How she had blossomed out! She became a great favourite of his, and each time he passed her on deck he winked at her so merrily that she issued a gurgling sound of delight.
‘And what is your name?’ she asked.
‘Tom.’
‘And which is your cabin?’ He showed her.
She laughed. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Uncle Tom’s cabin!’
He winked.
‘Oh! Oh! I so cried in Uncle Tom’s Cabin! Eva — such — such—such—such a nice girl! Oh, such a lovely!’
From that moment on she called the old seaman in the dark-blue blouse ‘Uncle Tom’, and since to children everyone is either an uncle or aunt, they all called him now ‘Uncle Tom’. And he liked it.
The Rhinoceros was a transport, and presently troops came on board in charge of a sergeant major, who detailed them in two parties. ‘You fellows,’ he said, ‘go to the sharp end of the ship, and you here to the blunt end of the ship.’
The naval ratings looked sarcastic. Oh, they did look sarcastic! Even ‘Uncle Tom’ smiled into his chin. ‘They are a hignorant lot, those army chaps,’ he confided to me, shaking his head.
The sergeant major heard him. ‘You hignorant hass!’ he said. ‘You bloody well mind your own bloody business!’
We were moving. From the bows came the regular impassive beat of the piston-rod. We were moving. The land slanted aside, and we were gliding farther and farther away on the green mirror of the sea towards the breeze.
‘Oh, the green green sea!’ Natàsha exclaimed, her sea-green eyes sparkling in the sun. Everywhere there were visible signs that the War Office had suddenly lost interest in us. The transport provided for us was definitely top-heavy, and as she went, lurched now on this side, now on that.
At lunch I found sitting next to me a Russian major general with wild pale eyes and long black fingernails, who said he had got back to Shanghai from Hong-Kong, but now, on reflection, was going back again to Hong-Kong without leaving the boat. I recognized his face: it was the man who had once called on me on New Year’s Day and had sat in the waiting-room along with other lunatics. His eyes were almost mad, his conversation incoherent. At the outbreak of the Revolution he, a Tsarist general, had sided with the rebels, and assumed command of the revolutionary troops; then his nerves had given way, and now he was adrift in the wide world, without plan and without purpose. If he was mad, there was a little method in his madness. He lived, he said, by issuing I.O.U.s at every port of call. At one place, when nobody would take his I.O.U., he hired a grand piano and then sold it, using the money realized on getting out of mischief. In his view all means were justified by a great end. But after listening to him week after week it struck me that ‘the end’ with him was possibly the weakest portion of it all. Cross-examined by me, he admitted that he scorned programmes, but believed in living from day to day following the dictates of his complex personality. Asked how he reconciled this view with his declared ideal of public service, he answered that he scorned the public.
During lunch, Harry made audible remarks about the passengers: ‘That boy over there has a fat head.’
‘Harry!’ uttered Aunt Teresa.
‘S-s-s-sh!’ Aunt Molly hissed.
The General’s nails took away some of our appetite, and I tried, diplomatically, to propel the conversation into some such channels. ‘The Chinese,’ I remarked, ‘have extraordinarily long nails.’
‘It’s a sign of aristocracy,’ he replied complacently. ‘To show that they do no work.’
‘But they are black!’
‘What matter? The colour is immaterial.’
The General confessed that he never took a bath, ‘Because,’ he said, ‘once a bath, always a bath — it opens the pores.’
At dinner, the General with the mad eyes grew tearful and melancholy. Surveying his hands and his clothes—‘I have sunk,’ he said. ‘God! how low I have sunk! My nerves have all gone to pieces. I am pursued from one end of the world to the other.’ Tears were in his eyes.
A war — a pre-eminently stupid business — is run by stupid people (all the wise ones having set their minds on stopping it as soon as possible); and men who ordinarily would be in the shade rise to the surface and set to organize a ‘Secret Service’ whose agents spend their time in sending one another information about all sorts of lunatics and innocents, and Vice-Consuls and so-called M.C.O.s do their level best to impede the traffic of the world years after the war is over. And some such cuckoo — I think it was Philip Brown — reported our friend the General with the mad eyes, and another cuckoo apprised the Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office notified the Admiralty and the War Office, and zealous officers had begun to send each other slips of information about this ‘dangerous revolutionary’.
The sea was a green mirror. All the way from Shanghai to Hong-Kong it was a green mirror. Not a sound reached our ears but the impassive beat of the piston-rod: proof of the unremitting toil of the engine. The infinite sea conduces to infinite thoughts about God and Man and the Universe. There is nothing to do, so one talks. Captain Negodyaev was philosophically inclined. I did not find that out till we fell into each other’s company more intimately on board the Rhinoceros. He stood there, leaning back against the rail, a rat on its hind legs, a rat in khaki, philosophizing. ‘If you go half the way of logic,’ he said, ‘and stop there, you have come as near the truth as you are likely to get this side of the grave. But describe the circle, and you are nowhere again. I—’
‘You mean,’ I said (as we are in the habit of saying when we interrupt to say what we mean), ‘you mean it simply comes to this: you wander till you find a barrier. Then you allow your soul to grow mature, satiate within the barrier. (When the gruel begins to brew, make haste and set to work: write, paint, experiment.) Then, some time afterwards, the barrier will break down — and again you will begin to wander in the meadow until again you find your way to the high-road.’ We talked unostentatiously, quietly, affecting, perhaps half-consciously, the pose of people of seasoned intellect that everything was understood between us, that we took for granted on the part of each all knowledge hitherto available about all things. His attitude to life was a dark smile — the smile of one who is pleased at the opportunity of recognizing a little additional evidence of the vileness which he had all along maintained pervaded life. Fundamentally, I believed in hope, he in despair. It was as if he said, ‘Tant pis!’ ‘You say it is impossible to despair. But it is possible to despair. I believe in despair. I live on it,’ he said.
‘You doubt the possibility of immortality, because—’
‘Captain Diabologh,’ he interrupted. ‘Lend me £15. I’ll pay it back to you — upon my word of honour — when we get to England.’
‘You doubt it because you have a wrong idea of what is real.’
‘I really will.’
‘The external world seems real to you because you see and hear and smell and feel it. But it is because your senses are so focused and conditioned and attuned that you see and feel and hear and smell it as you do. Actually it consists merely of certain illusory vibrations marking time in nothing — a form of mathematics to sustain the figment of Time made flesh. It is merely a world of appearance in which your I has immersed, like a fallen star which has mistaken the clouds for reality and doubts its own light. As a drop of water from the ocean contains identical properties with those of the ocean itself, so that light in you — your real I—has the immortal faculties of a timeless sun.’