Under the Volcano (22 page)

 
Philoctetes
 
in an interview as a tramp. Tramp or no, the whole ship rolled and
weltered in bourgeois prejudices and taboos the like of which Hugh had not
known even existed. Or so it seemed to him. It is wrong, though, to say she
rolled. Hugh, far from aspiring to be a Conrad, as the papers suggested, had
not then read a word of him. But he was vaguely aware Conrad hinted somewhere
that in certain seasons typhoons were to be expected along the China coast.
This was such a season; here, eventually, was the China coast. Yet there seemed
no typhoons. Or if there were the
 
Philoctetes
 
was careful to avoid
them. From the time she emerged from the Bitter Lakes till she lay in the roads
at Yokohama a dead monotonous calm prevailed. Hugh chipped rust through the
bitter watches. Only they were not really bitter; nothing happened. And they
were not watches; he was a day worker. Still, he had to pretend to himself,
poor fellow, there was something romantic in what he had done. As was there
not! He might easily have consoled himself by looking at a map. Unfortunately
maps also too vividly suggested school. So that going through the Suez he was
not conscious of sphinxes, Ismailia, nor Mt Sinai; nor through the Red Sea, of
Hejaz, Asir, Yemen. Because Perim belonged to India while so remote from it,
that island had always fascinated him. Yet they stood off the terrible place a
whole forenoon without his grasping the fact. An Italian Somaliland stamp with
wild herdsmen on it was once his most treasured possession. They passed
Guardafui without his realizing this any more than when as a child of three
he'd sailed by in the opposite direction. Later he did not think of Cape
Comorin, or Nicobar. Nor, in the Gulf of Siam, of Pnom-Penh. Maybe he did not
know himself what he thought about; bells struck, the engine thrummed;
 
videre; videre;
 
and far above was perhaps another sea, where
the soul ploughed its high invisible wake--
   
Certainly Sokotra only became a
symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have
passed within figurative hailing distance of his birthplace never occurred to
him... Hong Kong, Shanghai; but the opportunities to get ashore were few and
far between, the little money there was they could never touch, and after
having lain at Yokohama a full month without one shore leave Hugh's cup of
bitterness was full. Yet where permission had been granted instead of roaring
in bars the men merely sat on board sewing and telling the dirty jokes Hugh had
heard at the age of eleven. Or they engaged in loutish neuter compensations.
Hugh had not escaped the Pharisaism of his English elders either. There was a
good library on board, however, and under the tutelage of the lamp-trimmer Hugh
began the education with which an expensive public school had failed to provide
him. He read the
 
Forsyte Saga
 
and
 
Peer Gynt . It was largely owing to the lamp-trimmer too, a kindly
quasi-Communist, who normally spent his watch below studying a pamphlet named
the Red Hand, that Hugh gave up his notion of dodging Cambridge. "If I
were you I'd go to the poxing place. Get what you bloody can out of the
set-up."
   
Meanwhile his reputation had followed
him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the
Singapore
 
Free Press
 
might read "Murder of Brother-in-Law's
Concubine" it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some
such passage as: "A curly-headed boy stood on the fo'c'sle head of
the
 
Philoctetes
 
as she docked in Penang strumming his latest
composition on the ukelele." News which any day now would turn up in
Japan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least
Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward
voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole
object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of
eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from
 
Singing the Blues,
 
he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress.
He certainly didn't think of any other mistresses he might have had at home.
His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long
ago. A tender smile of Mrs Bolowski's, flashed in dark New Compton Street, had
haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the
advertisements for music halls up north. Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly
6.30, 8.30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis balls on crisp turf,
and their swift passage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea
(despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the
 
Philoctetes ), the recently acquired taste
for good English ale and old cheese...
   
But above all there were his songs,
which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that
very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice
nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by
those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking
of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already
brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel,
having gone through hell, through "fire"--and Hugh persuaded himself
such really was the case--he had earned as his right and reward.
   
But the time came when Hugh
 
did
 
go
through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the
 
Oedipus Tyrannus , whose namesake the
lamp-trimmer of the
 
Philoctetes might
have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote,
yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the
tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this
seemed about to happen, on the Philoctetes's poop all was excitement, then as
the vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a
megaphone:
   
"Give Captain Telson Captain
Sanderson's compliments, and tell him he's been given a foul berth!"
   
The Oedipus Tyrannus, which, unlike
the
 
Philoctetes, carried white firemen,
had been away from home the incredible period of fourteen months. For this
reason her ill-used skipper was by no means so anxious as Hugh's to deny his
ship was a tramp. Twice now the Rock of Gibraltar had loomed on his starboard
bow only to presage not Thames, or Mersey, but the Western Ocean, the long trip
to New York. And then Vera Cruz and Colón, Vancouver and the long voyage over
the Pacific back to the Far East. And now, just as everyone was feeling certain
this time at last they were to go home, he had been ordered to New York once
more. Her crew, especially the firemen, were weary to death of this state of
affairs. The next morning, as the two ships rode again at a gracious distance,
a notice appeared in the Philoctetes's after messroom calling for volunteers to
replace three seamen and four firemen of the Oedipus Tyrannus. These men would
thus be enabled to return to England with the
 
Philoctetes, which had been at sea only three months, but within the
week on leaving Yokohama would be homeward bound.
   
