CHAPTER V.
“Yet more! The billows and the depths have more:
High hearts and brave are gathered to thy breast!
* * * * * * * *
Keep thy red gold and gems, thou stormy grave!
Give back the true and brave!”—Felicia Hemans.
“To them their duty was clear, and they did it successfully; and the history of the island is written briefly in that little formula!”—Daily Telegraph, Dec. 5, 1878.
I did not feel as if I had been asleep five minutes, when I was rudely awakened, of course by noise, whistling, and inarticulate roaring, and I found that it was morning, and that the boatswain’s mate was “turning the hands up” to wash decks. Alister was ready, and I found that my toilet was, if possible, shorter than at Snuffy’s in winter.
“We puts hon our togs fust, and takes our shower-baths harterwards,” the boatswain humorously explained, as he saw me trying to get the very awkward collar of my “slops” tidy as I followed with the crowd.
The boatswain was a curious old fellow. He was
born in London, “within sound of Bow bells,” as he told me; but though a Cockney by birth, he could hardly be called a native of anywhere but the world at large. He had sailed in all seas, and seemed to have tried his hand at most trades. He had at one time been a sort of man-of-all-work in a boys’ school, and I think it was partly from this, and partly out of opposition to the sail-maker, that he never seemed to grudge my not having been born a poor person, or to fancy I gave myself airs (which I never did), or to take a pleasure in making me feel the roughest edge of the menial work I had to do, like so many of the men. But he knew very well just where things did feel strangest and hardest to me, and showed that he knew it by many a bit of not unkindly chaff.
His joke about the shower-bath came very strictly true to me. We were all on the main deck, bare-armed and bare-legged, mopping and slopping and swabbing about in the cold sea-water, which was liberally supplied to us by the steam-pump and hose. I had been furnished with a squeegee (a sort of scraper made of india-rubber at the end of broom-stick), and was putting as much “elbow-grease” into my work as renewed sea-sickness left me strength for, when the boatswain’s mate turned the hose upon me once more. I happened to be standing rather loosely, and my thoughts had flown home on the wings of a
wonder what Martha would think of this way of scrubbing a floor—all wedded as the domestic mind is to hairy flannel and sticky soap and swollen knees,—when the stream of sea-water came in full force against my neck, and I and my squeegee went head-over-heels into the lee scuppers. It was the boatswain himself who picked me out, and who avenged me on his subordinate by a round of abuse which it was barely possible to follow, so mixed were the metaphors, and so cosmopolitan the slang.
On the whole I got on pretty well that day, and began to get accustomed to the motion of the ship, in spite of the fact that she rolled more than on the day before. The sky and sea were grey enough when we were swabbing the decks in the early morning; as the day wore on, they only took the deeper tints of gathering clouds which hid the sun.