The Beach of Dreams | Page 2

asked Raft.
"Oh, I was a lot o' things," replied Harbutt. "Wished I'd never left them
to join this b--y business, but it's the same ashore, owners all the time
stuffin' themselves and gettin' rich, workers starvin'."
Raft belonged to the old time labour world dating from Pelagon, he
grumbled, but had no grudge against owners in general, it was only in
drink that Pelagon rose in him. Harbutt was an atom of the new voice
that is heard everywhere now, even in fo'c'sles. He had failed in

everything on land and a'board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a
voice and an A.B. at the same time.
"What was your last job ashore?" went on Raft with the persistence of a
child, always wanting to know.
"Cleanin' out pig sties," said Harbutt viciously. "Drove to it. I tell you
when a chap's down he's down, the chaps that has money tramples on
the chaps that hasn't. I've been through it and I know. It's the rich man
does it."
"Well," said Raft, "I don't even remember seeing one."
"Haven't you ever been in no cities?"
"I've been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side."
"Well, you've seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin' in carriages,
that's the sort that keeps us down, that's the sort we've got to make an
end of."
Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a
contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot--but he could not see
how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen
had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and
always busy about their own affairs--and how were they to be made an
end of?
"Do you mean killing them?" he asked.
"Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them, it's
their money does the trick."
He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned in
also and the fo'c'sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the
straining timbers of the ship.
Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality took
fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand clutching

the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the curved
fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the in-turned
thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it, intensifying, after
the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes, without losing in
power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know what these
things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene, with the
grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with smoke
haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers and the
boom of the waves. This is the fo'c'sle whose great, great, great
grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained to
benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.
CHAPTER II
NORTH-WEST
The Albatross, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown
out of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering
north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast,
like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against
which the top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the
cold blue of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like
the white clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.
Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the
deck with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then
for a glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast
canvas, talking all the time of subjects half a world away.
It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound
being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity
and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at
Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and
neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He
had been dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had
started from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and
he said so. It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before

him in dreamland.
"I've always dreamt before that I was starting from there," said he, "but
last night I was getting the old Albatross in, and the tow rope went, and
the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung round
and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside