‘Bless you, yes,’ I answered.
‘Any news, Mr. Dugdale?’ he asked, his voice beginning to languish as a sensation of nausea grew upon him with the larger awakening of his faculties.
‘We ran down a French lugger last night,’ said I, ‘and drowned a lot of men. That’s all.’
He eyed me dully, thinking perhaps that I was joking, and then said: ‘Well, there it is, you see. Yesterday, you were talking of the fun of a voyage; and the very earliest of the humours is the drowning of a lot of men.’
‘And women,’ said I.
‘Poor devils!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you hand me a bottle of Hungary water that you’ll find in my portmanteau? Much obliged to you, Dugdale: and will you kindly tell the steward as you pass through the cabin to bring me a cup of tea?’
‘Get up by-and-by, if you feel equal to it,’ said I. ‘Nursing sea-sickness only makes the demon more pitiless. Show yourself on deck, and the wind’ll blow the nausea out of you. And I’ll tell you a better cure than Hungary water or brandy flasks—a cube of salt-horse, Colledge; a hearty lump of marine beef, something to work up the muscles of your jaws, and to sharpen your teeth for you.’
‘Oh gracious, my dear fellow—don’t,’ he exclaimed, turning his face to the wall of the ship; and I heard him exclaim, as though muttering to himself: ‘How the water gurgles about this window, and what a doocid sickly green it is!’
But a very few of us assembled at the breakfast table. Colonel Bannister was there, a very ramrod of a man, with a Bengal-tigerish expression of face as he glared round about him from betwixt his white wire-like whiskers. There were also present Mr. Emmett, an artist, who was making the voyage to the East for the purpose of painting Indian scenery, a man with long hair curling down his back, a ragged beard and moustaches, a velvet coat, and Byronic collars, out of which his long thin neck forked up like the head of a pole through a scarecrow’s suit of clothes; Mr. Peter Hemskirk, who looked uncommonly fat, pale, and unfinished in his attire this morning; two young Civil Service fellows—as we should now call their trade—named Greenhew and Fairthorne; and Mr. Sylvanus Johnson, a journalist, bound to Bombay or Calcutta (I cannot be sure of the city), to edit a newspaper—a bullet-headed man, with a sort of low-comedian face, very blue about the cheeks where he shaved, and small keen restless black eyes, full of intelligence, whose suggestion in that way was not to be impaired or weakened by an expression in repose of singular self-complacency. Captain Keeling, at the head of the table, sat skewered up in his uniform frock-coat in stiff satin stock and collars. Mr. Prance occupied the other end of the table. He, too, was attired in a uniform resembling the dress worn by the skipper. He had a pleasant brown sailorly face, with a floating pose of head upon his shoulders that made one think of a soap-bubble poised on top of a pipe-stem. There were no ladies. Once I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Colonel Bannister’s Roman nose, and grey hair ornamented with a large black lace cap, fitfully hovering for a moment or two in the wide hatch past the chief officer’s chair, down which the steps led that went to the sleeping berths. But the apparition vanished with almost startling suddenness, as though the old lady had fallen or been violently pulled below. When, later on, I inquired after her, I learnt that she had betaken herself again to her bunk.
It was a mighty uncomfortable breakfast. The ship was rolling violently and convulsively upon the short snappish Channel seas—the most insufferable of all waters when in commotion, making even the seasoned salt pine for the long regular rhythmic heave of the blue ocean billow. The fiddles hindered the plates from sliding on to our laps; but their contents were not to be so easily coaxed into keeping their place; an unusually heavy lurch shot a large helping of liver and bacon on to Mr. Hemskirk’s knees; and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Hemmeridge, came perilously near to being badly scalded by Mr. Johnson, the literary man, who, in reaching for a cup of tea tilted the swinging tray. There was not much talk, and what little was said chiefly concerned the incident of the previous evening.