So Mouldytop regarded animated nature; which regarded him as a man whose duties implied opportunities. “I’m a poor man, mister.”–“The old son of a gun says he’s a poor man. You old liar, you’ve got streets of houses, you know you have.”
Some one who knew him at home was strongly of opinion that he was less terrible by his own fireside: that there was a fellow creature under whose guidance he roared like any sucking dove. It might be. Indeed, it was my impression that it could hardly be otherwise. I thought I noticed a certain caution even in his attitude to the large-bosomed laundrywoman who took the ship’s orders at Buenos Aires; and his comment on her charges had been of the weakest.
XXVI
We crossed the line at six in the morning, and in drizzling rain. There was not much comment, except upon the rain; the good thing about the damp cloudy weather was that we were spared the more furious heat, though the atmosphere had been oily and sultry. With the steamy clouds swarming about us I could picture a past life hereabouts which might justly have aroused man’s wrath; the sailing days, when to take advantage of whatever brief breeze might visit the sleepy doldrums, the sailors had to be constantly running aloft in the drenching mist, and afterwards lay down in their sweating glory-holes, in their soaked clothes, week after week.
The painting epidemic was not abated. Meacock and Mead camped out while they made their rooms as white as ivory. Mead looked charming in a round white cap, which he said a V.A.D. had given him. The steward, with his experience of every sort of ship under the sun, had developed an artistic eye: and, perhaps to relieve the whiteness, he decided upon a dado for the saloon, which hitherto had been from ceiling to floor done in white enamel. The dado was to be grained, in imitation of an actual wainscot. He began his solemn task, applying by way of groundwork a brimstone yellow and other sickly yellows which disturbed us at meals.
Meacock and Phillips varied these days with a discussion of firemen, whether white or coloured firemen were the more difficult to manage? Phillips was for his Africans, the excellent selection aboard at present forming a contrast with his memories of ne’er-do-wells, “doctors, remittance-men and all sorts,” of English birth. Meacock was soon hard at work describing with amusing mimicry a refractory negro, one of a number of Somalis who, hearing of labour troubles in England, did their best to be paid off in Africa. If they had succeeded, the ship would have been without firemen for her return voyage; so their efforts were resisted. The particular genius played the hand of “suicidal tendency.” Choosing a time when there were several people about the deck, he climbed somewhat slowly up the bulwarks and prepared with gestures to leap over the side. Meacock was a spectator of this piece of acting. The actor was pulled back with some violence, and “about half-past four we got the handcuffs on him. We would have had to turn the cook out of his room aft to lock this fellow up, but I didn’t want to do that, so I fastened him up with the handcuffs round a stanchion in the poop. I said, ‘And the rats will probably eat you before the morning’; and I really did expect to find him eaten by the morning; for there were some monsters in the poop.
“Next day, he began saying ‘Sick.’–‘Sick? Where are you sick?’–‘Sick all over.’ I had enough of this after a bit, and went and got the strongest black draught I’ve yet known. He didn’t want to drink it, and I said to him, ‘Now drink this up as quick as you can.’ And so he did. After that, whenever I looked in at the poop, this fellow would start waving his arms and hollering out. In fact, he was mad; every time I got near him, he was mad. That black draught was not popular, I think. When we got to Cuxhaven, the medical authority put this man through a careful examination. ‘He’s no more mad,’ he said, ‘than you or I. He’s got a slight touch of rheumatics in the arm. But,’ he said, ‘when you get to Hamburg, you can satisfy yourself by sending this man to the asylum.’ We did. Two days–and he was back.”
Meacock’s laconic phrases were accompanied with grimaces which told the tale to perfection.
The atmosphere had grown so literary that Mead now took pencil and paper with him to his day watch as a matter of course. The pages of the Optimist were beginning to look somewhat laboured. He determined to infuse a new vein. So a series of vividly coloured hoaxes came into existence, the first of which, a harem story, was too much in its full bloom for the editor’s acceptance. Not surprised, and not dejected, Mead offered “The Pirate,” and it duly appeared. These fictions ended, as did their successors, with a disillusionment: