Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck. Above his head, on the break of the poop, the night-watchman rang a double stroke. It was nine o’clock. Mr. Baker, speaking up to the man above him, asked:— ‘Are all the hands aboard, Knowles?’
The man limped down the ladder, then said reflectively:—
‘I think so, sir. All our old chaps are there, and a lot of new men has come . . . They must be all there.’
‘Tell the boatswain to send all hands aft,’ went on Mr. Baker; ‘and tell one of the youngsters to bring a good lamp here. I want to muster our crowd.’
The main deck was dark aft, but halfway from forward, through the open doors of the forecastle, two streaks of brilliant light cut the shadow of the quiet night that lay upon the ship. A hum of voices was heard there, while port and starboard, in the illuminated doorways, silhouettes of moving men appeared for a moment, very black, without relief, like figures cut out of sheet tin. The ship was ready for sea. The carpenter had driven in the last wedge of the main-hatch battens, and, throwing down his maul, had wiped his face with great deliberation, just on the stroke of five. The decks had been swept, the windlass oiled and made ready to heave up the anchor; the big tow-rope lay in long bights along one side of the main deck, with one end carried up and hung over the bows, in readiness for the tug that would come paddling and hissing noisily, hot and smoky, in the limpid, cool quietness of the early morning. The captain was ashore, where he had been engaging some new hands to make up his full crew; and, the work of the day over, the ship’s officers had kept out of the way, glad of a little breathing-time. Soon after dark the few liberty-men and the new hands began to arrive in shore-boats rowed by white-clad Asiatics, who clamoured fiercely for payment before coming alongside the gangway-ladder. The feverish and shrill babble of Eastern language struggled against the masterful tones of tipsy seamen, who argued against brazen claims and dishonest hopes by profane shouts. The resplendent and bestarred peace of the East was torn into squalid tatters by howls of rage and shrieks of lament raised over sums ranging from five annas to half a rupee; and every soul afloat in Bombay Harbour became aware that the new hands were joining the Narcissus.
Gradually the distracting noise had subsided. The boats came no longer in splashing clusters of three or four together, but dropped alongside singly, in a subdued buzz of expostulation cut short by a ‘Not a piece more! You go to the devil!’ from some man staggering up the accommodation-ladder — a dark figure, with a long bag poised on the shoulder. In the forecastle the newcomers, upright and swaying amongst corded boxes and bundles of bedding, made friends with the old hands, who sat one above another in the two tiers of bunks, gazing at their future shipmates with glances critical but friendly. The two forecastle lamps were turned up high, and shed an intense hard glare; shore-going hard hats were pushed far on the backs of heads, or rolled about on the deck amongst the chain-cables; white collars, undone, stuck out on each side of red faces; big arms in white sleeves gesticulated; the growling voices hummed steady amongst bursts of laughter and hoarse calls. ‘Here, sonny, take that bunk! . . . Don’t you do it! . . . What’s your last ship? . . . I know her . . . .Three years ago, in Puget Sound . . . This here berth leaks, I tell you! . . . Come on; give us a chance to swing that chest! . . . Did you bring a bottle, any of you shore toffs? . . . Give us a bit of ‘baccy . . . I know her; her skipper drank himself to death . . . He was a dandy boy! . . . Liked his lotion inside, he did! . . . No! . . . Hold your row, you chaps! . . . I tell you, you came on board a hooker, where they get their money’s worth out of poor Jack, by —! . . . ’
A little fellow, called Craik and nicknamed Belfast, abused the ship violently, romancing on principle, just to give the new hands something to think over. Archie, sitting aslant on his sea-chest, kept his knees out of the way, and pushed the needle steadily through a white patch in a pair of blue trousers. Men in black jackets and stand-up collars, mixed with men bare-footed, bare-armed, with coloured shirts open on hairy chests, pushed against one another in the middle of the forecastle. The group swayed, reeled, turning upon itself with the motion of a scrimmage, in a haze of tobacco smoke. All were speaking together, swearing at every second word. A Russian Finn, wearing a yellow shirt with pink stripes, stared upwards, dreamy-eyed, from under a mop of tumbled hair. Two young giants with smooth, baby faces — two Scandinavians — helped each other to spread their bedding, silent, and smiling placidly at the tempest of good-humoured and meaningless curses. Old Singleton, the oldest able seaman in the ship, sat apart on the deck right under the lamps, stripped to the waist, tattooed like a cannibal chief all over his powerful chest and enormous biceps. Between the blue and red patterns his white skin gleamed like satin; his bare back was propped against the heel of the bowsprit, and he held a book at arm’s length before his big, sunburnt face. With his spectacles and a venerable white beard, he resembled a learned and savage patriarch, the incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the blasphemous turmoil of the world. He was intensely absorbed, and, as he turned the pages an expression of grave surprise would pass over his rugged features. He was reading ‘Pelham.’ The popularity of Bulwer Lytton in the forecastles of Southern-going ships is a wonderful and bizarre phenomenon. What ideas do his polished and so curiously insincere sentences awaken in the simple minds of the big children who people those dark and wandering places of the earth? What meaning can their rough, inexperienced souls find in the elegant verbiage of his pages? What excitement? — what forgetfulness? — what appeasement? Mystery! Is it the fascination of the incomprehensible? — is it the charm of the impossible? Or are those beings who exist beyond the pale of life stirred by his tales as by an enigmatical disclosure of a resplendent world that exists within the frontier of infamy and filth, within that border of dirt and hunger, of misery and dissipation, that comes down on all sides to the water’s edge of the incorruptible ocean, and is the only thing they know of life, the only thing they see of surrounding land — those life-long prisoners of the sea? Mystery?
