everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the ballande liner st. louis.
we had managed to make our durance vile tolerable by means of yarning by day, and cribbage by night. in the after saloon, an apartment measuring about sixteen feet by eight, there were four of us—three men and the wife of a mining superintendent in pam. the miner was one of the good old colonial hard-shell type, a man of vast and varied experience, and the possessor of one of the[280] most luxuriant vocabularies i have ever had reason to admire in the course of many wanderings. one night, i remember, we all woke up wondering whether the ship had broken from her moorings and gone ashore or whether the kanaka crew had mutinied. it turned out that our shipmate had discovered a rat in his bunk, and was giving his opinion as to the chances of our all dying of plague before the quarantine was over. he knew that there had been fourteen deaths from plague only a month before on the miserable old hooker, and he was considerably scared. when he told us that the rat was alive i began to laugh, whereupon he turned the stream of his eloquence upon me. he literally coruscated with profanity, and the more his adjectives multiplied the louder i laughed, and only the influence of my stable companion, a pearl-sheller and diver from thursday island, who had been exploring the ocean floor round new caledonia, prevented a breach of our harmonious relations.
when i got my breath and the miner lost his, i explained that the fact of the rat being alive proved it to be absolutely harmless. it was indeed a guarantee that there was no plague on the ship.[281] if it had been dead and the sanitary authorities had got to know of it, it might have got us another twenty days’ quarantine. finally, it came out that the rat had bitten the miner’s toe, and, as he believed, inoculated him with the plague. i suggested that whiskey was the best antidote for anything of that sort and so the proceedings terminated amicably.
my friend the diver was also a man who could tell you tales of land and sea and under-sea in language which was unhappily sometimes too picturesque to be printable. we had travelled together all the way from noumea, and made friends before the st. antoine had left the wharf. we had both been rope-haulers and climbers before the mast, and the freemasonry of the sea made us chums at once. i never travelled with a better shipmate, and if this book ever reaches him across the world i hope that it will remind him of many hours that he made pleasant during that evil time.
i have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship.
i had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won education and culture of a sort disappeared, and i found myself[282] thinking the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’ boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse, blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. the man who is found out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of such was our conversation on the st. antoine and the st. louis; not exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true description of men and things.
on the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at north head, i said to him:
“well, i’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into civilisation again.”
“i suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. i thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and i had[283] had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in new caledonia, i was already beginning to feel sorry that i had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory.
the quarantine station, north head, sydney.
for nearly a month we had been living on food that a kaffir in the kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on board the st. louis we had eaten dirt of many french descriptions. everything was dirty. not even the insides of the loaves were clean. the galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of a starving man. the cook was to match. the steward who waited on us was willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself and his crockery. the chief steward on french ships is called ma?tre d’h?tel, and by this title we addressed him. on shore we should have said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the st. louis he was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was open to judicious bribery.
[284]
we had worried through our last dirty déje?ner on board, and preparations were being made for getting the anchors up. the captain and the mate had each put on a clean collar, and the chief engineer was wringing his hands and dancing about the forecastle because the donkey-engine had gone wrong and only fizzed feebly when it should have been getting the cable in.
“well, thank god,” i said to my diver friend, “we shall have a decent dinner to-night! you are going to dine with me at the australia. we’ll have a real cocktail at the bar, only one, for it won’t do to spoil a precious appetite, then we’ll eat our way through the menu and drink champagne. looks like heaven, doesn’t it?”
this is of course only an expurgated version of what i really said. his reply consisted of a finely embroidered comparison between the australia hotel and the st. louis, calculated to start every rivet in her hull.
