Introductory Note
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A Biography of Malcolm Lowry
ULTRAMARINE WAS WRITTEN FOLLOWING a sea voyage Malcolm Lowry made at eighteen, as a deck hand, cabin boy and ultimately a fireman’s helper on a tramp steamer. The voyage provided him with the background for the novel, but its real theme is the necessity of the boy, Dana Hilliot, to prove himself as a man among other men.
Malcolm was graduated from The Leys, a public school in Cambridge, England, in 1927 and had been entered for Christ’s College, Cambridge. But the sea was in his blood; he had read O’Neill and Joseph Conrad, and his home in Caldy, Cheshire, was near the great seaport of Liverpool. He finally persuaded his father to allow him to go to sea for a year before going to the University. His father, in what proved to be nearly a disastrous excess of good will, not only procured him the job on a freighter out of Liverpool, bound for the Far East, but even had him driven to the dock in the family limousine. This obviously did nothing to help Malcolm’s standing among the crew, to whom he was already a green Outsider.
When he returned from this voyage, which had taken him through the Suez Canal to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Singapore and Vladivostock, he went up to St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1929. He had kept notes during the voyage (as he always did: I have his notes made on our walking tour of the Lake District in 1957, just prior to his death); from these notes he wrote first two short stories which were printed in the Cambridge magazine Experiment, edited by Gerald Noxon. This was Malcolm’s first published work. One of the stories, “Seductio Ad Absurdum,” was chosen by E. J. O’Brien for the Best British Short Stories of 1931, and the second was given honorable mention for 1933. These stories were later incorporated in part into Ultramarine.
While he was working on the novel, he read Blue Voyage, by Conrad Aiken, and The Ship Sails On, by Nordahl Grieg. Both of these made a deep impression on him and their influence can be seen plainly in Ultramarine. Malcolm was very young; but while there are certainly traces of imitativeness in the novel, it is also highly original and, for its time, experimental. Malcolm had sought out Aiken in Boston, in 1929, working his way over on a freighter; they returned to England and, at Malcolm’s request, Aiken took him for a time as a pupil. They became fast friends and after Malcolm went up to Cambridge, he spent nearly all of his vacations with Aiken at Jeake’s House, Rye, Sussex. In the long vacation of 1930, however, he made another sea voyage, working his way as a coal trimmer on a Norwegian freighter to Norway, to meet Nordahl Grieg, with whom he also established a friendship that lasted until Grieg’s death.
Ultramarine was finished, I believe, during Malcolm’s last term at Cambridge, and was accepted by a London publisher. Then followed the first of a long series of calamities which pursued his work relentlessly. (In Ballast to the White Sea, a novel, was completely destroyed when our house burned down in 1944; the manuscript of Under the Volcano was lost, and recovered.) One of the directors of the publishing firm had his briefcase stolen from his car: he was apparently away only a few moments, but when he returned, the briefcase was gone and with it the only typescript of Ultramarine.
There seem to be conflicting versions of what followed, and I can only report what has been said. Malcolm had written much of Ultramarine at Aiken’s home, but he had completed the final draft at the home of a friend, Martin Case. Malcolm later told me he had thought the novel completely lost, since he had destroyed or thrown away all previous drafts and had not kept a copy of the final version, or even his notes taken on the voyage. But Martin Case, he said, had retrieved the cast-aside material and now came forward with it. When I met Case in London many years later, almost his first words to me were, “Did you know I was the man who saved Ultramarine from my waste-basket?” Conrad Aiken, however, says that he had a version of the novel in his house in Rye, and that Malcolm knew it. But who can sort out what actually happened, after thirty years?
In any case, the novel was rewritten and first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1933. To the best of my knowledge it has been out of print since 1934 or 1935, and is now published for the first time in America. Readers of Under the Volcano and Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place will find in Ultramarine many of the themes which were developed and deepened in the later books. The most important thing about this book, to me, is not its partially autobiographical content, but the fact that at this early period Malcolm was already so completely the self-conscious artist, in control of his material and his style.
