Tono Bungay

That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own.  It would, I suppose, make a book by itself—­it has made a fairly voluminous official report—­but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.

Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, sea—­sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self—­revelation are the master values of these memories.

I was sick all through the journey out.  I don’t know why.  It was the only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather since I became a boat-builder.  But that phantom smell of potatoes was peculiarly vile to me.  Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap.  On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time.  The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate vermin.  I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat.  Heavens! how I lacked that coat!  And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain.  Pollack, after conducting his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and trying to clean it.  “There’s only three things you can clean a pipe with,” he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand.  “The best’s a feather, the second’s a straw, and the third’s a girl’s hairpin.  I never see such a ship.  You can’t find any of ’em.  Last time I came this way I did find hairpins anyway, and found ’em on the floor of the captain’s cabin.  Regular deposit.  Eh?...  Feelin’ better?”

At which I usually swore.

“Oh, you’ll be all right soon.  Don’t mind my puffin’ a bit?  Eh?”

He never tired of asking me to “have a hand at Nap.  Good game.  Makes you forget it, and that’s half the battle.”

He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together.  “Captain’s a Card,” he would say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations.  “He’d like to know what we’re up to.  He’d like to know—­no end.”

That did seem to be the captain’s ruling idea.  But he also wanted to impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and to air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, to the English constitution, and the like.

He had learnt the sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book; he would still at times pronounce the e’s at the end of “there” and “here”; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at things English.  Pollack would set himself to “draw him out.”  Heaven alone can tell how near I came to murder.

Fifty-three days I had outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted ship that rolled and pitched and swayed.  And all the time the sands in the hour-glass of my uncle’s fortunes were streaming out.  Misery!  Amidst it all I remember only one thing brightly, one morning of sunshine in the Bay of Biscay and a vision of frothing waves, sapphire green, a bird following our wake and our masts rolling about the sky.  Then wind and rain close in on us again.

You must not imagine they were ordinary days, days, I mean, of an average length; they were not so much days as long damp slabs of time that stretched each one to the horizon, and much of that length was night.  One paraded the staggering deck in a borrowed sou’-wester hour after hour in the chilly, windy, splashing and spitting darkness, or sat in the cabin, bored and ill, and looked at the faces of those inseparable companions by the help of a lamp that gave smell rather than light.  Then one would see going up, up, up, and then sinking down, down, down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing his mind slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the captain was a Card, while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble incessant good.  “Dis England eet is not a country aristocratic, no!  Eet is a glorified bourgeoisie!  Eet is plutocratic.  In England dere is no aristocracy since de Wars of Roses.  In the rest of Europe east of the Latins, yes; in England, no.

“Eet is all middle-class, youra England.  Everything you look at, middle-class.  Respectable!  Everything good—­eet is, you say, shocking.  Madame Grundy!  Eet is all limited and computing and self-seeking.  Dat is why your art is so limited, youra fiction, your philosophin, why you are all so inartistic.  You want nothing but profit!  What will pay!  What would you?”...

He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans have abandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms, thrusting out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands under your nose until you wanted to hit them away.  Day after day it went on, and I had to keep any anger to myself, to reserve myself for the time ahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard and stowed—­knee deep in this man’s astonishment.  I knew he would make a thousand objections to all we had before us.  He talked like a drugged man.  It ran glibly over his tongue.  And all the time one could see his seamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually uneasy about the ship’s position, perpetually imagining dangers.  If a sea hit us exceptionally hard he’d be out of the cabin in an instant making an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of the hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked leaks.  As we drew near the African coast his fear of rocks and shoals became infectious.

“I do not know dis coast,” he used to say.  “I cama hera because Gordon-Nasmyth was coming too.  Den he does not come!”

“Fortunes of war,” I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of these two men.  I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament and wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express his own malignant Anti-Britishism.

He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain.  On the whole I was glad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.

(The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, get aground at the end of Mordet’s Island, but we got off in an hour or so with a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)

I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before he expressed it.  He was, I say, a taciturn man, but one day speech broke through him.  He had been sitting at the table with his arms folded on it, musing drearily, pipe in mouth, and the voice of the captain drifted down from above.

The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a moment.  Then he began to heave with the beginnings of speech.  He disembarrassed himself of his pipe.  I cowered with expectation.  Speech was coming at last.  Before he spoke he nodded reassuringly once or twice.

“E—­”

He moved his head strangely and mysteriously, but a child might have known he spoke of the captain.

“E’s a foreigner.”

He regarded me doubtfully for a time, and at last decided for the sake of lucidity to clench the matter.

“That’s what E is—­a DAGO!”

He nodded like a man who gives a last tap to a nail, and I could see he considered his remark well and truly laid.  His face, though still resolute, became as tranquil and uneventful as a huge hall after a public meeting has dispersed out of it, and finally he closed and locked it with his pipe.

“Roumanian Jew, isn’t he?” I said.

He nodded darkly and almost forbiddingly.

More would have been too much.  The thing was said.  But from that time forth I knew I could depend upon him and that he and I were friends.  It happens I never did have to depend upon him, but that does not affect our relationship.

Forward the crew lived lives very much after the fashion of ours, more crowded, more cramped and dirty, wetter, steamier, more verminous.  The coarse food they had was still not so coarse but that they did not think they were living “like fighting cocks.”  So far as I could make out they were all nearly destitute men; hardly any of them had a proper sea outfit, and what small possessions they had were a source of mutual distrust.  And as we pitched and floundered southward they gambled and fought, were brutal to one another, argued and wrangled loudly, until we protested at the uproar.

There’s no romance about the sea in a small sailing ship as I saw it.  The romance is in the mind of the landsman dreamer.  These brigs and schooners and brigantines that still stand out from every little port are relics from an age of petty trade, as rotten and obsolescent as a Georgian house that has sunken into a slum.  They are indeed just floating fragments of slum, much as icebergs are floating fragments of glacier.  The civilised man who has learnt to wash, who has developed a sense of physical honour, of cleanly temperate feeding, of time, can endure them no more.  They pass, and the clanking coal-wasting steamers will follow them, giving place to cleaner, finer things….

But so it was I made my voyage to Africa, and came at last into a world of steamy fogs and a hot smell of vegetable decay, and into sound and sight of surf and distant intermittent glimpses of the coast.  I lived a strange concentrated life through all that time, such a life as a creature must do that has fallen in a well.  All my former ways ceased, all my old vistas became memories.

The situation I was saving was very small and distant now; I felt its urgency no more.  Beatrice and Lady Grove, my uncle and the Hardingham, my soaring in the air and my habitual wide vision of swift effectual things, became as remote as if they were in some world I had left for ever….