‘No, I was searched. If I produce money now, they’ll guess I have a friend on board. Will, there’s one thing you must contrive: Let me have pencil and paper. Not now. Wait for a better chance. There will be plenty. I must write to him.’
‘How are you going to give him a letter?’
‘I’ll find a way, Will.’
‘Marian, there’s no man under these stars, which are beginning to shine, who’s worth what you’re doing for Tom. How cold the wind blows! And aren’t they driving the old bucket just! I know what it will be—eight bells, and Balls’s infernal pipe, and an hour’s roosting up amongst those boughs there to reef and stow. You don’t want all that water to wash in.’
He emptied two-thirds of the bucket, put the strap into my hand, and we went down the forecastle ladder. The steward, who was helping the other man to lay the cloth, asked what had kept me so long.
‘The pump’s stiff,’ said I, ‘and it blows hard on the fo’c’sle.’
‘Hard in your eye!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look lively now! There must be no skulking. If you don’t bear a hand here, I’ll send you forward to the bo’sun and the land of ropes’ ends and kicks.’
The under-steward laughed heartily. I went briskly to my cabin, and washed my face and hands as well as I could in the dark. I found nothing in the steward’s language to anger me—nothing in my situation to cause me an instant’s regret. The truth is, I was extraordinarily encouraged and supported by the sense of my sex—by the thought that I need but avow myself to become an object of romantic interest, and so be, at all events, humanely treated. Indeed, I caught myself laughing when I put my hand into the upper bunk to feel for the parcel of my wearing apparel. What, I thought to myself, would the steward think if I were to dress myself in those clothes and enter the cuddy?