Someone came up at me, and I did not care, I hit him and he went down, and then he came again, and this time I fell, but not before Jake had seen, and in a stroke he had sent my fellow crashing against the window, and there was a splintering crack of breaking glass. Now the lamps had shuddered in their brackets, and two were smashed by a chair thrown into the air, so that we moved about in the dim white light as shadowy figures, scarcely discernible, and I, struggling against the bar with some fellow, his hot breath on my face, saw someone run like a little beetle to the door, and struggle with the heavy bolt. I heard Jake’s warning shout, for once more there was a whistle in the air, and the little beetle was none other than the frightened Swede, whose life we would have saved, but he threw out his hands as though to grapple with an unseen danger, and I heard his last scream of terror, his choke and his cry, and he went down on to the floor with a knife in his back.
I broke away from my man; I must have winded him somehow, for he fell loosely with a grunt of pain, and I ran to the door and stood above the wounded Swede, and tried to pull the knife out from between his shoulder-blades, but it would not come, and the blood splashed over me, and anyway he was dead. Near me men were fighting, I heard the scuffle of their feet and I saw Jake’s face, white against a beam of light from the window, and his smile as he struck the jaw of a fellow who rose up towards him, and then I opened the heavy door and the white light streamed into the café, breaking the shadows into clarity. One of my eyes now was closed, the blood from it dry on my cheek, and my body might have been beaten all over; but none of this mattered and I was happy in a silly drunken fashion, not even sick at the poor dead Swede at my feet.
It was my voice that shouted in a high unnatural key: ‘Come on, Jake, come on,’ and they were my hands that fastened themselves round the throat of a man, and my feet that kicked something lying on the ground. For this was flesh against my flesh, and teeth that broke with my fist and the warm blood of a man I hated, and his cry of pain - crying because of me.
‘Hullo, Jake,’ I shouted,‘hullo,’ and then I laughed for no reason, except that my pain was as great as the pain I had caused, and this was glory, I thought, and this was hell, and here was a man’s fingers at my throat, and here was a great limp body under me, and ‘Fight, you unholy bastard, fight,’ I said.
Then from away down the street there was the shrill summons of a whistle, answered by another, and the call of voices, and the patter of footsteps running swiftly, and I heard Jake’s voice near me, and the touch of his hand on my arm.
‘Come, Dick,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to run for it,’ and I shook a man’s grasp from my collar and followed Jake out in the street, where the white light shone as clear as dawn, and the water glittered.
A whistle sounded close now, round the corner of the café, and the rush of feet was near.
‘Run, Dick,’ said Jake, ‘run for your life.’ I tore after him along the wide cobbled street, my heart bursting in my breast, my limbs aching, and I could hear the sound of the chase behind us, and a shout, and another blast of a whistle.
My breath came harshly, and the stones were sharp under my feet, and Jake was like a fleet shadow ahead of me, glancing back at me over his shoulder as he ran.
‘Come on, Dick,’ he said, and I felt the laughter shake me in my exhaustion, a great wave of laughter that could not be controlled, yet I must go on running, running because of the hurrying footsteps behind me, and the distant shout.
There was a bridge which we must cross, and a narrow street, and the corner of a dark building, and so on into a square, and another street and once more by the side of the water where ships were anchored. Here I paused, for I could go no longer, and Jake waited for me, and we listened, breathless, for the thin echo of those following footsteps, but there was no sound of them now, nor of the shouting, nor the whistle.
There were ships all round us, quiet against the quays, ghostly in this pale light of morning, and we flung ourselves down in a black corner where there were barrels huddled together, and here we lay, panting, laughing, with the tears falling from my closed eye, mixing in the dried blood of my cheek.
Jake’s upper lip was cut right open, and there was a swelling on his forehead as large as an egg, and as I looked at him I realized my own pain, my throbbing eye, my sore weary body, and I began to laugh, and I could not stop laughing, the sound tearing at my chest, while images floated into my mind, turning me sick and giddy, yet my laughter was uncontrolled.
‘Did you see?’ I said. ‘Did you see that fellow with the knife in his back?’ And I rolled over on my side, shaken and sobbing with this laughter that came from me, the tears of blood rolling into my mouth.
‘Stop it, Dick, stop it,’ said Jake, but he was laughing too, and I wondered who was mad, he or I, and whether we had really seen what we had seen, and done what we had done. Then, like a cold shudder and the sudden plunge of a warm body into water, we stopped laughing and we sat up and looked at one another, calm, sober, two solemn owls under a still sky, and I only conscious now of my pain and my weariness, and a dumb longing to sleep.
‘We’ll have to get away,’ said Jake; ‘we can’t stay around here with those fellows on our track.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said; ‘we’ve finished them, they haven’t any fight left.’
‘I’m not thinking of them,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of the police. It was their whistles that we heard, and their footsteps.’
‘Maybe we could explain,’ I said.
‘No, Dick, there’s the dead Swede with the knife in his back; we’d be as much in it as that bunch of chaps who did it. Who’d listen to us, anyway? We’ve got to quit.’
‘All right,’ I said.
We got up and began to wander once more along the quay. We came to the end of a jetty where a vessel was moored, a small tramp steamer of about two thousand tons, and there was no silence here, for she was coaling, and the lights of the jetty shone upon her, and we could hear the groan of the crane and the thunder of coal as it poured down the shaft into the hold.
In a glance we could tell she was a rough ship, no paint on her, her sides rusted, her decks unscrubbed, and a man on the bridge lounged over the rail, keeping no order, cursing at the men, chaffing, familiar, their faces black with the coal.
We watched them for a while, and then Jake looked at me, and I looked at him, and I shrugged my shoulders, and ‘This is our ship,’ he said.
He left me and walked across a plank to the deck, and I leant against a post on the quay, not bothering to look after him, biting my nails, looking down into the grey water. The crane creaked and groaned, and the coal rumbled down the shaft, while the men moved about the deck, and out of the corner of my one eye I could see Jake calling up to the fellow on the bridge, who leant over, grinning, his hand to his ear.
I felt myself slipping away into a dream, a dream of a far mountain and a rushing stream, a vision of slender trees, and a snow surface, and a white fall crashing into a narrow fjord, but then these would not stay with me when the coal thundered into the hold, and a crane rattled, and Jake himself touched my arm, saying in my ear: ‘Come on, her name is Romanie, she’s French, bound for Nantes.’ So I stumbled after him along the plank, not caring where I went, and he said to me: ‘They’ve finished loading now, and she’ll be away in an hour’s time.’
I blinked up at the lights, and knocked against a rope with my feet, and somebody laughed, and somebody called out to me in French.
And soon we were working with the others on the deck, finding our way about, hungry and tired, and I knew that this man who moved his limbs and cursed was not myself, for I lay asleep somewhere, curled in a dark corner. Now I had a crust of bread in my hands, and was peering into a black fo’c’sle, and now there was a movement of a ship under way, and the thrashing of her propeller in the water.
And now I was looking up into Jake’s face, he black and filthy with the coal, the swelling distorted on his forehead, and the black of my
face was caked with the blood from my eye. It seemed to me I had lived a hundred years in a night, and somehow a strength had come to me I had not yet possessed, so I laughed up at Jake with his cut lip and his swollen temple, and I knew this was what I had wanted, this thrill of danger, this taste of blood, so that it was good to be young, and good to be alive.
Jake laughed too, and he asked me how I was, and ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘you know I’m all right,’ and we stood there together and watched Stockholm disappear, clear-cut like a jewel, aloof, mysterious, bathing in a white light.
10
The Romanie was a black ship run by a crew of devils, and Jake and I were devils too, living in a hell, filthy and unwashed, hungry and tired, blaspheming to a heedless sky.
She was one of those miserable leaking little packets, too narrow for her length and shallow for’ard, who toss about the North Sea and the Baltic looking for freights, always dirty, always wet, rolling in a ground swell as though she were on her beam ends, and when she was loaded lying deep in the water like a sodden bucket, never lifting to the sea, sullen and slow.
