But though I stared long and earnestly, it was to no purpose; the body did not rise: haply because the whale wasn’t dead.
“Oh, but,” said Kennet, “a big chap like that ithn’t going to rithe up with a pop ath though he wath a little fith. When a whale gothe to work, no matter what hith buthineth ith, he’th bound to take hith time. Did you ever thee a fat man hurry himthelf. Courth not. Tho ith it with whaleth.”
For a long time I continued to furtively glance at the sea, and then gave up looking, secretly pleasing myself with the idea that the whale was still alive, and not very much hurt; for it seemed to me very hard that any creature should meet with so dreadful an end as being flogged to death.
CHAPTER IX.
HE SEES AN ICEBERG.
When I had finished my work in the boat, I walked forward to toast my hands for a little at the galley-fire. The cook and I were good friends. Our esteem for each other had grown up through my giving him a portion of my allowance of rum, which acts of attention he repaid by presenting me, from time to time, with a hot roll or jam tart. For, though the owner of the Lady Violet had told my father that his ships were sober vessels, yet with us it was the practice for the steward to serve out every day at noon, on the drum of the capstan on the quarter-deck, a gill, or tot, of rum to the whole ship’s company. We midshipmen, as being on the articles, were included, and, regularly with the rest, I presented myself for my “tot”; but the stuff was much too fiery for me; the flavour, moreover, I thought extremely disagreeable; so, instead of swallowing the dose, I preserved it in a bottle and gave it to the boatswain’s mate, and the cook, and to the man who washed my linen, and to one or two others.
Well, having yarned a bit with the cook about the fight between the whale and the thrasher, whilst I warmed my fingers at his genial stove, I quitted the galley to go aft again. As I left the structure, the chief mate, standing at the break of the poop, sang out for some hands to clew up the main-royal and furl it. The mizzen-royal, I saw, was in process of being stowed by Poole, and there was a fellow dancing up the lower fore-shrouds on his way to furl the fore-royal. Some hands came tumbling past me; they let go the halliards and tailed on to the clew-lines, and a couple of sailors jumped on to the bulwarks to get into the rigging. One continued on his way aloft; the other halted with his feet still upon the bulwark-rail, and his left hand upon his heart.
He was a short man, with a yellowish, coarse face, dingy and stained, the skin like an old blanket. He had a tuft of ginger-coloured beard under his chin, a rounded back that seemed hunched, and stunted bow legs. I looked at him as I came abreast on my way to the poop, struck by his lingering when he should have been running aloft—struck, also, by a quite indescribable expression in his face. His eyes were upturned like those of a sleeper when you part the lids. I was exactly opposite him when he fell. He tumbled inboards like a wooden figure; and his head struck my shoulder with such force that I was spun round and felled, half-senseless, to the deck.
I recovered in a few moments, and sat upright; nobody took any notice of me. A crowd had gathered round the prostrate man, and presently two or three of the sailors lifted him up and carried him forwards. He was stone dead! The doctor examined the body, and said it was disease of the heart that had killed him.