This new edition of Ultramarine reproduces the changes Malcolm had made, over the years since 1933, in his own copy of the original edition. During the years we spent together he was always working on two or three projects simultaneously, and there was, too, a spasmodic running commentary on Ultramarine. I would come upon him with the battered copy in his hands staring at it angrily and making notes on the pages, or sometimes just holding it and gazing out of the window; he would turn to me and say, “You know I must rewrite this someday.” I cannot remember exactly when he decided it was to be, in its rewritten form, the first volume in a group of six or seven novels, to be called collectively The Voyage That Never Ends. But it was at this time that he changed the name of the ship from Nawab to Oedipus Tyrannus, to conform with Hugh’s ship in Under the Volcano. He had also intended changing the viewpoint in Chapter III from first person to third person, and had projected a much more extensive revision than that contained in the marginal notations I later transcribed.
One of his additions, the recurrent joke about Pat Murphy’s goat, came about in this way: while we were living on the beach at Dollarton, British Columbia, we had as a neighbor and very dear friend an old man from the Isle of Man, Jimmy, a boat-builder. One stormy late afternoon in autumn, when Malcolm had stopped work and was having his tea, Jimmy dropped in. I have no recollection of what brought this to his mind, but at some point he began to chuckle and in his lilting Celtic voice came forth with this expression. Malcolm was simply delighted by it, he had the old man repeat it and he wrote it down. Then he jumped up from the table, took Ultramarine from the bookcase, and immediately made notations as to where he would use it, laughing all the while.
|
Margerie Lowry Los Angeles, California June 1962 |
Take any brid and put it in a cage
And do al thyn entente and thy corage
To fostre it tenderly with mete and drinke
Of aile deyntees that thou canst bithinke
And keep it al-so clenly as thou may
And be his cage of gold never so gay
Yet hath this brid by twenty thousand fold
Lever in a forest that is rude and cold
Gon ete wormes and swich wrecchedness.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Maunciples Tale
Let who will speak against Sailors; they are the Glory and Safeguard of the Land. And what would have become of Old England long ago but for them?
Samuel Richardson
“WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”
“Dana Hilliot, ordinary seaman.”
“Where were you born?”
“Oslo.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Where do you live?”
“Sea Road, Port Sunlight.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes—”
“Next please! What is your name?”
“Andersen Marthon Bredahl, cook.”
“Where were you born?”
“Tvedestrand.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Where do you live?”
“Great Homer Street, Liverpool.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes—”
“Next please. What is your name?”
“Norman Leif, galley boy.”
“Where were you born?”
“Tvedestrand.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Where do you live?”
“Great Homer Street, Liverpool.”
“Any advance?”
“Yes.”
“Next please—”
… Had he arrived anywhere, having been blown through this six weeks’ engulfing darkness of interminable ritual spelt out by bells and jobs, a six weeks’ whirlwind of suffering? I am on a ship, I am on a ship, and I am going to Japan, Hilliot repeated over and over again. Why? Perhaps the answers were too copious and melancholy anyway, and even if he had once evolved reasons, probably by now they had long ceased to be true.
Two bells sharply interrupted his thoughts. Five o’clock. He had been knocked off an hour. In another hour they would be alongside. Then he would turn to with the lamptrimmer and the port watch on the poop when the Oedipus Tyrannus would be made fast fore and aft. After that he was free.
Below him on the well deck some able seamen were under the bosun, working at the derricks. He watched them thoughtfully. At Tsjang-Tsjang, he supposed, the same interminable performance would be gone through as before; the usual stream of hawkers would surge on to the ship; the stevedores would clamber up the side from the lighters, or swing in on the derricks; the winchmen would soon be seated on their straw mats, and a shore serang, having been given a cigar by the first mate, would be watching an opportunity to steal his watch—
“ … Hilliot! Come and lend a hand here.”
