked on other evenings, casually, without enthusiasm because your eyes were too tired for the reading you would have preferred, but eagerly, intimately, expansively in quick, coloured sentences, in a desperate haste to get said in this short night all that must otherwise remain unsaid. And right through the conversation will run motif-wise the refrain “How tragic that this should be our last night.”

It is ridiculous, but there it is.

For days Eldred and I had been counting the hours to our release. For days we had been telling ourselves that neither in this nor any other life did we wish to see again one inch of those sulky sea-splashed decks, or one foot of all the feet that had trodden them. Yet when the time had come for us
to drift quietly through the still waters of the Caribbean we were almost regretting that on the next night it was to be under the grey shadow of Carbet that we should be sleeping.

§

It was wet and misty as the
Pellerin de Latouche
drew into Fort de France, and it was hard to distinguish the lettering on the large, broad-beamed cargo flying a French flag, that followed us into dock. There was, however, a familiar quality about that long, low ship with its single funnel, its black airholes, its squat, white superstructure; and yet I could scarcely believe that chance should have brought into that harbour at that moment a ship that only three times a year and for a few hours touched there. It would be the kind of coincidence that the novelist is counselled to avoid scrupulously. And yet it was very like the ship that twenty-four months before I had seen steam slowly into the Segond Channel.

I turned to the Commissaire.

“What's that boat over on our right?” I asked.

“That,” he answered, “Oh, that's the
Louqsor”

He spoke rather contemptuously. And no doubt the
Louqsor
to the Commissaire of an ocean liner would seem a somewhat discreditable acquaintance. To describe her as a cargo boat is to say nothing. The word ‘cargo boat' evokes a picture of Kipling's “black bilboa tramp,” and a “drunken dago crew.”

But nowadays there are not too many such. The smartest small ship I ever travelled on was the
Handicap,
a Norwegian cargo boat running between Europe and Seattle, that I boarded as she was passing through the Canal. She was an oil burner of 9,000 tons. There was never a speck of dirt upon her. The crew were housed in small, clean, airy cabins; two or three men in each. The twenty-three days' journey to London was the most comfortable I have ever had. She carried no passengers—I had to sign on as an assistant purser. My cabin was large and cool, the food better and more varied than I should have had on any save a transatlantic liner. There was naturally no saloon. But the captain, a married
man, travelling with his wife and two small children, had the kind of flat for which, furnished, you would pay four guineas a week in London. The word “cargo” boat nowadays means simply “not carrying passengers.”

Indeed, by that criterion, cargo is an inexact description of the
Louqsor.
It does carry passengers, a few. Built twenty-five years ago as a troopship, it now runs on the Messageries intermediate service between Noumea and Dunkerque. It is an old-fashioned ship. The steering apparatus is arranged on the outside, so that all night long a chain is rattling outside your cabin porthole. There is no cold storage, so that your meat has to be carried fresh. The front part of the ship is like a farmyard. There are sheep and bullocks and pigs and chickens. You feel as though you were travelling on the Ark. The great feature of the ship's life is the slaughter, twice weekly, of a bullock; a spectacle for which most of the passengers and any available deck hands assemble. The cabins are not large, the dining saloon is also the smoking-room, the bar, the library, and the music-room. When it rains there is no part of the deck on to which water does not leak. There is no promenade deck. If you want to take exercise, you have to take it between barrels of kerosene and wine on an unawninged deck. There are only two baths, one for women, the other for the male passengers and officers. It is not the kind of ship that a tourist agency would charter, but of the thirty or so ships on which I have travelled during the last four years it is by a long way my favourite.

Romance and glamour are bound up with it. From its decks I saw for the first time the mountains of Tahiti. With its engines throbbing, six months later I set out from Marseilles for the long voyage southwards and westwards through Panama to the Pacific. But it is not for these things alone I love her. I have known no ship where the life on board is more personal, familiar, sympathetic; where one feels more at home, where everyone on the ship; sailors, white and black; passengers, saloon and steerage, give the impression of belonging to one family. There is a delightfully free and easy atmosphere. You sit about in pyjamas all the morning;
you stand on the bridge watching the slow swaying of the prow as she cuts her way through the blue waters. When we crossed the equator the entire ship was devoted to aquatic revelry. Sailors and passengers chased each other with hose pipes and buckets of water along every deck. And yet in spite of this casual atmosphere discipline is never relaxed. The captain remained dignified and reserved, the master of his ship. As, indeed, all French captains do. We are told often that the French are indifferent sailors. They may be. That I am unable to judge. But this I do know that their captains in the merchant service compare very favourably with the British ones. Most of my travelling has been done on French boats, on the boats of the C.G.T., and the Messageries Maritimes. I have scarcely ever travelled on a first-class English liner—the Atlantic ferry boats are hotels rather than ships—but on the smaller liners there is an unfortunate tendency among British captains to consider as their chief concern the entertainment of their passengers. They behave as though they were the conductors of a pierrot troupe. That I have never seen happen on a French ship.

