I'll Never Be Young Again (18 page)

‘We’ll have to get away,’ said Jake; ‘we can’t stay around here with those fellows on our track.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said; ‘we’ve finished them, they haven’t any fight left.’

‘I’m not thinking of them,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of the police. It was their whistles that we heard, and their footsteps.’

‘Maybe we could explain,’ I said.

‘No, Dick, there’s the dead Swede with the knife in his back; we’d be as much in it as that bunch of chaps who did it. Who’d listen to us, anyway? We’ve got to quit.’

‘All right,’ I said.

We got up and began to wander once more along the quay. We came to the end of a jetty where a vessel was moored, a small tramp steamer of about two thousand tons, and there was no silence here, for she was coaling, and the lights of the jetty shone upon her, and we could hear the groan of the crane and the thunder of coal as it poured down the shaft into the hold.

In a glance we could tell she was a rough ship, no paint on her, her sides rusted, her decks unscrubbed, and a man on the bridge lounged over the rail, keeping no order, cursing at the men, chaffing, familiar, their faces black with the coal.

We watched them for a while, and then Jake looked at me, and I looked at him, and I shrugged my shoulders, and ‘This is our ship,’ he said.

He left me and walked across a plank to the deck, and I leant against a post on the quay, not bothering to look after him, biting my nails, looking down into the grey water. The crane creaked and groaned, and the coal rumbled down the shaft, while the men moved about the deck, and out of the corner of my one eye I could see Jake calling up to the fellow on the bridge, who leant over, grinning, his hand to his ear.

I felt myself slipping away into a dream, a dream of a far mountain and a rushing stream, a vision of slender trees, and a snow surface, and a white fall crashing into a narrow fjord, but then these would not stay with me when the coal thundered into the hold, and a crane rattled, and Jake himself touched my arm, saying in my ear: ‘Come on, her name is
Romanie
, she’s French, bound for Nantes.’ So I stumbled after him along the plank, not caring where I went, and he said to me: ‘They’ve finished loading now, and she’ll be away in an hour’s time.’

I blinked up at the lights, and knocked against a rope with my feet, and somebody laughed, and somebody called out to me in French.

And soon we were working with the others on the deck, finding our way about, hungry and tired, and I knew that this man who moved his limbs and cursed was not myself, for I lay asleep somewhere, curled in a dark corner. Now I had a crust of bread in my hands, and was peering into a black fo’c’sle, and now there was a movement of a ship under way, and the thrashing of her propeller in the water.

And now I was looking up into Jake’s face, he black and filthy with the coal, the swelling distorted on his forehead, and the black of my face was caked with the blood from my eye. It seemed to me I had lived a hundred years in a night, and somehow a strength had come to me I had not yet possessed, so I laughed up at Jake with his cut lip and his swollen temple, and I knew this was what I had wanted, this thrill of danger, this taste of blood, so that it was good to be young, and good to be alive.

Jake laughed too, and he asked me how I was, and ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘you know I’m all right,’ and we stood there together and watched Stockholm disappear, clear-cut like a jewel, aloof, mysterious, bathing in a white light.

T
he
Romanie
was a black ship run by a crew of devils, and Jake and I were devils too, living in a hell, filthy and unwashed, hungry and tired, blaspheming to a heedless sky.

She was one of those miserable leaking little packets, too narrow for her length and shallow for’ard, who toss about the North Sea and the Baltic looking for freights, always dirty, always wet, rolling in a ground swell as though she were on her beam ends, and when she was loaded lying deep in the water like a sodden bucket, never lifting to the sea, sullen and slow.

She belonged to some obscure company with a French name, and by the look and feel of her she ought to have been condemned, plunging and groaning as she did in the slightest sea, the inches of water in her hold pumped out once, and sometimes twice a day, while her skipper was a Belgian who did not know his job.

This was my impression from the start, and so I think was Jake’s, for the fellow seemed to have no idea of time or discipline, treating the men as equals, lounging over the rail on his bridge, and going down the river from Stockholm he remained on this bridge, with a pair of glasses glued to his eyes, searching the thousand islands for bathing girls, while the black smoke from our stinking funnel swept into the pure air, and we must have looked like a clanking tin kettle hissing our way through the still blue water.

