‘Ay,’ said he; ‘that’s Crabb.’
‘Dying, d’ye say, Mr. Smallridge?’ I considered an instant, and exclaimed: ‘Surely he was at the wheel from ten to twelve during the first watch last night?’
‘So he was,’ answered the boatswain; ‘but he took ill in the middle watch, and the latest noose is that he’s a-dying rapidly.’
‘What’s the poor fellow’s malady?’ said I.
‘Well, the doctor don’t seem rightly to understand,’ he answered: ‘he’s been forrards twice since breakfast-time, and calls it a general break-up—an easy tarm for the ‘splaining of a difficulty. But what it means, blowed if I know,’ he added, with a glance aft, to observe if the mate had hove into sight.
‘A general break-up,’ said I, ‘signifies a decay of the vital organs. I don’t mean to say that Crabb isn’t decayed, but I certainly should have thought the worst of his distemper lay outside.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said he; ‘you wouldn’t suppose that he’d need a worse illness than his own face to kill him. But this ain’t seeing after the ship’s work, is it?’ and with another pleasant sea-flourish of his hand to his brow, he left me.
A little later, I was walking leisurely aft, meaning to regain the poop for a yarn with Colledge, who stood alone to leeward, looking over the rail with his arms folded in the attitude of a man profoundly bored, when the ship’s doctor, Mr. Hemmeridge, came out of the cuddy door to take a few pulls at his pipe under the shelter of the overhanging deck.
‘So, doctor,’ said I, planting myself carelessly in front of him with a light swing on my straddled legs to the soft heave of the ship, ‘we are to lose a man, I hear?’
‘Who told you that?’ he exclaimed, gazing at me out of a pair of moist weak eyes, which, I am afraid, told a story of something even stronger than his jalap and Glauber salts, stored secretly amongst the bottles which filled the shelves of his dark and dismal little berth right away aft over the lazarette.