A——. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about “cheap stuff.”  He says I’m on the wrong tack and I’ll be a failure if I don’t do what the public wants.  I said I didn’t care a blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big name.  All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended....  To hell with writing, I want to feel and see!

I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter him!

His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art.  Happening to be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of “futurist” pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in the newspaper correspondence columns.  He wrote for a leading London journal an article on “The Conditions of Labour at Sea.”  He finds time to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor.  His letters written weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern cultivated men.  I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.

When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig.  He was interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too.  And after obtaining his extra chief’s certificate from the London Board of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to rest on his gauges.

In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard.  Neither Aliens nor Casuals of the Sea, which he had been at work on for years, met with the favour of New York publishers.  He carried his manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he was not loath to get back into the old harness.  And then came the war.

Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks.  But I made my proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is something of the same artistic creed.  In those two magnificent prefaces—­to A Personal Record and to The Nigger of the Narcissus—­Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of letters.  They can never be quoted too often: