‘Have you observed anything of the sort in him before?’ said I, knocking the ashes out of my pipe.
‘Never before,’ he answered; ‘but I have him on the hip now. He’s tried to make a fool of me to Miss Hudson, and this blessed evening shows me my way to a very pretty rejoinder. Come along, come along! Should he wake, there can be no performance.’
He went gliding with the step of a skater to the companion, and I followed, scarcely knowing as yet whether the young fellow was not designing in all this some practical joke of which I was to be the victim. We passed through the deserted cuddy, faintly lighted by one dimly burning lantern, and descended to the lower deck, where the corridor between the berths was illuminated by a bull’s-eye lamp fixed under a clock against the bulkhead. The cabin shared by the young men stood three doors down past mine on the same side of the ship. Greenhew halted a moment to listen, then turned the handle, took a peep, and beckoned me to enter. Affixed to a stanchion was a small bracket lamp, the glow of which was upon Riley’s face as he lay on his back in an under bunk, unmistakably in a deep sleep. His eyes were sealed, his lips parted, his respirations low and deep, as of one who slumbers heavily. The wild disorder of the bedclothes was corroboration enough of Greenhew’s tale, at least in one article of it.
‘Try him yourself,’ said my companion in a low voice.
‘No, no,’ I answered. ‘I have a sailor’s reverence for sleep. You have invited me here to witness a performance. It is for you to make the play, Greenhew.’
He at once cried out: ‘Riley! Riley! the ship is sinking! For God’s sake strike out, or you’re a drowned man!’
I was amazed to observe the young fellow instantly rise to his knees and motion with his arms in the exact manner of a swimmer, yet with a stoop of the head to clear it of the boards of the upper bunk, which I considered as remarkable as any other part of the extraordinary exhibition for the perception that it indicated of surrounding conditions; whilst his gestures on the other hand proved him completely under the control of the delusion created by his cabin-fellow’s cry. I also observed an expression of extreme suffering and anxiety in his face, that was made dumb otherwise by the closed lids. In fact it was the countenance of a swimmer battling in agony. Greenhew looked on half choking with laughter.
‘Oh,’ he whipped out in disjointed syllables, ‘if Miss Hudson could only see him now! Dugdale, you’ll have to find me some excuse to introduce her here. Her mother must attend too—the more the merrier!’ and here he went off again into a fit, as though he should suffocate.
For my part, I could see nothing to laugh at. Indeed, the thing shocked and astonished me as a painful, degrading, mysterious expression of the human mind acting under conditions of which I could not be expected of course to make head or tail. Riley continued to move his arms with the motions of a swimmer for some minutes, meanwhile breathing hard, as though the water’s edge rose to his lip, whilst his face continued drawn out into an indescribable expression of distress. His gesticulations then grew feeble, his respiration lost its fierceness and swiftness and became once more long drawn and regular, and presently he lay back, still in a deep sleep, in the posture in which I had observed him when I entered.
‘What d’ye think of that?’ exclaimed Greenhew with a face of triumphant enjoyment.