On the
Louqsor
life followed a calm routine. One woke with the sun at six. There was a leisurely dressing and
petit déjeuner.
By half-past seven I was in a corner of the dining saloon, a pen in hand, with four hours of work ahead of me. We lunched at eleven-thirty. At twenty past twelve the clock was put back to twelve. Through the heavy heat of the day we siestaed in long canvas chairs, sleeping a little, talking a little, reading desultorily. From five to half-past six I took my exercise on the lower deck, a solitary walk, through which I planned my next day's writing. After dinner there was nothing to do but to sit out on deck listening to a gramophone. Not an exciting life, but the most harmonious atmosphere I have ever known at sea. When I saw the
Louqsor
limping away towards Moorea, I felt—it is a clichéd phrase but there is no other adequate—that it was taking something of myself away with it. I never expected to see its weather-beaten prow again.

It was an extraordinary coincidence that its arrival in Fort
de France should have coincided with my own. Not the most extraordinary that I have known. The most extraordinary happened in the spring of 1928, when P. T. Eckersley, the Lancashire cricketer, was on the
Berengaria
with me, on his way to the West Indies for a cricket tour. It was a be-galed and be-fogged journey. On the first day out of Cherbourg the seas were so heavy that the engines were slowed down. We reached the Hudson river six hours late, to find an impenetrable mist laid low upon it. For two days we were marooned. A melancholy two days in prohibition waters. For everyone it was a dismal time. But for no one was it more exasperating than for Peter Eckersley. The connection he had meant to make in New York would be lost. It would be a week before another boat would sail. He would be late for the first Test Match. Gloomily he paced the unvibrating decks.

And then just about tea-time on the second day there was a faint quiver through the ship. Everyone ran to the taffrail to see, feet below it seemed, a ship that had collided with us. It was a seven- or eight-thousand-ton affair, but it looked an absurd midget alongside the majestic
Berengaria.
It was a David assaulting a Goliath. We mocked it as the Philistines mocked David, when suddenly Eckersley gave a gasp.

“Good heavens! I believe that's the ship I should be on,” he cried. It was; the ship that should have taken him to the West Indies and the first Test Match, that he had no chance of catching now, lay alongside of us thirty feet below. In his cabin were his trunk and cricket bag. He had only to lower them over the side and follow after. Yet there he had to sit waiting for the mist to rise, for the midget steamer and the vast liner to drift apart, for the
Berengaria
to move westward to the bleak climate of New York, and the little fruit boat to the sunlight and the palm trees and the level fields.

That, I think, was the most curious coincidence I have ever known. But the episode of the
Louqsor
was a quaint one. So quaint that I half wondered whether the arrival at the same hour as myself of this ship with which, in one way or another,
is bound up most of what in the last three years has mattered personally to me, was not an omen, a symbolic beckoning back of me towards Tahiti. On the top of the gangway there was the black notice-board, “
Le' Louqsor' partira pour Colon à neuf heures”
And in five days' time the word Colon would have been rubbed out, the word Papeete substituted. In five days' time. And three weeks later there would be the jagged outline of the Diadem.

We dined that night with Alec Daunes, the second captain, and his brother-in-law; the only two officers who had not changed since I had made the trip. And all the time we talked about Tahiti.

“There's nothing like it,” Daunes insisted. “I've been at sea for twenty years. I've seen most parts of the world, east and west. But if I were left two thousand dollars a year I'd go to Tahiti, and as long as I lived never ask anything else of life.” Then, persuasively, “Why not come on with us to-morrow? You've not got your trunks unpacked yet. Why not come?”

It was tempting; more than tempting when we were back on the ship for a last drink before we said good-bye. It was hard to believe, when we were grouped round the familiar table in the familiar cabin, that I had ever left, that I could ever leave, that ship.

“Come on now,” they pleaded. “We'll send one of the men back to the hotel to fetch your trunks. Stay on here. It'll be so simple. When you wake up next morning, we'll be out of sight of land.”

It was very tempting. And Eldred, I believe, was ready enough to yield. I resisted, though.

“Tahiti. I've said good-bye to it, I think, for ever.”

Which, two years previously, was the last thing that I could ever have imagined myself saying.

I Shall never forget my first sight of Tahiti.

For months I had been planning to go there. For weeks I had been dreaming of going there. But on the eve of my arrival I craved for one thing only: a magic carpet that would carry me to London. I had been travelling for eight months and I was very tired: tired of new places and new settings. My ears were confused with strange accents and my eyes with changing landscapes. To begin with there had been the Mediterranean. Naples, Athens, Constantinople. A few hours in each. A hurried rushing to the sights: then the parched seaboard of the Levant. Smyrna with its broken streets, and hidden among its ruins the oasis now and then of a shaded square where you can drink thick black coffee beside fat Syrians who puff lazily at immense glass-bowled pipes. Smyrna and Jaffa and Beyrout. An island or two. The climbing streets of Rhodes, the barren ramparts of Famagusta. Then Egypt and the mud houses. And the tall sails drifting down the Nile. Then Suez and the torment of the Red Sea when the heat is so intense that perversely you long to be burnt more and at lunch eat the hottest of hot pickles neat, till the inside of your mouth is raw: a torment that lapses suddenly into the cool of the Indian Ocean.