"Oh! Mummie, do come and see all the men waiting for their baths," said a little angel this morning, as she pointed at the solemn row of bare-footed men holding on to their towels and sponge-bags and tempers—we actually grinned. Like some others I give up the attempt to get a morning tub, and trust to sneak one in during the day; better to have no bath than to start the day cross—"better to smash your damned clubs than to lose your damned temper," as the golfer in a bunker was overheard muttering as he broke each club across his knee. The ladies, some hundreds, have I think five baths between them, and they wait for these a great part of the day. If you pass their waiting-room you get a glimpse of wonderful morning toilettes of every tint, muslins, laces, a black boy with red turbash bustling about to get the bath ready makes rather a good note of colour.
… Notwithstanding all the above grievance we hadn't such a bad day yesterday; it was calm and not too cold, with a soft pigeon grey sea and sky. … Put in a long day's painting in the corner of the after-well, and overhauling sketches done so far on the road—they are mounting up now, and I feel fortunate in having my apology for existence in such a handy shape as a paint box.
But how dull this log-writing becomes! How on earth can I find an incident to pad up this journal; what is there to write about in a route so monotonously first class! Here is absolutely the most risque exciting story I have heard for days; I must say the lady who told it has such an infectious laugh, that at the time I really thought it was very amusing.
You know the cabins on the P. & O. steamers are all exactly like each other, except the number above each door. So once upon a time she related, a certain lady tripped along to her cabin as she thought, to hurry up her husband for dinner and found him pulling on a shirt; she plumped into a seat, saying, "John, John, you are always too late for dinner, and there's no use trying to struggle into your shirt with the studs fastened?" Whereon the neck stud flew and revealed an astonished face—and it was not "John's." After lunch I told this to my barrister acquaintance; he smiled gently and said he had always thought it such an amusing story.
How I wish I was back at sea again on a whaler, with a swinging hammock, a tow net, and microscope, and opportunities any day to study the fairy beauties in drops of sea water, and with human interest too, so much more varied than on this P. & O. Hotel; there, would be all kinds of men, jolly, devil-may-care fellows, and even disreputable characters, mixed with canny, pawky, canting Scotties, and talk of all the corners of the world; ranting rollicking Balzacian yarns, rich in language, in poetry, and tenderness; any minute in the day amongst such people you might strike a yarn that would bear publication; the picturesque interest of life does not seem to be on the high plains, or low levels, but as it were between wind and water, where plain meets mountain, the poor the rich, between happiness and sorrow, and light and shade; and the fun of painting between one colour and the next. It is all very respectably drab here, and we talk of intellectual and proper things. For an hour to-day—no, two hours I am sure—I laboured at Indian sociology and history and Vedas and things, with the barrister, and I was tired! The barrister knows many books on these subjects, and recommends me to read Sir W. W. Hunter's "History of India" in its abridged form of only 700 pages; I suppose I must!—told my cousin I'd been trying to talk Indian sociology and he shouted: said he knew a man who had lived in India and studied the native life for twenty-eight years, and confessed he knew as little about it at the end as at the beginning; but R. admitted that whenever he had a knotty question of native affairs to settle he always went to this man, and the decision was invariably right. R. has qualified admiration for the Indians honesty. Once, he said, he had to leave his house at a moment's notice, to take home a sick relation, and left all standing, and on coming back months after found every single stick of furniture just as he left it, and not a single article stolen, except one door-mat; his night watchman had taken it with him to another situation, leaving a humble message to the effect that he had got so accustomed to it that he couldn't sleep without it! Their honesty must run in grooves for R. gave a heavy overcoat to one of his men in a cold station, and when he and his servants went to a very hot station, he noticed this man still wearing the thick coat and sweating like anything, so he asked him why he did so, and the man replied that he dared not put it off for a minute or it would be stolen.
We had quite an audience for the fiddles this Saturday—there are two lady violinists now, both very good players—but we had only a short spell of music in the music room on account of a choir practise, for to-morrow; the parson came and took our musicians down to the dining-room to sing over hymns and psalms, verse by verse. I heard the wheeze of the harmonium, and got back to my own chest-lid (sailor term for my own business)—"Every man to his own chest-lid and the cook to the foresheet," is it not a suggestive saying? To every man his prerogative, his chest-lid, and his duties, and the same for the cook and the least bit more! It is now getting passably mild, and we can sit out on deck at night. It was supposed to be hot enough for the punkahs in the saloon; one is hung over the length of each of the five tables, to port and starboard, and there are others the whole length of the table that runs up the middle of the saloon. I have long wished to see a punkah, now I wish I may never see another! On this ship they are narrow velvet rugs hung on edge from horizontal bars, this is swung by two ropes from the roof, and they are all guyed together with cords, so that one pull, from a lascar outside the cabin, sets them all into violent commotion. They hit your face when you stand, and sitting, their lowest edge stirs up your hair. These velvet rugs have white cotton covers on them now that they are being used, so the general effect at dinner-time is of a huge laundry in a gale, with beautiful laundresses in low dresses sitting at table under a world of wildly flapping linen; with the lamps lit, and our black coats for a foil, the colours are really extremely pretty, though the discomfort is great. Men and women are all getting a little brown with the sea air, and the ladies have a little of the blush of spring now, instead of the pallor of winter with which they came on board.
Egypt in sight, and this morning we tubbed in the water of the river that floated Moses, and that has been bathed in and drunk since by such a number of people we know, or have read about. Sea and Nile are meeting in blue, and green, and brownish stripes, blending to a general absinthe colour as we get closer to the flat delta; little level rows of cloud throw purple shadows across the crisp small waves, and over the horizon there's a flight of white lateen sails.
What a bustle there is on board to-day; people running up and down stairs with letters hurriedly finished, addressed and stamped to the children at home. No use writing to the man who waits out there, for we carry the mail. It is touching, the wife looking forward and back at the same time—the bull must pass—and the young girl too, leaving the old life for the new married life in a new country; it must take courage.
My notes at Port Said seem to have disappeared, possibly I did not write any. I remember that there was so much to see in the morning; and the change of colour in the water, the absinthe colour of the Nile with pale blue reflections winding in currents in distinct streams into the sea, would, with the blue ocean, need very subtile painting. I remember the fearful jabber, which I suppose has gone on and always will, since Port Said was invented. I got a glimpse of Lesseps's statue at lunch through the port-hole; he points with right hand twice life size up the harbour with a heroic expression, and seems to say to the steamers that come in from the sea, "Higher up there S.V.P.—try a little higher up." We watched the often described black men coaling in black dust, singing and working, the sun's rays making shafts of light stream through the clouds of black coal dust; and the same pandemonium at night in the flare of lights, when the scene is generally admitted to be like the nether regions.
I know we went ashore somehow or other, and that we could hardly see for the shouting and yelling! We felt fortunate in having a Mrs. Deputy-Commissioner for a companion, for she was bubbling over with humour and anecdote. She and G. promptly began shopping, and certainly succeeded in getting two rather becoming topees, flatter and prettier than any I have yet seen—you might call them Romney topees; one may appear in sketches further on. I sketched of course—always keep "screeb, screeb, screebling all day long," as an irate German lady once put it to me, "screebled"