Six bells clanged the dawning of the last hour in the midnight watch. I dropped my cards, for it was the peculiar custom to stop whist just as the bell sounded.
'Time up!' said the Captain regretfully, mopping his brow, 'How do we stand, Jenny?'
His wife's voice—'Eight and three eleven, and four'—rose in a vinegary triumph of addition from across the saloon table, to culminate in an emphatic 'Fifteen points.'
'Good! I rather think that's the best night yet, sir.—Bed, Jenny. Good-night, gentlemen. A hot night, an't it?'
'Good-night, Captain!' Good-night, Mrs Cape! Coming on deck, ?'
'No!' said my partner, 'bed for this child, g'night;' and murmuring a disgusted 'Fifteen points—and the vinegar—and the heat—phew!' he shut his cabin door with a jerk.
I climbed the stern hatchway, and joined the three men lounging against the skylight on the poop. The moon hung hazily between the softly flapping sails of the idling ship. Out of the deadly calm waters a little purposeless heave rocked her ever and anon to this side and that, and the old shellback at the useless wheel whistled softly to himself, as he looked vainly for the ship's wake in the oily tropical ocean.
The Southern Cross dipped afar on the port quarter, and innumerable stars spangled the stilly depths of the dark heavens. The curiously dissonant miaul of the foes' le cat hit the ear, through the sultry stifling air, with a sense of the relieved ridiculous.
'Dosé fallows you know' (he pronounced it 'gnau'), said the mate in his slightly nasal, foreign accent, evidently resuming, 'its very curious you know, dey rraālly haven't anny feelings.'
'Do you mean, they feel no emotions, as we understand the word?' said young Raymond impatiently, his intolerance of human beings so constituted ringing in the high-pitched tones of his clear voice.
'Not a blessed one!' said a third voice from the ship's side, shrill and worn, 'Yellow devils! Yellow devils! they've only one virtue.'
'And that, Doctor?'
'Opium, sirree. They're tolerable, when they're opium drunk.'
The mate looked up sharply, and with his brown, almond-shaped Slav eyes scrutinized keenly the dim figure of the speaker, and his mouth, between the close-trimmed pointed beard and drooping moustaches, took a more than usually cynical and mournful curve.
'You are severe, Doctor,' he said; but the other, without answering, turned away, and leaned over the bulwark wearily.
'Ah! that is bad, you know,' I heard the mate say to himself under his breath.
'Yes,' said the shrill voice presently from the darkness, 'you may have seen 'em and you may talk about 'em, but you don't know them. You've not worked in China Town amongst John Chinaman, as I've worked. I guess you've not seen 'em born, and die, and marry, as I've seen them. Ugh! devils—devils—hog-skinned, slit-eyed devils!'
'It is all tempérrament, you know,' said the mate, 'dosé fallows, you know, they are different all through, it is not a question of degree. A white man will never understand how their minds wōrrk. Will you have a cigarette, Doctor?' He watched the thin face and trembling hand closely, and shook his head, as the Doctor turned back with his lighted cigarette to the ship's side.
'It is bad, you know,' he muttered again to himself. Young Raymond had strolled to the wheel, and was standing talking cheerily to the helmsman; the heat seemed to have no effect on his buoyant spirits. I, stretched on a locker, fanned myself lazily with the mate's cap, and the mate himself sat in his favourite attitude with his hands clasping his knees, his chin sunk on his chest.
Presently the Doctor began to talk again, more to himself than to us.
'What a night!' he said. 'What a ghastly, hellish, stifling night! Look at that oily pond, can't you feel the heat lifting out of it into your face. I used to think nothing could lick the Queensland bush, but, Great Lordy! this is worse, many points worse; there was always a kind of a breeze there and some stir of life, but this flat, oily waste—Oh! for a breath of air. I can't breathe; I tell you, Armand, I can't breathe.' He turned round to the mate fiercely, and threw out his thin hands, as if to thrust from him some suffocating weight. 'What's the good of you seamen,' he laughed a feeble hoarse laugh, 'if you can't fetch some sort of air up out of your hell-doomed oceans?'
'No fear, Doctor, we'll get you some before long annyway, three days flat cālm is a big spell even for the Doldrums. How's her head, my son?' he called to the grey-bearded helmsman.