CHAPTER IX
Next morning Scholar was wakened by someone shaking his arm. It seemed that he had fallen asleep, worn out, in the midst of a babel, a mere second before the shake was given, and with a sense of distress he opened his eyes. Candlass bent over him, and in a voice so kindly that there came a lump in the throat of the new-awakened Scholar, he said: "Tumble up, young fellow. Four o'clock."
"Thank you," said Scholar, and was aware of the note in his own voice, a note as of gratitude.
Candlass, moving on, glanced back at him abruptly, and then went on again looking in bunk after bunk, top bunk, lower bunk, and wherever he saw, inert and blank, one of the men of the main deck squad he shook an elbow of the sleeper. Hauling on his boots, sitting on the edge of his bunk, Scholar looked after him, arrested. There could be no mistaking the expression of Candlass's face; it was with pity that he looked into these bunks. He shook gently, and there were grunts. He shook again, and there came a sigh, or an "Oh, hell!" and the eyes opened, and then Candlass, head bent, said: "Tumble up, Jack. Four o'clock!" or "Tumble up, Liverpool!" or Sam, or Dublin, or whatever the name might be. They woke in all sorts of ways. Some woke abruptly, and clenched a hand, prepared for attack; some quailed back and put up a hand to parry; some—great hulking fellows with the faces that we are accustomed to call brutal—looked as if they felt as did Scholar. Candlass, his task over, strolled quietly to the doorway, and his men did not keep him waiting long; they filed out and followed him in the dark tween-decks, where the lamps that hung here and there were beginning to swing, a slight roll being on the ship as she surged out of river into estuary.
The everlasting hum and whirr of the shaft went on below. Now and again one had to shorten a leg abruptly as she gave a roll. There was a new freshness in the draughts of air that scurried between the decks, and many little sounds suggested the open sea—little creakings and chirpings of wood and steel; and outside, in the dark round her, there rose faintly and fell away, a sound as of blown tissue paper. It was black above through the hatches, not yet blue. No stars showed. The atmosphere was fresh and full of little pin points of moisture. A bell struck above, and a bell responded, beat for beat, forward, and from beyond again a high piping voice was heard to declaim (it came with a slightly blown sound): "All's well!" She was forging out to sea. Away aft there was a whoop and shriek of: "Tumble up you sons of——!" There followed yells, cat-calls, loud voices. That incorrigible weasel was at it again. He sat up in his bunk, when the lower deck boss arrived, and—"Call me in another hour, Rafferty," he said, "and bring me me shaving water." He was less a cattleman than what is known in the begging fraternity of the States as a "gunsel." Half-a-dozen of his kidney together will set upon a grown man in a dark lane. Dislike of hitting a kid too hard clings to the man even in the midst of the tussle; but the kids have no qualms. They hang on like rats. It is almost impossible to tell their age. They may be anything from the mid teens to twenty-five, and they remain for many years looking simply neither boy nor man—peek-faced, cunning, slippery.
Rafferty slightly changed his tactics this morning. He stood and looked at the youth. He wagged his head at him.
"My lad," he said, "what I'll do with you is to take you into my berth, over my knee."
"No, you won't!" shouted the youth, and one or two others of the same breed added their voices to his, making a chorus.
"Tumble up, tumble up, damn ye; it's four o'clock!" said Rafferty, and then to the gunsels in general: "If you was a full-sized man and gave me that lip I would paste your face!" and he glared round at the full-sized men.
"Come on, come on!" said Cockney.
"Yah!" jeered the first gunsel.
Cockney gave that horrible jump that made his wide pants flap round his thin shanks. He had always to take people by surprise, so as to have any chance at all. Now he bowled the boy over with a flat blow on the cheek; and, not long since a gunsel himself, and very little patient with them, he leapt at the other two who were standing together waiting to see the fun, and crashed their foreheads together. There seemed less sympathy with them this morning. Harry, the crazy fellow, sat up with tousled hair and gibbered profanity at Rafferty, but Rafferty was nearly as crazy as he.
"Well, you're a grown man!" said he. "Take that!" and with a mighty quick action he flung his hand outside the cabin door, grabbed thence a pitchfork that he had left there on entering, and thrust at Harry with it. Harry put up his hand to protect himself, and the prong jabbed. He rolled over to get out of his bunk upon the other side, being in one of those amidships. The prong jabbed again—with a certain care this time, so that it was possibly not much worse than a pin-prick. He jumped in the way that some pedestrians jump from mad motorists, catching himself behind, and the men gave little laughing grunts.
"Come on, come on!" several growled, and the lower deck squad filed out, Cockney pushing his face close to the faces, one after the other, of the three weasely ones, who might be anything from sixteen to twenty-five. They seemed to understand that, and went quietly forward.