Singleton, who had sailed to the southward since the age of twelve, who in the last forty-five years had lived (as we had calculated from his papers) no more than forty months ashore — old Singleton, who boasted, with the mild composure of long years well spent, that generally from the day he was paid off from one ship till the day he shipped in another he seldom was in a condition to distinguish daylight — old Singleton sat unmoved in the clash of voices and cries, spelling through ‘Pelham’ with slow labour, and lost in an absorption profound enough to resemble a trance. He breathed regularly. Every time he turned the book in his enormous and blackened hands the muscles of his big white arms rolled slightly under the smooth skin. Hidden by the white moustache, his lips, stained with tobacco-juice that trickled down the long beard, moved in inward whisper. His bleared eyes gazed fixedly from behind the glitter of black-rimmed glasses. Opposite to him, and on a level with his face, the ship’s cat sat on the barrel of the windlass in the pose of a crouching chimera, blinking its green eyes at its old friend. It seemed to meditate a leap on to the old man’s lap over the bent back of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton’s feet. Young Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his backbone made a chain of small hills under the old shirt. His face of a street-boy — a face precocious, sagacious, and ironic, with deep downward folds on each side of the thin, wide mouth — hung low over his bony knees. He was learning to make a lanyard knot with a bit of an old rope. Small drops of perspiration stood out on his bulging forehead; he sniffed strongly from time to time, glancing out of the corners of his restless eyes at the old seaman, who took no notice of the puzzled youngster muttering at his work.
The noise increased. Little Belfast seemed, in the heavy heat of the forecastle, to boil with facetious fury. His eyes danced; in the crimson of his face, comical as a mask, the mouth yawned black, with strange grimaces. Facing him, a half-undressed man held his sides, and throwing his head back, laughed with wet eyelashes. Others stared with amazed eyes. Men sitting doubled up in the upper bunks smoked short pipes, swinging bare brown feet above the heads of those who, sprawling below on sea-chests, listened, smiling stupidly or scornfully. Over the white rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but the bodies were lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled narrow niches for coffins in a white-washed and lighted mortuary. Voices buzzed louder. Archie, with compressed lips, drew himself in, seemed to shrink into a smaller space, and sewed steadily, industrious and dumb. Belfast shrieked like an inspired Dervish:— ‘ . . . So I seez to him, boys, seez I, “Beggin’ yer pardon, sorr,” seez I to that second mate of that steamer — “beggin’ your-r-r pardon, sorr, the Board of Trade must ’ave been drunk when they granted you your certificate!” “What do you say, you —!” seez he, comin’ at me like a mad bull . . . all in his white clothes; and I up with my tarpot and capsizes it all over his blamed lovely face and his lovely jacket . . . . “Take that!” seez I. “I am a sailor, anyhow, you nosing, skipper-licking, useless, sooperfloos bridge-stanchion, you! That’s the kind of man I am!” shouts I . . . You should have seed him skip, boys! Drowned, blind with tar, he was! So . . . ’
‘Don’t ’ee believe him! He never upset no tar; I was there!’ shouted somebody. The two Norwegians sat on a chest side by side, alike and placid, resembling a pair of love-birds on a perch, and with round eyes stared innocently; but the Russian Finn, in the racket of explosive shouts and rolling laughter, remained motionless, limp and dull, like a deaf man without a backbone. Near him Archie smiled at his needle. A broad-chested, slow-eyed newcomer spoke deliberately to Belfast during an exhausted lull in the noise:— ‘I wonder any of the mates here are alive yet with such a chap as you on board! I concloode they ain’t that bad now, if you had the taming of them, sonny.’
