My Friend Wainscott

I only knew Wainscott for a brief six weeks during the War, but he is always cropping up in my mind. We joined the Royal Navy in the same rabble, and went for our training to a converted holiday camp on the east coast of England, a depressing place of chicken wire and crumbling plaster, where the wind blew mercilessly, and a few peeling billboards still said Hello Campers, Hello. Wainscott seemed cast officially for ridicule: He was round-shouldered, stooping, and giant-footed. His face drooped, and he mumbled and peered. Yet to everything that came his way, taunts included, he showed a mighty indifference; even to his uniform, which hung from him like a tarpaulin. He had no small talk. He never asked a question, and barely answered one. In the mail, all he ever got was an unintelligible weekly postcard, a move in the perpetual chess game he carried on with his grandfather in Mull. His main activity was knotting. Off duty, he sat on his bunk for hours behind his spectacles, knotting a ball of twine into torrents of experimental knots—Turk's-heads, Elizabethan fish-holds, Scottish cardigan knots. He also knotted belts and nets, and had designed, but not yet initiated, a knot shirt. To me, he was a true knotsman; because, ten minutes before lights-out, he would swiftly and masterfully untie his evening's experiments, wind up the twine with care, and go to sleep in his socks.

It was only by accident that I penetrated this profound barrier of knots, chess and silence. The fifth week in the crescendo of our training was given over to seamanship, the backbone of which was daily boat pulling, from eight A.M. until noon. Twelve of us sat in pairs in an unwieldy naval cutter, manhandling huge oars, under the eyes and orders of a coxswain, who stood upright at the tiller. Throughout our week on the ornamental lake deserted by the happy campers, I pulled the bow oar, on the port side. Beside me sat Wainscott, wordless as usual.

Our coxswain was a small wizened petty officer, Brunt by name, who told us with pride, but without explanation, that he was the only man in the Navy with a certificate to prove his sanity. He fairly flayed us with his tongue as we pulled our way from the Monday to the Saturday of boat-pulling week. We were bending our backs over the last half hour when—I cannot guess why—Brunt began idly to count the oars. Abruptly, on a stroke, he gave us "Rest oars," an order which we always executed with singular efficiency. Then: "Wastewater, count the oars." Wastewater, a pet sheep with nautical ambitions, obeyed with enthusiasm.

"How many?"

"Eleven, sir."

A curious sound, something like the death rattle of an albatross, came from Brunt's throat. Then: "Raise your oars in turn, from aft for'ard." My oar was last but one, and I heaved it up with a dry, unhappy feeling. Then: "Wainscott?"

"Haven't got an oar, sir." Wainscott's soft mumble. For, by some chance, our cutter lacked a 12th oar.

Brunt, whose temper broke daily on the slightest provocation, had no extra resources of rage for this. The boat floated heavily with the weight of the silence. Amazed, we heard Wainscott expound clearly and at length on the priority of Brunt's favorite rule—that no member of a boat's crew should ever speak unless first addressed by the coxswain. It was more than we had ever heard him say. Brunt's face was a dangerous color. We rowed back to the landing stage with the excitement that precedes doom.

Wainscott and the petty officer were away for a long time. But when Wainscott did shuffle back to the hut, he told us simply that nothing had happened; and he gave me a single glance. And nothing did happen, except that Brunt ignored him for the remainder of our training. I understood what his glance meant, and I never told what I knew; which was that all week Wainscott had sat next to me, farthest from the coxswain, with the backs of the rest of the crew to him, oarless. He had rocked back and forth magnificently, vigorously, gracefully, in time with the stroke. Perhaps even Brunt now appreciated the audacity of his performance; though I doubt it.

During the last week, I was admitted once or twice to what I felt was an audience with Wainscott. He never mentioned the rowing. He showed me a new tasseling knot he had invented. He told me that his grandfather had almost lost the current chess game, through stupidly relying on a defense taught him by his grandson. Then one evening he took from his kit bag a small black box. As he opened it, he looked at me sleepily through his big glasses. "You interested in trains?" he asked.

I said that I was, not daring to end the conversation.

"Where d'you live?"

I told him. "Then I suppose you travel to Edinburgh?" He fumbled in his box and produced a first-class single ticket from London to Edinburgh, unused. "A present," he mumbled. "Your best trains are the 9:04 from Kings Cross, or the 9:52 Night Scot." The black box was crammed with tickets, scissors, stencils, tiny pens, and the like. I began to realize that the boat-pulling episode had been a bagatelle to Wainscott. He had devised elaborate systems for traveling all over the British Isles by train, and his methods had all the patience of his knotting about them. He rebuilt old tickets, repairing punch holes, completing scripts, altering dates, sometimes even constructing new tickets. He had, he hinted, the means of outwitting the most vigilant conductors. There was nothing dishonest about it; he was a most upright man. But he felt bound to assert his own uniqueness in motion as in rest, and the railway companies were merely providing him with a hobby worthy of his contemptuous intelligence. If the Navy had ordered him to proceed independently through the Kiel Canal, he would have gone by train, quietly and ticketlessly. Instead, however, they expected him to row round and round an ornamental lake.

Recently, I found Wainscott's ticket at the back of an old desk. I had never used it, I think simply because I wasn't Wainscott. I last saw him shuffling along the platform on leave, probably armed with a battery of tickets which would take him on whim to Truro or Tobermory, in time to checkmate his grandfather, or else to some small Welsh station, with its name spelled in shells or sea pinks. He had a ball of twine in his hand for the journey.