'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose child it was.'
'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis.
The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.
Then the captain, at the head of the table, exclaimed: 'I knew a man years ago who had penetrated far north in a whaler. They were frozen up for a spell, hard bound in white ice, with hills to the horizon, till the season came and they broke adrift, the piece they were on floated round a point and gave them the sight of a little barque stranded on a slope, her topmast was standing, sails furled, everything in its place—she looked as if she had gone ashore the day before. They boarded her and found by her log and papers she had been in that situation eight years. But that wasn't it,' said he with a glance down the double line of listening faces turned his way, one of the most eagerly attentive of which I observed was the old gentleman's. 'In the cabin they found five frozen men, they looked to have died without a groan one after the other, every man in the act of doing something, none guessing that the forefinger of the grinning king was on his heart. One sat with a pipe in his hand, another leaned on the table as though he was meditating, a third lay back in his chair, his eyes on the skylight as if he heard a noise on deck. That's what cold will do,' said he.
Something at this point diverted the conversation, and the subject was dropped.
When I left the table I went on deck; the west was still full of warm splendour, the sea ran heaving in deep blue folds to an horizon crystalline in the delicate sweep of it against the east, on whose violet slope—that looked to thrill with the depth of its own hue as the blue of the calm trembles under the eye—a large star was flashing.
I lighted a cigar, sunk in thought over the talk about the ice. If the body should not prove Marie's, then, supposing the hull had got locked, how long would she be able to support life in the bleak dark cabin? I had often asked that of myself and of others. I asked it again now, and whilst my mind ran upon the dinner talk Captain Robson, the old retired Newcastle shipmaster, stepped up to me.
They did not allow you to smoke on the poop; I stood in what would be called the gangway, and Captain Robson came along with a great meerschaum pipe in his hand, stuffing the bowl with a queer kind of granulated tobacco which he pulled out of a little sack.
'This is Zooloo mundungus,' said he with a hoarse, shouting laugh; 'I am learning to like it. They say it is arle a man can get on the coast yon,' and he hove up three stout chins in a measured nod in the direction of the sea over the bows.