“Huh—dere dick as meggots alretty——”
“This is a kitchen coolie of mine—he must go. Send someone down to make a place and take his transportation——”
The grumbling that followed was a matter of habit rather than of effectiveness. Morning seemed to see the lower lip from which the voice came, a thick and loppy member.... The mate came down, stepping from shoulder to back, across the complaining natives. They were three deep on the deck. He kicked clear a hole in the lee of the cabin.... Morning sank in, and Endicott bent to whisper:
“Put the grub-basket between your knees and don’t take your hands off it.... Put the blanket over it. It’s a thick, good blanket. I could give you a better passage, but they wouldn’t take you—honest, they wouldn’t. If they see you’re white, tell old Himmelhock you’re Endicott’s house-coolie. He can’t do anything now.... If you live, write and send the big story to Endicott at Tongu.”
Morning was sinking to sleep. He felt the warmth of the blanket, a thick, rough blanket Endicott had donated. Its warmth was like the man’s heart.... Morning’s hands went out. A coolie growled at him.... There was no worry now. It was the night of the sixth, and he was sailing. He could do no more; the ivory finger in his brain neither froze nor burned.... The pitching did not rouse him—nor the men of sewers and fields—sick where they sat—woven, matted together, trusting to the animal heat of the mass to keep from dying of exposure. John Morning lay in the midst of them—John Morning whose body would not die.
The days and nights rushed together....
Sometimes he wondered if he were not back at the shipping—in some stock-car with the horses—but horses were so clean compared to this.... When he could think, he put clean lint to his wounds. He scorned pain, for he was on his way; and much was merciful coma.
There was rain, deluges; and though the air rose heavy as amber afterward, the freshness at the time was salvation. He learned as it is probable no other American ever learned, what it means to live in the muck of men. All one at the beginning and at the ending, it is marvelous how men separate their lives in the interval—how little they know of one another, and how easily foolish noses turn up. Here was a man alive—dreaming of the baths he had missed, of Japanese Inn baths most of all.
“Who am I?” he asked.... “John Morning,” would whip back to him from somewhere. “And who in hell is John Morning to revolt at the sufferings of other men?”
He had seen the coolies in the steerage of many ships—even these massed deck passages of the Yellow and China Seas and the Coasting trade. He had looked at them before as one looks into a cage of animals. Now he was one of those who looked out, one of the slumees. Once he asked, “Is this the bottom of the human drain, and if not—must I sink to it?”