by Grant Allen
“Ah, delightful for a painter, I’ve no doubt,” Hugh Massinger replied, half yawning to himself, “especially for a painter to whom mud and herons are bread, and butter, and brackish water is Bass and Allsopp; but scarcely, you’ll admit, an attractive picture to the inartistic public, among ‘whom I take the liberty, for this occasion only, humbly to rank myself. I go there, in fact, as a martyr to principle. I live for others. A member of my family — not to put too fine a point upon it, a lady — abides for the present moment at Whitestrand, and believes herself to be seized or possessed by prescriptive right of a lien or claim to a certain fixed aliquot portion of my time and attention. I’ve never admitted the claim myself (being a legally-minded soul); but just out of the natural sweetness of my disposition, I go down occasionally (without prejudice) to whatever part of England she may chance to be inhabiting, for the sake of not disappointing her foregone expectations, however ill-founded, and be the same more or less. — You observe, I speak with the charming precision of the English statute-book.”
“But how do you mean to get to Whitestrand?” Self asked suddenly, after a short pause. “It’s a difficult place to reach, you know. There’s no station nearer than ten miles off, and that a country one, so that when you arrive there, you can get no conveyance to take you over.”
“So my cousin gave me to understand. She was kind enough to provide me with minute instructions for her bookless wilds. I believe I’m to hire a costermonger’s cart or something of the sort to convey my portmanteau; and I’m to get across myself by the aid of the natural means of locomotion with which a generous providence or survival of the fittest has been good enough to endow me by hereditary transmission. At least, so my cousin Elsie instructs me.”
“Why not come round with me in the tub?” Relf suggested good-humouredly.
“What? your yacht? Hatherley was telling me you were the proud possessor of a ship. — Are you going round that way any time shortly?”
“Well, she’s not exactly what you call a yacht,” Relf replied, with an apologetic tinge in his tone of voice. “She’s only a tub, you know, an open boat almost, with a covered well and just room for three to sleep and feed in. ‘A poor thing, but mine own,’ as Touchstone says; as broad as she’s long, and as shallow as she’s broad, and quite flat-bottomed, drawing so little water at a pinch that you can sail her across an open meadow when there’s a heavy dew on. — And if you come, you’ll have to work your passage, of course. I navigate her myself, as captain, crew, cabin-boy, and passenger, with one other painter fellow to share watches with me. The fact is, I got her built as a substitute for rooms, because I found it cheaper than taking lodgings at a seaside place and hiring a rowboat whenever one wanted one. I cruise about the English coast with her in summer; and in the cold months, I run her round to the Mediterranean. And, besides, one can get into such lovely little side-creeks and neglected channels, all full of curious objects of interest, which nobody can ever see in anything else. She’s a perfect treasure to a marine painter in the mud-and-buoy business. But I won’t for a moment pretend to say she’s comfortable for a landsman. If you come with me, in fact, you’ll have to rough it.”
“I love roughing it. — How long will it take us to cruise round to Whitestrand?”
“Oh, the voyage depends entirely upon the wind and tide. Sailing-boats take their own time. The Mud-Turtle — that’s what I call her — doesn’t hurry. She’s lying now off the Pool at the Tower, taking care of herself in the absence of all her regular crew; and Potts, my mate, he’s away in the north, intending to meet me next week at Lowestoft, where my mother and sister are stopping in lodgings. We can start on our cruise whenever you like — say, if you choose, to-morrow morning.”
“Thanks, awfully,” Hugh answered, with a nod of assent. “To tell you the truth, I should like nothing better. It’ll be an experience, and the wise man lives upon new experiences. Pallas, you remember, in Tennyson’s ‘Oenone,’ recommended to Paris the deliberate cultivation of experiences as such. — I’ll certainly go. For my own part, like Saint Simon, I mean in my time to have tried everything. Though Saint Simon, to be sure, went rather far, for I believe he even took a turn for a while at picking pockets.”
CHAPTER II.
DOWN STREAM.