‘Not bad! Not bad!’ screamed Belfast. ‘If it wasn’t for us sticking together . . . Not bad! They ain’t never bad when they ain’t got a chawnce, blast their black ’arts . . . ’ He foamed, whirling his arms, then suddenly grinned and, taking a tablet of black tobacco out of his pocket, bit a piece off with a funny show of ferocity. Another new hand — a man with shifty eyes and a yellow hatchet face, who had been listening open-mouthed in the shadow of the midship locker — observed in a squeaky voice:— ‘Well, it’s a ’omeward trip, anyhow. Bad or good, I can do it hall on my ’ed — s’long as I get ’ome. And I can look after my rights! I will show ’em!’ All the heads turned towards him. Only the ordinary seaman and the cat took no notice. He stood with arms akimbo, a little fellow with white eyelashes, He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if he had been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth . . . and he smiled with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears were bending down under the weight of his battered hard hat. The torn tails of his black coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs. He unbuttoned the only two buttons that remained and every one saw he had no shirt under it. It was his deserved misfortune that those rags which nobody could possibly be supposed to own looked on him as if they had been stolen. His neck was long and thin; his eyelids were red; rare hairs hung about his jaws; his shoulders were peaked and drooped like the broken wings of a bird; all his left side was caked with mud which showed that he had lately slept in a wet ditch. He had saved his inefficient carcass from violent destruction by running away from an American ship where, in a moment of forgetful folly, he had dared to engage himself; and he had knocked about for a fortnight ashore in the native quarter, cadging for drinks, starving, sleeping on rubbish-heaps, wandering in sunshine: a startling visitor from a world of nightmares. He stood repulsive and smiling in the sudden silence. This clean white forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he could wallow, and lie and eat — and curse the food he ate; where he could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully — and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? A taciturn long-armed shellback, with hooked fingers, who had been lying on his back smoking, turned in his bed to examine him dispassionately, then, over his head, sent a long jet of clear saliva towards the door. They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called. The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking landlubbers. The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company. The independent offspring of the ignoble freedom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servitude of the sea.
Some one cried at him: ‘What’s your name?’ — ‘Donkin,’ he said, looking round with cheerful effrontery. — ‘What are you?’ asked another voice. — ‘Why, a sailor like you, old man,’ he replied, in a tone that meant to be hearty but was impudent. — ‘Blamme if you don’t look a blamed sight worse than a broken-down fireman,’ was the comment in a convinced mutter. Charley lifted his head and piped in a cheeky voice: ‘He is a man and a sailor’ — then wiping his nose with the back of his hand bent down industriously over his bit of rope. A few laughed. others stared doubtfully. The ragged newcomer was indignant. — ‘That’s a fine way to welcome a chap into a fo’c’sle,’ he snarled. ‘Are you men or a lot of ’artless cannybals?’ — ‘Don’t take your shirt off for a word, shipmate,’ called out Belfast, jumping up in front, fiery, menacing, and friendly at the same time. — ‘Is that ’ere bloke blind?’ asked the indomitable scarecrow, looking right and left with affected surprise. ‘Can’t ’ee see I ’aven’t got no shirt?’
He held both his arms out crosswise and shook the rags that hung over his bones with dramatic effect.
‘‘Cos why?’ he continued very loud. ‘The bloody Yankees been tryin’ to jump my guts hout ‘cos I stood up for my rights like a good’un. I ham a Henglishman, I ham. They set upon me an’ I ’ad to run. That’s why. A’n’t yer never seed a man ’ard up? Yah!
What kind of blamed ship is this? I’m dead broke. I ’aven’t got nothink. No bag, no bed, no blanket, no shirt — not a bloomin’ rag but what I stand in. But I ’ad the ’art to stand hup agin’ them Yankees. ’As any of you ’art enough to spare a pair of old pants for a chum?’
