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I

While this was happening in the Pacific, in the Southern Atlantic Dick Mazere leant over the taffrail deep in meditation. He had come aboard no mail-boat with ingratiating stewards shepherding him with news of celebrated women as fellow passengers. The T.S.S. Ballyphule had crept down the Channel in June rain and fog weeks before with a cargo of steel and migrants--assisted passengers--people pushed off their densely populated native island because no longer necessary to feed either manufactories or battlefields. The Australian taxpayers might reasonably have preferred to leave a percentage of these to adorn their native slums. Even the stewards referred to some of them as cattle. The more pretentious people--there are pretentious people even in jails and on steerage ships--described them as the scum of the earth. Great newspapers before elections and during wars extolled them as the bone and sinew of the greatest race upon the globe. There were also those paying their own frugal way, but no distinguished folk--most decidedly not.

Dick had found his cabin and his mate: the first a two-berth tubby, the second a decent-looking young man with all his hair and a Belfast brogue. The space was not enough for both to be out of their bunks at the same time, the bunks were so near together that a person could not sit up in the lower one.

"Surely to God they must take us for sardines!" observed the Irishman.

"You can't expect much for what you pay," said the steward. "Lots of these people are only paying three or four pounds."

"Go to hell!" said the Belfast voice. "You can't go the length of stuffing that down my throat: that a steamship company the like of these old pirates are philanthropists."

"Well, you see what I mean, sir," said the man in more conciliatory tone. "You don't pay much more than 'alf wot you do on some of the mail-boats, so wot can you expect? On a boat like this they mostly puts up wiv anything because they don't know no better."

Dick was investigating. The shoddy blanket smelt of urine, but only faintly. There had been a laundering, but in too much of its own extracts. The pillows were hard enough to induce growths in the ears, and smelt of castor-oil; but Dick had known pillows smelling equally stale in expensive New York or Continental hotels. Daintiness is almost more than millionaires can command in this age.

He found a nook out of the rain on the deck aft and fell into reverie. Was the ship moving? No: merely swinging in the incoming tide...By and by the softly purring engines increased their power. Throughout the ship was a lifting motion of life. She was indisputably moving. Small craft, churches, trees, buildings were receding. He was slipping clown the grey old river between its flat banks lined with ancient history; leaving the Plain of Tilbury where Elizabeth had reviewed her troops before the Armada; going back at last to his native land of singing rivers between gorges lined with stately trees, twice as high as any in this little island.

He recalled his eagerness to escape from the cockatoo farm into the world of adventure where there would be something doing and to be done. He had gone undismayed, nay unconscious that he was equipped with nothing but youth, and handicapped with a hypersensitive soul and body. After all the vicissitudes he was returning practically as he went. If equipped, it was merely with experience, and of what commercial account is mind-searching experience?

Could old scenes survive the test of return? Had imagination enshrined a beauty which reality must shatter, leaving adolescent memories bankrupt of treasure? Hardly possible with Coolooluk! At Coolooluk the river leant on the hills, the hills leant on that blue called sky, which is eternity. Coolooluk! The very name had magic--Coolooluk, via Bool Bool! He was dreaming of Coolooluk. The siren silver song of its waters had been with him ever and always, exquisitely Daunting. Coolooluk! Coolooluk!

The bugle announced midday dinner. He went below to discover his luck. None so bad. Beside him a young woman of lively countenance named Timson, and a pale young man in blue serge, good linen, and Manchester accents. Ranged opposite, a pretty mother and two children, a delicious Scottish grandmother and a man of pugilistic shape and mild gaze. Others.

The saloon compared with the second class of fifth-rate liners. No table napkins, but cutlery and cloths clean to begin. An attempt at gentility in a couple of aspidistras on each table. The usual ship's food--an attenuated menu. It began with soup. A robust cockroach squashed under the large dirty thumb of the steward decorated the rim of Dick's plate.

"Shure ye'll take no harrum from that!" observed the pugilist, who was a lap ahead and shovelling tinned peas into his mouth with his knife.

Complaint might ensure the steward being more observant in flicking insects out of sight before arriving at the table. Dick did the best he could. His cabin luggage was mostly prescribed biscuits to displace the proscribed white bread.

Armstrong, his cabin mate, was good-natured about space. Dick was in luck except that it was refined torture for him to be so closely yoked to any being. He had found proximity insupportable in his unsuccessful marriage. Armstrong snored loudly in his berth in the middle of the afternoon. Dick stepped softly, but his mate was one to sleep through slapping doors and the morning bugle, crying babies, boys thumping the wall of the cabin, anything. He had a maddening habit. He spat. He spat promiscuously. Every now and again he hawked and spat in a corner of the cabin. He was pale and never stated his business, but inquired earnestly about the climate of Sydney. He was of the class which dresses first and performs ablutions afterwards. There is discomfort in this school and that of the bathers being herded together.

Dick's mother had been one of the Labosseer girls of Coolooluk (where the river leans on the hills), whose excellences were a byword in the Southern Districts. His father and mother had been cousins, thus on both sides he had been reared in unusual refinement. These qualities may have contributed to his being invalided out of the war in 1917. He had been restored to normal activity by insulin and other regimes. Later he was adopted by a Christian Scientist, who captured his affection and belief, but as she often said, baffled, "You just don't quite trust God."

"It is up to God to reveal Himself to me, I admit."

"You must prove yourself to God."

"Your text-book postulates that man really is his own God."

"No, it contends that there is but one mind."

"And states that if one understands the principle set forth it precludes the need to believe; but it seems that it is better to be simple and believe without understanding--though God made the complex soul, too. It is up to Him to do something with him."

In any case, this particular theory of the supremacy of mind over materialism had come to him as a considerable revelation. Upon this long voyage he was to give himself up to study it. His early environment made him a little ashamed of his capitulation, but this was the place for it, hidden among simple strangers on an inconspicuous stratum of life. When Armstrong, reading his modest and ill-scrawled label, called him Meyers, he tied that label on his deck-chair and became Meyers for the voyage.

II

Ere three days had passed in the dining saloon many of the passengers were rebellious. The stewards were mostly labourers working their passage. At Dick's table was a young man from that class of parents which spawns without prevision and lets its offspring take its chance. He was fired with the ambition of getting to Australia, the refuge of the surplus and misfits now that the U.S.A. has grown selective. He served salt water in the carafe. He dropped plates of porridge or soup on his passengers, free from malicious intent. He scraped the plates loudly in the ears of the women, dropping bacon anywhere. He laid all the used cutlery on the cloth. When anyone asked for an extra spoon or knife he wiped one of this collection on his towel and handed it, unconscious of offence. He thought it unnecessary to wash a tumbler that had been used. He was always last. Long after every other table was served he would appear with cold inferior portions, as often as not on plates that had been used before.

The pale young man near Dick, who read Shaw and Aldous Huxley and discussed the merits of Noel Coward and Pirandello with Dick and Miss Timson, was nauseated. He had come from one of those provincial suburban homes that are the very substance of England. His had been a small detached villa with currant bushes and vegetables at the back and Dorothy Perkins roses over the front gate, where everything was dainty, where a pink-cheeked widowed mother and a blue-eyed sister as sweet as forget-me-nots had regarded him as the big event of the day. Cups and saucers patterned with the dribbles of previous users spoiled his appetite. The waiter seeing him wash the vessels in tea observed, "Ain't they clean enough for you?"

"They decidedly are not. I think this ship putrid and the service rotten."

"'Aven't you been at the wor? Wot we gotter all do is make the best of things."

"I don't see that being in or out of the war touches the present issue."

"Well, a man that's all the time grousin'--"

"Aw, shut up about the war," interposed a man on the other side of Manchester, who had really been in the fray. "What the blazes has the war got to do with you not bein' able to give a man a clean cup when he's damn' well paid enough for it? If it comes to the war an' all, I thought you b--fools who rushed into it were after conductin' a war to end war, not to maintain durrty tay-cups where clean ones ought to be."

This was at breakfast. At dinner Miss Timson grimaced. "Ugh, waiter, this water tastes like a decayed rat!"

