In Hazard Read online

  For it was in 1924 (during the first Labour Government), that I originally met Mr. MacDonald: in the “Archimedes,” a single-screw turbine steamer of a little over 9,000 tons.

  She was a fine ship. Purely a cargo-vessel (unless you refuse to class as cargo the Moslem pilgrims she occasionally carried). Her owners, one of the most famous Houses in Bristol, had a large fleet; but they loved each vessel and got the utmost out of her as if she was their child—a deep, sincere, selfish love like that, not mere sentiment. They built their ships to their own designs. They kept them in perfect repair, never hesitating to scrap anything that was antiquated or insecure. They never insured them. If there was any loss, it should be as much their own as the gains. There was a fanatical determination against any risk of loss, therefore, in everyone from the Chairman of the Company to the Ship’s Cat.

  No caution could be too great. Look at the funnel-guys of the “Archimedes,” for instance. They were designed to stand a strain of a hundred tons! But how could a strain of a hundred tons ever come upon funnel-guys? A wind of seventy-five miles an hour would blow every shred of canvas out of a sailing ship; yet even such a hurricane, the designers reckoned, would only lean against the funnel of “Archimedes” with a total pressure of ten or fifteen tons. The funnel itself (there was an inner one and an outer one bracketed together) was rigid enough to stand any such ordinary strain alone. When these guys were properly set up, that funnel was as safe as the Bank of England.

  II

  Mr. MacDonald, I think I said, was Chief Engineer. He was monarch of the engine-room, the fire-room, and various outlying territories.

  An engine-room is unlike anything in land architecture. It is an immensely tall space—reaching from the top of the ship, more or less, to the bottom. Huge. But, unlike most large architectural spaces (except perhaps Hell), you enter it through a small door at the top.

  Its emptiness is most ingeniously occupied by carefully placed machines: high and low pressure turbines, reduction gear, condensors, pumps and so on. But the visitor, of course, sees nothing of the nature of these machines, each being securely but-toned up in an iron case, with hundreds of heavy iron bolts for buttons. Large pipes of varying widths, some of them—cold—of shining bedewed copper, and others wrapped in thick white clothing to keep in their heat, connect one with another.

  You have seen, in a bush on a foggy day, the spider-runs among the branches? So, too, in an engine-room there are little metal runs at different levels, and gossamer steel stairs, to carry you to whatever part you want of these huge iron lumps: and above you are cranes and overhead railways to convey tools and spare parts for you, since such tools and spare parts often weigh several tons.

  The polished steel handrails are slippery with oil and moisture. The air, too, is a contrast to the bright sea-air outside: it is warm, and softened with steam (for a little always manages to escape from somewhere): and the place is moderately loud with the clangour of machinery.

  The stokehold (or fire-room), which you enter at the bottom ordinarily, through a low door from the bottom of the engine-room, is a very different place. The air here is hotter still; but quite dry. Here, moreover, is a symmetry more like that of land-architecture: a row of similar furnaces, small at the bottom and growing larger above, so that overhead they tend to come together, like gothic arches in a metal crypt (or the walls of a room in a dream).

  Opposite you, as you enter from the engine-room, is a line of oven-like doors, each with a little spyhole bright with the flames within. As you peer in through one of these holes at all that raging fire, it is hard to believe that it comes from the burning of only one little jet of hot oil, squirted through a nipple small enough to carry in a waistcoat pocket! And at the side of each furnace door is a container, such as you might stand an umbrella in. It holds a torch—a long iron rod with a bundle of rags at the end, immersed in oil. To relight a furnace (while it is still warm), all you need to do is to turn very carefully two cocks, one supplying the hot oil and the other a forced draught of air: and then a Chinaman lights the torch and thrusts it through a small hole into the empty, oven-like hollow of the furnace, where the hot oil vapor bursts immediately into a roaring flood of flame.

  Here, of course—in the fire-room—you are directly under the roots of the funnel. A steel ladder leads up into the space around its base, which is known as the Fiddley: and a doorway there gives direct access on to the deck for those firemen whose turn it is to enjoy a little fresh air: but the visitor to whom Mr. MacDonald is showing his regions generally passes back into the engine-room again.

  And there, beyond all this vastness of furnaces and clanging machinery, you will find at last the quiet, simple thing that all this is about: namely, a smooth column of steel, lying in cool and comfortable bearings and turning round and round with no sound—the propeller-shaft. A passage in which you cannot quite stand upright conveys its great length to the tail of the ship.

  Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship’s wake.

  III

  All that belonged exclusively to Mr. MacDonald, and so did certain other isolated mechanisms in the ship. The steering-gear, for instance, in its “house” on the after-castle (in the stern). That is a massive engine: yet its powerful forces, shifting with exactitude the heavy rudder, can be switched on or off by the delicate wrist of a Chinese quartermaster on the bridge, lightly twiddling the wheel. And should the wheel on the bridge for any reason be out of action, there is a second, an emergency wheel in the stern which can be connected up. But should the steam steering-engine itself fail, why, then you would be in a hole. For you cannot move so heavy a rudder by hand. Not all the man-power in the ship would suffice to move it one inch.

  What else shall I tell you, to describe to you “Archimedes”? I say nothing of her brilliant paint-work, or the beauty of her lines: for I want you to know her, not as a lover knows a woman but rather as a medical student does. (The lover’s part can come later.)

  Here is some more. The hull of a ship is double, and the space between the two skins is divided into compartments. It is these compartments in the actual walls of the ship which are called the tanks. They serve several purposes. Some contain the fuel oil (“Archimedes” being an oil-burning steamer). Others, if the sea is admitted to them, can be made to act as ballast, to control and adjust the stability of the ship. Others contain the fresh water. Access to these tanks can be had through man-holes, some of which are in the engine-room floor: and they are ventilated (fuel-oil gives off explosive gases) by some of those hook-topped pipes that you may have noticed on the promenade-deck of a liner, near the rails. It is the ship’s carpenter’s job to sound all these tanks once every watch, and record exactly the depth of whatever is in them.

  So much, then, for Mr. MacDonald’s region. He had under him seven engineer officers, their tartarean occupation indicated by a shred of purple against the gold on their sleeves: and under them was a sensible and skilful crew of Chinese firemen and greasers. The rest of the ship—the hull, the decks, and chiefest of all the cargo-space—belonged to Mr. Buxton, the Chief Officer, alias First Mate.

  It is curious how little interest deck-officers and engineers (of the old school) take in each other’s provinces. It is not so much a tactful avoidance of trespass as a complete ignoring. The engineer has to make certain machines work, but he has no interest whatever in what they are used for. He is as careless where they take him as a man’s stomach is ca
reless on what errand his legs are bound. The deck officer, for his part, hardly seems to know whether he is on a motor-ship or a steamer (except by the amount of dirt on the decks). He cannot explain the working of any simple mechanism that he employs every day. In their lives, too, they are segregated, as completely as boys and girls are in British education.

  Even in the “Archimedes,” where the policy was to throw them together, it did not really work. In the shipshape, decent mahogany of the Officers’ Saloon they dined at separate tables, the apprentices’ table as a barrier between them. Their quarters were separate. Even the Chinese firemen slept at one end of the ship, and the Chinese deckhands at the other!

  There are, of course, certain parts of the ship where the frontier is rather hard to draw—but drawn it is, everywhere. The inside of the funnel, for instance, belonged to Mr. MacDonald, the outside to Mr. Buxton. The steam-whistle belonged to Mr. MacDonald, but the foghorn unquestionably lay in the province of Mr. Buxton. This last point was not, in the “Archimedes,” so unimportant as it sounds. For it happened that Mr. Buxton had a slow-moving lemur, a “Madagascar Cat,” called Thomas; and it was in the foghorn that he habitually slept through the hours of daylight. He had the right to, seeing it was under his master’s rule. It was his sanctuary.

  This little Thomas slept all day, and he was not very energetic even at night. But he had one prejudice. He liked the human eye, and he did not approve of it being shut, ever. If he came into Mr. Buxton’s cabin while his master was asleep he would jump carefully on to the edge of the bunk, and then with anxious and delicate movements of his long fingers he would lift the sleeping man’s eyelids till the ball was fully exposed. This he would do to other deck-officers too, if he found them (to his distress) with their eyes shut at night upon any excuse whatever. They had, of course, to put up with Thomas (if the night was too hot to shut their doors): it was a matter of discipline. A woman in English society takes the rank of her husband: and at sea a pet takes the rank of its owner. An insult to the Chief Officer’s lemur would be an insult to the Chief Officer.

  As for the Engineers, Thomas knew well enough that he must never so much as approach their quarters: and in his master’s foghorn no-one dared to touch him.

  IV

  In the late summer of 1929 (five years after my first meeting with Mr. MacDonald) the “Archimedes” took in a mixed cargo at various ports on the Atlantic seaboard, for the Far East. The elaborate matter of its stowage Mr. Buxton was responsible for, of course (a deck officer has actually to know more about cargo than about waves). At New York he stowed some bags of wax at the bottom. Then came many kinds of mixed whatnots. One item was a number of tons of old newspapers, which the Chinese like to build their houses of. These were mostly stowed in the ’tween-decks—high up, that is to say, since they were comparatively light. At Norfolk (Virginia) they took in some low-grade tobacco, also bound for China, where it would be made into cheap cigarettes. This too was stowed in the ’tween-decks.

  Norfolk was the last loading port, and they were delayed there a bit. This was not irksome, however. Philadelphia, in spite of the stink in the docks, had been all right in its way since most of the officers had friends there; but Norfolk far outdid even Philadelphia in hospitality. The Master and the Chief Officer (it is a rule) must never both go ashore at the same time. Yet at Norfolk there were so many parties that both could have their fill of pleasure. Even Mr. MacDonald, when he could be persuaded to go to one of these affairs, grew gay—or at least, gayish.

  The junior officers mostly attended other and more casual parties, at which they had many eye-opening experiences. Mr. Watchett, for instance, of the sober East Anglian market-town of Fakenham, a very young officer, was caught up suddenly one night by a troop of Southern boys and girls. He told them he came from Norfolk, England—it was enough introduction. He had never seen them before that minute, but they treated him at once with the kindly indifference of old friends. They danced his legs off, somewhere; and then suddenly crowded into cars, and drove out into the night. The hot smell of oiled, sandy roads: the very high trees almost meeting overhead: the din of frogs and insects. They arrived at a fine Colonial house and gave Dick Watchett corn-whisky in a room full of elaborate Victorian-looking furniture that smelt musty.

  They were all highly civilised. Amongst them was one older man, an ex-soldier. He wore a gilt and ormolu leg with his evening clothes, for he held that the merely serviceable artificial limb which he wore with his day-clothes was wrong with a tuxedo. There was also in the party one very lovely fair girl, with wide innocent eyes. She was in the first bud of youth—still at High School. She told Dick that she came of a peculiarly aristocratic family, the property of whose blood, for countless generations, had been to send any flea which bit them raving mad. This property, indeed, had been their ruin. For her father, in order to win a footling bet, had wantonly deranged the wits of some of the most valuable performers in a flea-circus: and the family plantation had to be mortgaged to pay the enormous damages which the Court awarded against him. At least, so she told Dick.

  This was the first inkling which Dick Watchett had that America, as well as Europe, held her ancient aristocratic families, jealous of their blood.

  The man with the gilt and ormolu leg kept trying to make love to this girl (whose name was Sukie). She resented it, being actually as innocent even as she looked: so she adopted Dick as her protector, nestling against him like a bird. He did not notice that she was drinking far more neat corn-whisky even than he drank himself. Actually it was more than she was used to, being so young, and this her first party of the kind also: but having begun it did not occur to her to stop. It arrived in glass jars, each holding a gallon: so there was plenty.

