Once more I am writing “homeward bound.” Homeward bound! Outside the Channel fog is coming down to enfold us, the wind is cold, my stock of fruit, laid in at Las Palmas is done, and George the Fourth is growling through the ventilator, “T’ Longships, mister!”

Longships—that’s twelve hours’ run from the Mumble Head, the great white lenticular lenses of which fling wide-sweeping spokes of light across the tumbling waters of the Channel. The Skipper is cautious, has been twenty-two hours on bridge and in chart-room; refuses to go ahead until he can locate Lundy. We heard, in Grand Canary, that the big White Star Satanic is lying near the Lizard, back broken, total loss, heroic passengers all safely landed. Wonderful people, passengers. If they keep hysteria at a distance for a few hours, they are bravoed from one end of the Empire to the other. The Satanic’s engineers? The Empire has overlooked them, I suppose, which is their own peculiar glory.

Homeward bound! “Finishing,” too, for three of us. Chief, Second, and Fourth are leaving when we get in, and I shall be alone for a few days. That means work, I fear, and no joyful run up to Paddington this time. Well, well, next time I finish, and we shall foregather in the Walk once more. I was thinking, only a day or two back, that Chelsea Embankment must be in its glory now, glory of early spring. That noble line of granite coping and twinkling lights. How often have we walked down past the Barracks from Knightsbridge, taken pot-luck at the coffee-stall at the corner, and then fared homeward between the river and the trees! Ah, me! To do it once again—that is what I long for.

In the meanwhile, the Longships are away astern, the Skipper has found Lundy, a grey hump on the port bow in the morning light, and we are “full ahead” for the Mumbles. Sailors’ bags are drying on the cylinder-tops, Chief, Second, and Fourth are fixing up a “blow-out” up town to-morrow night; mess-room steward is polishing the brasswork till it shines like gold; and I am writing to my very good friend. We are all very cheerful, too; no “sailors’ gloom” in our faces as we go on watch. George the Fourth (I cannot imagine what the ship will be like without him) is making himself ridiculous by doing everything for “t’ last time.” “T’ last time!” he mutters as he starts the evaporator and adjusts the vapour-cock. He is taking the temperatures for the last time. He is going up to South Shields for his “tickut,” by which he means a first-class certificate of competency issued by the Board of Trade. That is George the Fourth’s utmost ambition. He is a man then; he is licensed to take any steamer of any tonnage into any sea on the chart. He has, moreover, a certain prestige, has this skylarky youth, when he gets his “chief’s tickut.” Ladies who preside over saloon bars will try to lure him into matrimony. He will grow (I hope) a little steadier, and fall really and truly in love.

My colleague the Second, he intends to work ashore and sleep at home. The clergyman’s daughter, I imagine, will come more and more into the scheme of things, and the mother he loves so well will give him her blessing. So each, you see, has a clearly defined plan, while I drift along, planless, ambitionless, smoking many pipes. I have been trying to think out something practicable. Am I to drift always about the world, a mere piece of flotsam on Swansea tide? Or am I to sit down once more in Chelsea, hand and brain running to seed, while the world spins on outside? I must think out a plan. And I must school myself to cancel all plans beginning “If she will—if only.” Why cannot I rise to some decent sense of self-respect, to say, as says the man in “The Last Ride Together”:

That’s manly—pre-eminently English, in fact. But, meanwhile, I drift planless.

The mighty Norseman, too, in his own sinewy Hyperborean style, is full of joy. His jolly pasty face beams joyously upon me. He will be “a passenger for one quid” from London to Gothenburg, thence to Stockholm, and Marianna. The engine-room is bulging, in places, with the contraband goods he is bringing home for Marianna. Pieces of silk “for the Signorina,” as the handsome old huxter-lady at Canary purrs in our ears; bottles of Florida water, mule canaries, and Herrick’s own divine Canary Sack, to which he so often bade “farewell.” All these for the dainty maiden who indulges in German Script. God speed you, oh, mighty Norseman! May your frescoed bosom never prove unfaithful to your grey-eyed maiden. I, at least, have been the better for having known you—a ship passing in the night.

And so we come to the Mumble Head.