nd the cat took no notice. He stood with arms
akimbo, a little fellow with white eyelashes. He looked as if he had
known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if he had
been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been
scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth... and he smiled
with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears were bending down
under the weight of his battered felt hat. The torn tails of his black
coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs. He unbuttoned the
only two buttons that remained and every one saw that he had no shirt
under it. It was his deserved misfortune that those rags which nobody
could possibly be supposed to own looked on him as if they had been
stolen. His neck was long and thin; his eyelids were red; rare hairs
hung about his jaws; his shoulders were peaked and drooped like the
broken wings of a bird; all his left side was caked with mud which
showed that he had lately slept in a wet ditch. He had saved his
inefficient carcass from violent destruction by running away from an
American ship where, in a moment of forgetful folly, he had dared to
engage himself; and he had knocked about for a fortnight ashore in the
native quarter, cadging for drinks, starving, sleeping on rubbish-heaps,
wandering in sunshine: a startling visitor from a world of nightmares.
He stood repulsive and smiling in the sudden silence. This clean white
forecastle was his refuge; the place where he could be lazy; where he
could wallow, and lie and eat--and curse the food he ate; where he could
display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where
he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully--and where
he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot
on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying
to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? A taciturn long-armed
shellback, with hooked fingers, who had been lying on his back smoking,
turned in his bed to examine him dispassionately, then, over his head,
sent a long jet of clear saliva towards the door. They all knew him! He
was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work
on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and
legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who
curses the sea while others work. The man who is the last out and the
first in when all hands are calle