Complete Works

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 whitewashed 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 tar-pot 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 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 felt 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 that 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