Under the Volcano (27 page)

Even so, on the very day, Friday the thirteenth of May, that Frankie Trumbauer three thousand miles away made his famous record of
For No Reason at All in C
, to Hugh now a poignant historical coincidence, and pursued by neo-American frivolities from the English Press, which had begun to take up the story with relish, ranging all the way down from ‘Schoolboy composer turns seaman', ‘Brother of prominent citizen here
feels ocean call', ‘Will always return Oswaldtwistle, parting words of prodigy', ‘Saga of schoolboy crooner recalls old Kashmir mystery', to once, obscurely ‘Oh, to be a Conrad', and once, inaccurately, ‘Undergraduate song-writer signs on cargo vessel, takes ukelele' — for he was not yet an undergraduate, as an old able seaman was shortly to remind him — to the last, and most terrifying, though under the circumstances bravely inspired ‘No silk cushions for Hugh, says Aunt', Hugh himself, not knowing whether he voyaged east or west, nor even what the lowliest hand had at least heard vaguely rumoured, that Philoctetes was a figure in Greek mythology — son of Poeas, friend of Heracles, and whose cross-bow proved almost as proud and unfortunate a possession as Hugh's guitar — set sail for Cathay and the brothels of Palambang. Hugh writhed on the bed to think of all the humiliation his little publicity stunt had really brought down on his head, a humiliation in itself sufficient to send anyone into even more desperate retreat than to sea… Meantime it is scarcely an overstatement to say (Jesus, Cock, did you see the bloody paper? We've got a bastard duke on board or something of that) that he was on a false footing with his shipmates. Not that their attitude was at all what might have been expected ! Many of them at first seemed kind to him, but it turned out their motives were not entirely altruistic. They suspected, rightly, that he had influence at the office. Some had sexual motives, of obscure origin. Many on the other hand seemed unbelievably spiteful and malignant, though in a petty way never before associated with the sea, and never since with the proletariat. They read his diary behind his back. They stole his money. They even stole his dungarees and made him buy them back again, on credit, since they had already virtually deprived themselves of his purchasing power. They hid chipping hammers in his bunk and in his sea-bag. Then, all at once, when he was cleaning out, say, the petty officer's bathroom, some very young seaman might grow mysteriously obsequious and say something like: ‘Do you realize, mate, you're working for us, when we should be working for you?' Hugh, who did not see then he had put his comrades in a false position too, heard this line of talk with disdain. His persecutions, such as they were, he took in good
part. For one thing, they vaguely compensated for what was to him one of the most serious deficiencies in his new life.

This was, in a complicated sense, its ‘softness'. Not that it was not a nightmare. It was, but of a very special kind he was scarcely old enough to appreciate. Nor that his hands were not worked raw then hard as boards. Or that he did not nearly go crazy with heat and boredom working under winches in the tropics or putting red lead on the decks. Nor that it was not all rather worse than fagging at school, or might have seemed so, had he not carefully been sent to a modern school where there was no fagging. It was, he did, they were; he raised no mental objections. What he objected to were little, inconceivable things.

For instance, that the forecastle was not called the fo'c‘sle but the ‘men's quarters', and was not forward where it should be, but aft, under the poop. Now everyone knows a forecastle should be forward, and be called the fo'c‘sle. But this forecastle was not called the fo'c‘sle because in point of fact it was not a fo'c‘sle. The deckhead of the poop roofed what all too patently were ‘men's quarters', as they were styled, separate cabins just like on the Isle of Man boat, with two bunks in each running along an alleyway broken by the messroom. But Hugh was not grateful for these hard-won ‘better' conditions. To him a fo'c‘sle — and where else should the crew of a ship live? — meant inescapably a single evil-smelling room forward with bunks around a table, under a swinging kerosene lamp, where men fought, whored, drank, and murdered. On board the
Philoctetes
men neither fought, whored, nor murdered. As for their drinking, Hugh's aunt had said to him at the end, with a truly noble romantic acceptance: ‘You know, Hugh, I don't expect you to drink only
coffee
going through the Black Sea.' She was right. Hugh did not go near the Black Sea. On board, nevertheless, he drank mostly coffee: sometimes tea; occasionally water; and, in the tropics, limejuice. Just like all the others. This tea, too, was the subject of another matter that bothered him. Every afternoon, on the stroke of six and eight bells respectively, it was at first Hugh's duty, his mate being sick, to run in from the galley, first to the bosun's mess and afterwards to the crew, what
the bosun called, with unction, ‘afternoon tea'. With tabnabs. The tabnabs were delicate and delicious little cakes made by the second cook. Hugh ate them with scorn. Imagine the Sea Wolf sitting down to afternoon tea at four o'clock with tabnabs! And this was not the worst. An even more important item was the food itself. The food on board the
Philoctetes
, a common British cargo steamer, contrary to a tradition so strong Hugh had hardly dared contradict it till this moment even in his dreams, was excellent; compared with that of his public school, where he had lived under catering conditions no merchant seaman would tolerate for five minutes, it was a gourmet's fantasy. There were never fewer than five courses for breakfast in the p.o.‘s mess, to which at the outset he was more strictly committed; but it proved almost as satisfying in the ‘men's quarters'. American dry hash, kippers, poached eggs and bacon, porridge, steaks, rolls, all at one meal, even on one plate; Hugh never remembered having seen so much food in his life. All the more surprising then was it for him to discover it his duty each day to heave vast quantities of this miraculous food over the side. This chow the crew hadn't eaten went into the Indian Ocean, into any ocean, rather, as the saying is, than ‘let it go back to the office'. Hugh was not grateful for these hard-won better conditions either. Nor, mysteriously, seemed anyone else to be. For the wretchedness of the food was the great topic of conversation. ‘Never mind, chaps, soon we'll be home where a fellow can have some tiddley chow he can cat, instead of all this bloody kind of stuff, bits of paint, I don't know what it is at all.' And Hugh, a loyal soul at bottom, grumbled with the rest. He found his spiritual level with the stewards, however…

