Never for one moment, even with the agony of the work and the terrible fatigue, did I regret what I had done, for this was a freedom in itself and Jake was beside me.
His cot swung above mine in the dingy fo’c’sle, and there was always an assuring comfort in his presence, even from that first night at sea when we had staggered down from the deck to the watch below, I bewildered and helpless with the unaccustomed orders, and groping my way in the dim light to my cot I heard him climb to the one above me, and felt his hand touch my shoulder for a minute, and his voice, half anxious: ‘All right, Dick?’ in my ear.
So we were together from the start, both being cast in the same watch, and we ate side by side, carrying our tin of food from the galley to the fo’c’sle, and we tramped the deck by night talking of things or not talking, and picking up a smattering of Norwegian or Danish from our companions.
I learnt to take my trick at the wheel with the others, and it seemed to me that this must be the grandest moment of my life - one fine clear night it was in the middle of the Baltic Sea on our way to Finland from London, with a fair wind on the quarter, and a black sea around me, and the tall masts before me pointing to the stars.
I heard the sigh of wind in the canvas and I felt the strain of the wheel, and I looked down upon my course marked on the compass in the light of the binnacle, and there was no sight or sound of any moving thing upon the sea save us and the ship, and I felt that this moment was good and could never be destroyed.
And when Jake came to relieve me he waited a while, seeing my arms flung carelessly through the spokes as though I had been born for this, I showing off a little to both him and myself, and as he watched me I could not hide the smile on my face which would not leave me for the beauty of this moment. He did not bother to laugh at me, but he said: ‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ and he knew.
Days and nights had gone past now though, and we were bound from Helsingfors to Copenhagen to discharge our cargo of timber, and from thence we were uncertain, but there were rumours of our proceeding round the coast to Oslo in ballast, and there to wait our turn for a freight.
It mattered little to Jake and myself, for we had no plans, only to take what chances should come our way, and when we became tired of a thing to go off on our own once more, and work or stay idle, whichever should come to our minds. The wind held fair from the north as I have said, and we made a quick passage to Copenhagen, but there was a dirty colour in the sky and we saw a long line of sailing yachts, running to their moorings before the weather broke, following close upon one another’s heels, a lovely sight in the half-light before the sun went down.
Then the sky filled with grey, and I saw the city of Copenhagen through a mist of rain that fell gently on the red roofs and the towers, making it seem like England and home.
I was as thrilled as a schoolboy on holiday, and Jake and I went ashore that night with the rest of the crowd from the ship, and we made straight for the Tivoli, the fun fair of the people of Copenhagen, where we scattered kronen without bothering about the cost of anything, riding the switchbacks and throwing darts, seeing ourselves in distorted mirrors, driving ridiculous little cars controlled by electricity, peering at the girls on the dancing-floor where some of the boys were bold enough to venture, but I felt shy about this and hung back with Jake, pretending I did not care to dance. All the time the rain fell, and we splashed about in puddles with the lights of the Tivoli reflected in them green and gold, and a band played a dance tune that was good to hear.
Then Jake and I moved off to explore the streets, and I left the Tivoli with the sound of that tune in my head and a memory of a girl with a great cloud of flaxen hair looking over somebody’s shoulder to where we had stood some minutes before, jammed in the crowd, and I wondered if I had really been shy to mingle with the other boys on the dancing-floor or if it was a desire to be on the same level as Jake, who cared only to find the cobbled stones of a market square and a canal by a twisted bridge. So we walked about the streets in the rain until I was tired, and I felt flat after the excitement of landing earlier in the evening, but Jake looked as if he could keep this up all night, taking a passionate interest in the shape of buildings and the corner of some old house, so that my mood was out of tune with his for perhaps the first time since we had been together, though I managed to hide it from him.