“Blast the bloody bosun,” said Hilliot, but slid down the poop ladder to the well deck, and set to with the others. A thick rope roared and ripped on the drum end of a winch, and the yellow derrick slowly rose toward the sky.
“ … All right! That’s enough! Take in the slack!” shouted the bosun. “Square off them guys. Hilliot, you there! Take in the slack, take in the slack, I said! Somebody here, you, Horsey, show him how to do it, for Christ sake … . Hilliot, get out of that! Come here. Over here. Spell-oh, you others.”
“Now Hilliot,” he smiled, “you can go back and dream to your heart’s content. What are you standing there for like that? Go on. Now men,” he said, turning to the others immediately, “now for the standing derricks on the fo’c’sle head!”
As Hilliot was going he met Andy the cook coming down the poop ladder. Oh Christ, he thought. But perhaps today would be an exception. He smiled. “Hullo.” Andy scowled darkly at him, blocking the companion ladder. He was rolling up his sleeves, his enormous arms were tattooed all over; a Norwegian flag, a barque in full sail, a heart, presumably, and God knows what. This was the sort of man to be, all right. But there was something weak about him, he had such a weak chin. Andy made no move to let Hilliot pass. He spat deliberately. “Now look here,” he said, “I’ve been twenty years at sea. And that bosun’s been about the same time at sea. I’ve sailed with him twice, and he knows bloody well same as myself it doesn’t pay to shout and be unkind to youngsters, not if you want them to do well, and he told me that he thought at first you would be one of his star turns. Well, I didn’t say anything—I know your type—see? You would be one of his star turns … . And now you’ve turned out nothing but a goddam nuisance. And he can’t help it. He can’t help shouting at you—see? He doesn’t like it, and you don’t like it. And Christ knows I don’t blame him—he can’t help it if you’re just a bloody senseless twat—”
“Look there,” Andy pointed over the side, “that’s where you want to be. See that?”
“It’s a shark that’s been following the ship. They always say they do that when someone’s going to kick the bucket on board. Well, I’m sure I don’t know, but I’ve heard fellows say sharks like little boys—”
Hilliot went past him up the ladder. He had found out it was no good doing anything about this sort of abuse; but it was worst of all coming from Andy, who could never get over toffs who came to sea. Perhaps they reminded him too much of those days twelve years before, when he had lost his ticket as a second mate on a tramp steamer out of Christiania. Matt told them that he had struck the new skipper, a Stavanger man, for calling him a Bergener.
Oh, well, he had heard all of it before in the forecastle. Useless, we don’t know what sort of bloody man you are at all. Just a nancy. Not all of it had been unkind, but he knew that they thought he wasn’t one of them. He had offered to fight, but the men had pulled out combs, or drummed their knives on the table. They didn’t much care about his making a hero of himself in that way. “We’ll see you bloody well logged,” they had laughed. He watched the shark again, for which he felt now almost a sort of affection: it reminded him just now strangely of a swift in flight, then of a boomerang he had once had in Frognarsaeteren. Now it had disappeared.