Once away from the river, though, and out in the Baltic, we met a high-running sea, and a strong wind blowing from the sou’-west, rain striking down from the low swift-scurrying clouds, and we were scarcely clear of the land when we realized what sort of a vessel we were in and what we might expect her behaviour to be.

The skipper, as I have said, was easy-going, good-natured and unreliable, and as if to make up for this he had for a mate a fellow who never kept still for a single moment, a concentrated bundle of nerves and fuss, who screamed and worried at the men, grumbling at our work, finding everything wrong and driving us all to the verge of mutiny.

They were a tough little crowd in the fo’c’sle of the
Romanie
. Besides Jake and I there were five Belgians, counting the cook, and a couple of firemen, both Dutch. We had no business to be there, of course, they were full without us, but the skipper accepted our services in return for our passage, and here we were, for better, for worse, tossed about on the Baltic in a dirty little tramp steamer, all because of the flick of a coin on the road to Otta. We were covering now much of the same distance as we had already done, on that first voyage from Helsingfors to Copenhagen in the barque
Hedwig
, but then the wind had been fair and the ship a thing of beauty for all her discomfort, and the Scandinavian boys were grand fellows, but there was not much romance in the dirty leaking
Romanie
, in this atmosphere of rust, and rain and coal, nor did I care about eating and sleeping beside these garlic-stinking bastards, who used any part of the fo’c’sle for any purpose. I hated them and I hated the ship, the only comfort was that Jake was there, and we could curse and blaspheme together. I don’t think Jake lost his temper much; he seemed impervious to the coal, the dirt and the stink in the fo’c’sle.

We talked of going south after we reached Nantes. We imagined the sun in Africa, the hot sky, and the dust in the streets. There would be little restaurants with orange blinds reaching down from the long windows, and tables huddled together, and a fat smiling waiter with black hair and a greasy face, flicking at the flies with a cloth. There would be white houses with the shutters closed, and purple flowers creeping against the walls, and lying in the cool shadow of a eucalyptus tree somebody would sleep, dusty and brown, his head in his hands. The sea would sparkle there, like a sweltering sheet of paper, and the grass and the trees be burnt yellow from the sun. I could see the streets, the patches of vivid colour, a woman in a blue apron shaking a bright rug from a high balcony, then leaning over this, lazy, yawning, listening to a banjo played in a restaurant below. The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long brown arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.

When Jake told me about Africa we were standing outside the galley of the
Romanie
, pitching and tossing in the trough of a great sea, the water running along the deck and from the galley the smell of oil and grease, and brown garlic soup, and soot coming from the cheap coal.

Somebody had drawn pornographic figures on the bulkhead above the galley; they stood out strongly in white chalk, the pathetic creations of a stupid mind, very crude and obvious, as a child might have drawn. The men added bits from time to time, changing the attitudes, scratching words beside the figures, and then roaring with laughter, like little schoolboys, finding a strange stimulation, flushed, and proud of themselves.

I wondered if I had seemed thus to my father when I laid my verses on his desk before him, and if he could have thought less of me than I did of myself. It was all incredible to me that these things had once happened.

Meanwhile we sweated and toiled on the ship, we rose and fell in the grey sea.There was every kind of hell on board the
Romanie
.

‘When we get out of this,’ I said to Jake, ‘we’ll live in luxury, deck-chairs under palm trees, and a waiter in a white coat bringing drinks when we raise a finger. We’ll sleep all day, and reach out a tired hand for a great ripe passion fruit, while a dark girl stands behind the chair waving us with a paper fan.’

Jake did not say anything; he looked up at the sky and the wall of grey mist ahead of us, he watched the stern of the
Romanie
lift sluggishly to the high sea. ‘Dick,’ he said later, ‘do you notice how she wallows in it like something tired of the struggle? She hasn’t got any kick left; she wants to lay down her head and die.’