A boisterous Welshman at the next table rose and spat the water from his mouth. He bawled for the decanters and tumblers to be stacked at one end, and demanded the head steward. His table was with him, and investigation was promised. Various explanations circulated. In selecting a fresh tank a slop-water current had been turned on by mistake. The dirt was stirred up by the heavy swell. "She always stinks like that at the bottom," maintained the permanent stewards. "You can't do nothink about it."

There was rumbling talk of deputations. Threats that the ship should be boycotted, the Company exposed. Those on their first voyage anticipated revolution. It went in and out of the ears of experienced travellers, till there was Las Palmas to create diversion. The weather was growing warmer, the sea smoother, as they tubbed along towards the Equator. Those who had not been out of the cold lands looked forward to the tropics as to a battle engagement.

Dick was not satisfied with himself. Sleep was scanty in the surroundings and induced irritation fatal to harmony. Everybody else could sleep but himself. He felt as if the Lord were discriminating against him. He was compelled to concentrate on this defect, to the exclusion of higher spiritual exploration. It even left him behind the normal line of starting. He conned his text-book. The revelation held theoretically, but he could not 'demonstrate'.

He was much alone on the boat deck save for a few amorously afflicted, and away to the south one evening saw the Southern Cross again after long years, shining as it had shone above his childhood. Time and distance had preserved its dear loveliness. His heart swelled. Spiritual ease softened him.

It was good to be alive and going home to his own land. A dear, dear land, his very own. The Cross was set as a benediction in the heavens. His senses, his sentiment could not draw deeply enough on the feast spread in the sky.

The tall thin silent man, generally so aloof, felt a desire to share this, even with these transient shipboard fellows. They were gentle worthy people. His heart warmed to them that they had uprooted themselves from old grooves, taken their all in their work-marred hands and were off to his wonderful country.

"Come and I'll show you the Southern Cross."

A dozen bored people responded with alacrity, but it was difficult to make them see the Cross. They were polite, as demanded by the attitude of the Australians and South Africans aboard, but it was plain they were disappointed. Northerners always are. They expect a constellation of planets like Venus. Dick understood, though to him that night the sky was an empress in the state jewels who has added an order of Koh-i-noors. He sought the poop deck again to be alone with his treasure. He could see it as it swung above the ranges, and hear the song of the rivers, the cry of plover, curlew, or koala. On inland frosty nights it had blazed like a cluster of planets, dimmer on other nights at the full of the moon, when he had gone possuming. Each tree had held a dozen dark objects. But old Jerry Riddall, who taught him to set snares, used to boast that in his young days there had been twenty possums to every tree, and in some favourites at least a hundred. He had not appreciated old Jerry and his blowing about old days. If only he was still alive and had his wits, he'd be glad to talk with the old chap. Hadn't thought of him in years till the Southern Cross brought him back.

The precious constellation had altered existence. It guaranteed that Coolooluk was real. Intolerable conditions were of small consequence with such a promise in the sky. Beef but half-boiled, jam of several sorts mixed! What trifles. Even his cabin mate's habits became less trying.

III

He sought Miss Timson, his table mate, though hitherto he had kept covered from her. She seemed unusually penetrating, and Dick Mazere, going home to his family after half a lifetime abroad, was desirous of arriving almost surreptitiously till he could re-orientate himself.

Yes. She had seen the Cross. "To an Australian it is always wonderful to see it again."

"Must one be an Australian?"

"I'm not quite sure, but I am sure that you are an Australian."

"Have I the twang?"

"No. It's your hands. They are coarsened around the thumb and look probably twenty years older than they should, but beautifully kept--the hands of a sensitive gentleman who has worked like a navvy in his young days. You are perhaps a member of one of the old squatting families up the country. The dear old bush idioms now and again confirm that impression."

"Are you of the same breed, that you detect the symptoms?" He had had a brother-in-law named Timson, but would not risk disclosing himself by inquiring if she were of that family.

"I know most of the English-speaking world."

An interesting man, she was thinking. His story might relieve a long dull voyage. He placed his chair beside hers and she remarked: "I hope you will not be too disillusioned after long absence. The simple old pioneers with their neighbourly ways are replaced by a thrusting commercial gang without idealism."

With that promise in the heavens his expectations were otherwise. "I've noticed you reading the text-book sometimes. Are you an advanced student?"

