Strolling along the quays, I got into conversation with two British seamen by means of the old and tried introduction (which has extracted many a sixpence from me)—‘Got a match?’ We had a drink together. Neither of them were in ships bound for England, but they had a pal in a motorship which was sailing for London the next day.
The pal, hailed from the bar to join us on our bench, was a bit wary of me; he was inclined to think that I was a parson from the seamen’s mission masquerading as an honest worker. I calmed his suspicions with two double whiskies and my most engaging dirty story, whereupon he declared that I was a Bit of All Right and consented to talk about his officers. The captain, it seemed, was a stickler for correct detail—thinks ’e’ll lose ’is ticket if ’e forgets a muckin’ ’alfpenny stamp. But Mr Vaner, the First Officer, was a One and a Fair Caution; I gathered from his wry smile that the pal found the mate a hard taskmaster, while admiring his flamboyant character. Mr Vaner was obviously the man for me. And yes, I might catch him still on board if I hurried because he had been out late the night before.
She was a little ship, hardly more than a coaster, lying alongside an endless ribbon of wharf with her grey and white forecastle nosing up towards the load-line of the huge empty tramp in front of her, like a neat fox-terrier making the acquaintance of a collie.
Two dock policemen were standing near by. I kept my back to them while I hailed the deck importantly.
‘Mr Vaner on board?’
The cook, who was peeling potatoes on a hatch-cover, looked up from the bucket between his knees.
‘I’ll see, sir.’
That ‘sir’ was curious and comforting. In spite of my shabby foreign clothing and filthy shoes, the cook had placed me at a glance in Class X. He would undoubtedly describe me as a gent, and Mr Vaner would feel he ought to see me.
I say Class X because there is no definition of it. To talk of an upper or a ruling class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry who probably do belong to Class X but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the State—terms which are self-contradictory.
I wish there were some explanation of Class X. We are politically a democracy—or should I say that we are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent?—and the least class-conscious of nations in the Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X and don’t: the suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives, especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux.
Who belongs to Class X? I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing. I am not talking, of course, of provincial society in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education.
I should like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that in England a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat (that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty) and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon Bar if he enters the Public.
I worry with this analysis in the hope of hitting on some new method of effacing my identity. When I speak a foreign language I can disguise my class, background, and nationality without effort, but when I speak English to an Englishman I am at once spotted as a member of X. I want to avoid that, and if the class could be defined I might know how.
Mr Vaner received me in his cabin. He was a dashing young man in his early twenties, with his cap on the back of a head of brown curls. His tiny stateroom was well hung with feminine photographs, some cut from the illustrated weeklies, some personally presented and inscribed in various languages. He evidently drove himself hard on land as well as sea.
As soon as we had shaken hands, he said:
‘Haven’t met you before, have I?’
‘No. I got your name from one of the hands. I hear you are sailing tomorrow.’
‘Well?’ he asked guardedly.
I handed him my passport.
‘Before we go any further, I want you to satisfy yourself that I am British and really the person I pretend to be.’
He looked at my passport, then up at my face and eyeshade.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Take a seat, won’t you? You seem to have been in trouble, sir.’
‘I have, by God! And I want to get out of it.’
‘A passage? If it depended on me, but I’m afraid the old man …’
I told him that I didn’t want a passage, that I wouldn’t put so much responsibility on either him or the captain; all I wanted was a safe place to stow away.
He shook his head and advised me to try a liner.
‘I daren’t risk it,’ I answered. ‘But show me where to hide, and I give you my word of honour that no one shall see me during the voyage or when I go ashore.’
‘You had better tell me a little more,’ he said.
He threw himself back in his chair and cocked one leg over the other. His face assumed a serious and judicial air, but his delightfully swaggering pose showed that he was enjoying himself.
I spun him a yarn which, so far as it went, was true. I told him that I was in deadly trouble with the authorities, that I had come down the river in a boat, and that an appeal to our consul was quite useless.
‘I might put you in the store-room,’ he said doubtfully. ‘We’re going home in ballast, and there’s nowhere in the hold for you to hide.’
I suggested that the store-room was too dangerous, that I didn’t want to take the remotest chance of being seen and getting the ship into trouble. That seemed to impress him.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘if you can stand it, there’s an empty freshwater tank which we never use, and I could prop up the cover so that you’d get some air. But I expect that you’ve slept in worse places, sir, now that I come to think of it.’
‘You recognized my name?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t do this for anyone.’
All the same I think he would, given a story that appealed to him.
I asked when I could come aboard.
‘No time like the present! I don’t know who’s down in the engine-room, but there’s nobody on deck except the cook. I’ll just deal with the cops!’
He waited till the couple of police had walked two hundred yards up the wharf and then started waving and shouting good-bye as if someone had just gone away between the warehouses. The two looked round and continued their stroll; they had no reason to doubt that a visitor left the ship while they had their backs to her.
Mr Vaner sent the cook ashore to buy a bottle of whisky.
‘You’ll need something to mix with your water,’ he chuckled, immensely pleased that he had now committed himself to the adventure, ‘and I don’t want him around while I open up the tank. You wait here and make yourself comfortable.’
I asked him what I had better say if anyone came aboard unexpectedly and found me in his cabin.
‘Say? Oh, tell ’em you’re her father!’ He pointed to a photograph of a giggling young girl who was bashfully displaying her legs as if to advertise silk stockings. ‘I should surely have urgent business elsewhere if you were. Inside the water tank myself, as likely as not!’
He settled his cap over one ear and marched out of the cabin, whistling with such an elaborate air of unconcern that any one of his young women would have known he was planning some deception. But I was pretty sure he would take no risks. His play-acting was for his own amusement and for me, his partner in crime. To the rest of the world he was the responsible ship’s officer.