I wondered if Jake was joking at first, but when I saw his face I knew he was serious. He would not be an alarmist without reason; I trusted him about these things. When he said this I felt a little cold premonition of fear, and it was as though a voice whispered within me: ‘I shall remember this.’

In any other danger there would be a thrill for me, but not in the
Romanie
, not out here suddenly in that wall of fog, drifting helplessly . . .

‘Oh!’ I said,‘we’re all right now and making down the Channel. We can’t get lost with the traffic around.’

‘We’ve got a lonely stretch ahead of us, Dick,’ said Jake, ‘and we’ve got a couple of fools on the bridge looking after things. You don’t know the coast of Brittany, do you?’

I did not want to have to listen carefully to his words. I said to myself it did not matter; I had seen a fellow killed in Stockholm, anyway - this was nothing to me.

‘D’you think we’ll be for it, later?’ I asked.

I spoke carelessly, shutting from my mind a vision of sudden panic.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jake, and he looked at me strangely, as though he, too, held vistas of unspeakable things, but having greater courage than I he looked into them closely, not putting them away from him. It was easy to laugh, though, all the same, standing as we did by the galley in security.

‘Africa, Jake,’ I said, ‘we’re going to live there better than we’ve ever lived, the first night we get ashore.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I was sure everything would be all right. There was a kind of conceit in me that gave me a firm belief in safety. In spite of this, I hated the
Romanie
. We went on down the Channel, the mist never lifting, the seas running high, and the wind blowing continuously from the south-west.

Even though it would have meant beating against it, I would rather have been in the barque
Hedwig
. Had the wind and the seas increased we could have hove to, lying as snug as a house.

Not the
Romanie
, though, groaning and shuddering in each successive sea, settling in the trough of it as Jake had said, like a soul who is weary of living. In the fo’c’sle the sides of the ship smelt of damp rust and iron-mould. The water ran in the bilges with a hollow sound. Outside the galley the cook had once hung a cloth, and he had forgotten to take it down. It fluttered now in the rain, sodden and grey, a torn rag. The bunting round the bridge was black with the soot and the rain.

The mate paced up and down, a small figure like a beetle in an oilskin several sizes too large for him.

The Dutch fireman came up for a breather; he put his head out of the round scuttle and sniffed at the rain. In the fo’c’sle one of the Belgians was playing on a mouth-organ; he drew in his breath with short, spasmodic jerks, and the tune came dolefully, a harsh, strained sound. Somehow the hearing of it brought back to me a memory of long ago, when I had been taken as a child by my mother to a bay some twenty miles from home. We had a picnic on the beach, and a mist had blown in upon us from the sea, even as this mist that wrapped the
Romanie
now, and listening I had heard the mournful tolling of a bell coming from a far distance across the bay. My mother told me it was a buoy, set in the sea to mark a dangerous ledge of rock, and when sailors heard the toll of it through the mist it served them as a warning, and they altered their course accordingly. The mouth-organ was like a poor thin echo of that tolling bell; it shivered its way through the air from the fo’c’sle to the galley door, borne on the wind and the rain. Someone began to sing against the tune in a different key, and then there was a great burst of laughter, and a silly, high French voice. It jarred horribly, and I shuddered for no reason. I hated the
Romanie
.

 

It was about half-past seven in the evening. We had passed the Ile d’Ouessant early in the afternoon; it had been fine enough to distinguish it away on the quarter, and then the wall of fog had come up again, and we ran away into this with the land left far astern. I had been up on the bridge, taking my stand at the wheel. The skipper had been beside me for a while, but when we came into the fog once more he shrugged his shoulders as though this was some trick the fates had played him, and after peering about him he altered the course he had just given me, then called to the mate for some sort of conference - mainly, I think, to impress me with their joint efficiency, and finally disappeared and leaving me with no confidence at all. The mate remained on the bridge, nervous, restless, and his very manner unsettled me, especially the way he kept turning his head and listening - straining his eyes into the bank of fog. It was as though he expected to hear something.