I could not forget that it was my first night in Copenhagen and I was a sailor ashore, and that every minute should be filled with the possibility of adventure, while here we were plodding the wet streets that might, in the light we saw them, have belonged to an English country town, and I was not sure if it was a girl I wanted or a drink or neither, but all I knew was that I wanted it to be different from this.
We got back to the landing-stage just as the rain had stopped and it was getting light.
The boys were in the boat wondering if they should bother to wait for us. They were most of them happily drunk, and a young Norwegian who spoke English told me with a sleepy grin he had picked the best girl in Denmark and had gone home with her. They all laughed at him and said he had been too drunk to do anything, and then they chaffed one another in their own language, and I watched them, rather foolish and apart, not being able to understand what they said. I wished I was drunk too and exhausted in the same way, having known something about Danish girls, and lighting a cigarette I glanced over to where Jake was crouching in the bows, his knees drawn up to his chin, his eyes narrowing as he looked away from all of us to where the dawn was breaking clear and cold over the water. I knew his thoughts were of Copenhagen shrouded still in a grey light, the green patch of colour in the sky and the beauty of a spire, and he had not listened to our chatter and our laughter.
I supposed we must have sounded like a flock of cackling geese, and I did not laugh much after that, but somehow I envied Jake’s mood and I envied the boys too, and I felt very dull, for whichever way I looked at it my evening had been a failure.
I don’t think it was fine all the time we were in Copenhagen. We were kept busy most of the time discharging our cargo, and when we were free of the timber we had to set about shifting our own ballast to get the right trim.There were not many hours for going ashore with all this work on our hands. I was not sorry when we weighed anchor once more, and made for the open sea with Copenhagen astern of us in a curtain of rain.
We were making all the sail we could, for the breeze was light, and high up in the rigging Jake leaned across the yardarm, and shouted to me, pointing to a ridge of land away on the quarter. ‘That’s Helsinor,’ he said, and I could not help smiling at his excitement, and then fell to wondering at this man who had been a sailor, and a prize-fighter, and had killed his friend because of an ideal, and had spent seven years in prison, and who liked me, and who knew about Hamlet.
But there was not time to puzzle out these things, for the mate shouted up to us from the poop, his hands to his mouth, and I had picked up enough Norwegian by now to know that he was cursing us to work smartly, and put some muscle into the job, and I tore at the beating canvas and the ropes stiffened with the disuse in the harbour and the rain, the blood running from under my broken nails.
As we had imagined, the Hedwig was bound for her home port of Oslo, and many of the boys were talking of leaving the ship when she docked, and going ashore for a spell, for it was likely she would have to go into dry dock and be overhauled before she secured a freight, and this might take several weeks, so, anyway, the crew would be paid off. The boys could sign on with another ship when their money was spent if the Hedwig was not ready by then. So much we gathered from the smattering of Danish and Norwegian in the fo’c’sle, and Jake and I talked the matter over in our watch below, he smoking cigarette after cigarette stretched out in his cot, his feet on the bulkhead, while I lay below him, my head pillowed in my arms, watching the swinging light and the haze of smoke and the sleeping faces of the watch.
‘We’ll lay off the sea for a while,’ said Jake; ‘I’ll buy a map
when we get to Oslo and we’ll strike inland, north of course, to the mountains.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I don’t care how we get there, do you? We’ll walk and ride and get lifts in a truck. We don’t have to worry about anything, do we?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘I’ve got some money,’ he said; ‘we shan’t want much, as a matter of fact. That’s an advantage of prison, Dick, you’re clear of bills, and your balance mounts steadily.’
‘Oh! hell!’ I said, ‘I can’t hang on to you like this, Jake.’
‘Don’t be a fool. Who brought you on this trip, anyway?’
‘No - listen here. . . .’
‘I’m sick of your voice; go to sleep, can’t you?’ he said.
‘It’s all damn funny for you,’ I muttered, ‘but what do I look like, mucking around on your savings?’
‘Who’s going to look at you?’
