The Henson Journals

[3]

Sunday, April 18th, 1909.

At last I felt sufficiently recovered to shave and clothe myself. The morning was spent in a deck chair: I excused myself from attending the service, which was read by Captain Barr, and seems to have been satisfactory. There was no sermon. Canon Walpole offered to take a service for the steerage passengers: but as they seem mainly to be papists a popish priest read prayers to about 600. Mostly I read novels –'A dreamer of dreams' by Mrs Steel: 'A Prince's Pranks' by somebody whose name I forget. It is an account of the doings of the present Kaiser, then Prince William of Prussia, at the Jubilee in 1887: Henry of Navarre by May Wynne, a rather conventional romance in the Stanley Weyman manner of the Bartholomew Massacre.

The sea has been smoother: but there is no sun, and it is very cold. The thermometer reported 410.

Certainly life on board ship is a wearisome thing even when one is well: when one is ill it is indescribably odious. There is no way of escape save by going over–board, which puts a premium on suicide, and thus confuses our moral proportions! Conversation is not at a high level: for after all though the intimacy be close and constant, it is the creature of temporary circumstance not of normal knowledge. Thus nobody can talk of anything beyond the shallowest conventionality. There is not even the daily text of the 'Times' for the daily 'homilies of the table!

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