Now at sea more days are more
dollars, however few. And at sea likewise three months is a terribly long
while. But fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an
eternity. It was not likely that the Oedipus Tyrannus would face more than
another six of vagrancy: then one never knew; it might be the idea gradually to
transfer her more long-suffering hands to homegoing vessels when she contacted
them and keep her wandering two more years. At the end of two days there were
only two volunteers, a wireless watcher and an ordinary seaman.
   
Hugh looked at the Oedipus Tyrannus
in her new berth, but swinging again rebelliously close, as to the tether of his
mind, the old steamer appearing now on one quarter, now on another, one moment
near the breakwater, the next running out to sea. She was, unlike the
 
Philoctetes, everything in his eyes a ship
should be. First she was not in rig a football boat, a mass of low goalposts
and trankums. Her masts and derricks were of the lofty coffee-pot variety.
These former were black, of iron. Her funnel too was tall, and needed paint.
She was foul and rusty, red lead showed along her side. She had a marked list
to port, and, who knows, one to starboard as well. The condition of her bridge
suggested recent contact--could it be possible?--with a typhoon. If not, she
possessed the air of one who would soon attract them. She was battered,
ancient, and, happy thought, perhaps even about to sink. And yet there was
something youthful and beautiful about her, like an illusion that will never
die, but always remains hull-down on the horizon. It was said she was capable
of seven knots. And she was going to New York! On the other hand should he sign
on her, what became of England? He was not so absurdly sanguine about his songs
as to imagine his fame so bright there after two years... Besides, it would
mean a terrible readjustment, starting all over again. Still, there could not
be the same stigma attaching to him on board. His name would scarcely have
reached Colón. Ah, his brother Geoff, too, knew these seas, these pastures of
experience, what would he have done?
   
But he couldn't do it. Galled as he
was lying a month at Yokohama without shore leave it was still asking too much.
It was as if at school, just as the end of term beautifully came in sight, he
had been told there would be no summer holidays, he must go on working as usual
through August and September. Save that no one was telling him anything. Some
inner self, merely, was urging him to volunteer so that another sea-weary man,
homesick longer than he, might take his place. Hugh signed on board the Oedipus
Tyrannus.
   
When he returned to the
 
Philoctetes a month later in Singapore he was
a different man. He had dysentery. The Oedipus Tyrannus had not disappointed
him. Her food was poor. No refrigeration, simply an icebox. And a chief steward
(the dirty wog) who sat all day in his cabin smoking cigarettes. The fo'c'sle
was forward too. He left her against his will however, due to an agential
confusion, and with nothing in his mind of Lord Jim, about to pick up pilgrims
going to Mecca. New York had been shelved, his shipmates, if not all the
pilgrims would probably reach home after all. Alone with his pain off duty Hugh
felt a sorry fellow. Yet every now and then he rose on his elbow: my God what a
life! No conditions could be too good for the men tough enough to endure it.
Not even the ancient Egyptians knew what slavery was. Though what did he know
about it?
   
Not much. The bunkers, loaded at
Miki--a black coaling port calculated to fulfil any landsman's conception of a
sailor's dreams, since every house in it was a brothel, every woman a
prostitute, including even an old hag who did tattoos--were soon full: the coal
was near the stokehold floor. He had seen, only the bright side of a trimmer's
job, if it could be said to have one. But was it much better on deck? Not
really. No pity there either. To the sailor life at sea was no senseless
publicity stunt.
   
It was dead serious. Hugh was
horribly ashamed of ever having so exploited it. Years of crashing dullness, of
exposure to every kind of obscure peril and disease, your destiny at the mercy
of a company interested in your health only because it might have to pay your
insurance, your home-life reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen
mat every eighteen months, that was the sea. That, and a secret longing to be
buried in it. And an enormous unquenchable pride. Hugh now thought he realized
dimly what the lamp-trimmer had tried to explain, why he had been alternately
abused and toadied to on the
 
Philoctetes.
   
It was largely because he had
foolishly advertised himself as the representative of a heartless system both
distrusted and feared.
   
Yet to seamen this system offers far
greater inducement than to firemen, who rarely emerge through the hawsehole
into the bourgeois upper air. Nevertheless, it remains suspect. Its ways are
devious. Its spies are everywhere. It will wheedle to you, who can tell, even
on a guitar. For this reason its diary must be read. One must check up, keep
abreast of its deviltries. One must, if necessary, flatter it, ape it, seem to
collaborate with it.
   
And it, in turn, flatters you. It yields
a point here and there, in matters such as food, better living conditions, even
though it has first destroyed the peace of mind necessary to benefit by them,
libraries. For in this manner it keeps a stranglehold on your soul. And because
of this it sometimes happens you grow obsequious and find yourself saying:
"Do you know, you are working for us, when we should be working for
you?" That is right too.
   
The system is working for you, as you
will shortly discover, when the next war comes, bringing jobs for all.
"But don't imagine you can get away with these tricks for ever," you
are repeating all the time in your heart; "Actually we have you in our
grip. Without us in peace or war Christendom must collapse like a heap of
ashes!" Hugh saw holes in the logic of this thought. Nevertheless, on
board the Oedipus Tyrannus, almost without taint of that symbol, Hugh had been
neither abused nor toadied to. He had been treated as a comrade. And generously
helped, when unequal to his task. Only four weeks. Yet those weeks with the
Oedipus Tyrannus had reconciled him to the