On the poop Hilliot found a coil of rope. Lighting his pipe he tried to think clearly about the situation. Looking round him as if for enlightenment, he suddenly discovered that he was staring aloft, where a bird—a kind of gull or dunghawk, was it?—perched like a finial on the swaying mainmasthead, was preening its feathers. But the sun hurt his eyes. Lowering his head, he tried to calculate how long it had been there. Today, or was it yesterday? Two days ago. All the days were the same. The engine hammered out the same stroke, same beat, as yesterday. The forecastle was no lighter, no darker, than yesterday. Today, or is it yesterday? Yes, two days it must be. Two days-two months—two years. Six weeks. How remote, how incredibly remote it all seemed. It was ridiculous, but he could not get a clearer vision of anyone or anything at this moment than of the clerk in the Board of Trade office, and of the desk at which the signing on had taken place. And really he felt that he might not have been questioned there within the space of time at all, but in some dreamed other life. … I am on a ship, I am going to Japan—or aren’t I? I have been to a certain number of ports—Port Said, Perim, Penang, Port Swettenham, Singapore, Kowloon, Shanghai. This evening we reach Tsjang-Tsjang … . No, there was precious little meaning left now in this life which so surprisingly had opened out before him. Nor could he see why he had ever been fool enough to set this seal upon such a wild self-dedication. No meaning at all, he thought, as he shook out some ash from his pipe. Not, at any rate, to himself, a man who believed himself to live in inverted, or introverted, commas; to a man who saw the whole damned business in a kind of benign stupor. His recollections were suddenly enlivened and illuminated, and he remembered how he had almost at once picked out Norman, the galley boy, with his fair hair falling over his eyes, and Andersen, the tattooed cook, him whom they called Andy, whose weakness of chin was complemented by his extraordinarily dignified forehead, as those among the crew who would be his friends; he remembered just where he had stood, just what he had said, and how he said it, just how the silver compasses of the Liver Building clock had indicated half-past eleven. Norman and Andy—Norsemen (were they?). And once more his thoughts turned tenderly to Janet. She it was he apprehended in their voices, she, and no other. And he thought of that time when their families, for ten years neighbours in Port Sunlight, had met in Christiania when he was a boy, and how their love for each other had never changed. That winter they had seen an elk in the street, driven down from the mountains by starvation—everyone was on skis—all was white—
Then the ship’s articles, meaningless to him, had been intoned by another sort of clerk—“Seamen and firemen mutually to assist each other,” he had said, as though Britons and Norwegians, a Spaniard, an American, and a Greek would spend their watch below in a brotherly communion! A pale-faced fireman told him where he could get his clothes, and the two of them whiled away an hour lounging against the swimming bar of the Anchor.
“Nearly all of us are Norwegian our side of the fo’c’sle,” he said, “but the two cooks are Norse too—the sailors are nearly all English on yours. I am the one they call Nikolai, but my real name is Wallae.” And the little fireman wrote down his name, “Nikolai Wallae,” on an envelope for Hilliot—
“I was born in Norway too,” Hilliot had said when Nikolai had finished.
“I tink you are very much English all the same,” the other smiled. “Our two cooks have been very long time in England, and now you don’t tell them from Liverpool men. But Bredahl is the best cook I ever sailed with, I will say that,” he added magnanimously. “Andy, they call him. Well, the ship is like that too, you knaw. She was built in Norway, but she has been under the English flag for years. Some of the notices are in Norwegian, nowadays—”
“It gives me such a queer feeling to think of that,” Hilliot had said.
“Oh, I don’t knaw,” said Nikolai, “English or Norwegian all the same. In Falmouth I make a fire to my pipe, you knaw, and I stood listening to the children playing—laughing over the same troubles as Norwegian children, you knaw. But Falmouth left me a souvenir of my wisit,” he added laughingly, “the third time I have had a souvenir in England.”
“Did anything exciting happen last voyage?” Hilliot asked after a silence.
“Oh, well,” smiled Nikolai, “the first mate got a dose. Going round the land in Finland we make a small wisit this trip to Helsingfors. The men they was all drunky—all the time, oh, there was much dispeace. They all had knives, you knaw, and they made a great fiest. But two mens and three womens they was all killed. By coffee time it is all forgotten. So this voyage we go to Japan again—long voyage. Oh, it will be a long voyage on our rotten ship.”