Yet he felt trapped. The more completely for the realization that in no essential sense had he escaped from his past life. It was all here, though in another form: the same conflicts, faces, same people, he could imagine, as at school, the same spurious popularity with his guitar, the same kind of unpopularity because he made friends with the stewards, or worse, with the Chinese firemen. Even the ship looked like a fantastic mobile football field. Anti-Semitism, it is true, he had left behind, for Jews on the whole had more sense than to go to sea. But if he had
expected to leave British snobbery astern with his public school he was sadly mistaken. In fact, the degree of snobbery prevailing on the
Philoctetes
was fantastic, of a kind Hugh had never imagined possible. The chief cook regarded the tireless second cook as a creature of completely inferior station. The bosun despised the carpenter and would not speak to him for three months, though they messed in the same small room, because he was a tradesman, while the carpenter despised the bosun since he, Chips, was the senior petty officer. The chief steward, who affected striped shirts off duty, was clearly contemptuous of the cheerful second, who, refusing to take his calling seriously, was content with a singlet and a sweat-rag. When the youngest apprentice went ashore for a swim with a towel round his neck he was solemnly rebuked by a quartermaster wearing a tie without a collar for being a disgrace to the ship. And the captain himself nearly turned black in the face each time he saw Hugh because, intending a compliment, Hugh had described the
Philoctetes
in an interview as a tramp. Tramp or no, the whole ship rolled and weltered in bourgeois prejudices and taboos the like of which Hugh had not known even existed. Or so it seemed to him. It is wrong, though, to say she rolled. Hugh, far from aspiring to be a Conrad, as the papers suggested, had not then read a word of him. But he was vaguely aware Conrad hinted somewhere that in certain seasons typhoons were to be expected along the China coast. This was such a season; here, eventually, was the China coast. Yet there seemed no typhoons. Or if there were the
Philoctetes
was careful to avoid them. From the time she emerged from the Bitter Lakes till she lay in the roads at Yokohama a dead monotonous calm prevailed. Hugh chipped rust through the bitter watches. Only they were not really bitter; nothing happened. And they were not watches; he was a day worker. Still, he had to pretend to himself, poor fellow, there was something romantic in what he had done. As was there not! He might easily have consoled himself by looking at a map. Unfortunately maps also too vividly suggested school. So that going through the Suez he was not conscious of sphinxes, Ismailia, nor Mt Sinai; nor through the Red Sea, of Hejaz, Asir, Yemen. Because Perim belonged to India while so remote from
it, that island had always fascinated him. Yet they stood off the terrible place a whole forenoon without his grasping the fact. An Italian Somaliland stamp with wild herdsmen on it was once his most treasured possession. They passed Guardafui without his realizing this any more than when as a child of three he'd sailed by in the opposite direction. Later he did not think of Cape Comorin, or Nicobar. Nor, in the Gulf of Siam, of Pnom-Penh. Maybe he did not know himself what he thought about; bells struck, the engine thrummed;
videre; videre;
and far above was perhaps another sea, where the soul ploughed its high invisible wake —

Certainly Sokotra only became a symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have passed within figurative hailing distance of his birthplace never occurred to him… Hong Kong, Shanghai; but the opportunities to get ashore were few and far between, the little money there was they could never touch, and after having lain at Yokohama a full month without one shore leave Hugh's cup of bitterness was full. Yet where permission had been granted instead of roaring in bars the men merely sat on board sewing and telling the dirty jokes Hugh had heard at the age of eleven. Or they engaged in loutish neuter compensations. Hugh had not escaped the Pharisaism of his English elders either. There was a good library on board, however, and under the tutelage of the lamp-trimmer Hugh began the education with which an expensive public school had failed to provide him. He read the
Forsyte Saga
and
Peer Gynt
. It was largely owing to the lamp-trimmer too, a kindly quasi-Communist, who normally spent his watch below studying a pamphlet named the Red Hand, that Hugh gave up his notion of dodging Cambridge. ‘If I were you I'd go to the poxing place. Get what you bloody can out of the set-up.'

Meanwhile his reputation had followed him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the Singapore
Free Press
might read ‘Murder of Brother-in-Law's Concubine' it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some such passage as: ‘A curly-headed boy stood on the fo'c‘sle head of the
Philoctetes
as she docked in Penang strumming his latest composition on the ukelele.' News which any day now would
turn up in Japan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from
Singing the Blues
, he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress. He certainly didn't think of any other mistresses he might have had at home. His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long ago. A tender smile of Mrs Bolowski's, flashed in dark New Compton Street, had haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the advertisements for music halls up north. Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly 6.30, 8.30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis balls on crisp turf, and their swift passage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea (despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the
Philoctetes
), the recently acquired taste for good English ale and old cheese…

But above all there were his songs, which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel, having gone through hell, through ‘fire' — and Hugh persuaded himself such really was the case — he had earned as his right and reward.

But the time came when Hugh
did
go through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the
Oedipus Tyrannus
, whose namesake the lamp-trimmer of the
Philoctetes
might have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote, yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this seemed about to happen, on the
Philoctetes's
poop all was excitement, then as the
vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a megaphone: