The Nigger of the Narcissus | Page 5

he resembled a learned and savage
patriarch, the incarnation of barbarian wisdom serene in the
blasphemous turmoil of the world. He was intensely absorbed, and as
he turned the pages an expression of grave surprise would pass over his
rugged features. He was reading "Pelham." The popularity of Bulwer
Lytton in the forecastles of Southern-going ships is a wonderful and
bizarre phenomenon. What ideas do his polished and so curiously
insincere sentences awaken in the simple minds of the big children who
people those dark and wandering places of the earth? What meaning
can their rough, inexperienced souls find in the elegant verbiage of his
pages? What excitement?--what forgetfulness?--what appeasement?
Mystery! Is it the fascination of the incomprehensible?--is it the charm
of the impossible? Or are those beings who exist beyond the pale of life
stirred by his tales as by an enigmatical disclosure of a resplendent
world that exists within the frontier of infamy and filth, within that
border of dirt and hunger, of misery and dissipation, that comes down
on all sides to the water's edge of the incorruptible ocean, and is the
only thing they know of life, the only thing they see of surrounding
land--those life-long prisoners of the sea? Mystery! Singleton, who had
sailed to the southward since the age of twelve, who in the last
forty-five years had lived (as we had calculated from his papers) no
more than forty months ashore--old Singleton, who boasted, with the
mild composure of long years well spent, that generally from the day
he was paid off from one ship till the day he shipped in another he
seldom was in a condition to distinguish daylight--old Singleton sat
unmoved in the clash of voices and cries, spelling through "Pelham"
with slow labour, and lost in an absorption profound enough to
resemble a trance. He breathed regularly. Every time he turned the
book in his enormous and blackened hands the muscles of his big white
arms rolled slightly under the smooth skin. Hidden by the white
moustache, his lips, stained with tobacco-juice that trickled down the

long beard, moved in inward whisper. His bleared eyes gazed fixedly
from behind the glitter of black-rimmed glasses. Opposite to him, and
on a level with his face, the ship's cat sat on the barrel of the windlass
in the pose of a crouching chimera, blinking its green eyes at its old
friend. It seemed to meditate a leap on to the old man's lap over the
bent back of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton's feet. Young
Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his backbone made a
chain of small hills under the old shirt. His face of a street-boy--a face
precocious, sagacious, and ironic, with deep downward folds on each
side of the thin, wide mouth--hung low over his bony knees. He was
learning to make a lanyard knot with a bit of an old rope. Small drops
of perspiration stood out on his bulging forehead; he sniffed strongly
from time to time, glancing out of the corners of his restless eyes at the
old seaman, who took no notice of the puzzled youngster muttering at
his work.
The noise increased. Little Belfast seemed, in the heavy heat of the
forecastle, to boil with facetious fury. His eyes danced; in the crimson
of his face, comical as a mask, the mouth yawned black, with strange
grimaces. Facing him, a half-undressed man held his sides, and,
throwing his head back, laughed with wet eyelashes. Others stared with
amazed eyes. Men sitting doubled up in the upper bunks smoked short
pipes, swinging bare brown feet above the heads of those who,
sprawling below on sea-chests, listened, smiling stupidly or scornfully.
Over the white rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but
the bodies were lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled
narrow niches for coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary.
Voices buzzed louder. Archie, with compressed lips, drew himself in,
seemed to shrink into a smaller space, and sewed steadily, industrious
and dumb. Belfast shrieked like an inspired Dervish:--"... So I seez to
him, boys, seez I, 'Beggin' yer pardon, sorr,' seez I to that second mate
of that steamer--'beggin' your-r-r pardon, sorr, the Board of Trade must
'ave been drunk when they granted you your certificate!' 'What do you
say, you------!' seez he, comin' at me like a mad bull... all in his white
clothes; and I up with my tar-pot and capsizes it all over his blamed
lovely face and his lovely jacket.... 'Take that!' seez I. 'I am a sailor,
anyhow, you nosing, skipper-licking, useless, sooperfloos

bridge-stanchion, you! That's the kind of man I am!' shouts I.... You
should have seed him skip, boys! Drowned, blind with tar, he was!
So..."
"Don't 'ee believe