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