ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER XII
It is always rather a problem how to spend Christmas. Forced festivities can often be as tedious as forced isolation, and over-eating has definite drawbacks. Donald, a stranger in a strange land, found it very difficult to know what to do. He had no relations to visit, and he did not like to thrust himself upon any of the friends who had been so kind to him during the months that he had spent in England. For Christmas is essentially the feast of the Family, and it is the only season of the year in which the Englishman instinctively prefers to be surrounded with his relations rather than with his friends. And Donald had to be very careful about admitting his prospective isolation, for he knew that his English acquaintances would violate even the Yuletide sanctity of the home rather than allow him to be lonely at Christmas. When the Englishman does let himself go, he hates to think that others may not be so fortunately situated.
Donald, therefore, decided that the best thing to do would be to avoid embarrassing these worthy folk either by his presence at their feast or by his absence from any feast, and he saw the solution of the problem in the window of a Haymarket travel-bureau. For the modest sum of ten pounds he could travel in a small steamship from Hull to Danzig, spend one day in Danzig, and return from Danzig back to Hull, all in seven days. Impulsively he went in and bought a ticket, and at 5 o'clock on a drizzly, foggy, winter's afternoon he found himself, with spirits rapidly sinking, in the gloomy city of Kingston-upon-Hull. As he stood in the centre of that dismal spread of squalor and shivered in the cold and listened to the screaming trams, he began to regret bitterly his impulse. The only shred of consolation that he could find for the fact that he was standing—cold, wet, and lonely—in the town of Hull, was that he might be standing cold, wet, and lonely in the town of Goole, which, as seen from the train, looked even bloodier than Hull.
The boat was not due to sail until 8 o'clock; the pubs did not open until 6 o'clock. An hour had to be spent in this desperate wilderness of slate and stone and rain before even a drink could be got. Donald's spirits went lower and lower. He cursed that infernal impulse in the Haymarket. He cursed Hull and the North Sea and Danzig and himself and Christmas, and the insane rules for the opening and shutting of public-houses, and the English and England and the weather. At 6 o'clock he entered the smallest, the squalidest, the smelliest public-house he had ever been in and drank a half-pint of abominable beer and fled, almost in tears, to the ship. The ship itself put the finishing touch to his despair. It was very small and very dirty. It looked, to Donald's feverish and distorted vision, as if it was about three times the size of an ordinary rowing-boat. Actually it was about 1800 tons, and very old. The crew was Polish, the officers Russian, except the wireless operator, who was German, and there was to be only one other passenger. Donald stood on the quay and looked at the rusty hen-coop in which he was going to spend three days and three nights upon a wintry North Sea. And, what somehow made it worse, he was going to spend them in the hen-coop voluntarily. He was under no sort of compulsion. He had taken his passage of his own free will. Seventy-two hours there, in the company of a parcel of foreigners and a strange Englishman, and seventy-two hours back in the company of God knew who.
In the depths of despondency, he leant against a warehouse and watched a party of dock labourers, helped, or rather hindered, by the Polish sailors, struggling to hoist a queer-shaped engine on to the ship. The operation was superintended by a foreman who was encrusted from head to foot in grit and coal-dust and general grime, and Donald was appalled to learn from the company's agent that this foreman was to be his fellow-passenger in the hen-coop.
At 8 o'clock the tiny ship began to plunge its way laboriously down the Humber, and Donald sat down to a solitary dinner—for the foreman had disappeared with his machine into the hold. Dinner was excellent, and whisky out of bond at five shillings a bottle restored a little of the forlorn traveller's spirits.
By some meteorological caprice the North Sea next day was a sheet of misty steel and, after a large breakfast, Donald leant on the taffrail and watched the distant fishing-fleets and the timber ships from Russia and Finland, and began to enjoy himself. 0
Just before lunch the foreman appeared, wearing a smart grey suit and a stiff collar and blue tie secured with a ring, spruced up to the nines. The removal of the grit and coal-dust revealed a thin, clean-shaven face, close-cut grey hair, and a general appearance of about sixty years of age. He talked in a broad Yorkshire accent that was sometimes a little difficult to understand.
"I'm real glad to meet you, Mister," he exclaimed, grasping Donald's hand in a huge, thin, bony grip. "My name is Rhodes, but I'm mostly called William, or Will, or Bill, but mostly William. Shall we go in to dinner? The bell's gone."
Mr. Rhodes proved to be a great conversationalist. In fact he hardly ever stopped talking. Donald, who spoke French and a certain amount of halting German, wondered if he would have to interpret for Mr. Rhodes on the ship. He also wondered how Mr. Rhodes was going to manage when he reached Poland. He also wondered why on earth the engineering firm, which had made the queer-looking machine, had not sent a more educated caretaker with it. For whatever William's technical efficiency might be, it jumped to the eyes that he had not been educated at Eton.
