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Usually natives, who range under the category of labourers, go as deck-passengers on steamers in the East. Therefore, after I had bought second-class tickets for them, and the Dutch Packet Boat Company had courteously offered to have a man meet them on arrival, I felt satisfied that they would have no trouble in landing. I then continued my journey over Penang to Madras.
Kenton went silently back to his book, which he took with him to the reading-room, where from time to time his wife came to him and reported that Ellen and Breckon were still walking up and down together, or that they were sitting down talking, or were forward, looking over at the prow, or were watching the deck-passengers dancing.
After the measurement of the pile by the mate or captain, the deck-passengers and boat-hands stow it away in the vicinity of the furnaces it being part of the terms of passage, that the lower order of passengers shall assist in the operation.
In one of the uppermost of the filthy bunks, in the darkest corner, near the wheel, he discovered what he thought to be his man. The deck-passengers were still asleep, lying around stupidly. August paused a moment, checked by a sense of the dangerousness of his undertaking.
I was fourth officer then; we had about seven saloon passengers, including the Captain's wife and another woman, and perhaps five hundred deck-passengers going up the coast to a shrine, on just such a night as this, when she was ripping through the level sea at a level nine knots an hour. The man on the bridge, whoever it was, saw that she was sinking at the head.
Native deck-passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white man, so the presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend. Davidson was telling us all about it afterwards. Heyst said that his father had written a lot of books. He was a philosopher. "Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too," was Davidson's comment. "Apparently he had quarrelled with his people in Sweden.
It hung as it might be over yonder, and as I came along from the cuddy, the deck-passengers hung round me, shoving their money-belts into my hand, taking off their nose-rings and earrings, and thrusting 'em upon me to buy just one chance for life. If I hadn't been so desperately busy, I should have thought it horrible. I put biscuits and water into the boat, and got the two ladies in.
At night a young Turk sang plaintive, quavering laments to the accompaniment of a sort of guitar, some of the others occasionally joining in the mournful chorus. I found my chief recreation, when it grew too dark to read, in watching an Orthodox priest, who was one of the deck-passengers, prepare for the night by combing and putting up his long and greasy hair.
We had on board, among our deck-passengers, a middle-aged Indian, of the Juri tribe; a short, thickset man, with features resembling much those of the late Daniel O'Connell. He was dressed in European-style black hat, coat, and trousers looking very uncomfortable in the dreadful heat which, it is unnecessary to say, exists on board a steamer, under a vertical sun, during mid- day hours.
Another of the deck-passengers was a rather prosperous-looking, middle-aged Levantine who had been in America making his fortune, he told me, and was now returning to his wife, who lived in a little village on the Dardanelles, after an absence of sixteen years. She had no idea that he was coming, he said, as he had planned to surprise her. Perhaps he was the one to be surprised.
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