Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [75]
Meanwhile his reputation had followed him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the Singapore Free Press might read "Murder of Brother-in-Law's Concubine" it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some such passage as: "A curly-headed boy stood on the fo'c'sle head of the Philoctetes as she docked in Penang strumming his latest composition on the ukelele." News which any day now would turn up in Japan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from Singing the Blues, he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress. He certainly didn't think of any other mistresses he might have had at home. His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long ago. A tender smile of Mrs Bolowski's, flashed in dark New Compton Street, had haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the advertisements for music halls up north. Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly 6.30, 8.30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis balls on crisp turf, and their swift passage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea (despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the Philoctetes ), the recently acquired taste for good English ale and old cheese...
But above all there were his songs, which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel, having gone through hell, through "fire"--and Hugh persuaded himself such really was the case--he had earned as his right and reward.
But the time came when Hugh did go through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the Oedipus Tyrannus , whose namesake the lamp-trimmer of the Philoctetes might have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote, yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this seemed about to happen, on the Philoctetes's poop all was excitement, then as the vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a megaphone:
"Give Captain Telson Captain Sanderson's compliments, and tell him he's been given a foul berth!"
The Oedipus Tyrannus, which, unlike the Philoctetes, carried white firemen, had been away from home the incredible period of fourteen months. For this reason her ill-used skipper was by no means so anxious as Hugh's to deny his ship was a tramp. Twice now the Rock of Gibraltar had loomed on his starboard bow only to presage not Thames, or Mersey, but the Western Ocean, the long trip to New York. And then Vera Cruz and Colón, Vancouver and the long voyage over the Pacific back to the Far East. And now, just as everyone was feeling certain this time at last they were to go home, he had been ordered to New York once more. Her crew, especially the firemen, were weary to death of this state of affairs. The next morning, as the two ships rode again at a gracious distance, a notice appeared in the Philoctetes's after messroom calling for volunteers to replace three seamen and four firemen of the Oedipus Tyrannus. These men would thus be enabled to return to England with the Philoctetes, which had been at sea only three months, but within the week on leaving Yokohama would be homeward bound.
Now at sea more days are more dollars, however few. And at sea likewise three months is a terribly long while. But fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an eternity. It was not likely that the Oedipus Tyrannus would face more than another six of vagrancy: then one never knew; it might be the idea gradually to transfer her more long-suffering hands to homegoing vessels when she contacted them and keep her wandering two more years. At the end of two days there were only two volunteers, a wireless watcher and an ordinary seaman.