“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.
“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits, and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it, said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and sugar——”
“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.
“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night; but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything. And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow, when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”
“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.
“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with scented soap.”
The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes. “Scented——”
“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d several cases of a special toilet and complexion article on board. By the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out Bingo had given up all interest in his own appearance. The weather was squally, a bit of a sea got up, hardly a passenger put in an appearance at the saloon tables, and Bingo only shook his ears when the bugle blew, and turned away from his morning haystack and mound of cabbages with disgust. Nurse Amy got him to eat some biscuits and drink a bucket of Bovril, but you could see he was only doing it to oblige her. ‘Oh, come, cheer up!’ she said in a brisk, professional way. ‘You’ll get your sea-legs on directly and the officer says we’re having a wonderfully smooth passage, considering the time of the year.’ But Bingo only sighed, and two tears trickled out of his little red eyes, as he swayed from side to side. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ says I; for somehow I was generally about when Nurse Amy was looking after her big charge. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ and he was.”
The Pressman’s face was streaked and shiny, his hair lay glued to his brow. The pencil went on, devouring page after page.
“Nurse Amy, luckily for her patient, was not upset by the pitching of the vessel, for it blew half a gale steady from the sou’-west, and the old Centipede dipped her nose pretty frequently. Nurse was as busy as a bee endeavoring by every means she could devise or adopt from the suggestions of the stewardesses, who showed a good deal of interest in her and her charge, to alleviate the sufferings of Bingo. I have seen that little woman stand for an hour on the wet planking, holding a six-foot deck-swab soaked with eau-de-Cologne to Bingo’s forehead....”