Section 18

. . .” He looked up and spoke louder. “No
. . . No more for yer ... no more bloomin’
gals that cook oysters . . . Who’s yer? It’s
my turn now ... I wish I was drunk; I would soon giv’ you a leg up. That’s where yer bound to go.
THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” 153
Feet fust, through a port . . . Splash! Never
see yer any more. Overboard! Good ’nuff fur yer.”
Jimmy’s head moved slightly and he turned his eyes to Donkin’s face; a gaze unbelieving, desolated and appealing, of a child frightened by the menace of being shut up alone in the dark. Donkin observed him from the chest with hopeful eyes; then, without rising, tried the lid. Locked. “I wish I was drunk,” he muttered and getting up listened anxiously to the distant sound of footsteps on the deck. They approached — ceased. Some one yawned interminably just outside the door, and the footsteps went away shuffling lazily. Donkin’s fluttering heart eased its pace, and when he looked to¬ wards the bunk again Jimmy was staring as before at the white beam. — “ ’Ow d’yer feel now?” he asked. — “ Bad,” breathed out Jimmy.
Donkin sat down patient and purposeful. Every half-hour the bells spoke to one another ringing along the whole length of the ship. Jimmy’s respiration was so rapid that it couldn’t be counted, so faint that it couldn’t be heard. His eyes were terrified as though he had been looking at ipispeakable horrors; and by his face one could see that he was thinking of abominable things. Suddenly with an incredibly strong and heart¬ breaking voice he sobbed out:
“Overboard! . . . I! . . . My God!”
Donkin writhed a little on the box. He looked un¬ willingly. James Wait was mute. His two long bony hands smoothed the blanket upwards, as though he had wished to gather it all up under his chin. A tear, a big solitary tear, escaped from the corner of his eye and, without touching the hollow cheek, fell on the pillow. His throat rattled faintly.
And Donkin, watching the end of that hateful nigger, felt the anguishing grasp of a great sorrow on his
154 THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS”
heart at the thought that he himself, some day, would have to go through it all— just like this — perhaps! His eyes became moist. “Poor beggar,” he murmured. The night seemed to go by in a flash; it seemed to him he could hear the irremediable rush of precious minutes. How long would this blooming affair last? Too long surely. No luck. He could not restrain himself. He got up and approached the bunk. Wait did not stir. Only his eyes appeared alive and his hands continued their smoothing movement with a horrible and tireless industry. Donkin bent over.
“Jimmy,” he called low. There was no answer, but the rattle stopped. “D’yer see me?” he asked, trembling. Jimmy’s chest heaved. Donkin, looking away, bent his ear to Jimmy’s lips, and heard a sound like the rustle of a single dry leaf driven along the smooth sand of a beach. It shaped itself.
“Light . . . the lamp . . . and . . .
go,” breathed out Wait.
Donkin, instinctively, glanced over his shoulder at the brilliant flame; then, still looking away, felt under the pillow for a key. He got it at once and for the next few minutes remained on his knees shakily but swiftly busy inside the box. When he got up, his face —for the first time in his life — had a pink flush — per¬ haps of triumph.
He slipped the key under the pillow again, avoiding to glance at Jimmy, who had not moved. He turned his back squarely from the bunk, and started to the door as though he were going to walk a mile. At his second stride he had his nose against it. He clutched the handle cautiously, but at that moment he received the irresistible impression of something happening behind his back. He spun round as though he had been tapped on the shoulder. He was just in time to see Wait’s eyes
THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” 155
blaze up and go out at once, like two lamps overturned together by a sweeping blow. Something resembling a scarlet thread hung down his chin out of the corner of his lips — and he had ceased to breathe.
Donkin closed the door behind him gently but firmly. Sleeping men, huddled under jackets, made on the lighted deck shapeless dark mounds that had the ap¬ pearance of neglected graves. Nothing had been done all through the night and he hadn’t been missed. He stood motionless and perfectly astounded to find the world outside as he had left it; there was the sea, the ship sleeping men; and he wondered absurdly at it, as though he had expected to find the men dead, familiar things gone for ever: as though, like a wanderer return¬ ing after many years, he had expected to see bewildering changes. He shuddered a little in the penetrating freshness of the air, and hugged himself forlornly. The declining moon drooped sadly in the western board as if withered by the cold touch of a pale dawn. The ship slept. And the immortal sea stretched awayr immense and hazy, like the image of life, with a glitter¬ ing surface and lightless depths. Donkin gave it a defiant glance and slunk off noiselessly as if judged and cast out by the august silence of its might.
Jimmy’s death, after all, came as a tremendous sur¬ prise. We did not know till then how much faith we had put in his delusions. We had taken his chances of life so much at his own valuation that his death, like the death of an old belief, shook the foundations of our society. A common bond was gone; the strong, effective and respectable bond of a sentimental lie. All that day we mooned at our work, with suspicious looks and a disabused air. In our hearts we thought that in the matter of his departure Jimmy had acted in
156 THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS”
a. perverse and unfriendly manner. He didn t back us up, as a shipmate should. In going he took away with himself the gloomy and solemn shadow in which our folly had posed, with humane satisfaction, as a tender arbiter of fate. And now we saw it was no such thing. It was just common foolishness; a silly and ineffectual meddling with issues of majestic import — that is, if Podmore was right. Perhaps he was? Doubt survived Jimmy; and, like a community of banded criminals disintegrated by a touch of grace, we were profoundly scandalised with each other. Men spoke unkindly to their best chums. Others refused to speak at all. Singleton only was not surprised. “Dead — is he? Of course,” he said, pointing at the island right abeam: for the calm still held the ship spell-bound within sight of Flores. Dead — of course. He wasn’t sur¬ prised. Here was the land, and there, on the fore- hatch and waiting for the sailmaker — there was that corpse. Cause and effect. And for the first time that voyage, the old seaman became quite cheery and garru¬ lous, explaining and illustrating from the stores of ex¬ perience how, in sickness, the sight of an island (even a very small one) is generally more fatal than the view of a continent. But he couldn’t explain why.