He knew how to conquer the naive instincts of that crowd. In a moment they gave him their compassion, jocularly, contemptuously, or surlily; and at first it took the shape of a blanket thrown at him as he stood there with the white skin of his limbs showing his human kinship through the black fantasy of his rags. Then a pair of old shoes fell at his muddy feet. With a cry:— ‘From under,’ a rolled-up pair of trousers, heavy with tar stains, struck him on the shoulder. The gust of their benevolence sent a wave of sentimental pity through their doubting hearts. They were touched by their own readiness to alleviate a shipmate’s misery. Voices cried:— ‘We will fit you out, old man.’ Murmurs: ‘Never seed seech a hard case . . . Poor beggar . . . I’ve got an old singlet . . . Will that be of any use to you? . . . Take it, matey . . . ’ Those friendly murmurs filled the forecastle. He pawed around with his naked foot, gathering the things in a heap and looked about for more. Unemotional Archie perfunctorily contributed to the pile an old cloth cap with the peak torn off. Old Singleton, lost in the serene regions of fiction, read on unheeding. Charley, pitiless with the wisdom of youth, squeaked:— ‘If you want brass buttons for your new unyforms I’ve got two for you.’ The filthy object of universal charity shook his fist at the youngster. — ‘I’ll make you keep this ’ere fo’c’sle clean, young feller,’ he snarled viciously. ‘Never you fear. I will learn you to be civil to an able seaman, you hignorant hass.’ He glared harmfully, but saw Singleton shut his book, and his little beady eyes began to roam from berth to berth. — ‘Take that bunk by the door there — it’s pretty fair,’ suggested Belfast. So advised, he gathered the gifts at his feet, pressed them in a bundle against his breast, then looked cautiously at the Russian Finn, who stood on one side with an unconscious gaze, contemplating, perhaps, one of those weird visions that haunt the men of his race. ‘Get out of my road, Dutchy,’ said the victim of Yankee brutality. The Finn did not move — did not hear. ‘Get out, blast ye,’ shouted the other, shoving him aside with his elbow. ‘Get out, you blanked deaf and dumb fool. Get out.’ The man staggered, recovered himself, and gazed at the speaker in silence. — ‘Those damned furriners should be kept hunder,’ opined the amiable Donkin to the forecastle. ‘If you don’t teach ’em their place they put on you like hanythink.’ He flung all his worldly possessions into the empty bed-place, gauged with another shrewd look the risks of the proceeding, then leaped up to the Finn, who stood pensive and dull. — ‘I’ll teach you to swell around,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll plug your eyes for you, you blooming square-head.’ Most of the men were now in their bunks and the two had the forecastle clear to themselves. The development of the destitute Donkin aroused interest. He danced all in tatters before the amazed Finn, squaring from a distance at the heavy, unmoved face. One or two men cried encouragingly: ‘Go it, Whitechapel!’ settling themselves luxuriously in their beds to survey the fight. Others shouted: ‘Shut yer row! . . . Go an’ put yer ’ed in a bag! . . . ‘ The hubbub was recommencing. Suddenly many heavy blows struck with a handspike on the deck above boomed like discharges of small cannon through the forecastle. Then the boatswain’s voice rose outside the door with an authoritative note in its drawl:— ‘D’ye hear, below there? Lay aft! Lay aft to muster all hands!’
There was a moment of surprised stillness. Then the forecastle floor disappeared under men whose bare feet flopped on the planks as they sprang clear out of their berths. Caps were rooted for amongst tumbled blankets. Some, yawning, buttoned waistbands. Half-smoked pipes were knocked hurriedly against woodwork and stuffed under pillows. Voices growled: — ‘What’s up? . . . Is there no rest for us?’ Donkin yelped:— ‘If that’s the way of this ship, we’ll ’ave to change hall that . . . You leave me alone . . . I will soon . . . ’ None of the crowd noticed him. They were lurching in twos and threes through the doors, after the manner of merchant Jacks who cannot go out of a door fairly, like mere landsmen. The votary of change followed them. Singleton, struggling into his jacket, came last, tall and fatherly, bearing high his head of a weatherbeaten sage on the body of an old athlete. Only Charley remained alone in the white glare of the empty place, sitting between the two rows of iron links that stretched into the narrow gloom forward. He pulled hard at the strands in a hurried endeavour to finish his knot. Suddenly he started up, flung the rope at the cat, and skipped after the black tom that went off leaping sedately over chain compressors, with the tail carried stiff and upright, like a small flag pole.
Outside the glare of the steaming forecastle the serene purity of the night enveloped the seamen with its soothing breath, with its tepid breath flowing under the stars that hung countless above the mastheads in a thin cloud of luminous dust. On the town side the blackness of the water was streaked with trails of light which undulated gently on slight ripples, similar to ............