She belonged to some obscure company with a French name, and by the look and feel of her she ought to have been condemned, plunging and groaning as she did in the slightest sea, the inches of water in her hold pumped out once, and sometimes twice a day, while her skipper was a Belgian who did not know his job.
This was my impression from the start, and so I think was Jake’s, for the fellow seemed to have no idea of time or discipline, treating the men as equals, lounging over the rail on his bridge, and going down the river from Stockholm he remained on this bridge, with a pair of glasses glued to his eyes, searching the thousand islands for bathing girls, while the black smoke from our stinking funnel swept into the pure air, and we must have looked like a clanking tin kettle hissing our way through the still blue water.
Once away from the river, though, and out in the Baltic, we met a high-running sea, and a strong wind blowing from the sou’-west, rain striking down from the low swift-scurrying clouds, and we were scarcely clear of the land when we realized what sort of a vessel we were in and what we might expect her behaviour to be.
The skipper, as I have said, was easy-going, good-natured and unreliable, and as if to make up for this he had for a mate a fellow who never kept still for a single moment, a concentrated bundle of nerves and fuss, who screamed and worried at the men, grumbling at our work, finding everything wrong and driving us all to the verge of mutiny.
They were a tough little crowd in the fo’c’sle of the Romanie. Besides Jake and I there were five Belgians, counting the cook, and a couple of firemen, both Dutch. We had no business to be there, of course, they were full without us, but the skipper accepted our services in return for our passage, and here we were, for better, for worse, tossed about on the Baltic in a dirty little tramp steamer, all because of the flick of a coin on the road to Otta. We were covering now much of the same distance as we had already done, on that first voyage from Helsingfors to Copenhagen in the barque Hedwig, but then the wind had been fair and the ship a thing of beauty for all her discomfort, and the Scandinavian boys were grand fellows, but there was not much romance in the dirty leaking Romanie, in this atmosphere of rust, and rain and coal, nor did I care about eating and sleeping beside these garlic-stinking bastards, who used any part of the fo’c’sle for any purpose. I hated them and I hated the ship, the only comfort was that Jake was there, and we could curse and blaspheme together. I don’t think Jake lost his temper much; he seemed impervious to the coal, the dirt and the stink in the fo’c’sle.
We talked of going south after we reached Nantes. We imagined the sun in Africa, the hot sky, and the dust in the streets. There would be little restaurants with orange blinds reaching down from the long windows, and tables huddled together, and a fat smiling waiter with black hair and a greasy face, flicking at the flies with a cloth. There would be white houses with the shutters closed, and purple flowers creeping against the walls, and lying in the cool shadow of a eucalyptus tree somebody would sleep, dusty and brown, his head in his hands. The sea would sparkle there, like a sweltering sheet of paper, and the grass and the trees be burnt yellow from the sun. I could see the streets, the patches of vivid colour, a woman in a blue apron shaking a bright rug from a high balcony, then leaning over this, lazy, yawning, listening to a banjo played in a restaurant below. The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, gold ear-rings showing from thick black hair brushed away from her face, long brown arms, a cigarette between her lips. Night like a great dark blanket, voices murmuring at a street corner, the air warm with tired flowers, and a hum from the sea.
When Jake told me about Africa we were standing outside the galley of the Romanie, pitching and tossing in the trough of a great sea, the water running along the deck and from the galley the smell of oil and grease, and brown garlic soup, and soot coming from the cheap coal.
Somebody had drawn pornographic figures on the bulkhead above the galley; they stood out strongly in white chalk, the pathetic creations of a stupid mind, very crude and obvious, as a child might have drawn. The men added bits from time to time, changing the attitudes, scratching words beside the figures, and then roaring with laughter, like little schoolboys, finding a strange stimulation, flushed, and proud of themselves.
I wondered if I had seemed thus to my father when I laid my verses on his desk before him, and if he could have thought less of me than I did of myself. It was all incredible to me that these things had once happened.
