souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used
to wonder what it was. Only at the football matches did it seem to lift
at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in
their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their
features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type
here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was
oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning
peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous
and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry,
living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by
marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had
built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired
ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and
skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at
church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow
streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like
sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract
folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were
away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and
invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it
was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make
several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a
continuous stampede from saloon to junction and from junction to saloon.
I couldn't understand it at first, for the mate was a decent, wide-open
sort of chap, and fairly sober considering he had once been master and
so had an inducement to drown dull care. But I discovered that his wife
wouldn't have it in the house, and he was fortifying himself against a
'dry week-end.' It certainly was dry to me. The house, partly paid for
when he had a collision and lost his job in the Fort Line, was still
called _Fort William_ after his ship, and I could see that the
name-plate had been carved out of teak by the carpenter to please 'the
old man.' How were the mighty fallen! You know, there was something
pathetic to me in that man's drop from master to mate. To him it was
more than pathetic, it was the next thing to the end of the world. He
was just an average seaman. He had no culture, no art, no religion, no
philosophy to support him