Jimmy was to be buried at five, and it was a long day till then — a day of mental disquiet and even of physical disturbance. We took no interest in our work and, very properly, were rebuked for it. This, in our con¬ stant state of hungry irritation, was exasperating. Donkin worked with his brow bound in a dirty rag, and looked so ghastly that Mr. Baker was touched with compassion at the sight of this plucky suffering. — “Ough! You, Donkin! Put down your work and go lay-up this watch. You look ill.” — “I am bad, sir — in my ’ead,” he said in a subdued voice, and vanished
THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” 157
speedily. This annoyed many, and they thought the mate “bloomin’ soft to-day.” Captain Allistoun could be seen on the poop watching the sky to the southwest, and it soon got to be known about the decks that the barometer had begun to fall in the night, and that a breeze might be expected before long. This, by a subtle association of ideas, led to violent quar¬ relling as to the exact moment of Jimmy’s death. Was it before or after “that ’ere glass started down?” It was impossible to know, and it caused much con¬ temptuous growling at one another. All of a sudden there was a great tumult forward. Pacific Knowles and good-tempered Davis had come 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, wrap¬ ped 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 cabls. 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, puffing furiously, with his head in a cloud of tobacco smoke; he turned the flaps over, pulled at the
158 THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS”
stitches, stretched at the canvas. — “Lift his shoul¬ ders. . . . 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 1 . . . West Lidia Station . . . Li 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 re¬ signed 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-
THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” 159
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 harm¬ lessly 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 de¬ spair 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 Wait did not move.— “Higher,” muttered the boatswain angrily. All the heads were raised; every man stirred uneasily, but James Wait gave no sign of going. In death and swathed up for all eternity, he yet seemed to cling to the ship with the grip of an undying fear. Higher! Lift!” whispered the boatswain,
160 THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS”
fiercely. — “He won’t go,” stammered one of the men, shakily, and both appeared ready to drop everything. Mr. Baker waited, burying his face in the book, and shuffling his feet nervously. All the men looked pro¬ foundly disturbed; from their midst a faint humming noise spread out — growing louder. . . . “Jimmy!
cried Belfast in a wailing tone, and there was a second of shuddering dismay.
“Jimmy, be a man!” he shrieked, passionately. Every mouth was wide open, not an eyelid winked. He stared wildly, twitching all over; he bent his body forward like a man peering at an horror. “Go!” he shouted, and sprang out of the crowd with his arm ex¬ tended. “Go, Jimmy!— Jimmy, go! Go!” His fin¬ gers touched the head of the body, and the grey package started reluctantly to whizz off the lifted planks all at once, with the suddenness of a flash of lightning. The crowd stepped forward like one man; a deep Ah h h! came out vibrating from the broad chests. The ship rolled as if relieved of an unfair burden; the sails flapped. Belfast, supported by Archie, gasped hyster¬ ically; and Charley, who anxious to see Jimmy’s last dive, leaped headlong on the rail, was too late to see anything but the faint circle of a vanishing ripple.
Mr. Baker, perspiring abundantly, read out the last prayer in a deep rumour of excited men and fluttering sails. “Amen!” he said in an unsteady growl, and closed the book.
“Square the yards!” thundered a voice above his head. All hands gave a jump; one or two dropped their caps; Mr. Baker looked up surprised. The master, standing on the break of the poop, pointed to the westward. “Breeze coming,” he said, “Man the weather braces.” Mr. Baker crammed the book hurriedly into his pocket. “Forward, there — let go the
THE NIGGER OF THE “NARCISSUS” 161
foretack! he hailed joyfully, bareheaded and brisk;
Square the foreyard, you port-watch!” — “Fair wind —fair wind,” muttered the men going to the braces. —
What did I tell you? mumbled old Singleton, fling¬ ing down coil after coil with hasty energy; “I knowed it — he’s gone, and here it comes.”
It came with the sound of a lofty and powerful sigh. The sails filled, the ship gathered way, and the waking sea began to murmur sleepily of home to the ears of men.
1 hat night, while the ship rushed foaming to the Northward before a freshening gale, the boatswain un¬ bosomed himself to the petty officers’ berth:— “The chap was nothing but trouble,” he said, “from the mo¬ ment he came aboard — d’ye remember — that night in Bombay? Been bullying all that softy crowd — cheeked' the old man we had to go fooling all over a half- drowned ship to save him. Dam’ nigh a mutiny all for him and now the mate abused me like a pickpocket for forgetting to dab a lump of grease on them planks. So I did, but you ought to have known better, too, than to leave a nail sticking up — hey, Chips?”
“And you ought to havfe known better than to chuck all my tools overboard for ’im, like a skeary green¬ horn,” retorted the morose carpenter. “Well — he’s gone after ’em now,” he added in an unforgiving tone. — “On the China Station, I remember once, the Ad¬ miral he says to me . . .” began the sailmaker.
A week afterwards the Narcissus entered the chops of the Channel.