There were a few people assembled at the fore-end of the table as I made my way to the hatch whose wide steps led to the sleeping berths below. It was not hard to perceive that one of them was an East Indian military gentleman whose liver was on fire through years of curry. His white whiskers of the wire-like inflexibility of a cat’s, stood out on either side his lemon-coloured cheeks; his little blood-shot eyes of indigo sparkled under overhanging brows where the hair lay thick like rolls of cotton-wool. This gentleman I knew to be Colonel Bannister, and as I cautiously made my way along—for the movements of the decks were staggering enough to oblige me to tread warily—I gathered that he was ridiculing the medical profession to Dr. Hemmeridge, the ship’s surgeon, for its inability to prescribe for sea-sickness.
‘It iss der nerves,’ I heard a fat Dutch gentleman say—afterwards known to me as Peter Hemskirk, manager of a firm in Bombay.
‘Nerves!’ sneered the colonel, with a glance at the Dutchman’s waistcoat. ‘Don’t you know the difference between the nerves and the stomach, sir?’
‘Same thing,’ exclaimed Dr. Hemmeridge soothingly; ‘sea-sickness means the head, any way; and pray, colonel, what are the brains but’——
‘Ha! ha!’ roared the colonel, interrupting him; ‘there I have you. If it be the brains only which are affected, why, then, ha! ha! no wonder Mynheer here doesn’t suffer, though it’s his first voyage, he says.’
But my descent of the steps carried me out of earshot of this interesting talk. My cabin was well aft. There was a fairly wide corridor, and the berths were ranged on either hand of it. From some of them, as I made my way along, came in muffled sounds various notes of lamentation and suffering. A black woman, with a ring through her nose and her head draped in white, sat on the deck in front of the closed door of a berth, moaning in a sea-sick way over a baby that she rocked in her arms, and that was crying at the top of its pipes. The door of a cabin immediately opposite opened, and a young fellow with a ghastly face putting his head out exclaimed in accents strongly suggestive of nausea: ‘I thay, confound it! thtop that noithe, will you? The rolling ith bad enough without that thindy. Thteward!’ The ship gave a lurch, and he swung out, but instantly darted back again, being indeed but half clothed: ‘I thay, are you the thteward?’
‘No,’ said I. ‘Keep on singing out. Somebody’ll come to you.’
‘Won’t they thmother that woman?’ he shouted, and he would have said more, but a sudden kickup of the ship slammed his cabin door for him, and the next moment my ear caught a sound that indicated too surely his rashness in leaving his bunk.
I entered my berth, and found the lamp alight in it, and the young gentleman who was to share the cabin with me sitting in his bedstead, that was above mine, dangling his legs over the edge of it, and gazing with a disordered countenance upon the deck. I had chatted with him during the afternoon and had learnt who he was. Indeed, his name was in big letters upon his portmanteau—‘The Hon. Stephen Colledge;’ and incidentally he had told me that he was a son of Lord Sandown, and that he was bound to India on a shooting tour. He was a good-looking young man, with fair whiskers, white teeth, a genial smile, yet with something of affectation in his way of speaking.
‘It’s doocid rough, isn’t it, Mr. Dugdale?’ said he; ‘and isn’t it raining?’