Complete Works

chaps. You... are nice... and... quiet... you are! Yelling so... before... the door....”
    He made a longer pause, during which he worked his ribs in an exaggerated labour of breathing. It was intolerable. Feet were shuffled. Belfast let out a groan; but Donkin above blinked his red eyelids with invisible eyelashes, and smiled bitterly over the nigger’s head.
    The nigger went on again with surprising ease. He gasped no more, and his voice rang, hollow and loud, as though he had been talking in an empty cavern. He was contemptuously angry.
    “I tried to get a wink of sleep. You know I can’t sleep o’ nights. And you come jabbering near the door here like a blooming lot of old women.... You think yourselves good shipmates. Do you?... Much you care for a dying man!”
    Belfast spun away from the pigstye. “Jimmy,” he cried tremulously, “if you hadn’t been sick I would —  —  — ”
    He stopped. The nigger waited awhile, then said, in a gloomy tone: — ”You would.... What? Go an’ fight another such one as yourself. Leave me alone. It won’t be for long. I’ll soon die.... It’s coming right enough!”
    Men stood around very still and with exasperated eyes. It was just what they had expected, and hated to hear, that idea of a stalking death, thrust at them many times a day like a boast and like a menace by this obnoxious nigger. He seemed to take a pride in that death which, so far, had attended only upon the ease of his life; he was overbearing about it, as if no one else in the world had ever been intimate with such a companion; he paraded it unceasingly before us with an affectionate persistence that made its presence indubitable, and at the same time incredible. No man could be suspected of such monstrous friendship! Was he a reality — or was he a sham — this ever-expected visitor of Jimmy’s? We hesitated between pity and mistrust, while, on the slightest provocation, he shook before our eyes the bones of his bothersome and infamous skeleton. He was for ever trotting him out. He would talk of that coming death as though it had been already there, as if it had been walking the deck outside, as if it would presently come in to sleep in the only empty bunk; as if it had sat by his side at every meal. It interfered daily with our occupations, with our leisure, with our amusements. We had no songs and no music in the evening, because Jimmy (we all lovingly called him Jimmy, to conceal our hate of his accomplice) had managed, with that prospective decease of his, to disturb even Archie’s mental balance. Archie was the owner of the concertina; but after a couple of stinging lectures from Jimmy he refused to play any more. He said: — ”Yon’s an uncanny joker. I dinna ken what’s wrang wi’ him, but there’s something verra wrang, verra wrang. It’s nae manner of use asking me. I won’t play.” Our singers became mute because Jimmy was a dying man. For the same reason no chap — as Knowles remarked — could “drive in a nail to hang his few poor rags upon,” without being made aware of the enormity he committed in disturbing Jimmy’s interminable last moments. At night, instead of the cheerful yell, “One bell! Turn out! Do you hear there? Hey! hey! hey! Show leg!” the watches were called man by man, in whispers, so as not to interfere with Jimmy’s, possibly, last slumber on earth. True, he was always awake, and managed, as we sneaked out on deck, to plant in our backs some cutting remark that, for the moment, made us feel as if we had been brutes, and afterwards made us suspect ourselves of being fools. We spoke in low tones within that fo’c’sle as though it had been a church. We ate our meals in silence and dread, for Jimmy was capricious with his food, and railed bitterly at the salt meat, at the biscuits, at the tea, as at articles unfit for human consumption — ”let alone for a dying man!” He would say: — ”Can’t you find a better slice of meat for a sick man who’s trying to get home to be cured — or buried? But there! If I had a chance, you fellows would do away with it. You would poison me. Look at what you have given me!” We served him in his bed with rage and humility, as though we had been the base courtiers of a hated prince; and he rewarded us by his unconciliating criticism. He had found the secret of keeping for ever on the run the fundamental imbecility of mankind; he had the secret of life, that confounded dying man, and he made