After agreeing to meet Nikolai on the Oedipus Tyrannus, he had gone with some of the sailors to a “Mutual Aid Society Booth” in Cathcart Street, near the berth of the ship, a street dreary in the grainy rain, and loud with the clatter of shunting dockside engines and the shouts of floury stevedores; large drops had fallen in his eyes and down his neck, and he had felt desolate and miserable, wishing that he could have stayed in England with Janet forever. He had bought—good God, what had he bought?—a sea jersey, two singlets, a shanghai jacket and dungaree trousers, and a pair of sea boots. Norman, who bought a pair of Blücher boots, had advised him to get all those, as it was his first voyage. The boatswain, who was in the booth himself, crackling a huge yellow oilskin, had smiled at him kindly. “You always want to hang up an oilskin, son, when it gets wet. Don’t throw it around anywhere, like.”
But Andy, the chinless cook, yet with such a queer, gentle look in his eyes, from whom above all he would have liked a kind word, was unsympathetic and morose. “Well, I don’t want to say anything at all. I suppose you think it’s pretty good coming to sea. Well, you’ll find out pretty soon what it’s like; it’s just a question of working as hell—one port’s the same as another. Yes, you’ll find out pretty soon too. The bosun won’t give you all the tiddley jobs to do by a long chalk—”
But the boatswain had given Hilliot a sly wink. “You always want to keep in with the cook when you’re in a ship.”
Later that day, before he returned home to say good-bye to Janet, he had heard Andy remark to the boatswain, “I hate those bloody toffs who come to sea for experience … .” And indeed, after his guardian had driven him up to the wharf where the Oedipus Tyrannus was berthed, and after he had clambered out of the car and slung his seabag (from which the drum of his taropatch protruded) over his shoulder, the misery of parting with Janet overwhelmed him.
He saw it all again vividly, imagined himself wearing his blue suit, saw again his guardian wave good-bye to him, for Janet would not come to the ship, saw the two detectives on the Oedipus Tyrannus, the night watchman and the dirty firemen carrying wrenches; saw himself enter the forecastle and put his seabag in a bottom bunk before looking into the sailors’ messroom; saw the light burning, and the shadows which galloped over the long cedarwood table with forms round it, riveted to bulkheads, saw the stove with a twisted chimney on which a dishcloth and a pair of dungarees were drying. A skylight opened out on the poop. A crew list on a notice board contained his own name, spelt wrong—D. Heliot. There were some notices in English and others in Norwegian. It was all very strange, like a nightmare, but also exciting. At length one of the detectives came into the forecastle and invited him to the pantry for a cup of tea. The tea had condensed milk in it. The ship was not to sail till six o’clock the next morning—
After that he had continued, in the bitter watches when he knew the mind must be fixed on something or give way, to puzzle about Andy’s attitude towards him. The way he reasoned to himself was as follows: unless he justified his presence on the ship in some way with the crew, Andy not only would never allow him into his companionship or turn to Hilliot’s own, but also would resent his acceptance by Norman: he would remain a “toff,” a someone who didn’t belong: and until he shone in some particular way in his work, or performed some act of heroism, they would never be the contented trio whose formation alone would render life tolerable on the Oedipus Tyrannus … . After they had knocked off they would have met, and talked or sung wild songs, together they would have gone ashore for a deaf, blind debauch; or in the eyes of the other members of the crew enjoyed a sort of collective status, some distinguishing name for their trio.