TIDE served next morning at eleven; and punctual to the minute — for, besides being a poet, he prided himself on his qualities as a man of business — Hugh Massinger surrendered himself in due course by previous appointment on board the Mud-Turtle at the Pool by the Tower. But his eyes were heavier and redder than they had seemed last night; and his wearied manner showed at once, by a hundred little signs, that he had devoted but small time since Relf left him to what Mr. Herbert Spencer periphrastically describes as “reparative processes.”
The painter, attired for the sea like a common sailor in jersey and trousers and knitted woollen cap, rose up from the deck to greet him hospitably. His whole appearance betokened serious business. It was evident that Warren Relf did not mean to play at yachting.
“You’ve been making a night of it, I’m afraid, Massinger,” he said, as their eyes met. “Bad preparation, you know, for a day down the river. We shall have a loppy sea, if this wind holds, when we pass the Nore. You ought to have gone straight to bed when you left the club with me last evening.”
“I know I ought,” the poet responded with affected cheerfulness. “The path of duty’s as plain as a pikestaff. But the things I ought to do I mostly leave undone; and the things I ought not to do, I find, on the contrary, vastly attractive. I may as well make a clean breast of it. I strolled round to Pallavicini’s after you vacated the Bow last night, and found them having a turn or two at lansquenet. Now, lansquenet’s an amusement I never can resist. The consequence was, in three hours I was pretty well cleaned out of ready cash, and shall have to keep my nose to the grindstone accordingly all through what ought by rights to have been my summer holiday. This conclusively shows the evils of high play, and the moral superiority of the wise man who goes home to bed and is sound asleep when the clock strikes eleven.”
Relf’s face fell several tones. “I wish, Massinger,” he said very gravely, “you’d make up your mind never to touch those hateful cards again. You’ll ruin your health, your mind, and your pocket with them. If you spent the time you spend upon play in writing some really great book now, you’d make in the end ten times as much by it.”
The poet smiled a calm smile of superior wisdom. “Good boy!” he cried, patting Relf on the back in mock approbation of his moral advice. “You talk for all the world like a Sunday-school prize-book. Honest industry has its due reward; while pitch-and-toss and wicked improper games land one at last in prison or the workhouse. The industrious apprentice rises in time to be Lord Mayor (and to appropriate the public funds ad libitum); whereas, the idle apprentice, degraded by the evil influences of ha’penny loo, ends his days with a collar of hemp round his naughty neck in an equally exalted but perhaps less dignified position in life — on a platform at Newgate. My dear Relf, how on earth can you, who are a sensible man, believe all that antiquated nursery rubbish? Cast your eyes for a moment on the world around you, here in the central hub of London, within sight of all the wealth and squalor of England, and ask yourself candidly whether what you see in it at all corresponds with the idyllic picture of the little-Jack-Horner school of moralists. As a matter of fact, is it always the good boys who pull the plums with self-appreciative smile out of the world’s pudding? Far from it: quite the other way. I have seen the wicked flourishing in my time like a green bay-tree. Honest industry breaks stones on the road, while successful robbery or successful gambling rolls by at its ease, cigar in mouth, lolling on the cushions of its luxurious carriage. If you stick to honest industry all your life long, you may go on breaking stones contentedly for the whole term of your natural existence. But if you speculate boldly with your week’s earnings and land a haul, you may set another fellow to break stones for you in time, and then y
ou become at once a respectable man, a capitalist, and a baronet. All the great fortunes we see in the world have been piled up in the last resort, if you’ll only believe it, by successful gambling.”
“Every man has a right to his own opinion,” Warren Relf answered with a more serious air, as he turned aside to look after the rigging. “I admit there’s a great deal of gambling in business; but anyhow, honest industry’s a simple necessary on board the Mud-Turtle. — Come aft, here, will you, from your topsy-turvy moral philosophy, and help me out with this sheet and the mainsail. Before we reach the German Ocean, you’ll have the whole art of navigation at your fingers’ ends — for I mean to sketch while you manage the ship — and be in a position to write an ode in a Catalonian metre on the Pleasures of Luffing, and the True Delight of the Thames Waterway.”