Meanwhile we sweated and toiled on the ship, we rose and fell in the grey sea.There was every kind of hell on board the Romanie.
‘When we get out of this,’ I said to Jake, ‘we’ll live in luxury, deck-chairs under palm trees, and a waiter in a white coat bringing drinks when we raise a finger. We’ll sleep all day, and reach out a tired hand for a great ripe passion fruit, while a dark girl stands behind the chair waving us with a paper fan.’
Jake did not say anything; he looked up at the sky and the wall of grey mist ahead of us, he watched the stern of the Romanie lift sluggishly to the high sea. ‘Dick,’ he said later, ‘do you notice how she wallows in it like something tired of the struggle? She hasn’t got any kick left; she wants to lay down her head and die.’
I wondered if Jake was joking at first, but when I saw his face I knew he was serious. He would not be an alarmist without reason; I trusted him about these things. When he said this I felt a little cold premonition of fear, and it was as though a voice whispered within me: ‘I shall remember this.’
In any other danger there would be a thrill for me, but not in the Romanie, not out here suddenly in that wall of fog, drifting helplessly . . .
‘Oh!’ I said,‘we’re all right now and making down the Channel. We can’t get lost with the traffic around.’
‘We’ve got a lonely stretch ahead of us, Dick,’ said Jake, ‘and we’ve got a couple of fools on the bridge looking after things. You don’t know the coast of Brittany, do you?’
I did not want to have to listen carefully to his words. I said to myself it did not matter; I had seen a fellow killed in Stockholm, anyway - this was nothing to me.
‘D’you think we’ll be for it, later?’ I asked.
I spoke carelessly, shutting from my mind a vision of sudden panic.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jake, and he looked at me strangely, as though he, too, held vistas of unspeakable things, but having greater courage than I he looked into them closely, not putting them away from him. It was easy to laugh, though, all the same, standing as we did by the galley in security.
‘Africa, Jake,’ I said, ‘we’re going to live there better than we’ve ever lived, the first night we get ashore.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
I was sure everything would be all right. There was a kind of conceit in me th
at gave me a firm belief in safety. In spite of this, I hated the Romanie. We went on down the Channel, the mist never lifting, the seas running high, and the wind blowing continuously from the south-west.
Even though it would have meant beating against it, I would rather have been in the barque Hedwig. Had the wind and the seas increased we could have hove to, lying as snug as a house.
Not the Romanie, though, groaning and shuddering in each successive sea, settling in the trough of it as Jake had said, like a soul who is weary of living. In the fo’c’sle the sides of the ship smelt of damp rust and iron-mould. The water ran in the bilges with a hollow sound. Outside the galley the cook had once hung a cloth, and he had forgotten to take it down. It fluttered now in the rain, sodden and grey, a torn rag. The bunting round the bridge was black with the soot and the rain.
The mate paced up and down, a small figure like a beetle in an oilskin several sizes too large for him.
The Dutch fireman came up for a breather; he put his head out of the round scuttle and sniffed at the rain. In the fo’c’sle one of the Belgians was playing on a mouth-organ; he drew in his breath with short, spasmodic jerks, and the tune came dolefully, a harsh, strained sound. Somehow the hearing of it brought back to me a memory of long ago, when I had been taken as a child by my mother to a bay some twenty miles from home. We had a picnic on the beach, and a mist had blown in upon us from the sea, even as this mist that wrapped the Romanie now, and listening I had heard the mournful tolling of a bell coming from a far distance across the bay. My mother told me it was a buoy, set in the sea to mark a dangerous ledge of rock, and when sailors heard the toll of it through the mist it served them as a warning, and they altered their course accordingly. The mouth-organ was like a poor thin echo of that tolling bell; it shivered its way through the air from the fo’c’sle to the galley door, borne on the wind and the rain. Someone began to sing against the tune in a different key, and then there was a great burst of laughter, and a silly, high French voice. It jarred horribly, and I shuddered for no reason. I hated the Romanie.