"I'm taking a machine to Warsaw," said William, tucking away at the garlic sausages and cold tunny-fish and onions; "a machine for pumping out sewers. Oh! it's lovely. It'll pump out a five-thousand-gallon sewer in eighty-five seconds, all by steam vacuum. I'm going to teach the fellows how to use it. Our folk built it in the shops, and I had the assembling of it. I drove it down from Leeds yesterday—first time it's 0 ever been on the road. But do you know what, Mister?" He leant across the table earnestly. "Have you ever seen the crest of the Corporation of Warsaw? You haven't? Well, you mightn't believe me, but it's the upper half of a woman without any clothes on. Can you beat it? And there it is, painted on both sides of that sewer-pump, and me, William Rhodes, that's known throughout the length and breadth of the East Riding, sitting atop of that machine and driving her to Hull yesterday. I tell you I fair blushed with shame as I came through some of those villages where I'm known. It's indecent, Mister, that's what it is. Downright indecent."
Mr. Rhodes made hay of an omelette and ordered a small bottle of beer and went on.
"Have you ever been in Hungary, Mister?"
"No," replied Donald, "but I've got a friend out there who says——"
"I would like right well to hear about him," said William sincerely. "I spent two years in Hungary once with a machine for weeding between the rows of fruit-trees. It's a lovely country—Hungary, with miles of peaches and apples and cherries, but they were terrible troubled with weeds. Fine chaps, those Hungarians; I liked them. It was a lovely machine. I took it out to show those fellows how to use it, and I stayed two years. Queer, wasn't it?"
Donald agreed that it was extremely queer, and started to tell Mr. Rhodes about his friend who had a castle in Transylvania.
"Just one moment, Mister," interposed Mr. Rhodes. "I want very much to hear about your 0 friend, but before we get on to him, Transylvania's in Roumania, isn't it?"
"Yes," replied Donald, "by the Treaty of Trianon——"
"I was in Roumania before the War," said Mr. Rhodes reminiscently, "with machines for oil-boring. I was teaching those fellows how to use them. Queer folk, the Roumanians. I was there nearly three years. Do you know I got to like those folk quite a lot after a bit. Yes, I liked them quite a lot. Queer, isn't it?"
"Very queer," said Donald with just a touch of coldness in his voice.
"Russia, now," pursued Mr. Rhodes, "that is a queer place. I was there before the War, with dredgers. We were to dredge a canal near Petersburg and I went out to show those fellows how to manage the scoops and grapplers. It was mostly grapplers—the canal was full of rocks you see—and some nob or other had got a contract for supplying barges for the machines, a Grand Duke or Heir Apparent as like as not, and the barges were rotten. Yes, Mister, they were rotten. And every time we grappled a rock and hauled, instead of the rock coming up, the barge went over, and the grappler with it. In another month we'd have had to dredge the canal for dredging-machines. We couldn't use our own barges, because this nob, whoever he was, had bribed everyone right and left. It would have been a scream if we hadn't been working on a time-limit—job not done by a certain date, no money. And then this nob would get the contract himself, fish up our grapplers, and make a packet. My word, but it was a business." 0
"What happened in the end?" enquired Donald politely.
Mr. Rhodes blushed.
"To tell you the truth, Mister, I had to do a thing I didn't like doing. But I had my firm to consider, and I've been with them now for one-and-forty years. I couldn't let them down, now, could I? So what could I do but what I did?"
"And what was that?"
"Well, I bribed the chief engineer to certify that the canal was dredged. It was the only way round that nob. He had bribed everyone except the chief. That's a cardinal rule in life, Mister, and I pass it on to you with pleasure, because I like you. Never bribe if you can possibly help it, but when you do, only bribe the heads. Stick to that and you can't go wrong."
Donald promised to stick to that, and escaped as soon as possible to the top-deck with a book, and saw no more of William until the evening. By the time the steward was ringing the bell and announcing that dinner was ready, Donald was so bored by his own company, by the unvarying oiliness of the sea, and by the absence of anything to look at except the wintry sun and, once or twice an hour, a timber-ship, that he found himself almost longing for a storm and almost looking forward to William's company at table.
William began to talk even before he had sat down.
"Have you ever travelled in Spain?" he started at once. "It's a very queer country. I don't know that I've ever been in a queerer; not that Java isn't queer too, but then you expect that from black men. But in 1 Spain they're white and that makes it all the funnier. Bone-lazy, that's the trouble. And when I say bone-lazy, I mean bone-lazy. If a Spaniard doesn't want to work, he won't. Not if you offered him a million pounds. I spent eight months in Spain some years ago, digging irrigation canals. At least I had to do the digging in the end, though it wasn't what I went out for originally. My firm built some canal ploughs, beauties, steam-machines you understand, and fitted with four-foot plough-sheaves, and I went out with them to teach those fellows how to use them. Well, I'd spend a week teaching a fellow, and then, just as I'd got him in good shape, he'd remember that his cousin's aunt had got scarlet fever or something, and off he'd go and I'd have to start again with a new fellow. I stuck it for six weeks and then I ploughed the canals myself and went back to Leeds."
