The Bonadventure entered the tropics, calm, hot, blue expanse. I do not know why, but our passing into that zone was for me contemporary with an access of wild and vivid dreams. These were odd enough to cause me to record what remained of them in the morning, and as they still seem prominent in my recollections of my sea-going, I make a note of some of them. Now, it was no other than the great Lord Byron, pursuing me with a knife, applauded by two ladies. The basis of actuality, at least, was there. Now I was taking my way along weedy rivers, which at first were the innocent shallow streams I once met and knew in Kent. But as the dream progressed a Byronic change came over it; and these streams grew more and more foul with weeds and grotesque in stagnation, until I realized as if with an awakening that they were full of tremendous fish, pike perhaps, often perch, and hybrids of many colours and streakings. These fish lay watching, stretched from one bank to the other; their number, my loneliness, their immensity, my fixity conspired to frighten me unspeakably.

At other times the river was in flood, and I, as before, compelled by the secret of the matter to walk along its towpath, in danger of its torrents; the path itself became unknown, or lay between two huge channels choking with muddy torrents. Ever expecting the worst, I was suddenly at an ancient mill, watching

gliding under the footbridge. This was sickly phantasm, the very waters breathing decay. The scene swiftly changed. Paddington! and you, dear old friend C., racing with me across the metals to catch a train, and— Then C. is in his grave again, and I am in a trap outside my old home; a stranger stands in the road, cuts his throat; I look on, smile, and shudder, for he races after the trap with his knife; but I outstare his Malayan eyes, and he gives up the chase. By way of respite, I now walked at leisure into a bookshop, and my hand fell upon rarities indeed. The Church, by Leigh Hunt–I had never seen that before! “We don’t have much time for dinner,” said the bookseller, and I took the hint and went out.

And there were other familiar scenes in this phase of nightly alienation. On occasion, though I awoke several times from a haunting, I fell asleep again to return to it. Half-nonsense as these dreams were, there was a persistent force about them. Here was the battalion, expecting to be attacked. Its nerves, and mine, were restive. The attack broke out farther up the line, and we got off with a reaction almost as unwelcome as a battle. Or I was in a town behind the line, into which a number of very small round gas-shells were falling; then, in the cattle-truck for the front; presently, in the wild scenery of great hills and deep curving ravines which I seemed to know so well. (The entrenched ridges in the unnatural light of the flares looked monstrous once.) I was company commander; we were to be relieved; and, God, what had I done? Begun to bring my men out before the other crowd had come up! The mound would be lost, I should be “for it.” The company must be halted in the open; and so we waited for the relief. It never came.

Still the dreams came: the war continued. S. S. was with me, walking up a big cobbled road, muddy as ever, towards the front. On every side lay exhausted men, not caring whether they were in the mud or not. I was not quite sure, but was not this Poperinghe Station? At that station was–I hope is–an hotel, bearing the legend, “Bifsteck À Toute Heure”; was this gaudy-looking place, perhaps, the same? At all events, S. S. said, “Let’s go and have a port.” We did, and the drink appears to have gone to my head, for I now found myself alone, walking across a large common or pasture. Here Mary and another woman went by, but I could not at the moment recognize them. There, beyond the common with its dry tussocks, stood a town, flanked by mountains, which I knew to be–Barry. A cathedral or abbey of white stone rose in gigantic strength into the sunlight. This place, I soliloquized, so near the line, and yet not shelled! But I was not to escape. I proceeded. The screen alongside was blown down. Better slink along these hedges at the double! It was the support line. Some large splinter-proof dugouts came into sight, and some officers, who told me about an attack. We were going over. I recognized my destined end.

However, I woke up alive, having again suffered more from fear and the atmosphere of it–in projection–in a few seconds, than I was ever conscious of suffering in a day of the actual war. With weary and aching head, whether these fantasies were to blame or not, I looked out to ask the wireless expert if there had been a storm in the night. He grinned, and going farther I saw outside a sea of pale glow not a great deal more disturbed than a looking-glass.

The ashen whiteness soon gave place to a deep blue, and our entry into the tropics became plainer and plainer, the sea fluttering with the sun’s blaze. This was unfamiliar also, to be roasting on the water in January. The pith-helmet season began. The third mate could not claim a pith helmet, but he displayed what none of the others could, as he sat washing on the step of the alleyway–a marvellous red and blue serpent tattooed on his arm, by the very Chinaman, he said, who had tattooed King George. It was, I still think, a superfine serpent.

Washing, or “dobing,” was not Mead’s sole recreation. Literature, and even poetry, with limitations, had its power over him. Suspecting me of critical curiosity about his favourite poets, he directly approached the matter. Rudyard Kipling and “A Sentimental Bloke” were satisfactory, but he couldn’t bear the others who gave their views on love. Lawrence Hope had done one or two good things–but the rest, as Keats, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and so forth, might as well be cut out. His approval of Kipling was confirmed by Meacock’s saying in the saloon, where books and authors were a favourite pabulum, “H’m–the third mate seems to be getting very interested in Kipling. He brought me a paper with all he could remember of IF written out on it, and asked me if I could supply any of the rest.”

This literary halo aroused Bicker, who was already known to me as the ship’s poet, and had unfortunately left his MSS. at home. He now urged his claims. “The gardener called me Poet when I was about seven or eight, and I often get called that now.” The chief, chuckling, brought off his little joke. “I suppose that’s what drove you to sea.”

In connection, no doubt, with poetry, that strange device, the mate looked back to a ship in which he once served, and which was chartered to carry the largest whale ever caught in Japanese waters to New York for the New York Museum. By whale, he said he meant the skeleton, of course; but it had been sketchily cleaned, “and when we got her to New York,” he said with a comical frown, “nobody could get near the hatches”: and, finding the sequence easy, he added that there was often some peculiar cargo on that New York-Hong Kong run–take for instance those rows of dead Chinamen in the ’tween-deck homeward bound.

The face of the sky often held me delighted. There is nothing, I think, of dullness about this world’s weather; and its hues and tones may still be a sufficient testing theme for the greatest artists with pen or pencil. To express the sunset uprising of clouds, many of them in semblance of towering ships under full sail, many more like creatures mistily seen in endless pastures, was an attempt in which my own vocabulary scarcely lasted a moment. One evening, the nonpareil of its race, especially “burned the mind.”

At first the blue temple was hung with plumes of cloud, golden feathers. When these at last were grey, a rosy flush swiftly came along them, like a thought, and passed. It seemed as though the night had come, when the loitering tinges of the rose in a few seconds grew unutterably red, and the spectacle was that of an aerial lattice or trellis among the clouds, overgrown with the heavenly original of all roses. “In Xanadu—” From brightness the amassed cloud-bloom still increased to brightness: then suddenly the flames turned to ember. Even now again a ghost of themselves glowed, until all was gone, and Sirius entered upon his tenancy of another glory, and Orion and Canopus, casting a hoar-frost glimmer ahead of the riding ship.

Hosea agreed this was a remarkable sunset; then took me off to the friendly tot and talk in his room. He loved to discuss all sorts of theory in art and religion, of which he might have been, with a slight change of circumstance in his boyhood, a student and enthusiast: meanwhile, the sailor in him would be rummaging through the makings of a curiosity shop which crowded his official desk, besides the manifests and ship’s articles–his watches, knives, coins and notes of twenty countries, photographs of friends all over the world.

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