He was born under a baleful star. I know, because I was there at the time. But at the outset of this veracious history, to prevent probable misunderstanding, allow me to assert that what follows in all its details is literally and absolutely true. Naturally deficient in imagination, I would not attempt to embellish so curious a narrative as this, which, were I gifted beyond all literary romancists, I should only mar by adding fiction thereunto.
Well then, for the locus in quo, a lumbering old Yankee-built ship of some 2000 tons burden, bound from Liverpool to Bombay with coal, and at the inauspicious opening of my subject’s erratic career wallowing in the storm-torn sea off the Cape of Good Hope. His mother was a middle-aged lady pig, with a bitter grievance against mankind in general, and her present owners in particular. Brought on board during the vessel’s stay in Madras the previous year, she had never forgotten or ceased to lament her native jungle, nor had the long course of gentle treatment and good food modified by a single vengeful gasp her virulent hatred of all and sundry. Insult was added to injury when, in Liverpool, she was mated with an alien spouse, the chubby pink-flushed whiteness of whose skin made no greater contrast to her inky hue than did the calm placidity of his temper to her furious, unappeasable, and continual rage. Many tokens of her regard were scored deeply along his fat sides; indeed, but for the manifest impossibility of getting a fair bite at him, it is only reasonable to suppose that she would have devoured him alive.
Now it befell upon a certain evening, when a bitter north-east gale was brewing under the lowering leaden sky, and the weird whistling of the coming tempest made melancholy music through the complaining shrouds, that an interesting event in her history drew near its fulfilment. In anticipation of this occurrence, our carpenter had rigged up a rude sort of fold under the top-gallant forecastle, and within its narrow limits she was ranging tiger-like, champing her foam-flecked jaws, and occasionally tobogganing from side to side in various unhappy attitudes as the ship tumbled every way in the bewildered sea. When the watch to which I (a small urchin of fourteen) belonged came on deck at midnight I was immediately told off by my inveterate foe, the second mate, to attend to the requirements of the “lady in the straw.” Inverted commas are necessary, because the “straw” did not exist, nor any substitute for it; nothing but the bare deck polished to a glossy slipperiness by the incessant friction of the sliding sow. There was a fresh hand at the bellows before we had been on deck many minutes, and all the watch were soon perched aloft, struggling short-handedly with the acreage of thundering canvas, while the ship plunged so violently that I could only remain under the forecastle by clinging, bat-like, to the side of the pen that confined the miserable mother-elect. During that vigil of terror and darkness (for I had only one of those ancient teapot-shaped lamps, that yield more smoking stench than light) eleven wretched parti-coloured morsels of pork came into being, the advent of each one exacerbating the feelings of the already frantic parent to such a degree that she became a veritable fury, and to my terrified eyes seemed to dilate with potentialities of destruction. Out of the whole family I succeeded, at the imminent risk of my own life, in saving two from the jaws of their maniacal mother, and one of those sagaciously succumbed before eight bells. I received small thanks for my pains, and narrowly escaped a colting at my tyrant’s hands, who saw his visions of abundant sucking-pig rudely dispelled by what he was pleased to call my “dam’ pig-headed foolishness.”
It boots not now to tell of the wealth of ingenuity I lavished upon that ill-starred piglet, to whom I stood perforce in loco parentis—how I must needs lasso the snorting, shrieking mother, and, having entangled her legs fore and aft, drag her to the side of the pen and lash her securely down, while I held my protégé to one streaming teat after another. Enough that the care of that solitary remnant of a family embittered my days and rendered my nights sleepless interregnums of weariness. Unto all things their appointed end, saith the sage, and so at last I was freed from this porcine incubus by my charge having grown able and wily enough to dodge his unnatural parent, and snatch his sustenance from her in a variety of ingenious ways. But still he might not trust himself to sleep near her, and so he discovered a nest beneath the heel of the bowsprit, whereby her insatiable desire for his destruction was completely frustrated, since she could by no possible artifice get at him. After a while it was noticed that Sûsti (as for some hidden reason he had come to be called) invariably wore at the end of his tail a crimson ornament, which, upon closer examination, was found to be where something amused itself, or themselves, by nibbling during the night. The carpenter, who is always called upon to repair everything on board ship except ropes and sails, turned to and bound up the lessening terminal with a piece of tarred canvas, and plentifully besmeared the outside of the bandage with tar also. And this he did many days, because tar, and dressing, and a little more of Sûsti had always disappeared in the morning. So the outrage continued, and the tail became more and more abbreviated until it was entirely non est, and the midnight marauders had actually excavated a socket in the corpus delicti nearly half an inch deep.