"How did you manage to make yourself understood to all these people?" asked Donald. "Do they all talk English?"
"None of them," said Mr. Rhodes, "until you get up Scandinavia way. But most of them understand a bit of German, and I just talk German to them until I've picked up enough of their lingo to rub along in."
This unexpected linguistic talent in a working engineer startled Donald.
"Where did you learn your German?" he asked.
"I'm bi-lingual in English and German," answered the engineer. "You see, my father was forty years in the same firm and he was their representative in Hamburg when I was born. But I can get along in most languages except French. I never had a job of 1 work to do in France in all my life. But as I was saying, Mister, Demerara is a queer place. Rum's cheaper than water in Demerara. Have you ever drunk rum?"
"During the War——" began Donald.
"I can tell you a curious thing about Demerara rum," proceeded William.
"Most of ours came from Jamaica during the War."
"I was in Demerara ploughing drainage-ways for getting water out of canals," said William. "It was a queer job, because I had to make a machine that would go through the water as well as do the ploughing. It took me a time to do it, I can tell you, but I hit on a lovely notion. I made a special carburettor that would take rum instead of petrol. What do you think of that? Rum, ninety overproof, at a penny a gallon and petrol at one and eleven. But do you know what I hadn't reckoned on?"
"I've no idea," murmured Donald, overwhelmed by this flow of technical wizardry.
"Why!" exclaimed William triumphantly, "I hadn't reckoned that rum at ninety overproof would eat into ordinary steel just as I'd eat into that cheese," and he helped himself to a cut at the Camembert that made the steward jump.
"But I beat that rum," went on William, sinking his voice to an impressive whisper. "I beat it, and do you know how? I got some old tank-engines that had been sold for scrap, lovely engines, all specially hardened aluminium, and I coppered those engines and I fitted them into my drainage-ploughs, and by gum, Mister, I ploughed drainage-ways eight and a half per cent faster than they'd ever been ploughed before in those parts. By gum, those fellows were surprised. I was teaching them, do you see? And I taught them another thing, too. Do you know that they were sending out their folks on foot to work—two hours there and two hours back? Did you ever hear such silliness? I made them see it though, and before I left Demerara I built them a light railway, plumb through a greenwood savannah, too. I don't know if you've ever built a light railway through a greenwood savannah, Mister?"
Donald was forced to admit that so far this experience had eluded him. He would have liked very much to have indicated that hardly a week passed in which he did not drive railways through greenwood savannahs. It sounded a romantic sort of undertaking. But his native honesty prevented him, although it did occur to him that William would never find out that he was lying because William would not listen to him in any case.
"I had to make them a machine, first of all, for uprooting the trees," proceeded the inexorable wizard, "and then I went to them and said, 'Look here, Misters,' I said, 'there's all that fine greenwood timber lying there and going to waste. It all belongs to you, and there's money in it. All you want is a couple of sixty-foot steel barges to bring the trunks down the canal to the sea, and a steam saw-mill to cut it up.' And then after we'd got the wood cut up, they gave me a hundred pounds to go back to Leeds. They said if I stayed any longer I'd sell them a machine for hoisting them into bed at night and tucking them up; but of course that was just their joke, because I never heard of any such machine or of anybody asking for tenders for one."
William spent that evening in the wireless operator's cabin—the operator, or "Sparks" as William invariably called him, was a German-speaking Pole from Poznan who had served in the German Imperial Navy and been sunk at Jutland—discussing the latest developments in wireless and showing the operator one or two small contrivances of his own invention.
Next morning the good ship Wilno chugged doggedly up the Elbe, through the lock-gates at Braunebüttel, and into the Kiel Canal, that mighty witness to an overwhelming Imperial ambition. For sixty miles, at ten miles an hour, the Wilno steamed between the concrete walls, with flat pasture-land and woods and windmills on each side, passing from time to time reminders of vanished Power, great iron railway bridges raised on vast embankments to allow for the passage of tripod-masts of Derfflingers and Von der Tanns and Hindenburgs; deserted repair-shops on whose crumbling walls was still visible the Black Eagle of Hohenzollern; and ruined quays for the tying-up of small ships to make way for the Hoch See Flotte, now lying derelict, encrusted with seaweed, at the bottom of a far-off Shetland bay.
