I am grown tired of books. It is a fact that protracted manual toil strikes a shrewd blow at one’s capacity for thought, and at times I turn from the fierce intellectual life with a weariness I never knew in the old days. How my friend would smile at such a confession. I, who have thumped the supper-table until three in the morning, until our eyelids were leaden with fatigue, growing weary of the strife! Yet it is sometimes true.

After all, though, my real study nowadays is on deck and below, where Shakespeare and the musical glasses are beyond the sky-line, and one can talk to men who have never in their lives speculated upon life, have never imagined that life could possibly be arraigned and called in question, or that morality could ever be anything but “givin’ the girl her lines, like a man.” My friend the Mate is a compendium of humanism, the Chief provides me with curious researches in natural history. Even the Cook, with whom I have been conversing, presents new phases of life to me, and brings me into touch with the poor, the ignorant, and the prolific. The poor whom we know at home are only poor in purse. These men are poor in everything save courage and the power to propagate their kind. The Cook has received a letter from his sister-in-law to the effect that he is now the father of twins, and he looks at me and smiles grimly. Under the pretence of obtaining hot water for shaving, I am admitted to his sanctum sanctorum abaft the funnel, and we talk. It is hardly necessary to say that the Malthusian doctrine receives cordial approbation from my friend the Cook, when I have expounded it to him.

“Certainly, Mr. McAlnwick,” he observes, “but ’ow are you goin’ to start?”

“You see,” I reply, “it isn’t a question of starting, but a question of stopping.”

“Well,” he says stolidly, rolling a cigarette, “’ow are you goin’ to start stoppin’?”

“You,” I answer, “might have dispensed with these twins.”

“Lord love yer, mister, I can dispense with ’em easy enough. That’s not the question. The question is, ’ow am I to feed ’em, now I’ve got ’em? An’ ’ow am I to avoid ’em, me bein’ a man, mind, an’ not a lump o’ dry wood?”

Like all theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I look round me, and watch my interlocutor preparing to make bread. There is a mammoth pan on the bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with a lake of water in the middle. Cook is opening the yeast-jar, an expression of serious intent on his face. Some cooks sing when they make bread; the Scotchman I told you of in a previous letter invariably trilled “Stop yer ticklin’, Jock,” and his bread was invariably below par. But this cook does not warble. He only releases the stopper with a crack like a gun-shot, flings the liquid “doughshifter” over the lake in a devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m., and his wife can find nothing better to do than present him with twins!

I look into the glowing fire and think.

I feel this is delicate ground, even allowing for the natural warmth of a man who has twins, so I am silent.

“Sometimes,” Cook continues, growing pensive as the dough grows stiff, “sometimes I feel as though I could jump over the side with a ‘’ere goes nothink’ and a bit of fire-bar in me ’ip-pocket. Same blasted work, day after day. Monday curry an’ rice, fresh meat an’ two veg., ‘’arriet lane’ and spuds. Toosday, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully soup an’ pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an’ clean the galley. Sat’day, ‘’arriet lane’ an’ spuds, fresh meat, two veg., an’ tart. Sunday, similar with eggs an’ bacon aft. What good do it do? Who’s the better for it all? Not me. ‘’Ere goes nothink!’”

He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in the door, and pushes his cauldrons about. To one who knows Cook all this is merely the safety-valve lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so he will be smiling again, and telling me how nearly he married a laundryman’s daughter in Tooley Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with pathos. It appears that, after bidding the fair blanchisseuse good-night, he chanced one evening to take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where he fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing appearance. Quite oblivious of the fact that Mademoiselle Soap-Suds had followed him, “just to see if he was as simple as he looked,” he enjoyed himself immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran right into her. He assures me he was “’orror-struck.” Like a man, he admitted that he was conversing with “that—that there.” I always like this part of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been the uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. Alas, the heiress of Soap-Suds Senior had no appreciation of the queenly attribute of forgiveness. She boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. “She was allus a spiteful cat,” he observes pensively; “so p’raps the wash ’us ’ud ha’ been dear at the price. Still, it was a nice little business, an’ no kid.”

As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head and shoulders fill up the upper half of the galley doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for some “crawfish legs.” Like Mr. Peggotty and the crustacea he desires to consume, he has gone into hot water very black, and emerges very red. His flannel shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest—I see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and asks for a match.

“Well, Donkey,” says Cook, “’ow goes it?”; “Donkey” is the mighty Norseman’s professional title aboard ship.

“Aw reet, mon,” says he with the fiendish aptitude of his race for idiom. “How is the Kuck?”

“Oh, splendid. Stand out o’ the way, and let me make thy daily bread.”

“Daily!” screams the Donkeyman. “Tell that to the marines. I have one loaf sof’ bread three times a week, an’ there are seven days to a week. Daily! Tell that——”

“Find another ship, me man, find another ship if the Benvenuto don’t suit!” And the Mate passes on to the chart-house, where are many dogs.

“Ay, will I, when we get to Swansea,” says the Donkey man to me, beaming. “There are more ships than parish churches, eh? Mister, I want to speak to you. Come out here.” I go outside in the moonlight, and the mighty Norseman takes hold of the second button of my patrol-jacket.

“Well, Donkey?”

“I ’ave had a letter from Marianna,” he whispers.

“Ah! And so she is——”

“She is Marianna, always Marianna now. A good letter—two and a half page. See, in German, mister. She write it very well, Marianna.” And I behold a letter in German script.

Tastes differ. I am compelled to believe that passion can flow even through German script—aye, when it is written by a Swedish maiden of uncertain caligraphy. Heavenly powers! I turn the sheet to the light from the galley. Surely no mortal can decipher such a farrago of alphabetical obscurity. And I do so want to know what Marianna says for herself. I love Marianna, for the mighty Norseman says she is small and dainty, and her eyes are grey, and—and—well, the resemblance doesn’t end there; so when I tell my friend, he may laugh as much as he pleases. But there had been a quarrel (in German script), and the mighty Norseman had grown mightily misogynistic. His jolly pasty face had been as long as my arm most of the way out, and his sentiments, confided to me each day at seven bells, were discourteous to the sex. But now, behold the cloud lifted: German script has undone its own villainy, and Johann Nicanor Gustaffsen beams.

“I will go ’ome this time, mister,” he says, folding up the reconciling hieroglyphics.

“How, Donkey—work it?”

“Not much, you bet. I go to London and take a Swedish boat from Royal Albert Docks to Gothenburg, train from Gothenburg to Marianna. Seventeen knots quadruple twin screw. I will be a passenger for one quid.”

“Donkey, did you ever hear of Ibsen—Henrik Ibsen?”

“Ibsen? Noa. What ship is he Chief of, mister?”

“A ship that passes in the night, Donkey.”

“What’s that, mister?”

How small a thing is literary fame, after all! When one considers the density of the human atmosphere, the darkness in which the millions live, is not Ibsen to them a ship passing in the night indeed, a mysterious light afar off, voyaging they know not where? Perhaps that is what I meant.

“He wrote plays, Donkey—Schauspielschreiber, you know.”

“Oa! Ich hatte nicht daran gedacht! ’Ave you a bit of paper and envelope, mister, please? I will write to Marianna.”

“Give her my love, Donkey.”

“Oh-a-yes, please! I’ll watch it! What? You cut me out?” A rumbling laugh comes up from that mighty chest, he beams upon me, and plunges into the galley for his crawfish legs.