Charlie Jones, bending to the right and raised to
my own height by the grating on which he stood, looked
over my shoulder. Dinner was about to be served.
The women had come out. The table-lamps threw
their rosy glow over white necks and uncovered arms,
and revealed, higher in the shadows, the faces of
the men, smug, clean-shaven, assured, rather heavy.
I had been the guest of honor on a steam-yacht a year
or two before, after a game. There had been
pink lights on the table, I remembered, and the place-cards
at dinner the first night out had been caricatures
of me in fighting trim. There had been a girl,
too. For the three days of that week-end cruise
I had been mad about her; before that first dinner,
when I had known her two hours, I had kissed her hand
and told her I loved her!
Vail and Miss Lee had left the others and come into
the chart-room. As Charlie Jones and I looked,
he bent over and kissed her hand.
The sun had gone down. My pipe was empty, and
from the galley, forward, came the odor of the forecastle
supper. Charlie was coughing, a racking paroxysm
that shook his wiry body. He leaned over and
caught my shoulder as I was moving away.
“New paint and new canvas don’t make a
new ship,” he said, choking back the cough.
“She’s still the old Ella, the she-devil
of the Turner line. Pink lights below, and not
a rat in the hold! They left her before we sailed,
boy. Every rope was crawling with ’em.”
“The very
rats
Instinctively had left it,”
I quoted. But Charlie, clutching the wheel,
was coughing again, and cursing breathlessly as he
coughed.
I RECEIVE A WARNING
The odor of formaldehyde in the forecastle having
abated, permission for the crew to sleep on deck had
been withdrawn. But the weather as we turned
south had grown insufferably hot. The reek of
the forecastle sickened me—the odor of
fresh paint, hardly dry, of musty clothing and sweaty
bodies.
I asked Singleton, the first mate, for permission
to sleep on deck, and was refused. I went down,
obediently enough, to be driven back with nausea.
And so, watching my chance, I waited until the first
mate, on watch, disappeared into the forward cabin
to eat the night lunch always prepared by the cook
and left there. Then, with a blanket and pillow,
I crawled into the starboard lifeboat, and settled
myself for the night. The lookout saw me, but
gave no sign.
It was not a bad berth. As the ship listed,
the stars seemed to sway above me, and my last recollection
was of the Great Dipper, performing dignified gyrations
in the sky.
I was aroused by one of the two lookouts, a young
fellow named Burns. He was standing below, rapping
on the side of the boat with his knuckles. I
sat up and peered over at him, and was conscious for
the first time that the weather had changed.
A fine rain was falling; my hair and shirt were wet.