"No. I have to abrogate while in the Australian atmosphere."

He took it that she was Australian, but refrained from comment. "If the principle is right, it should be of greater service where there is greater need."

"Exactly. But I cannot demonstrate." She turned the subject. "What do you think of this lot going out to swell the population?"

"Australia needs population."

"That is a fetish. You would probably regard my views as bolshevistic. This quantity notion...the human race should think of quality. The more pretentious migrants say they can't carry on in the old country any longer and money is to be made in Australia, so they have no choice. Those down in the Sections--the 'loose boxes', as my steward calls them, 'the scum of the earth', as the Pretentious Man says--are poor white trash, by religious or clinical ignorance the victims of incontinent fecundity."

"The most presentable groups seem to be getting off at South Africa."

"They want to go to Rhodesia or Kenya Colony, where they will have coloured labour to keep their hands clean. They prefer China or India to Australia for the same reason. The imperialist, with his penchant for annexing territory and his conceit of transcendent ability to govern, thinks his mission is to introduce stable government to lesser breeds who shall do the distasteful toil. He won't go to Australia if he can afford to go elsewhere. Only foundlings and poor white trash tackle Australia because it is Hobson's choice."

"But there, I believe, is Australia's strong point. She is willing to do her own work in the sweat of her Anglo-Saxon brow, free from dependence on underworld workers, black or white. She's game to roughen her own hands." He glanced at his in the electric light, and noted what she meant by the enlarged knuckles and wrinkles around the thumb.

"Sounds heroic, but no matter how well filled the stomachs, a whole nation of labourers is a headless thing. Progress of any sort--spiritual, artistic, scientific or commercial--depends on the outstanding brains and characters, and if they are all occupied and preoccupied with making a henhouse or in clearing, the higher effort must wait. It tends to a terrific levelling down." She sighed out of experience of two years marooned on the resultant lower levels.

"Here's a case in which I cannot make the C.S. principle work. Am I to have a heart full of love for all these riff-raff, and leave things to God; or as a patriotic Australian should I take a hand in national housekeeping? Take the bilge about the sacredness of human life. The race would be better if most children and their parents were dropped overboard. It would be a greater thing if the last far continent could be preserved till man has some plan of regulating numbers. He is on the plane of deer or kangaroos, a nuisance when he becomes, too prolific. The motor car has superseded horses and camels. On some of the out-stations they are shooting hundreds of horses, as well as camels that were once £60 per head, to save grass for more profitable sheep. The world can only healthily use so many men...a man has to secure a licence to keep a dog, but any moron can have half a dozen children as his right though society has no opening for them. This fuss about the virtue of hordes to devour products so that a few manipulators can make vast profits selling to them is an antediluvian notion and works like a snake swallowing its tail. Neither Big Business efficiency nor combines nor war can much longer retard the evolution of a better system, so I don't want Australia filled with a repetition of Europe or Asia. There are very few people for whom I'd displace the gentle kangaroo and the regal gum-tree."

"I feel that there are all kinds of spiritual adventures awaiting us, not by mortifying the flesh in the medieval way, but in transcending it."

"How are we to get away from the sodden mass of husks, the people unable to think, who take what is given them? The whole apparatus of education and publicity is held by a soulless, ruthless set of masters whose philosophy is still material might pursued through manipulating the herds for profit--for fortunes which they don't know how to spend when acquired. When sectarianism and alcoholism are the paramount issues with a people--"

"We must not try in ourselves to usurp the whole duty of God," said Dick softly. He was a little ashamed to speak of God, as are all Englishmen of any social standing, homeland or outland. It seemed unmodern and a mental weakening, but the night was soft and dark, the Southern Cross hung not far away, and he had the freedom of anonymity with a stimulating companion far out on the ocean in shipboard intimacy, which is like none other on earth. He might never see Miss Timson again. He was in fact careful against after acquaintance with her.

"'Let those who lack wisdom, ask of God.' I shall look around and get into the skin of things." He could not confess that he was going home to write a poem as his contribution to the preservation of the last, the loveliest of vacant lands and a few of its bewitching fauna, till man should by the abolition of poverty and war be worthy to inhabit it. A poem seemed fantastically trivial to set beside migration and immigration, discrimination against backward peoples, and all those involved and staggering problems in which man has the importance and authority of a bee or an ant, or perhaps only of a louse. But with the Cross shining before him and harmony suffusing him he felt it was the truth.

