I have a great admiration for Chief Engineers.
They are men in authority, needing all the comforts
and aids that can possibly be given them—such
as bathrooms of their own close to their own cabins,
where they can clean off at leisure.
It is not fair to mix them up with the ruck of passengers,
nor is it done on real ships. Nor, when a passenger
wants a bath in the evening, do the stewards of real
ships roll their eyes like vergers in a cathedral
and say, ‘We’ll see if it can be managed.’
They double down the alleyway and shout, ‘Matcham’
or ‘Ponting’ or ‘Guttman,’
and in fifteen seconds one of those swift three has
the taps going and the towels out. Real ships
are not annexes of Westminster Abbey or Borstal Reformatory.
They supply decent accommodation in return for good
money, and I imagine that their directors instruct
their staffs to look pleased while at work.
Some generations back there must have been an idea
that the P. & O. was vastly superior to all lines
afloat—a sort of semipontifical show not
to be criticised. How much of the notion was due
to its own excellence and how much to its passenger-traffic
monopoly does not matter. To-day, it neither
feeds nor tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships
well enough to put on any airs at all.
For which reason, human nature being what it is, it
surrounds itself with an ungracious atmosphere of
absurd ritual to cover grudged and inadequate performance.
What it really needs is to be dropped into a March
North Atlantic, without any lascars, and made to swim
for its life between a C.P.R. boat and a North German
Lloyd—till it learns to smile.
A RETURN TO THE EAST
The East is a much larger slice of the world than
Europeans care to admit. Some say it begins at
St. Gothard, where the smells of two continents meet
and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car
dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at
Venice on warm April mornings. But the East is
wherever one sees the lateen sail—that
shark’s fin of a rig which for hundreds of years
has dogged all white bathers round the Mediterranean.
There is still a suggestion of menace, a hint of piracy,
in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or
fruiting or coasting.
‘This is not my ancestral trade,’
she whispers to the accomplice sea. ’If
everybody had their rights I should be doing something
quite different; for my father, he was the Junk, and
my mother, she was the Dhow, and between the two of
’em they made Asia.’ Then she tacks,
disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the
unimaginative steam-packet with her hat over one eye
and a knife, as it were, up her baggy sleeves.
Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty
extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their
loaded clumsiness. They are all children of the
camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but
it was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine,
unchanged in any rope and patch.