‘Oh! I don’t know, but what am I going to feel like?’
‘You haven’t got any feelings, Dick.’
‘Sure, I have.’
‘Forget ’em, then, they’re not worth a cent.’
‘No, but look here. . . .’
‘Go to sleep, little boy, you’re no nerve tonic to a tired sailor.’
I laughed, cursing him at the same time. I saw that it was no use protesting, and, anyway, it did not matter very much.
I fell asleep, smiling at the thought of my father, who scarcely existed any more for me, sitting at his desk in the old library gazing out of the windows on to the smooth lawn, and I, stretched in a cot of a fo’c’sle with an unknown country before me to explore, and a rough track through the mountains, and forests, and a frozen lake, and no night and jumbled up with this the imagined approach to Oslo, another strange city, the lights and laughing, and a song and maybe a girl somewhere. . . .
Every moment was new to me on the passage to Oslo, and there were a thousand and one things to make me wonder, or smile, or curse, and the work was hard, nor did we ever get much sleep. I dare say I should have grumbled if it hadn’t been for Jake, who seemed eternally to understand the light and shade of my moments, the heights and the depths, and he had the power of knowing when to throw a word at me and when to leave me alone.
The hardships and the monotony were forgotten when I remembered that each minute we were getting farther north, and the summer evenings stretched themselves indefinitely with scarcely a breaking up of day into night. The ship would slip over the surface of the water with every rag set to catch a breath of the inconsistent wind, and suddenly the sun would be gone without my having known, and no cover of darkness would fall upon the sea, only a hard white light that seemed to be born of distant mountains and cold glaciers, a light that belonged to a rushing stream set in a forest of great hills and the silence of lakes, frozen in midsummer.We were in the midst of the sea with no land near to us, but there was something in the stark purity of the air that told us these things existed ’way ahead to the north of us, and I was aware of a dumb sorrow in me that I could not explain for the beauty of what lay around me and I had not seen.
Then I was glad of the presence of Jake near to me at all times, for a horror would come upon me because of the vast solitude of space and the solitary splendour of the regions where we were drifting; even the white stars seemed cold and terribly remote, and we, poor human beings on our little ship, were wretched and pathetic in our attempts to equal their wisdom, nor had we any right to venture upon the imperturbability of these waters.
Something inside me wept I knew not why, and my heart hungered for unattainable things that had no name, so that I would gaze upon the still sea bathed in its white light with a shudder and a strange despair, till Jake stood beside me on the deck, and the touch of his shoulder and the smell of his cigarette brought me to some sense of reality, I clutching at the sound of his voice so natural and unafraid, as a crumb of comfort and a sign of security.
Then perhaps there would be a shift of wind, and a call from the mate on the poop to go aloft or lay a hand on the braces, so there would have to be a forgetting of one’s thoughts, shy and unexplained, and a casting of mind and body into this business of wind and sail.
It would seem to me that the smell of ships and the sea was in my blood now, and I had never known any life but this.
We docked in Oslo early one morning before the sound and movement of the day. A large tramp steamer had come to her moorings before us, and the belching smoke from her funnel made a curtain in the sky, so that all I could perceive of Oslo in the faint light were the forms of many ships, the ugly cranes of the docks, and stretching away from this the old town on a hill, and on the left the buildings of the modern capital, with a sparkle of blue water and blue hills beyond.
Jake and I were paid off with the rest of the crew at Oslo, and we looked back with regret to the steel outline of the barque that had been our home. For all the discomfort we had endured there had been moments of glory and exultation and the thrill of this first adventure could not surely be surpassed.
I resented the idea that when the Hedwig sailed again there would be some strange Norwegian snoring in my cot in the dingy fo’c’sle, for places where we have lived intensely become part of ourselves, I always think. However much now Jake and I might resolve to return when the barque was out of dry dock, I felt there would be other things claiming us by then and the Hedwig would belong to the past as surely as the bridge over London river belonged to the past, with the sailor as vanished as the boy who trembled at death.
Even now, with the spars of the ship hidden from view by a tall crane, I turned forgetting her a little, and looked towards Oslo and the blue hills beyond. We said good-bye to the boys, some of them had their homes far away, one or two were going to look for another ship. It seemed odd parting from them, after having worked side by side and eaten and slept with them. My friend the Norwegian made some joke and waved his cap and smiled, but I knew I would not see him again.
Jake and I wandered about looking for shops in Oslo. There were avenues of trees and trams, and the colour of the buildings was yellow. I got some dungaree trousers and a pair of canvas shoes, and a blue cap with a peak, but Jake only bought a toothbrush and a map.
We found a cheap restaurant where they knew about beer, and we spread the map out on the table in front of us. I could not make head nor tail of it, I wanted to get away up north to the patches of blue that looked like water. ‘They’re the fjords,’ said Jake; ‘we’ll strike them on our way. Look here, these are the mountains, and that’s Turin right in the heart of them before you get to the fjords. We’ll have to work this way, and follow the roads.’ His thumbnail was pointing to something called Fagerness, away in the wilds, and miles from Oslo.
His voice was excited, and his hair fell over his eyes. He looked younger than I had ever seen him.
Somebody laughed at another table, and the smell of food was good. Soon it would be evening, and the lights, and more people crowding together, and outside the still air and the white sky, although it was night. I thought how splendid it all was, and how I might have been dead.
‘I want to get drunk,’ I said to Jake. He laughed, he did not care.
We went out after a while and we found somewhere to sleep that night; it seemed cheap enough, and a paradise of luxury to us after the cramped fo’c’sle of the barque Hedwig.
I was not tired enough and I did not want to go to bed yet awhile.
‘Come on,’ I said to Jake, and we looked about us for a theatre, but there did not seem anything much on, though he suggested trying the opera; they were giving Tosca, and I told him to go to hell, so once more we found ourselves in one of those café-restaurant places ordering drinks. I did not think much of the night life of Scandinavia. Even the Tivoli at Copenhagen was better than this.
‘We ought to have tried Stockholm,’ I said to Jake, but he was dragging out his damned map again and did not listen to me, so I kept calling the waiter fellow to bring us mo
re drinks, and then looking around me, but there weren’t any girls worth worrying over, and they all had their own parties, anyway.
‘We can get a train to take us to Fagerness,’ said Jake; ‘I reckon it to be about ten hours’ journey from Oslo. Then we’ll see if we can get horses and strike away for the mountains - you can ride, can’t you, Dick?’
‘Sure I can ride,’ I said, but his words seemed nonsense to me, and the air was very thick, and his voice was coming from a long way away.
I did not know how to stop myself from smiling.
‘We ought to get out to the glaciers somehow,’ said Jake, ‘but that’s right north in another group of fjords. See here’s Sandene, and there’s the Briksdol glacier we ought to see.’
‘Oh! shut up,’ I thought, ‘who cares?’ and I tried to keep my eyes focused on something on the table, but they kept wandering away to the corner of the room where there were a couple of men, and an ugly girl who had something queer on her hat, not that it mattered to me, but the light caught it and it was aggravating not to know, and some damn fool orchestra started which muddled itself up with the sound of Jake’s voice and the movement of a passing waiter.
I began to wish I hadn’t drunk so much, but it was too late now, and perhaps none of this was going on really at all, but I was asleep, and it was happening in my imagination. It would have been a relief to sweep the things off the table and stretch out my arms, and then lay my face in my hands and not bother any more. There was no fun in getting drunk this way; I ought to be talking a lot or being amusing, or singing from sheer joy and the strength of life. I knew that Jake would be able to drink anything and even then not show the slightest sign, but walk twenty miles or climb a mountain, or maybe go out laughing and kill a fellow.
I'll Never Be Young Again Page 5
