’But the Capt’n niver said a single wurrd.
He choked where he stud, an’ thin he went into
his thrap widout sayin’ good-night, an’
I wint back to barricks.’
‘And then?’ said Ortheris and I together.
‘That was all,’ said Mulvaney; ’niver
another word did I hear av the whole thing. All
I know was that there was no e-vasion, an’ that
was fwhat I wanted. Now, I put ut to you, Sorr,
is ten days’ C. B. a fit an’ a proper
tratement for a man who has behaved as me?’
‘Well, any’ow,’ said Ortheris,’tweren’t
this ’ere Colonel’s daughter, an’
you was blazin’ copped when you tried
to wash in the Fort Ditch.’
‘That,’ said Mulvaney, finishing the champagne,
‘is a shuparfluous an’ impert’nint
observation.’
[Footnote: 1895]
We were wallowing through the China Seas in a dense
fog, the horn blowing every two minutes for the benefit
of the fishery craft that crowded the waterways.
From the bridge the fo’c’sle was invisible;
from the hand-wheel at the stern the captain’s
cabin. The fog held possession of everything—the
pearly white fog. Once or twice when it tried
to lift, we saw a glimpse of the oily sea, the flitting
vision of a junk’s sail spread in the vain hope
of catching the breeze, or the buoys of a line of
nets. Somewhere close to us lay the land, but
it might have been the Kurile Islands for aught we
knew. Very early in the morning there passed
us, not a cable’s-length away, but as unseen
as the spirits of the dead, a steamer of the same line
as ours. She howled melodiously in answer to
our bellowing, and passed on.
‘Suppose she had hit us,’ said a man from
Saigon. ’Then we should have gone down,’
answered the chief officer sweetly. ’Beastly
thing to go down in a fog,’ said a young gentleman
who was travelling for pleasure. ‘Chokes
a man both ways, y’ know.’ We were
comfortably gathered in the smoking-room, the weather
being too cold to venture on the deck. Conversation
naturally turned upon accidents of fog, the horn tooting
significantly in the pauses between the tales.
I heard of the wreck of the Eric, the cutting
down of the Strathnairn within half a mile
of harbour, and the carrying away of the bow plates
of the Sigismund outside Sandy Hook.
‘It is astonishing,’ said the man from
Saigon, ’how many true stories are put down
as sea yarns. It makes a man almost shrink from
telling an anecdote.’
‘Oh, please don’t shrink on our account,’
said the smoking-room with one voice.
‘It’s not my own story,’ said the
man from Saigon. ’A fellow on a Massageries
boat told it me. He had been third officer of
a sort on a Geordie tramp—one of those
lumbering, dish-bottomed coal-barges where the machinery
is tied up with a string and the plates are rivetted
with putty. The way he told his tale was this.
The tramp had been creeping along some sea or other
with a chart ten years old and the haziest sort of
chronometers when she got into a fog—just
such a fog as we have now.’
