I hung in the wind a moment, then said: ‘Yes; I will go with you;’ and we trudged forwards.
The sailors’ dwelling-place was what is called a topgallant forecastle; a structure in the bows of the ship corresponding with the cuddy and its poop-deck aft. There was a wing on either hand of it that came very nearly to abreast of the foremast, for in those times a ship’s foremast was stepped or erected nearer to the bows than it now stands. Each of these two wings held a couple of cabins, respectively occupied by the boatswain, the sailmaker, the carpenter, and the cook. You entered the forecastle itself by doors just forward of the huge windlass, the great fore-hatch lying between it and the long-boat that stood in chocks full of live-stock. It should have been familiar ground to me; yet I found something of real novelty, too, in the sight as I followed the doctor through the port door and entered what resembled a vast gloomy cave, resonant with the sound of seas smitten by the cutwater, with a slush-lamp swinging amidships under a begrimed beam, and a line of daylight falling a little beyond fair through the open scuttle or deck-hatch, and resembling in its dusty shaft and defined margin a sunbeam striking through a chink of the shutter of a darkened room.
There was at least a score of hammocks hung up under the ceiling or upper deck, with here and there the faces of mariners showing over them, or perhaps the half of a stockinged leg, and nothing else of the man inside but that to be seen. There was also a double tier of bunks, which wound round from the after bulkhead into the gloom forward, that seemed the darker, somehow, for the loom of the immense heel of the bowsprit that came piercing through the knightheads. It was a rough, wild scene to survey by that light; a blending into a sort of muddle, as it were, of hammocks and sea-chests and stanchions and dangling oil-skins and sea-boots and canvas bags, and divers other odds and ends of the marine equipment. There were figures seated on the boxes, stolidly smoking, or stitching at their clothes; grim, silent, unshaven salts, stealing out upon the eye in that strange commingling of dull light and dim shadow, in proportions so grotesque and even startling that they hardly needed to vanish on a sudden to persuade one they were creatures of another universe. Many creaking and straining noises threaded the hush in this gloomy timber cavern. The motion of the ship, too, was much more defined here than it was aft, and you felt the deck rising and falling under your feet as though you were on a see-saw with a frequent small thunder of cleft sea breaking in.
The doctor made his way to a bunk on the port side, almost abreast of the scuttle, where the light came sifting through the gloom with power enough to define shape, and even colour. In this bunk lay a motionless figure under a blanket, and a small square of canvas over his head. The bunks in the immediate neighbourhood were empty, and the fellows who swung in hammocks a little distance away peered dumbly at us, with eyes which gleamed like discs of polished steel amid the hair on their faces.
Dr. Hemmeridge pulled the bit of sail-cloth from the face of the body, and there lay before me the most hideous mask that could enter the mind of any man, saving the master who drew Caliban, to figure. Nothing showed of the eyes through the contracted lids but the whites. There was a drop in the under-jaw that had twisted the creature’s hare-lip into the distortion of a shocking grin.
I took one look and recoiled, and, as I did so, a fellow who had been watching us at the forecastle door approached and said respectfully: ‘There ain’t no doubt of his being stone-dead, sir, I suppose?’
Hemmeridge turned from the body. There was an odd look of loathing and puzzlement in his face.
‘Oh yes, man, quite dead,’ he answered. ‘An amazing corpse, don’t you think, Mr. Dugdale? Good enough to preserve in spirits as a show for the museum of a hospital.’
‘I hope,’ exclaimed a deep voice from a hammock that swung near, ‘if so be that that there Crabb’s dead and gone, he ain’t going to be let lie to p’ison the parfumed hatmosphere of this here drawing-room.’
‘No, my man,’ answered the doctor, looking at the body; ‘we’ll have him out of this in good time. But there’s nothing to hurt in his remaining here a bit.’