“Oh, I say, dam’-it-all,” expostulated Jenkins. Moore started to pull Donald’s stuff out of the bunk. Donald jumped to his feet. “What the deuce are you doing with my things?” he cried calmly.
“I’m goin’ to take this bunk,” he growled. “If you or Jenkins want a punch in the jaw, I’ll give it to you!”
Donald realized in a flash that his comfort in future absolutely depended upon himself—nobody else would help him here, so he gave Moore a blow on the mouth with all the power of his right fist. The Irish lad’s beady eyes snapped savagely, and with the blood streaming from his cut lips, he went for Donald and the two mixed it up in a proper rough and tumble.
Thompson jumped from the seat and hauled Moore away. “You leave McKenzie and his bunk alone, you blighter, or I’ll wipe the deck with you! You take that bunk there and be blamed glad to get it!” And he hove Moore down into the worst located of the two lowers.
Donald sat down panting with an eye which was rapidly discoloring. “I say, Jenkins,” he said to the other apprentice, “I’m sorry to have done you out of a good bunk, but I’m game to toss you for it—” “No, you won’t,” laughed Jenkins. “It serves me right for not joining the ship in Glasgow. First come, first served. You keep the bunk, nipper. Let’s have a drink!” He produced a bottle of whisky, and on Donald refusing to join in, they offered a drink to Moore, who sullenly accepted.
This whisky drinking by lads of sixteen and twenty rather shocked Donald, but he had scarcely been an hour in the company of the three before he heard enough to convince him that there wasn’t much in the way of vice they didn’t know. The drinking, swearing, and the recounting of vicious adventures and questionable stories caused Donald to wonder why such wickedness was not visited by instant retribution from Heaven. Blasphemy and the ribald use of the most sacred things seemed to roll from the tongues of his companions like water from a fountain.
Thompson had been applying himself to the bottle rather heavily and he was fast becoming “tight.” He turned around to Donald, who was sitting on his chest listening to the talk. “Look at that poor l’il devil there!” he drawled thickly. “I like that l’il feller—he’s such a pale-faced skinny l’il nipper. He c’d crawl through a ring-bolt, by Godfrey! Ne’mind, son! You’ve jus’ got t’ learn to drink a four-finger nip ‘thout blinkin’ or coughin’, an’ learn to spin nine hundred dirty yarns, an’ swear to music, an’ keep watch snoozin’ between bells, an’ you’ll be a real dyed-in-the-wool shellback, with every finger a fishhook, and every hair a ropeyarn, an’ blood of Stockholm tar!” Thompson rambled on. “His uncle owns this hooker. Th’ lousy Scotch miser! But he don’t love that kid, he don’t. Sends him to sea in this ruddy coffin an’ fits him out with a donkey’s breakfast and a dog’s wool blanket an’ a kit ye could shoot peas through—”
A heavy tramp of sea-booted feet halted outside. Jenkins whipped the bottle away, as the broad ugly face of Mr. Hinkel appeared in the door. “Now, den, vot are you lazy defils loafin’ avay your time in here for?” he rasped in his guttural brogue. “Gome oudt of dot und bear a hand to bend der flying yib und overhaul some of der gear aloft. Dam’ rigger’s snarls everywhere und dam’ lazy boys loafin’ und yarnin’ und egspecting Gottalmighty to do der vork!” He slammed the door and Jenkins extended a spread hand with a thumb to his nose, while Thompson cursed the second mate for a “beastly yumping yiminy Yudas Dutchman!”
The boys toiled and mucked all afternoon in the rain and bitter wind, and Donald crawled to his bunk at seven that evening aching in every limb and muscle and with his hands skinned and painful. For hours he tossed around listening to the snores of his ship-mates, and the sighing of the rain-laden wind in the gear aloft. It had been an eventful day, but a day in which his clean ideal of a sea-life had been rudely shattered. He was seeing it now in its naked, unvarnished, unromantic reality, and he was realizing that if he would hold his own he must protect his rights by physical force and steel himself to endure many hardships in soul and body; case-harden his finer feelings, and rigorously restrain all impulses of sympathy and the fine charity which can be exhibited ashore. His father was the embodiment of all that was good and honorable and kind, yet, no doubt, he was as unimpressionable and as callous as Thompson or even Mr. Nickerson, while roughing it in his early days at sea. He thought of Thompson and Jenkins. Both these lads were “straight” according to youthful ethics, but how rough and tough they were in their sea-life, yet, in their homes they were possibly, and probably, as fine, true and as honorable young fellows as those environed by gentler walks of life. Sea-ways were not shore-ways, and it did not take Donald long to find out that a sea-life would make of a man exactly what he himself desired. Youth was left very much to his own resources. There was no mother to caress or to correct in a ship’s half-deck, and in the ruck of it all, with its disgusting familiarity, evil talk and callousness, the lad who had the instincts of a gentleman and a clean heart implanted in him, would come through it without being contaminated in mind or speech or diseased in body.
The Kelvinhaugh lay for three days at the Tail of the Bank getting ready for sea. Though a brand new ship and fresh from the riggers’ yard, yet there was more to do in getting her ready than in a craft that had been under sailors’ hands for a dozen voyages. Standing gear had to be screwed up again, running gear rove off through the right leads and a hundred and one small gadgets installed which riggers omit and sailors have to fit. In this work, Donald did his share and spent many hours aloft working with the other lads. There was a rare thrill in this climbing and toiling with good honest cordage up in the tops and on the yards—and he felt that clambering and swinging about on the barque’s dizzy eminences savored of the real adventure of sea-faring. Like all boys, he could climb, and being free from giddiness, he thoroughly enjoyed the view from aloft. Looking down on the ship, she appeared to his unsailorly eye, a most beautiful model, and the men working on deck seemed as pigmies, while he, suspended like Mahomet’s tomb, between sea and sky, felt a strange exhilaration—a sensation which lent zest to the work and made him look to the future with a happier heart. Alas, he was unconsciously imbibing the doctrines of all sailoring, in which one remembers the good times and forgets the hardships and the miserable days.