Massinger turned to do as he was directed, and to inspect the temporary floating hotel in which he was to make his way contentedly down to the coast of Suffolk. The Mud-Turtle was indeed as odd-looking and original a little craft as her owner and skipper had proclaimed her to be. A centre-board yawl, of seventeen tons registered burden, she ranked as a yacht only by courtesy, on the general principle of what the logicians call excluded middle. If she wasn’t that, why, then, pray what in the world was she? The Mud-Turtle measured almost as broad across the beam as she reckoned feet in length from stem to stern; and her skipper maintained with profound pride that she couldn’t capsize in the worst storm that ever blew out of an English sky, even if she tried to. She drew no more than three feet of water at a pinch; and though it was scarcely true, as Relf had averred, that a heavy dew was sufficient ‘to float her, she could at least go anywhere that a man could wade up to his knees without fear of wetting his tucked-up breeches. This made her a capital boat for a marine artist to go about sketching in; for Relf could lay her alongside a wreck on shallow sands, or run her up a narrow creek after picturesque waterfowl, or approach the riskiest shore to the very edge of the cliffs, without any reference to the state of the tide, or the probable depth of the surrounding channel.
“If she grounds,” the artist said enthusiastically, expatiating on her merits to his new passenger, “you see it doesn’t really matter twopence; for the next high tide’ll set her afloat again within six hours. She’s a great opportunist: she knows well that all things come in time to him who can wait. The Mud-Turtle positively revels in mud; she lies flat on it as on her native heath, and stays patiently without one word of reproach for the moon’s attraction to come in its round to her ultimate rescue.”
The yawl’s accommodation was opportunist too: though excellent in kind, it was limited in quantity, and by no means unduly luxurious in quality. She was a working-man’s yacht, and she meant business. Her deck was calculated on the most utilitarian principles — just big enough for two persons to sketch abreast; her cabin contained three wooden bunks, with their appropriate complement of rugs and blankets; and a small and primitive open stove devoted to the service of the ship’s cookery, took up almost all the vacant space in the centre of the well, leaving hardly room for the self-sacrificing volunteer who undertook the functions of purveyor and bottle-washer to turn about in. But the lockers were amply stored with fresh bread, tinned meats, and other simple necessaries for a week’s cruise; while food for the mind existed on a small shelf at the stem in the crude shape of the “Coaster’s Companion,” the Sailing Directions issued by Authority of the Honourable Brethren of the Trinity House, and the charts of the Thames, constructed from the latest official surveys of her Majesty’s Board of Admiralty. Thus equipped and accoutred Warren Relf was accustomed to live an outdoor life for weeks together with his one like-minded chum and companion; and if the spray was sometimes rather moist, and the yellow fog rather thick and slabby, and the early mornings rather chill and raw, and the German Ocean rather loppy and aggressive on the digestive faculties, yet the good dose of fresh air, the delicious salty feeling of the free breeze, and the perpetual sense of ease and lightness that comes with yachting, were more than enough fully to atone to an enthusiastic marine artist for all these petty passing inconveniences.
As for Hugh Massinger, a confirmed landsman, the first few hours’ sail down the crowded Thames appeared to him at the outset a perfect phantasmagoria of ever-varying perils and assorted terrors. He composed his soul to instant death from the very beginning. Not, indeed, that he minded one bit for that: the poet dearly loved danger, as he loved all other forms of sensation and excitement: they were food for the Muse; and the Muse, like Blanche Amory, is apt to exclaim, “Il me faut des émotions!” But the manifold novel forms of enterprise as the lumbering little yawl made her way clumsily among the great East-Indiamen and big ocean-going steamers, darting boldly now athwart the very bows of a huge Monarch-liner, insinuating herself now with delicate precision between the broadsides of two heavy Rochester barges, and just escaping collision now with some laden collier from Cardiff or Newcastle, were too complicated and too ever-pressing at the first blush for Massinger fully to take in their meaning at a single glance.