  Presently she told Dick she had a cat so smart that it first ate cheese and then breathed down the mouseholes—with baited breath—to entice the creatures out. Her eyes were getting very wild: and sometimes, as she lay in Dick’s arm, she shivered. Dick did not try to talk to her much: but he enjoyed her being there. His own head was a little giddy, and the party seemed to advance and recede, and was difficult to listen to. But Sukie, by then, must have drunk quite a pint of the bootleg liquor neat, which is a lot for a girl of sixteen: and in time it took hold of her altogether. She suddenly struggled out of his arms, and sprang to her feet. Her eyes, wider than ever, did not seem to see anybody, even him. She wrenched at her shoulder-straps and a string or two, and in a moment every stitch of clothing she had was gone off her. For a few seconds she stood there, her body stark naked. Dick had never seen anything like it before. Then she fell unconscious on the floor.

  Dick set down his own drink suddenly, a wilder intoxication thumping in his ribs. She had been lovely in her clothes, but she was far more lovely like this, fallen in a posture as supple as a pool; all that white skin; her forlorn little face, with its closed eyes, puckered already in the incipient distress of nausea. Suddenly Dick realised that everyone else had left the room: and as suddenly he realised that he loved this girl more than heaven and earth. With shaking hands he rolled her in the hearth-rug, for fear she should catch cold: made her as comfortable as he could on a sofa; and returned, shaking, to his ship.

  For hours he lay awake, quite unable even to dim the vivid picture in his inward eye of Sukie’s drunken innocence. But at last he fell asleep, her lovely face and her naked body flickering in his dreams. And then presently he was awakened by feeling his heavy lids lifted by thin little fingers, and found himself staring, through the texture of his dream, into large, anxious, luminous eyes, only an inch from his own; eyes that were not Sukie’s. He bashed at the electric light switch in a panic.

  It was Thomas, with his soft fur and his big tail, hopping away on his unnaturally elongated feet, nervously folding and unfolding his ears.

  The next night, the night before their departure for Colon and the Panama Canal, Captain Edwardes gave a party on board, with dancing to a gramophone. The gramophone belonged to Mr. Foster, the S
econd Mate. The ladies were friends of the Captain’s: relatives of the company’s agent chiefly, or of the shippers. They were picked by the dictates of duty. None of them were young, and none beautiful: and not being aristocratic like Dick’s friends, they behaved with a strict but slightly coarse decorum. Captain Edwardes himself, Mr. Buxton, and Mr. MacDonald, were as happy and as flirtatious as children, and the dance went on till very late—till nearly half past eleven.

  The only officer who did not take part was Mr. Rabb. Mr. Rabb did not belong in the “Archimedes”: he was down as a Supernumerary Officer, not as a numbered mate. He really belonged to the “Descartes”—another of the Sage Line’s fleet of philosophers: and was to be landed at Colon to join her.

  Mr. Rabb was a strict Christian, and did not really approve of dancing under any conditions. But especially he thought it wrong on the part of senior officers with impressionable young juniors in their charge. Apart from the four apprentices, who were still boys, there was Dick Watchett, for instance. To dance with these ladies might well arouse in him those very passions from which a life at sea was intended by God as a refuge. Watchett showed very little outward sign of being inflamed by holding any of these partners in his arms; yet it was against nature that he should in fact not be—who knew that better than Mr. Rabb? And the young are so deceitful.

  However, it was not his business: this was not even his ship. But he hoped Captain Theobald, of the “Descartes,” would prove more serious-minded.

  Dick Watchett liked Mr. Rabb, as did all juniors who came in contact with him. The midshipmen adored him. And indeed he was a likeable person, with his crisp hearty voice, his clean mind, and his courteous manner with the young or the poor—the best type of Englishman.