I have a great admiration for Chief Engineers.  They are men in authority, needing all the comforts and aids that can possibly be given them—­such as bathrooms of their own close to their own cabins, where they can clean off at leisure.

It is not fair to mix them up with the ruck of passengers, nor is it done on real ships.  Nor, when a passenger wants a bath in the evening, do the stewards of real ships roll their eyes like vergers in a cathedral and say, ‘We’ll see if it can be managed.’  They double down the alleyway and shout, ‘Matcham’ or ‘Ponting’ or ‘Guttman,’ and in fifteen seconds one of those swift three has the taps going and the towels out.  Real ships are not annexes of Westminster Abbey or Borstal Reformatory.  They supply decent accommodation in return for good money, and I imagine that their directors instruct their staffs to look pleased while at work.

Some generations back there must have been an idea that the P. & O. was vastly superior to all lines afloat—­a sort of semipontifical show not to be criticised.  How much of the notion was due to its own excellence and how much to its passenger-traffic monopoly does not matter.  To-day, it neither feeds nor tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships well enough to put on any airs at all.

For which reason, human nature being what it is, it surrounds itself with an ungracious atmosphere of absurd ritual to cover grudged and inadequate performance.

What it really needs is to be dropped into a March North Atlantic, without any lascars, and made to swim for its life between a C.P.R. boat and a North German Lloyd—­till it learns to smile.

II

A RETURN TO THE EAST

The East is a much larger slice of the world than Europeans care to admit.  Some say it begins at St. Gothard, where the smells of two continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car dinner in the tunnel.  Others have found it at Venice on warm April mornings.  But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail—­that shark’s fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white bathers round the Mediterranean.  There is still a suggestion of menace, a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or fruiting or coasting.

‘This is not my ancestral trade,’ she whispers to the accomplice sea.  ’If everybody had their rights I should be doing something quite different; for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, she was the Dhow, and between the two of ’em they made Asia.’  Then she tacks, disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, as it were, up her baggy sleeves.

Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness.  They are all children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope and patch.