The tidal Thames is the Cheapside of the ocean, a mart of many nations, resorting to it by sea and by land. It’s all very well going down the river on the Antwerp packet or the outward-bound New-Zealander; you steam then at your ease along the broad unencumbered central channel, with serene confidence that a duly qualified pilot stands at your helm, and that everybody else will gladly give way to you, for the sake of saving their own bacon. But it’s quite another matter to thread your way tortuously through that thronged and bustling highway of the shipping interest in a centre-board yawl of seventeen tons registered burden, manned by a single marine artist and an amateur passenger of uncertain seamanship. Hugh Massinger was at once amused and bewildered by the careless confidence with which his seafaring friend dashed boldly in and out among brigs and schooners, smacks and steamships, on port or starboard tack, in endless confusion, backing the little Mud-Turtle to hold her own in the unequal; contest against the biggest and swiftest craft that sailed the river. His opinion of Relf rose rapidly many degrees in mental register as he watched him tacking and luffing and scudding and darting with cool unconcern in his toy tub among so many huge and swiftly moving monsters.
“Port your helm!” Relf cried to him hastily once, as they crossed the channel just abreast of Greenwich Hospital. “Here’s another sudden death down upon us round the Reach yonder!” And even as he spoke, a big coal-steamer, with a black diamond painted allusively on her bulky funnel, turning the low point of land that closed their view, bore hastily down upon them from the opposite direction with menacing swiftness. Massinger, doing his best to obey orders, grew bewildered after a time by the glib rapidity of his friend’s commands. He was perfectly ready to act as he was bid when once he understood his instructions; but the seafaring mind seems unable to comprehend that landsmen do not possess an intuitive knowledge of the strange names bestowed by technical souls upon ropes, booms, gaffs, and mizzen-masts; so that Massinger’s attempts to carry out his orders in a prodigious hurry proved productivo for the most part rather of blank confusion than of the effect intended by the master skipper. After passing Greenhithe, however, they began to find the channel somewhat clearer, and Relf ceased for a while to skip about the deck like the little hills of the Psalmist, while Massinger felt his life comparatively safe at times for three minutes together, without a single danger menacing him ahead in the immediate future from port or starboard, from bow or stem, from brig or steamer, from grounding or collision.
About two o’clock, after a hot run, they cast anchor awhile out of the main channel, where traders ply their flow of intercourse, and stood by to eat their lunch in peace and quietness under the lee of a projecting point near Gravesend.
“If wind and tide serve like this,” Relf observed philosophically, as he poured out a glassful of beer into a tin mug — the Mud-Turtle’s appointments were all of the homeliest— “we ought to get down to Whitestrand before an easy breeze w
ith two days’ sail, sleeping the nights in the quiet creeks at Leigh and Orfordness.”
“That would exactly suit me,” Massinger answered, draining off the mugful at a gulp after his unusual exertion. “I wrote a hasty line to my cousin in Suffolk this morning telling her I should probably reach Whitestrand the day after tomorrow, wind and weather permitting. — I approve of your ship, Relf, and of your tinned lobster too. It’s fun coming down to the great deep in this unconventional way. The regulation yacht, with sailors and a cook and a floating drawing-room, my soul wouldn’t care for. You can get drawing-rooms galore any day in Belgravia; but picnicking like this, with a spice of adventure in it, falls in precisely with my own view of the ends of existence.”
“It’s a cousin you’re going down to Suffolk to see, then?”
“Well, yes; a cousin — a sort of a cousin; a Girton girl; the newest thing out in women. I call her a cousin for convenience’ sake. Not too nearly related, if it comes to that; a surfeit of family’s a thing to be avoided. But we’re a decadent tribe, the tribe of Massinger; hardly any others of us left alive; when I put on my hat, I cover all that remains of us; and cousin-hood’s a capital thing in its way to keep up under certain conditions. It enables a man to pay a pretty girl a great deal of respectful attention, without necessarily binding himself down in the end to anything definite in the matrimonial direction.”
