Complete Works

beating about his calves. Amongst the shadows of stanchions and bowsprit, Donkin munched a piece of hard ship’s bread, sitting on the deck with upturned feet and restless eyes; he held the biscuit up before his mouth in the whole fist and snapped his jaws at it with a raging face. Crumbs fell between his outspread legs. Then he got up.
    “Where’s our water-cask?” he asked in a contained voice.
    Singleton, without a word, pointed with a big hand that held a short smouldering pipe. Donkin bent over the cask, drank out of the tin, splashing the water, turned round and noticed the nigger looking at him over the shoulder with calm loftiness. He moved up sideways.
    “There’s a blooming supper for a man,” he whispered bitterly. “My dorg at ‘ome wouldn’t ‘ave it. It’s fit enouf for you an’ me. ‘Ere’s a big ship’s fo’c’sle!... Not a blooming scrap of meat in the kids. I’ve looked in all the lockers....”
    The nigger stared like a man addressed unexpectedly in a foreign language. Donkin changed his tone: — ”Giv’ us a bit of ‘baccy, mate,” he breathed out confidentially, “I ‘aven’t ‘ad smoke or chew for the last month. I am rampin’ mad for it. Come on, old man!”
    “Don’t be familiar,” said the nigger. Donkin started and sat down on a chest near by, out of sheer surprise. “We haven’t kept pigs together,” continued James Wait in a deep undertone. “Here’s your tobacco.” Then, after a pause, he inquired: — ”What ship?” — ”Golden State,” muttered Donkin indistinctly, biting the tobacco. The nigger whistled low. — ”Ran?” he said curtly. Donkin nodded: one of his cheeks bulged out. “In course I ran,” he mumbled. “They booted the life hout of one Dago chap on the passage ‘ere, then started on me. I cleared hout ‘ere. — ” “Left your dunnage behind?” — ”Yes, dunnage and money,” answered Donkin, raising his voice a little; “I got nothink. No clothes, no bed. A bandy-legged little Hirish chap ‘ere ‘as give me a blanket. Think I’ll go an’ sleep in the fore topmast staysail to-night.”
    He went on deck trailing behind his back a corner of the blanket. Singleton, without a glance, moved slightly aside to let him pass. The nigger put away his shore togs and sat in clean working clothes on his box, one arm stretched over his knees. After staring at Singleton for some time he asked without emphasis: — ”What kind of ship is this? Pretty fair? Eh?”
    Singleton didn’t stir. A long while after he said, with unmoved face: — ”Ship!... Ships are all right. It is the men in them!”
    He went on smoking in the profound silence. The wisdom of half a century spent in listening to the thunder of the waves had spoken unconsciously through his old lips. The cat purred on the windlass. Then James Wait had a fit of roaring, rattling cough, that shook him, tossed him like a hurricane, and flung him panting with staring eyes headlong on his sea-chest. Several men woke up. One said sleepily out of his bunk: “‘Struth! what a blamed row!” — ”I have a cold on my chest,” gasped Wait. — ”Cold! you call it,” grumbled the man; “should think ‘twas something more....” — ”Oh! you think so,” said the nigger upright and loftily scornful again. He climbed into his berth and began coughing persistently while he put his head out to glare all round the forecastle. There was no further protest. He fell back on the pillow, and could be heard there wheezing regularly like a man oppressed in his sleep.
    Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man’s passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone — those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity. They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted, unruly and