For to be accepted by Andy, who seemed to rule amidships as he did the forecastle, was not that to be accepted by the crew? And to be accepted by the crew, was not that also to justify himself to Janet? Certainly he was willing to do anything, cost what it might, to show that he was one of them, that he did belong. How often, for instance, as now, he had looked up at that mast with extraordinary desire! Some day, he felt, someone would be up there and lose his nerve: he, Dana Hilliot, would bring him down. The captain would call for him and congratulate him. “My boy, I’m proud of you; you’re a credit to the ship—” Actually on the ship they had taken very little notice of him except to put him in his place: as he was a first voyager he must go through the mill like any other bloody man on his first voyage, a man who went to sea for fun would go to hell for a pastime, that was the way of things. While Andy, pursuing logically his conduct in the Mutual Aid Society Booth, usually went out of his way to be cruel. He had called him “Miss Hilliot.” “Hurry up there, Miss Hilliot, seven bells gone half an hour ago, your ladyship.” And the stewards laughed. Yet he knew himself to be jealous of those splendid adventures ashore Andy boasted of so magnificently, adventures in which he himself would have dearly liked to have been included, and of which any first voyager might be truly envious: or was it, he asked himself, that he wished to boast of them merely, rather than to be included in them, to be part of them? Or was it that he really hated Andy, the “chinless wonder,” that his interpretations of his attitude as friendly or jealous were both equally false? Anyway, it would be admirable to score off Andy sometime, about that particular physical defect. “You chinless wonder,” he would snarl it out, with portentous contempt—
Hilliot suddenly lifted the skylight by which he was standing, and looked down into the messroom of the sailors’ forecastle: tobacco smoke curled up towards him, and there was a fresh smell of soap and water. It was as if he had lifted the lid of a box of toys. There they all were: Ted opening a tin of condensed milk with a marline-spike; Horsey making an oilskin; and old Matt the riveter, who lived in Cheapside, and Cock—and the eternal card-players … . On the other side of the alleyway the twelve-to-four firemen’s watch were having their supper, and the rest of the seamen had wandered over there for company. The others he saw in a mist, no figure stood out. The steering gear creaked: below, the engines were pounding: cloom—cloom—cloom—cloom. Andy must be in the galley, then. He dropped the skylight with a bang, and Matt’s shout of “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” was suddenly muffled.
Hilliot went to the rails, which vibrated as though they would uproot themselves from the deck. Fourteen men in a forecastle. How swiftly, how incredibly swiftly they had become a community; almost, he thought, a world … . World within world, sea within sea, void within void, the ultimate, the inescapable, the ninth circle. Great circle … From his place there on the poop—for the fo’c’sle was “aft”—Hilliot allowed himself to examine the visible structure of the ship, the deep red-leaded well deck, the companion ladders, the winch deck, and beneath it the white-painted galley with its geniculated, blackened smokestack splayed at the top like (he had said in a letter to Janet) a devastated cigar; the quartermasters’ rooms and roundhouse amidships, up to the bridge, which the officer on watch paced ceaselessly with a slow rhythm, a rhythm sometimes ridiculously hastened by the swing of the sea. Once he saw him level his binoculars at the coast of Manchuria, a mile or so to port, sighted at five bells that morning, whose brutal mountains strode into the blazing sky. The brasswork burnt and flickered in the heat. Two firemen slept under an awning. Beyond, the bow did whatever a bow did, lolled back, then did it again. … It was getting late, they would be in port before night; in another half-hour—
But now it was absurd, he reflected, absurd to be preoccupied with anything besides this, this world so peculiarly his own. Why bother with Andy or anybody else? “Yes, but if you had a chin I’d hit you on it.” That was what he would say when the time came, that was the way to treat him, the bastard toad-He was walking, stimulated by his thoughts to angry energy, along the throbbing alleyway past the quartermasters’ rooms. He walked briskly over the tarred seams, occasionally being forced into a side-step. The slight head wind blew coolly and clearly in his face, rumpling his chafing dungarees, stained with red lead, round his ankles. Cloom—cloom—cloom—cloom. The Oedipus Tyrannus was making about eight knots, and her engines throbbed away cheerfully somewhere down below: a shovel clanged, and an endless spout of water and refuse was splashing from her rusty side into the Yellow Sea. And there, and there, the joyous derangement of the boundless waste must be their harbour. It was impossible to believe that so soon the sad sea horizons could melt into another land line, another climate, another people, and another port which would emerge, inevitably, out of such nothingness! The ship rose slowly to the slow blue combers, a ton of spray was flung to leeward, and that other sea, the sky, smiled happily down on her, on seamen and firemen alike, while a small Japanese fishing boat glimmered white against the black coast—oh, in spite of all, it was grand to be alive!
