However, by this time I had refreshed myself with a wash, and now quitted the cabin after a slight look round, in which I took notice of the portrait of a stout lady cut out in black paper and pasted upon a white card, a telescope, a sextant case, a little battery of pipes in a rack over the bunk.
Helga arrived, holding her sealskin hat in her hand. Her amber-coloured hair—for sometimes I would think it of this hue, at others a pale gold, then a very fine delicate yellow—showed with a little roughness in it, as though she were fresh from the blowing of the wind. But had she been an artist she could not have expressed more choiceness in her fashion of neglect. She had heartened and brightened greatly since our rescue from the raft, and, though there were still many traces of her grief and sufferings in her face, there was likewise the promise that she needed but a very short term of good usage from life to bloom into as sweet, modest, and gentle a maiden as a man's heart could wish to hold to itself.
The Captain, motioning us to our places, took his seat at the head of the table with a large air of hospitality in his manner of drawing out his whiskers and inflating his waistcoat. The vessel creaked and groaned noisily as she pitched and rolled, so slanting the table that, but for the rough, well-used fiddles, every article upon it would have speedily tumbled on to the deck. The lamp burned brightly, and almost eclipsed the rusty complexion of daylight that lay upon the glass of the little skylight directly over our heads.
Punmeamootty waited nimbly upon us, though my immediate impression was that his alacrity was not a little animated by fear and dislike. As the Captain sat smilingly recommending the ham that he was carving—dwelling much upon it, and talking of the pig as an animal on the whole more serviceable to man than the cow—I caught the coloured steward watching him as he stood some little distance away upon the skipper's left, with his dusky shining eyes in the corner of their sockets. It reminded me of the look I had observed the fierce-looking fellow at the wheel fasten upon the Captain. It was as though the fellow cursed him with his dusky gaze. Yet there was nothing forbidding in his face, despite his ugliness. His skin was of the colour of the yolk of an egg, and he had a coarse heavy nose, which made me suspect a Dutch hand in the man's creation. His hair was coal black, long, and lank, after the Chinese pattern. It would have been hard to guess his age from such a mask of a face as he carried; but the few bristles on his upper lip suggested youth, and I dare say I was right in thinking him about two-and-twenty.
The Captain talked freely; sometimes he omitted his nasal twang; but his conversation was threaded with pious reflections, and I took notice of a tendency in the man to sermonize, as though little in the most familiar talk could occur out of which a salutary moral was not to be squeezed. He seemed to be very well pleased to have us on board, not perhaps so much because our company was a break as because it provided him with an opportunity to philosophize, and to air his sentiments. I shall not be thought very grateful for thus speaking of a man who had rescued us from a trying and distressful situation, and who was entertaining us kindly, and, I may say, bountifully; but my desire is to give you the truth—to describe exactly as best I can what I saw and suffered in this strange passage of my life, and the portrait I am attempting of Captain Joppa Bunting is as the eyes of my head, and of my mind too, beheld him.
As I looked at him sitting at the table, of a veal-like complexion in that light, blandly gesticulating with his fat hands, expressing himself with a nasal gravity that was at times diverting with the smile that accompanied it, it seemed difficult to believe that he was a merchant captain, the master of as commonplace an old ocean waggon as ever crushed a sea with a round bow. I asked him how long he had followed the life, and he astonished me by answering that he was now forty-four, and that he had been apprenticed to the sea at the age of twelve.
'You will have seen a very great deal in that time, Captain,' said I.
'I believe there is no wonder of the Lord visible upon the face of the deep which I have not viewed,' he responded. 'There is no part of the world which I have not visited. I have coasted the Antarctic zone of ice in a whaler, and I have been becalmed for seventeen weeks right off, with thirty miles of motion only in those seventeen weeks, upon the parallel of one degree north.'
On this I observed that Helga eyed him with interest, yet I seemed to be sensible, too, of an expression of recoil in her face, if I may thus express what I do not know how better to define.
'You have worn wonderfully well,' said I.