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Updated: June 28, 2025
I stroll up and down for an hour at a time, with whichever mate has the watch. Mr. Mellaire is always full-garmented, but Mr. Pike, on these delicious nights, stands his first watch after midnight in his pyjamas. He is a fearfully muscular man. Sixty-nine years seem impossible when I see his single, slimpsy garments pressed like fleshings against his form and bulged by heavy bone and huge muscle.
Then, as the bow lifted, for an instant in the pencil of light that immediately lost it, I glimpsed a vague black object that bounded down the inclined deck where no water was. What became of it we could not see. Mr. Pike descended to the deck, followed by Mr. Mellaire.
Mellaire's watch, I discovered another efficient. He was at the wheel, a small, well-knit, muscular man of say forty-five, with black hair graying on the temples, a big eagle- face, swarthy, with keen, intelligent black eyes. Mr. Mellaire vindicated my judgment by telling me the man was the best sailor in his watch, a proper seaman.
By the light-stick we made it out to be a large, barnacle-crusted cask. "She's been afloat for forty years," was Mr. Pike's judgment. "Look at the size of the barnacles, and look at the whiskers." "And it's full of something," said Mr. Mellaire. "Hope it isn't water."
But the men shrank away from the order and from him. "For two cents . . . " I heard Mr. Pike growl to himself, then choke off utterance. He flung about on his heel and started for the bridge. In the same order as on the previous trip, Mr. Mellaire second, and I bringing up the rear, we followed.
Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge not a sailor dared to accompany us other lines of "The Galley Slave" drifted through my brain, such as: "Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . "
Once, under the weather cloth, I came upon him talking to himself. It was more a prayer. "If only she don't pipe up," he kept repeating. "If only she don't pipe up." Mr. Mellaire was quite different. "It never happens," he told me. "No ship ever went around like this. You watch her come. She always comes a-smoking out of the sou'west." "But can't a vessel ever steal around?" I asked.
And yet all he said was: "Mr. Mellaire." "Yes, sir," answered Mr. Mellaire, after a moment of tense silence. "Come aft here," came Captain West's voice. I heard the second mate move along the deck beneath me and stop at the foot of the poop-ladder. "Your place is aft on the poop, Mr. Mellaire," said the cold, passionless voice. "Yes, sir," answered the second mate. That was all.
From now on the less you see aboard this ship the better. That is all." And again he turned on his heel and went his way. No, the sea is not a gentle place. It must be the very hardness of the life that makes all sea-people hard. Of course, Captain West is unaware that his crew exists, and Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire never address the men save to give commands.
At last I tossed the novel aside, damned all analytical Frenchmen, and found some measure of relief in the more genial and cynical Stendhal. Over my head I could hear Mr. Mellaire steadily pace up and down. At four the watches changed, and I recognized the age-lag in Mr. Pike's promenade.
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