“There are a few berths unoccupied in the quarters of your men, are there not?”
“Two or three, I believe.”
“Give him one of those and increase the mess allowance by one. Get something to eat now, my man, and report to the chief officer, forward, when you have finished.”
“I’ll send you down a couple of cotton suits,” whispered the chief steward, as he labored up the ladder; “you’ll die of the plague with that outfit on.”
I lingered in the “glory-hole” long enough to have eaten breakfast and hurried forward. The mate, scowling, began a rapid-fire of questions, in the hope of tangling me up in a contradictory story. The attempt failed.
“Box the compass,” he snarled, suddenly.
I did so. For an hour he subjected me to a severe nautical examination without any startling satisfaction.
“Umph!” he growled at last, “Take that holly-stone with the handle”—it weighed a good thirty pounds—“and go to polishing the poop. You’ll work every day from six in the morning until seven at night, with a half-hour off for your mess. From four to six in the morning and from eight to ten at night, you’ll stand look-out in the crow’s-nest and save us two Lascars. On Sunday you’ll stand look-out from four to eight, nine to twelve, two to seven, and eight to ten. Look lively, now, and see that the poop deck begins to shine when I come aft.”
Without a break, I continued this régime as long as the voyage lasted. Having once imposed his sentence upon me, the mate rarely gave me a word. Less from fear of his wrath than of a leer of satisfaction on his rough-hewn face, I toiled steadily at the task he had assigned. The holly-stone took on great weight, but the privilege of viewing every tropical sunrise and sunset from the crow’s-nest I would not have exchanged for a seat at the captain’s table. My messmates were good-hearted, their chief ever eager to do me a kindly service. The Hindu crew took vast joy in my fancied degradation, and those intervals were rare when a group of the brown rascals were not hovering over me, chattering like apes in the forest, and grinning derisively. But the proudest man on board was the sarang; for it was through him that the mate sent me his mandates. Since the days when he rolled naked and unashamed on the sand floor of his natal hut on the banks of the Hoogly, the native boatswain had dreamed of no greater bliss than to issue commands to a sahib.
Ten days the Worcestershire steamed on through a motionless sea, under a sun that waxed more torrid every hour. The “glory-hole” became uninhabitable. Men who had waded through the snow on the docks of Liverpool two weeks before took to sleeping on the deck of the poop, in the thinnest of garb. With the smell of land in our nostrils, the good-night chorus was sung more than once on the eleventh evening, and our sleep was brief. Before darkness fled I had climbed again to my coign of vantage on the foremast. The first gray of dawn revealed the dim outline of a low mountain range, tinged with color by the unborn sunrise behind it. Slowly the mountains faded from view as the lowlands rose up to greet us. By eight bells we were within hailing distance of a score of brown-black islanders, unburdened with clothing, who paddled boldly seaward in their outrigger canoes. The Worcestershire found entrance to a far-reaching breakwater, and, escorted by a great school of small craft, rode to an anchorage in the center of the harbor. A multitude swarmed on board, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and in the resulting overthrow of discipline I left my stone where the mess-call had found it, and hurried below to make up my “shore bundle.” By the kindness of the chief steward, I was amply supplied with cotton suits. The frock coat, still in the lifeboat, I willed to “Peggy,” and reported to the captain. His permission granted, I tossed my bundle into the company launch, and, with one English half-penny jingle-less in my pocket, set foot on the verdant island of Ceylon.