We did not get away so quickly as had been thought, and as every one seemed to wish. Heavy skies came on, giving the slack waters a leaden look. The air, though it was not hot, was close; and the fine dust from the grain which carpeted all the decks began to sit heavy on the lungs. Among the business outstanding remained that of stowing 7,500 bags in the bunker hatch–slower work, clearly, than the loading in bulk which had until now been the method with the Bonadventure. Bicker and Mead, as they supervised the trimming of hatches that had been filled, wore a melancholy look, nor was the entry at breakfast of two young men from the Customs, though pleasant acquaintances, considered a relief. If clouds disappeared, and left the day like a furnace, there was every facility for doing nothing at all. Even at evening the cabins were filled with tepid air and flies: and most of us might be found leaning over the rails in silence, watching sunset’s orange red colour to the prime and die away again in the sky and the water below it, scarcely marked with a ripple; and then the moon riding high above our bridge, itself not unexalted, not ungraceful by its proximity to the warehouse. In such a night comes Mead, and a consultation ends in my approaching Mouldytop the steward with respectful petition for ship’s biscuits. These soon refreshed in my mind Solomon’s choosing a dish of herbs and love over a stalled ox and hatred.

The time now arrived when I was honourably appointed to a job of work. I felt proud indeed when Meacock explained it to me. It was, to keep count of the number of bags of grain shipped for the bunker hatch and another one aft. The tallyman employed by the merchants kept his record, shouting out his “Una, dos, tres” until each tally of bags was complete; the ship’s representative looked on at the descending bags and made his oblique strokes in his book accordingly. This work in effect was not so simple as it sounds; sometimes after a pause the bags would be let loose suddenly and in quick succession, nor moreover was it possible to question the other tallyman at the moments of disagreement, since he spoke no English and I no Spanish.

This delivery of some thousands of bags was to be completed in the course of a day, but was not. The arrangement of shoots for the bags to travel down was as neat as a scenic railway: they slid down one, were deflected by a fixed bag at the foot of it to another shoot at right angles to it, and so on down to the caverns and the packers. The day’s work ended, but some thousands of bags remained to be put aboard, and I felt that I was growing used to times and seasons nautical, “the ways of a ship,” in the cook’s phrase. When a sergeant-major says, Parade at 8.30, he is understood to have ordered a parade for 8.15; but I suspect that at sea, should the tramp be expected away this week, next week is the actual time of departure.

Newspapers reached the ship from Buenos Aires, one day old, and by that time having an antiquarian value of twenty centavos, or fourpence. In consequence we generally went without; yet somehow important news, such as the result of Cardiff City versus Tottenham Hotspur, was quickly passed round. Unimportant, such as the latest development in the Anglo-Irish situation, was considered “politics,” and its seeker ignored.

The wharves were haunted, it goes without saying, by rats; more publicly, by dogs. One grey giant was regarded, especially by the mess-room boy, with romantic fondness. His history, if his, was current. He was “a Yankee,” but had lost his passage in the North American ship to which he belonged; and now, it was maintained, he made a complete round of all the docks, boarded every ship that came in, and looked into the alleyways to try and recognize his own. The dog did, I agree, wear a saddened expression. But, discreetly, I did not feel sure about his sentimental journey. It was “Mess-room” too who encouraged a cat to prepare for the homeward voyage, and I cannot say that he at first appeared likely to persuade the animal, which, shut in for the night, like Chips on a recent occasion, gave vent to piercing miaows. Parrots and monkeys, without which surely no sailor should ever return to his native village, were alike scarce.

The subject of my future standing in the village tavern had already been discussed when others failed. It now arose again. The saloon’s ideas of rural England were almost as broad as mine of sea life. They could see or affected to see nothing else in agriculture but one large joke; and its communities as so many tribes of gaping lads in smocks, with churchwardens, clustering about the oldest inhabitant. I had told them not once nor twice that no one in my village had any sense of distance, or wish to travel, or to hear of travels. But still it was believed that on my return I should be received at the inevitable “Green Cow” or “Pig and Whistle” with roars of applause, all mouths in the shape of O’s, all attentions grappled to my lightest word. More probably, I hinted, if I were to return and mention as a news item a voyage in a tramp to South America, the patronage would preserve a chilling silence, as who should say, “We are too old for these youthful frivolities. We are not amused”; and would then resume the old buzz of ‘sheening and jack hares and the riches of the rich’– But I was not heard.

