The steward looked at Mr. Briggs and grinned.
'If you please, sir, you can't, them pirates took it all,' said Bunting.
JACK-ALL-ALONE
As it happened, I was the only passenger in the steamship Hindoo, and I found little entertainment in the company of her officers. The skipper was said never to open his mouth except upon Sundays, when he preached furiously to the assembled crowd and promised them hell as a reward for their labours on the deep sea. He was a religious maniac, much in favour with the owners because he combined religion with honesty and an unequalled degree of meanness about stores. He was little, and of a pallor that no sun could touch. He carried a hymn-book in his breast-pocket, and loose snuff in a side one. I found no comfort in him, and even less in the two mates. They were much married men with large families, and were subdued by the fear of losing their billets. They hung together and abused the skipper, and took no interest in the sea or any of its works. They pined for inland farms, where they would have been pelicans in a dry desert. I turned to the crew, and by dint of giving them tobacco and occasional nips of liquor overcame their distrust and shyness. For even though I had once been a seaman, that time was so far away that I had lost all look of it. And even when they knew it, they took it for granted I had been an officer, which put me out of their range. It was only my loneliness and my low cunning with rare whisky that made me free of their company, and at last loosened their tongues. I often sat with them in the dog-watches and set them yarning when I could by yarning myself. But only one story that I heard remains in my memory. It remains, not so much by its strangeness as by the strange way it was told, and the difficulty I had in getting it told at all. It was one of the younger seamen that put me on the tracks of the man who had it to tell.
'Why don't you try old Silent for a yarn, sir?' he said one day, when I was on the fo'castlehead with him on the look-out; 'he that says nought could say a lot. He might open up with you. With us he's as close as a water-tight compartment. But they do say in this vessel that he came out of one ship the honly survivor.'
What can one do on board a lonely steamer where there is no one to talk to and nothing to read, and there are so many unoccupied hours in front of one? The days were grey, the sea was grey, and as flat as last year's news. I set out yarn-hunting, and went for old Silent as they called him. I went for him warily. To ask him a question would be to cheat oneself of any expectation. I ceased to attempt to talk with him. But having fallen into his mood, I added to the compliment by giving him more tobacco on the quiet than I gave any one else. I called him into my deck cabin, and gave him a drink of whisky without a word. He drank it without a word, wiped his lips, scraped a sort of bow, and withdrew.
He was a melancholy man, downcast, ragged-bearded, with a glazed, yellow skin on his face, and shining scales upon the backs of his hands. His teeth were black with tobacco-chewing. His ears had been pierced for earrings, though he wore none. His eyes were deep-set, black; his mouth was a mere slit, his ears large and outstanding, like a couple of stunsails. He was obviously strong even yet. But he assuredly bore the marks of certain disastrous hours upon him, and his nerves betrayed him at times. I saw his hand shake when he lifted the drink to his lips.
'You've been through something, my friend,' I said to myself. 'I wonder what it is. It's not only "D.T."'
Life to my mind is a series of fights, and one is mostly knocked out. I could see that old Silent had been knocked out. Well, so had I, many a time, and his gloomy face appealed to me as a man of like disasters to myself. I saw (ay, and see) so many who seem to have no kind of insight into things. They are mere children, and one pities them as one does young recruits going to war. I've known men to die without suspecting it. For the most part, men live without suspecting any of the dangers, traps, pitfalls, and disasters that surround them. There was an uneasy alertness at times in this old seaman's eye which suggested that he knew Death was close at hand. I watched him keenly enough, for I had a great curiosity about him. What was the story of this poor inhabitant of this strange globe? What had he in common with those who see through illusion, who can pierce the hollow earth and see the fires, who can foretell storms, who can scent immediate and irremediable death?