By this time we had reached Bombay, and were busy, with the aid of a swarming host of coolies, in getting rid of our grimy cargo. But some one found time to suggest that a place of safety for Sûsti should be found during the night, fearing that, unless something was done soon, we should seek him one morning and find only a disembodied squeal. Consequently Sûsti was captured every evening, and, protesting discordantly, was confined in a coal-basket, which was carefully enclosed in the after hatch house. The plan succeeded admirably, so far that the diminution in our stock of pork ceased. But one morning, when the after hold was empty, the hatch house was lifted off as usual and placed by the side of the gaping hatchway, its door open, and Sûsti lying, forgotten, in his basket. All hands went to breakfast, while the coolies below, as was their wont, stopped work, and, squatting in the after-hold, held a conversazione. In the middle of our meal there was a hideous uproar, and an eruption of the heathen from all the hatchways, greenish-grey with fright, and swarming madly in every possible direction—overboard, aloft, anywhere. When at last we were able to elicit from the demented crowd the reason for their panic, we learned that as they were all toiling strenuously to prepare the coal for a renewal of our operations, down into their midst came flying a demon of Jehannum in the guise of a gigantic pig, with vast bat-like wings, and eyes of the bigness of a man’s fists glaring like red-hot coals. What wonder that they had fled, Hindoo and Mussulman alike, at the sight of their abomination in such an avatar of dread hurtling down upon their shaven crowns. The story sent us all seeking below, little dreaming that the luckless Sûsti was to blame. Presently we found him lying by the side of the keelson, badly hurt, but cheerful as ever. And with that indomitable pluck that had endeared him to us all, he not only survived, but made a complete recovery within a week.
Now, however, his rotund body had taken a curve, by reason of which he always appeared to be in the act of reaching around to look for the tail that had been. This peculiar bent of his figure had the strangest results whenever he took exercise. Wherever his goal might be, and in spite of his most energetic efforts to reach it, he only succeeded in describing what I am obliged to call a lateral parabola, along which he would eventually arrive at some unforeseen spot near his starting-point. Nor were the co-efficients of his curves at all regular. Sometimes, owing to the energetic efforts he made to counteract this inevitable curvilinear bias, a series of maxima and minima were produced which, when traced upon the deck, afforded some very interesting problems in the parallelograms of forces.
But I regret to record that the principal result of his errata was a decided increase in the local consumption of Scotch whisky. For our jovial skipper became so inordinately vain of his boomerang pig that he issued invitations to his fellow-captains in the harbour, in quite a reckless fashion, to come and see what an unprecedented curio he had gotten. They came multitudinously, came to scoff, but remained to grow purple with laughter and lose all their loose change in bets upon the probable points of arrival made by Sûsti in his gyratory gallops after sweet biscuits. And they returned to their several ships in a charming variety of unconventional attitudes, vocal but not harmonious, at irregular intervals during the night. Meanwhile Sûsti, pampered beyond even swinish dreams of avarice, waxed fat and almost uncontrollable. Joie de vivre filled him from end to end—from snout to socket. It seized him suddenly at all sorts of times, causing him to squeal hysterically, waggle his incipient hams momentarily, and then launch himself into space along the line of some marvellously complicated curve terminating in the most unexpected places.
As long as Europeans were about him he was safe, except for an occasional belabouring when he chanced to upset some luckless passer-by. But we were ordered round the coast to Cocanada in ballast, and, to expedite our loading there, took a number of coolies with us. On the day of our arrival, and shortly after anchoring, all hands were seated peacefully at dinner on the forecastle head. Below, on the shady side of the forward house, the “bundaree” had prepared the coolies’ meal, an immense flat dish of rice piled into a cone, with a number of tiny wells of curry round the rim, and a larger reservoir of the same fiery compound at the apex in a sort of crater. Around this the placid Hindoos crouched on their hams in orthodox fashion, and each right hand had just begun to manipulate a bolus of curry-moistened rice for conveyance to the expectant mouths, when with a meteoric rush Sûsti came round the corner of the house in a grand ellipse, and landed in the centre of the rice-pan. This was too much for even those mild coolies. With yells and imprecations they sprang for handspikes, belaying-pins, etc., and rushed upon the unclean beast, perfectly mad with rage. Our big retriever, who hated all black men impartially, and was therefore rigidly limited to the poop as a rule, saw the melée, and, judging doubtless that it was high time for his interference, came flying from his eminence, all shining teeth and savage snarl, into the centre of the struggling mass. For a brief moment nothing could be clearly distinguished; then suddenly there was a break up and a stampede. Every coolie sprang overboard like the demon-possessed swine of Gadara, leaving Neptune sadly sniffing at the lifeless body of Sûsti, which lay embedded in a heap of the befouled and scattered rice.