"I am tremendously hopeful that we shall produce a great literary prophet or a statesman."

"Disillusionment is waiting for you if you think he is discernible yet. There is a junker clique growing very sure of itself. They have a few sheep, but little culture or idealism. The men ape English sport and tailoring, the women are slaves to Paris dressmakers and cosmetic experts. There is infinitesimal criticism of drama or literature except dishwash echoes of London. Local newspapers, with rare exceptions, are modelled on London conservative dailies. The Australian writer or other artist goes where the contacts develop him into a Gilbert Murray. If he came back to Australia, or more particularly if it was a she, she would be given a job of charing."

"Yes, but I have a feeling in my bones that there will be a great blossoming of native drama and literature and statesmanship just any time now."

"When the first truth-tellers arrive there'll be pillaloo!"

"It may not need to come through the channels of destructive criticism. It could come by a shining way of imagination."

"You deserve to be right. How grand it would be! I should like to meet you again in a year to see how your dreams bear up under reality."

He did not make any provision for insuring meeting. Neither did she. Australia had few people. If Meyers was of any importance he could easily be found.

IV

The south-east trades came to meet the voyagers three days in advance of scheduled time and robbed them of the caressing equatorial warmth, and there was an increasing roll. The faithful aspidistras had been parked when a little south of the Line. Amenities dwindled and died. South Africans thanked I heir stars that their incarceration was almost run. Discomfort engendered discontent. It accumulated with the cold and rolling. There was no place of refuge for any but men who went to be shaved and sat in the barber's padded seats. There was a small space like a tram waiting-shed forward with garden seats and tables and a piano. Above the door ran the legend, LADIES' ROOM. Inadequate to seat one-fourth of the mothers with infants if reserved for their use, it was full of adolescents.

As the days grew cold and the Cape sheep came up to meet them, Miss Timson examined it as a place to sit till the sacred inspection should be past and she could curl in her berth and read. Space was made for her by a woman with no teeth, a litter of brats, and the accents of the disinherited, which would be no acquisition to the already unclassic Australian intonations. Taking an infant on her knees, she cuffed two toddlers savagely on to the floor. "Get aht of the wye, can't yer, an' mike room for the lydy. You don't want the whole plice to yerselves." The poor are usually generous in sharing what is already insufficient, while the rich are exclusive where there is more than they need. The poor therefore live in hutches in slums and are transported in slums to overrun other spots of God's good earth. The exclusive have a flat or suite unoccupied in London and travel de luxe to a waiting villa at Nice or Cannes.

Miss Timson took the place so readily offered, and talked to the woman. They were off aht to Austrilyer because of mar's 'ealth. Mar 'ad asthma something crool. Wot were they goin' to do? They 'ad sold a little grocery business, an' were goin' to do the sime in Melbourne. They 'ad a brother aht there in one of the new suburbs.

Miss Timson knew those little groceries kept by "pommies" in the new suburbs. She did not feel at all open-hearted towards that class of migrant. They would re-create old-world slums on easy streets wrought by the hard slogging of the pioneers. The fetid air and the discomfort of sitting bolt upright on a hard seat in a lively roll may have de-Christianized her view. The immediate stink was of babies' napkins, the general that of the unwashed bodies of the poor. In addition to the din of squalling children, three hefty boys above the age of fourteen were thrashing the piano with the evident intention of breaking it. The woman did not remonstrate. Stewards passed in and out without remarking the performance. Two of the boys, falling out over the battering, resorted to fists. A table was overturned in the savage contest, endangering the bones of a three-year-old, who howled like a native bear. A lady of seventy-six climbed on to a seat. Several mothers escaped through a door into a passage that was shipping heavy seas.

"They 'adn't oughter be let fight in 'ere where there's bibies," mildly protested the woman with the rancid offspring, but there was general admiration.

"They oughter to be able to look after theirselves all right w'en they're a little older, seein' the way they git to business now," said another woman with equally rancid offspring.

"They'll be orl right fer Austrilyer!"

"I never remember seein' lads of their age get down to it In such manful fashion," observed the steward of the section.

Miss Timson went to her bunk. Her steward protested that Inspection was not over. "You leave me to deal with that. I'm not one of the 'cattle'," she snapped, irascible with nausea and the lack of common decency in the ladies' room.

The following forenoon she was interested to see the Pretentious Man driven there. He had commanded his wife to keep the children from the rabble on deck. Whenever they passed, women muttered that their children were just as clean us his. He sat down with his dainty little girls. Near him was a worn middle-aged woman with her inseparable woman friend and a man. Suddenly the man called the woman a "Woody bitch", and struck her a blow which laid her on the floor. Another man and the steward intervened. Some lifted the woman. Others held the man. He was protesting that he was not drunk. "A nice thing in a free country if a man can't do wot he likes wiv his own b--- wife! Wait till I catch her at it next time! I'll beat the b--- lights outer her."

The woman promenaded not long afterwards, a little suggillated but apparently untouched by humiliation. She belonged o that layer of London society. The smarting effect was on the Pretentious Man.

"If I had known that the O. & O. ran a boat like this, where my family and myself would be compelled to associate with the scum of the earth! Ought to be exposed in the public Press so that decent people will never come this way again. It will surely kill all business on this line."

"Ah," laughed an Irishman from Dick's table, who had had twenty years' experience of ocean liners. "Shure there's always this fuss on every boat, whether it's millionaires on the Aquitania or an immigrant tub like the old Ballyphule."

"I don't propose to let the matter drop."

"Ah, now, shure whin ye get off the boat yell be boasting what a grand life ye've had, and yell recommend others to cme by the O. & O., an' they'll be runnin' a hundred years hence, as they were seventy years back, and raising big dividends all the time."

"That's quite true," added Miss Timson. "I've heard worse threats from first-classers about the mail-boats via Suez, and far worse scandals."

The days were dragged through. Miss Timson had supplied herself with much reading. Dick was tortured by lack of sleep. Work at his text-book as he would, he could not sleep in noises. Parties organized to bring relief to the young took place just above him till 11 p.m. It took the roysterers till midnight to settle down. At 4 a.m. the stewards began hitting the walls of his cabin with scrubbing brushes. Undisturbing to others. Hell to him.

He found pleasure in Miss Timson. She knew England and America, had read much that he had read, and her spirited disquisitions showed she had traversed many similar ruts of thought. Whether she was married or single he could not determine, nor her age, because she, was free from feminine urge to attract, indifferent to what impression she made. With her there was peace and safety from amorous pursuit to which a good-looking unattached man is vigorously subjected on ship-board. Most of the passengers thought Miss Timson was "making up" to Mr Meyers. Their laughter and continual talking together looked like it to the large percentage of persons unfurnished with any other basis of interest in conversation between the opposing sexes.

V

The grand silhouette of Cape Town was before them one dusk, the Table and the lion couchant called the Devil's Peak, and the grand peak called the Lion's Head, just as pictured. Dick stood forward on the poop once more, his heart uplifted by the grandeur. A good Scot was at his elbow maintaining that it was nothing to Bonnie Scotland--nothing at all! But it was glorious to Dick, who, given a little beauty, in the way of poets, became a millionaire of the soul.

He and Miss Timson went ashore and bought ostrich feathers, and strolled in the gardens right under that incomparable Peak. They rhapsodized in harmonious keys. They were children when finding the winter-blooming flowers that had decked the old gardens up the country. They went out to Camp Bay and back by the Kloof, and to the Museum and saw the casts of the strange people about which they had read, and the great beasts and birds, and the lovely deer in which South Africa is rich. They rejoiced in the sun, warm as English summer, and brighter, but at four o'clock insisting with asperity that it was winter under the Southern Cross. So they went to the Market and obtained as much fruit as they could carry. They had a good meal, bought the papers, and saw a picture-show. A day to remember as tilth of life.

The ship got away next morning as the sun was coming up in a vasty glory of blue and gold over mountains that rolled away into infinity. Dick stood aft filling his reservoir. That outline and the Southern Cross would be a bank to draw on all the way to Australia--to Coolooluk!