Lightning, a passion with me, grew bright and furious towards the end of our stay, about the fall of darkness; in its blue flare, it was startling to see how like a wreck a Swedish motor-ship, which had put in because of a fire aboard, lay lonely at some distance from us. Presently the rain came down and cooled the air; the night grew quiet then, the far thunder dying out, or if there was noise, it was the cricket’s cry, and the gruff brief conversation of the ship’s watchman with his comrade on the wharf as he passed by.

Sunday came again, day of washing for Meacock and others; day of eggs and bacon for the Saloon’s breakfast, and with it special duff and crimson sauce for dinner, tinned pineapple and cake for tea. Fortified thus, Bicker and Mead and myself go a-fishing on the opposite quay, where some Argentines have been catching fine fish. Now it is, to the best of my memory, the fact that I have never yet caught one fish on Sunday; and so I should have been wiser than to have joined in this excursion. Luck stopped dead as soon as we began, and to make things worse, through a sleepy reply of Bicker’s I imagined the line to be made fast to the jetty, and threw out the sinker with special success “far out at sea.” That line was not made fast. It had belonged to the steward. He, when he heard the disaster, stood in a kind of rigor, gazing at high heaven as one insensible to misfortune.

And now came our last day at Ingeniero White. Not too soon, it seemed; the scenery of the port having but little of freshness, and the drama of loading again lacking in situations. Mosquitoes here served me well by arousing me in the early morning, as I was instructed to take a hand at six with tallying the bags of grain. I was there to the moment, but my duty proved to be that of standing by, enjoying life. At twelve, all hands were mustered amidships and numbered by the port authority, and one was missing. At length it was found out who, namely, one Towsle the sleepiest of the apprentices, and where–in his bath, dozing unaware of the parade outside the door. The pilot came aboard at three, and the tug Lydia presented herself to guide the Bonadventure out: there was much business with ropes fore and aft, and the ship swinging round was free of the wharf about the top of the tide. The warehouses with their stacks of bags, slippered blue-trousered handymen, surpliced overseers with their sampling hollow bayonets, railway trucks and capstans, ubiquitous dogs and all, began to recede. But we had not come more than a couple of miles from the elevators, nor out of sight of the refugee-like town behind them, when we anchored to await Hosea. At a considerable space from the town, all alone, we saw as we waited the big drab square building euphemistically known aboard as the “variety show.” It was a sad sight, and to me in its significance of some people’s luck in this world, a challenge to my random cheerful philosophy, which I have not yet been able entirely to dismiss.

Presently from the land a storm began to foreshadow itself, and suddenly there was a burst of wild piping wind, like a spiteful cry, that flung sharp rain over us and in scarcely a minute had died down again. Its short career sent every one interested scampering to take in the canvas awnings, and left a breeze which when the captain arrived in a launch, carrying some newspapers, blew them round him like a garment. He was wearing a straw hat. He jammed it on with a will and hurried up the rope ladder. With his return, we were at sea again, though not yet in the open.

The evening was one of strange majesty. One saw clouds amassing in every similitude of mountainous immensity and ascent, and wild lights everywhere burning among them; but most of all, a tawny lion’s colour mantled in a great tract of the sky and below shone dim yet in a manner dazzling from the darkening water. The heat of the day had been oven-like. Lightnings began after a red weeping sunset, sheet lightnings often veined with the fiercest forks of white flame, wreaths of golden fire, volleys, cataracts, serpents; and these danced about the horizon until daybreak, sometimes in silence, sometimes with deep but weary-sounding thunderclaps. The light that these wanderers cast was often of an intensity scarcely credible. A deluge of rain was always imminent, but only towards dawn arrived.

The Bonadventure had been, under these innumerable lights, making quiet way down an avenue of buoys twinkling in their degree, and came into view of the lightship beyond them. The pilot sounded the siren (for he was to leave us here), and in reply to the second call of the siren the lamp of a boat pulling out towards us appeared. It was good-bye to the pilot and his bag, which on the end of a rope now caused a moment’s interest; the engines, stopped to let him depart, were started again, and the captain fixed the ship’s course. Mead’s watch, as usually it was, shared by the purser, engaged us in more recollections of the great war; and in the glitter first of a swarm of dragon-flies, then presently the surly gleam of the lightning, we talked on until midnight. I admired him for having already forgotten all about his disappointment in the lottery, and begun with new hopes according to his motto; Quo fata vocant.

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