Complete Works

to blows over it. The watch below interfered with spirit, and for ten minutes there was a noisy scrimmage round the hatch, where, in the balancing shade of the sails, Jimmy’s body, wrapped up in a white blanket, was watched over by the sorrowful Belfast, who, in his desolation, disdained the fray. When the noise had ceased, and the passions had calmed into surly silence, he stood up at the head of the swathed body, lifting both arms on high, cried with pained indignation: — ”You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!...” We were.
    Belfast took his bereavement very hard. He gave proofs of unextinguishable devotion. It was he, and no other man, who would help the sailmaker to prepare what was left of Jimmy for a solemn surrender to the insatiable sea. He arranged the weights carefully at the feet: two holystones, an old anchor-shackle without its pin, some broken links of a worn-out stream cable. He arranged them this way, then that. “Bless my soul! you aren’t afraid he will chafe his heel?” said the sailmaker, who hated the job. He pushed the needle, purring furiously, with his head in a cloud of tobacco smoke; he turned the flaps over, pulled at the stitches, stretched at the canvas. — ”Lift his shoulders.... Pull to you a bit.... So — o — o. Steady.” Belfast obeyed, pulled, lifted, overcome with sorrow, dropping tears on the tarred twine. — . “Don’t you drag the canvas too taut over his poor face, Sails,” he entreated, tearfully. — ”What are you fashing yourself for? He will be comfortable enough,” assured the sailmaker, cutting the thread after the last stitch, which came about the middle of Jimmy’s forehead. He rolled up the remaining canvas, put away the needles. “What makes you take on so?” he asked. Belfast looked down at the long package of grey sailcloth. — ”I pulled him out,” he whispered, “and he did not want to go. If I had sat up with him last night he would have kept alive for me... but something made me tired.” The sailmaker took vigorous draws at his pipe and mumbled: — ”When I... West India Station... In the Blanche frigate... Yellow Jack... sewed in twenty men a week... Portsmouth-Devon-port men — townies — knew their fathers, mothers, sisters — the whole boiling of ‘em. Thought nothing of it. And these niggers like this one — you don’t know where it comes from. Got nobody. No use to nobody. Who will miss him?” — ”I do — I pulled him out,” mourned Belfast dismally.
    On two planks nailed together and apparently resigned and still under the folds of the Union Jack with a white border, James Wait, carried aft by four men, was deposited slowly, with his feet pointing at an open port. A swell had set in from the westward, and following on the roll of the ship, the red ensign, at half-mast, darted out and collapsed again on the grey sky, like a tongue of flickering fire; Charley tolled the bell; and at every swing to starboard the whole vast semi-circle of steely waters visible on that side seemed to come up with a rush to the edge of the port, as if impatient to get at our Jimmy. Every one was there but Donkin, who was too ill to come; the Captain and Mr. Creighton stood bareheaded on the break of the poop; Mr. Baker, directed by the master, who had said to him gravely: — ”You know more about the prayer book than I do,” came out of the cabin door quickly and a little embarrassed. All the caps went off. He began to read in a low tone, and with his usual harmlessly menacing utterance, as though he had been for the last time reproving confidentially that dead seaman at his feet. The men listened in scattered groups; they leaned on the fife rail, gazing on the deck; they held their chins in their hands thoughtfully, or, with crossed arms and one knee slightly bent, hung their heads in an attitude of upright meditation. Wamibo dreamed. Mr. Baker read on, grunting reverently at the turn of every page. The words, missing the unsteady hearts of men, rolled out to wander without a home upon the heartless sea; and James Wait, silenced for ever, lay uncritical and passive under the hoarse murmur of despair and hopes.
    Two men made ready and waited for those words that send so many of our brothers to their last plunge. Mr. Baker began the passage. “Stand by,” muttered the boatswain. Mr. Baker read out: “To the deep,” and paused. The men lifted the inboard end of the planks, the boatswain snatched off the Union Jack, and James