“I’ve been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side.”
“Well, you’ve seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin’ in carriages, that’s the sort that keeps us down, that’s the sort we’ve got to make an end of.”
Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot—but he could not see how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and always busy about their own affairs—and how were they to be made an end of?
“Do you mean killing them?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s other ways than killin’,” replied Harbutt. “It’s not them, it’s their money does the trick.”
He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned in also and the fo’c’sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the straining timbers of the ship.
Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it, intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes, without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene, with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers and the boom of the waves. This is the fo’c’sle whose great, great, great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.