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I remained on the wreck till among the last of the passengers, managing to get a can of crackers and some sardines out of the submerged pantry, a thing the rest of the passengers did not have, and then I went quietly ashore in one of the boats.
"I hope you will get good food." He laughed. "I expect to have to live on just whatever I can shoot or grub up. You see, the more completely I leave all civilisation, the more correctly I shall get my 'copy. I can't crawl into the long grass, carrying tins of sardines and bottles of Bass!" "You might take meat lozenges," suggested Ronnie's wife.
For dinner we had the last tin of sardines, the last pot of apricot jam, and a tin of ratifia biscuits a most extraordinary mixture, I admit, but there was nothing else. There were six people to be fed every day, and nothing to feed them with. Thursday's breakfast was a discovered crust of dry bread, very stale, and our dinner that day was rice and salt the last rice in the store-room.
"Get well right away!" chuckled the Indian. "Very good to smell them." Then to Billy: "You eat. You get ready. You ride now to Fort o' Farewell." So they built up the dying fire, made tea, cooked a little bacon, and all three ate heartily. "I'll leave you the teapot, of course," said Billy, taking a dozen hardtack and one tin of sardines. "Slough water's good enough for me."
She would sit at the cabin table and drink beer and eat sardines, saying saucily, "Me white mans, too," as she joked and laughed with the captains and supercargoes. Or, if some one put his head down the hatchway, she would call out, "Oh, the Kanaka dog! Go 'way, you peeping Kanaka dog!"
I executed these commissions, and in due time, business being ended, Doubleday and I and Crow, and the sardines and the cigars, started in a body for Cork Place, where, in a first-floor front, the estimable Mr Doubleday was wont to pitch his daily tent. They were cosy quarters, and contrasted in a marked manner with Beadle Square. Doubleday knew how to make himself comfortable, evidently.
A narrow space is walled off with canvas for the exclusive use of the female deck passengers, and in this enclosure scores of women and children of the above-named nationalities are huddled together indiscriminately for the night, packed, I should say, closer than sardines in a tin box.
The "sardonic smile" and "sardonic laughter" have been supposed by some learned men to refer to the smiles of the ancient Sardinians when stoning their aged parents. But they have no more to do with Sardinians than they have with sardines or sardonyx. The word "sardonic" is related to a Greek word which means "to snarl," and a sardonic grin is merely a snarl.
All through that winter he lived the fisherman's life: on land, in one of the tiny fisher-booths where a five-man crew is packed like sardines in an air so thick you can cut it with a knife; at sea, where in a fair wind you stand half the day doing nothing and freezing stiff the while and a foul wind means out oars, and row, row, row, over an endless plain of rolling icy combers; row, row, till one's hands are lumps of bleeding flesh.
Soft, crumbling orange cheese, pickles, smoked sardines, chopped liver, olives, pretzels all the now-forgotten appetizers were laid out on broad silver platters. "I wish I could offer you a drink," said Bleak, "but as you know, it would be unconstitutional. With your permission, I shall have to have something. My office hours begin shortly, and some one might come in."
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