But the Oedipus Tyrannus poured out black smoke, mephitic and angry, from her one enormous funnel; its broad shadow slanted blackly along the sea to the horizon; it was the one smudge on all that glad serenity.
Hilliot poked his head in through an iron engine-room entrance, and watched the engines, a maelstrom of noise which crashed on his brain; it was humiliating to watch the nicety with which lever weight and fulcrum worked, opening and closing their hidden mechanisms and functioning with such an incomprehensible exactness! He thought of the whirling clanks holding horribly in their nerveless grip the penetrating shaft that turned the screws, that internal dynamic thing, the life of the ship. He walked round the fiddley, and looked down to the stokehold where Nikolai, who had scarcely noticed him once they were aboard the ship, seen through a shower of sparks, like red blossoms, was leaning heavily on his slice bar. He threw the slice away, and hastily shovelled more coal into the furnace, then he returned to his slice. The furnace blazed and roared, the flying clinkers were driving him further and further back into his corner, the fire was beating him. He dropped the slice with a curse, and mopped his face with his sweat rag. “Plenty hard work!” he shouted grinning up at Hilliot, a firebright fiend. “Like hell you say,” Hilliot muttered. As they spoke a trimmer emptied a bucket of water on the ashes, a tremendous cloud of steam hissed up with an awful sound, all was dark.
It was a pity that Nikolai always seemed to be down below, or skylarking with the other firemen; he could never see him. But despite their work the firemen seemed to get more fun out of life than the seamen, and seemed somehow to be better, in some queer way to be nearer God—
Suddenly three bells rang out, tin tin tin, and were echoed by the lookout man, and from far below, down in the engine room, three submarine notes floated up and were followed by the jangling of the telegraph, while the engine changed key.
What sorrow was it, stirring in his mind behind the screen of time? A note of memory merely, growing fainter, drowning in the yellow sea of his consciousness? Ah, but no, he had it, and following it, he suddenly saw a small boy, himself three years ago, inkstains on his fingers, sitting upon the steps of the swimming baths at school, his eyes burning … . Forlorn! The very word is like a bell. To toll me back from thee to my sad self. What could it have been that reminded him? The engine, possibly, of the steam heater, that pounded there all day to warm the baths. Green water. It had been like plunging into moss … . Left out of the swimming team, the important match against Uppingham. He had stolen out of last period to have a look on the notice board. A smell of peat smoke from the fens. He had got up when he saw two prefects coming down past the Hall, early from the Doctor’s Greek Testament class: ϵιδι δϵ vήϵϛ πoλλαι έv àµϕιάλω ‘Iθaκή—how did it go?
Later, in the dock, at Kowloon it was, he had been able to show that at least he was the fastest and most skilful swimmer on board the Oedipus Tyrannus—not that anyone cared. Norman had merely floundered about near the steps, and Andy, who couldn’t swim at all, had come down stripped to the waist to show off his extraordinary tattoo marks and to laugh at Norman… . Now the engine pounded on smoothly at its lower speed.
A moment later, Hilliot was walking again in the direction of the well deck. He was thinking of the first time he had seen Andy in the booth, where he had been talking about a girl at Tsintao, on the bathing beach there. How on earth, how, he asked himself, could a woman like a man with no chin? Yet Hilliot knew nothing about women, not in Andy’s sense, although there was Janet of course; yes, perhaps that was precisely what was wrong with him … . His thoughts came to a sudden check. There was a commotion down on the well deck.
He descended the galley companion quickly, his hand slipping on the greasy leather of the hand rail as he did so. Before him, on the number six hatch, seamen and firemen—and Norman!—were gathered. They were staring up serenely at the long tapering mainmast aft, which swayed gently with the vibration and motion of the ship. Andy, outside the galley, a dishcloth under his arm, was staring heavenward impassively, his chin impudently retrogressive, thought Hilliot, as he joined a group of firemen. They had been interrupted in the middle of supper, and they stood on the hatch with cups of coffee in their fists watching in their shuddering dungarees. “Wot’s to do there?” one of them said, “it’s only a bloody dunghawk.”