For mile after mile the Wilno met no ship in the Imperial Canal, not even a barge or dredger or skiff, except a single oil-tanker, carrying the Hammer and Sickle upon its great Red Flag, and a string of timber-ships. Ten miles from Kiel the Wilno slowed up, and there was a great running to and fro among the officers and much frenzied talk. William hung about the door of the engine-room, listening to the sound of the engines and excitedly maintaining to Donald that something was up with some fearfully technical apparatus that he seemed to know all about. After a little, his expert diagnosis was confirmed by "Sparks," who had torn himself away from an account on his loud-speaker of a boxing match in Berlin, to find out what was up, and William darted off to his cabin for his overalls. He spent the next four hours on his back in the engine-room, welding or riveting or performing some such mysterious feat, to the vast admiration of the Polish engineers, and the Wilno resumed its normal speed. That night at dinner the captain sent William a bottle of champagne, which distressed William a good deal, for he greatly preferred his small bottle of beer, but did not want to hurt the captain's feelings. He insisted upon Donald helping him out with it, and he related during the meal a queer experience he had once had when, after taking a dozen steam-tractors from Vladivostok to Samarcand, he had been asked to survey the camel-route from Samarcand to the Afghan frontiers to see if it could be made practical for motor-buses with caterpillar wheels.
After dinner that night there was an informal concert and William danced a clog-dance and told several mildly improper stories in German and sang "Ilkley Moor." By this time Wilhelm, or Weely, was the life and soul of the ship.
On the third afternoon the great towers of the Marienkirche rose above the waters of the Bay of Danzig. William pointed them out to Donald.
"Another journey over," he said, and then he added unexpectedly, "I'm getting too old for journeys. Thirty-five years I've been travelling the world, and there's only one place I want to see, and that's Leeds. When I was younger it was different. Take my advice, Mister, and travel when you're young. If you get a chance to go to Honolulu when you're twenty-five, take it, like I did. Because you won't be half so keen to go back at fifty-five, like I did."
Donald asked him if he ever thought of asking the firm to let him stay at home. William shook his head.
"It's the foreign pay," he explained. "That, and the travelling allowances. I've got two sons, and until the second one is fair started, I can't afford to give it up."
"Are they going into the firm too?" Donald asked. "You said your father was in it before you."
"Yes, but my sons won't be," said William. "I'm only a working engineer, and when I get back to Leeds after the trip abroad, back I go to the bench in the assembling-shop. I've never known anything except machines. But I've saved enough in forty-and-one years to give them a better chance. They've both been to Leeds University, and that's not bad for the sons of a shop-foreman."
Donald asked him what they were going to be.
"The eldest is a schoolmaster with a fine job near Birmingham, and the youngest is just finishing to be a parson. A parson! That's queer, isn't it? And him 1 mad on cricket, too. They wanted him to play for Yorkshire, but he wouldn't. ''Tis a great game,' he said, 'but 'tisn't a life.' And I reckon he's right. But I've seen him bat all afternoon for the Chapel, or the Scouts. He doesn't get very many runs, mind you, but there's mighty few in Leeds or Bradford can get him out. And the funny thing is we've called him Parson ever since he was a nipper. Never smoked, never touched a drop. No films or skirts. But put him with Scouts, or Boys' Brigade, or Y.M.C.A., and he's as happy as happy. Ay! when he's settled in a parish, I reckon I'll be able to chuck the travelling and stick to Leeds."
"And chuck the engineering too?"
"Nay, lad," said William, breaking into his broadest Yorkshire, "I'll never chuck the shop till the shop chucks me, and that won't be for many a year yet." He held out his two great thin hands and went on, with perfect simplicity: "I can make any machine in the world with these two. I'm a craftsman, lad, as good as any in the North Country. And it isn't only that." He laid one of his hands upon Donald's sleeve and said with earnestness: "There's poetry in machines. You'll maybe not understand. But that's how I see it. Some folks like books and music and poems, but I get all that out of machines. I take a lot of steel and I put it into different shapes, and it works. It works. D'you see? It works as true as a hair to the thousandth part of an inch just as I made it and meant it. I'll go on making machines till my dying day, even if it's only toy engines for grandchildren. There now," he broke off, as a bell clanged vehe 1mently in the depths of the ship, and someone shouted in a loud voice, "I thought we weren't going to round that buoy. The skipper's drunk, you see, and he told me just now on the bridge that he couldn't see the buoy, but that the ship had done the trip often enough and ought to be able to round the buoy on her own."
There was more shouting and bell-clanging, the first officer ran up to the bridge, the engines slowed, then reversed, and the good ship Wilno managed to slip round the right side of the buoy. The pilot-boat came alongside and the pilot stepped aboard. The ancient city of Danzig came steadily towards them. The voyage was at an end.
Donald felt that he was parting from a lifelong friend when he shook hands on the quay with William, once again in his overalls, ready to land his machine.
He had learnt a good deal about England upon that rusty Polish hen-coop.