well, we got away from our anchorage and were towed up to sydney. we took two of the finest appetites on the australian continent up with us. we had that cocktail. we sat down in the dining-room of the australia at a[285] table covered with the first clean table-cloth we had seen for a month and glittering with polished glass and shining silver. the dinner was as good a one as you will get anywhere between sydney harbour and king george’s sound—and we couldn’t eat it! we fooled about with the courses, trying to believe that we were hungry and having a real treat, but it was no good. we had lost our taste for clean, well-cooked food, and our palates and digestions were hopelessly vitiated. course after course went away hardly touched. we said many things to each other across the table in decently lowered tones, and ended by satisfying our hunger and thirst with bread and butter and champagne!
after dinner i renewed my acquaintance with the doctor and the purser of the steam-roller alameda, and they imparted the unwelcome information that the regular liners were not booking any passengers from sydney lest melbourne and adelaide, albany and perth might refuse them admittance, or, at any rate, decline to take passage in a ship from a plague port. moreover, it was possible that sydney passengers might be quarantined at every port. personally, i had had all the[286] quarantine i wanted, and so i was not sorry to accept the other alternative which was to go across to melbourne and adelaide by train, and thence by a boat to freemantle. this would give me time to have a glimpse at western australia before picking up the messagerie liner at albany. unhappily, as i have said, we ran up against the plague again at freemantle, and the inevitable delay, combined with the very leisurely gait of the west australian trains, made it just impossible for me to visit the gold-fields without missing my steamer.
one of the first people to welcome me back to sydney was my very good friend and fellow-voyager from honolulu, the accidental american, and with him and his wife i travelled to melbourne.
after we had passed the customs and changed trains and gauges at albury the journey began to take on a new, or, rather, an old interest for me. twenty years before i had tramped up through the bush from melbourne to the murray after taking french leave of the lime-juicer in which i had made my first miserable voyage from liverpool to australia. i had halved the fifteen shillings, with which i started, with a[287] penniless “old chum” in exchange for his company and experience, and then turned the other seven and sixpence into about seventy pounds, and, on the strength of my wealth, travelled back to melbourne first-class.
now i was doing it again, and as the express swung past the little station, which i had reached after an all-night tramp across the ranges, i found it to be a good deal less changed than i was. indeed, save for a few new houses scattered about the clearing, it was just as it was when i pitched my swag down on a bench before the hotel, put my blackened billy beside it, and ordered my last breakfast in the bush.
at melbourne we put up at menzies, and one afternoon i took my friend down to spencer street to pay a visit to the hotel that i had last stayed in—the sailors’ home. here again nothing was altered. the very cubicle i slept in twenty years before looked as though i had only just turned out of the little blue-and-white counterpaned bed, and outside my yester-self, to coin the only word that seems to fit, was loafing about in beerless and penniless idleness “waiting for a ship.”
[288]
“there i am as i was,” i said; “how do you like me?”
“not a little bit, griff,” he replied in the terse speech of his fortuitously native land. “i guess if you were to come like that among the friends you have now you’d look mighty like a dirty deuce in a new deck of cards.”
the next morning i went over to williamstown to have a look at the scene of my old escapade, the only one, by the way, which ever brought me into unpleasant relations with the police, for in those days breaking your indentures was a matter of imprisonment. happily they did not catch me. i found the old railway hotel, known, aforetime to officers and apprentices as the hen and chickens, since it was kept by a dear old scotchwoman assisted by four charming daughters with one or all of whom every apprentice in port was supposed to be in love. it was through the kindly offices of one of them that i had saved my kit and dodged the police.
i sat in the little parlour on the same sofa i had sat on that memorable night; opposite was the same old piano on which one or other of our charmers used to accompany our shouting[289] sea-songs, and there beside it was the little cupboard in the wall in which my superfluous wardrobe had been stowed away. not a thing was altered, i believe the very table-cloth was the same, and the patch of vacant ground opposite, across which i had bolted at the penultimate moment to catch the last train to melbourne, was still unbuilt on; and there was i, still a wanderer, though of a different sort, wanting only the old faces and the old voices to be able to persuade myself that the twenty changing years had begun with the last night’s dream and ended with the morning’s awaking.