“Well, I’m going up to get it anyhow,” replied Norman, “it’s been there for three bloody days and it will be bloody starving.”
“That’s all right, I’ll go,” said Hilliot, and made for the mast, but a big stoker in a chain-breaker singlet soon put a stop to that idea. “Aw you, you’d pass out before you bloody got to that bloody table, you would,” he blustered, his tattooed arms (where had they been tattooed, Iloilo, Zamboanga?) folded on his heaving chest. And Norman, the Norwegian galley boy, who had been taking a spell, added, “You want to mind your own bloody business, you do,” and when Hilliot raised his head again was already halfway up the mast. “That’s the boy, Norman,” they shouted. “’Urry up or it’ll fly away.”
“That’s the stuff, Sculls,” shouted the Englishmen. “Good—good—fine! There now, come to Daddy.”
“Shut up or you’ll scare the damn thing away,” put in Hilliot, who had to say something to justify his defeat. But they took no notice of him now that both seamen and firemen were so immensely pleased with their new hero.
It was a tricky job at the top, too, for as Hilliot could well see, Norman had to leave the topmost ladder, in itself a flimsy enough thing and scarcely ever used, to scramble as best he might up the great mast, which was so thick it was impossible for him to get his arms round it properly. Somehow he did it, returning to the deck with the bird securely captured under his dungaree jacket. He was quite covered with soot and grime, which now was blowing directly on to the mast from the funnel. The bird was a grey carrier pigeon, tired and hungry. It had round its leg a message which no one could understand, for the one word decipherable was “Swansea.” But it seemed to be, or Hilliot felt it to be, a message of reprieve.
“It can’t have come from Swansea though, that’s plain enough,” chattered Norman. “It’s on the other side of the world.”
“It’s probably just some Englishman sending a message from one of the ports along the coast or something of that,” said one.
“A code—”
“A bloody dispatch,” mumbled one and all.
But there was a queer elation in the eyes of the Liverpool men as they shuffled into the forecastle. Something had happened, at any rate, a tender voice from home had whispered for a moment to those in exile, a mystery had shown its face among the solitudes. Hilliot stood apart from the others, leaning over the rail. After all …
What was the good of understanding? The pigeon might be the very messenger of love itself, but nothing would alter the fact that he had failed. He would hide his face from Janet forever, and walk in darkness for the rest of his days. Yet if he could only see her at this moment, she would give him another chance, she would be so gentle and companionable and tender. Her hands would be like sun gently brushing away the pain. His whole being was drowning in memories, the smells of Birkenhead and of Liverpool were again heavily about him, there was a coarse glitter in the cinema fronts, children stared at him strangely from the porches of public-houses. Janet would be waiting for him at the Crossville bus stop, with her red mackintosh and her umbrella, while silver straws of rain gently pattered on the green roof … . “Where shall we go? The Hippodrome or the Argyle? … I’ve heard there’s a good show on at the Scala—”
Oh, his love for her was not surely the fool of time like the ship: it was the star to the wandering ship herself: even labour, the noble accomplishment of many years, could be turned into an hourglass, but his love was eternal.
Had he not sought her in the town and meadow and in the sky? Had he not prayed to Jesus to give him rest, and found none until the hour he met her? … Again they seemed to be sitting together on the sand dunes, staring at the sky; great wings had whirred above them, stooping, dreaming, comforting, while the sand, imprinted like snow, had been whistled up about them by the wind. Beyond, a freighter carried their dreams with it, over the horizon. And there had been nothing that mattered, save only themselves and the blue day as they scampered like two children past the Hall Line shed to the harbour wall just in time to see the Norwegian tramp steamer Oxenstjerna