Scholar had a certain depression in his heart. Mike was perhaps aware of it.
"Oh, I'd rather have you than him any day, all the same," said Mike, as if in response to a spoken regret at inability to learn the ways of the society on board. "I think I'll turn in now. Remember what I was telling ye about them gas-fitters."
Mike rattled down the companion-way, but Scholar remained on deck. A faint sound of voices came from below, now and then a laugh. The decks throbbed with the everlasting engine; a hissing and a scudding went along the weather side; a sheep snuffled and bleated; a little while ago fresh lashings had been put round their pens, tarpaulin dodgers protecting the tops. There seemed to be nobody about; here and there a lozenge of golden light, of deck lights, showed. The night was fallen almost as dark as the smoke from the smoke-stack. The Glory tossed and slid, tossed and slid onward; spray rattled with a sound like handfuls of shot on the tops of the sheep-protecting tarpaulins. From forward the sea's assaults began to sound more loudly, with many a resonant clap, and then the rattling as of grape shot followed. Scholar thought he would go below, among his fellows. Friendliness was very dear to him. It was only prying and worming into him that ever caused his jaw to tighten, his eyes to narrow, as he wondered what the stage directions might be.
CHAPTER XIV
When Scholar descended out of the tearing night he choked like an asthmatical man. It was not now a smell as of fresh cattle that filled the cattlemen's safe, called cabin; it was a suffocating smell as of ammonia. Somebody was singing in the cabin that rose and fell with steely and wooden screams, and with whispers of the sea running round it, the tremendous sea that swirled and broke and sprayed on the other side of the thin iron plates. The tobacco smoke was perhaps not quite so thick to-night, for tobacco was growing scarce; but there were still plenty of pipes a-going for blue clouds to temper the callous glare of the electric light.
Scholar slipped into the cabin, feeling for a moment almost shy. He had learned how to come into the cabin when it was a kind of bedlam; but to come into it now, and find it a kind of temperance sing-song hall for poor seamen, with several of the poor seamen glancing at him in a way that suggested their thought was: "Ah! we'll ask him to sing next!" was a little upsetting. He tried to efface himself in his bunk. The applause following a heartrending solo about "For the flag he gave his young life!" had just ended.
"Charles will give us a solo upon the mouth organ," said someone.
Charles looked bashful; it was one thing to play the mouth organ on the dock front while the others double-shuffled (or, for that matter, to play it on an ordinary evening when the ordinary life was going on, some listening, others talking, voices roaring: "You're a liar!" others bellowing: "Shut up!") but quite another to have everybody quiet even before he began to play. Charles screamed that he was "fed up with the thing!" and very likely felt a qualm in his heart so soon as the words left his lips, for he was not at all "fed up" with his mouth organ; he was very keen on it.
Many coaxed him, and one-eyed Michael said: "Well, never mind if you don't want to play. Don't worry the young fellow if he doesn't feel inclined. Jimmy there will play."