The Beach of Dreams | Page 2

in drink that Pelagon rose in him. Harbutt was an atom of the new voice that is heard everywhere now, even in fo'c'sles. He had failed in everything on land and a'board ship he was a slacker. You cannot be a voice and an A.B. at the same time.
"What was your last job ashore?" went on Raft with the persistence of a child, always wanting to know.
"Cleanin' out pig sties," said Harbutt viciously. "Drove to it. I tell you when a chap's down he's down, the chaps that has money tramples on the chaps that hasn't. I've been through it and I know. It's the rich man does it."
"Well," said Raft, "I don't even remember seeing one."
"Haven't you ever been in no cities?"
"I've been in cities right enough, but most by the water-side."
"Well, you've seen chaps in plug hats and chaps drivin' in carriages, that's the sort that keeps us down, that's the sort we've got to make an end of."
Raft did not quite see. He had a respect for Harbutt mixed with a contempt for him as a sailor. Harbutt knew a lot--but he could not see how the chaps in plug hats kept other people down; the few he had seen had always seemed to him away and beyond his world, soft folk, and always busy about their own affairs--and how were they to be made an end of?
"Do you mean killing them?" he asked.
"Oh, there's other ways than killin'," replied Harbutt. "It's not them, it's their money does the trick."
He finished his patch and turned in. Raft finished his pipe and turned in also and the fo'c'sle was given over to the noises of the sea and the straining timbers of the ship.
Now that the figures of the two sailors had vanished its personality took fuller life, grim, dark, close, like the interior of a grimy hand clutching the lives of all those sleepers. The beams shewed like the curved fingers, and the heel of the bowsprit like the point of the in-turned thumb, a faint soul-killing rock of kerosene filled it, intensifying, after the fashion of ambergris, all the other perfumes, without losing in power. Bilge, tobacco and humanity, you cannot know what these things are till they are married with the reek of kerosene, with the grunts and snores of weary men, with lamplight dimmed with smoke haze; with the heave and fall of the sea; the groaning of timbers and the boom of the waves. This is the fo'c'sle whose great, great, great grandmother was the lower deck of the trireme where slaves chained to benches laboured till they died, just as they labour to-day.
CHAPTER II
NORTH-WEST
The Albatross, bound from Cape Town to Melbourne, had been blown out of her course and south of the Crozet Islands; she was now steering north-west, making towards Kerguelen, across an ice-blue sea, vast, like a country of broken crystal strewn with snow. The sky, against which the top-gallant stay-sails shewed gull-white in the sun, had the cold blue of the sea and was hung round at the horizon by clouds like the white clouds that hang round the Pacific Trades.
Raft was at the wheel and Captain Pound the master was pacing the deck with Mason the first officer, up and down, pausing now and then for a glance away to windward, now with an eye aloft at the steadfast canvas, talking all the time of subjects half a world away.
It was a sociable ship as far as the afterguard was concerned. Pound being a rough and capable man of the old school with no false dignity and an open manner of speech. He had been talking of his little house at Twickenham, of Mrs. Pound and the children, of servants and neighbours that were unsociable and now he was talking of dreams. He had been dreaming the night before of Pembroke docks, the port he had started from as a boy. Pembroke docks was a bad dream for Pound, and he said so. It always heralded some disaster when it appeared before him in dreamland.
"I've always dreamt before that I was starting from there," said he, "but last night I was getting the old Albatross in, and the tow rope went, and the tug knocked herself to bits, and then the old hooker swung round and there was Mrs. P. on the quayside in her night attire shouting to me to put the helm down--under hare sticks in the docks, mind you!"
"Dreams are crazy things," said Mason. "I don't believe there's anything in them."
"Well, maybe not," said Pound. He glanced at the binnacle card and then went below.
Nothing is more impressive to the unaccustomed mind than the spars and canvas of a ship under full sail seen from the deck, nothing more suggestive of power and the daring