Out past the Twelve Apostles, past Cape Agulhas, the last land for five thousand miles. They sat on the decks comfortably all day in spite of the increasing roll, and missed the South Africans who had gone their ways in that tremendous land, to Durban, Rhodesia, elsewhere.

Content reigned following the break. They settled down to another three weeks' tubbing along in the old Ballyphule in a tumultuous ocean all to themselves and the Cape sheep. People retired quietly and early after the port racket. All was well.

Dick felt it a little rough. The rocking was pleasant. He was having a rare night of several hours' sleep. He was wakened by a loud crashing and the rush of water.

Had they struck? No. Merely the result of incompetently screwed ports and all available glasses breaking in a sudden lurch. His and Armstrong's trunks ran about the floor like mice and fought together. Dick got out, but was bashed on o the wash-basin and back to the bunk-rails, so desisted. He reached breakfast by holding on to rails. All implements were off the tables, on which wet blankets were laid. Wet blankets were also laid for the stewards to walk on, but no rope or rails had been provided near the serving window, and once started, there was nothing to break gravitation to the ship's outside wall, where their plates crashed in a grand mélange of porridge, fish, and stew. The children were tied in their Fairs. Plates, if not tightly held, jumped the divisions of the fiddles like goats. Pieces of bread hopped like grasshoppers. A sense of adventure was abroad.

Heavy seas were being shipped from the high green waves. Part of the taffrail went, and the boatswain within an inch of going with it. Ropes were tied everywhere to help the stewards against the water which boiled around the decks in whirlpools. They were off the Cape of Storms. Poets and other writers record that two great oceans for ever battle there for supremacy. "A heavy swell," the old deck steward, a survival from sailing-ships, called it. The swell increased and continued for days. The Ballyphule seemed to have the great south waters to herself. Away she went, down and down, below forty-five degrees for the easier currents. Away through the Aleutian Deep towards Kerguelen, plunking along at the pace of a wheelbarrow, with clouds of albatrosses and big black petrels for convoy. The wind lifted spume from the waves that darkened the heavens. A white squall. The ship sometimes rolled to an angle of nearly forty degrees. When the rough weather routine settled, Dick felt it inspiring to watch the waves tower up like cathedrals forward and flatten out aft as if the ship had trampled them to foaming suds.

There was no place of retreat with comfort except the garden seats in the bar. The ladies' room was vile with the stench of babies and fightings and bleatings of youths as they thumped the piano. It was a relief when the increasing roll caused the seats to be roped in a stack and the piano locked.

A convoluted corrugated effluvium reigned in Miss Timson's corridor. One of those women furnished with a plant to give birth, but lacking the capability to keep the consequences clean on shipboard, was the cause. The chief steward wondered helplessly what it could be. "The man's a fool or incompetent, to travel on a migrant ship and not recognize infants' diapers," said Miss Timson.

The housewifery went on with hardship on the workers. The passengers spent their days skidding about, the men finding entertainment in helping the women with children. The food grew worse, or, in face of the difficulties, the preparation and cooking deteriorated. A few of the valiant and optimistic, headed by the Pretentious Man, waited upon the Purser and Captain. Improvement was promised. By day the children howled, the male adolescents, lacking other outlet for their motor endowment, racketed. At night there were rows and raids.

"Didn't I tell you?" said an old steward. "It's always worse after the Cape. These immigrants begin to find their feet, and there's no puttin' up wiv 'em."

Armstrong snored and snored, filling and staling the cabin, making all rest impossible for Dick. If only he had struck one of those cabin mates who sat in the bar and played cards from after breakfast till 11 p.m., it would have given him a chance. To the sensitive, robbed of sleep, they were brutalized and lost days out of life, so inadequately short.

"Such months at sea could be made more fruitful if instruction was provided for the migrants," observed Dick.

"The cheapness of the 'cattle' doesn't call for it under the present system of economics," said Miss Timson. "Cheap labour at present is less expensive if left cheap. Competition will shortly compel the masters to grab their workers out of the public-house gutters and grade them, and will not admit of their rolling here idle for six or eight weeks."