"Well, you see, I have been seventeen days on deck.""Seventeen!...But you must have slept.""I suppose I must have.I don't know.But I'm certain that I didn't sleep for the last forty hours.""Phew!...You will be going ashore presently I suppose?""As soon as ever I can.There's no end of business waiting for me there."The surgeon released my hand, which he had taken while we talked, pulled out his pocket-book, wrote in it rapidly, tore out the page and offered it to me.
"I strongly advise you to get this prescription made up for yourself ashore.Unless I am much mistaken you will need it this evening.""What is it, then?" I asked with suspicion.
"Sleeping draught," answered the surgeon curtly; and moving with an air of interest toward Mr.Burns he engaged him in conversation.
As I went below to dress to go ashore, Ransome followed me.He begged my pardon; he wished, too, to be sent ashore and paid off.
I looked at him in surprise.He was waiting for my answer with an air of anxiety.
"You don't mean to leave the ship!" I cried out.
"I do really, sir.I want to go and be quiet some-where.Anywhere.The hospital will do.""But, Ransome," I said."I hate the idea of parting with you.""I must go," he broke in."I have a right!"...He gasped and a look of almost savage de-termination passed over his face.For an instant he was another being.And I saw under the worth and the comeliness of the man the humble reality of things.Life was a boon to him--this precarious hard life, and he was thoroughly alarmed about himself.
"Of course I shall pay you off if you wish it," Ihastened to say."Only I must ask you to remain on board till this afternoon.I can't leave Mr.
Burns absolutely by himself in the ship for hours."He softened at once and assured me with a smile and in his natural pleasant voice that he under-stood that very well.
When I returned on deck everything was ready for the removal of the men.It was the last ordeal of that episode which had been maturing and tem-pering my character--though I did not know it.
It was awful.They passed under my eyes one after another--each of them an embodied reproach of the bitterest kind, till I felt a sort of revolt wake up in me.Poor Frenchy had gone suddenly under.
He was carried past me insensible, his comic face horribly flushed and as if swollen, breathing stertorously.He looked more like Mr.Punch than ever; a disgracefully intoxicated Mr.Punch.
The austere Gambril, on the contrary, had im-proved temporarily.He insisted on walking on his own feet to the rail--of course with assistance on each side of him.But he gave way to a sudden panic at the moment of being swung over the side and began to wail pitifully:
"Don't let them drop me, sir.Don't let them drop me, sir!" While I kept on shouting to him in most soothing accents: "All right, Gambril.
They won't! They won't!"
It was no doubt very ridiculous.The blue-jackets on our deck were grinning quietly, while even Ransome himself (much to the fore in lending a hand) had to enlarge his wistful smile for a fleet-ing moment.
I left for the shore in the steam pinnace, and on looking back beheld Mr.Burns actually standing up by the taffrail, still in his enormous woolly over-coat.The bright sunlight brought out his weird-ness amazingly.He looked like a frightful and elaborate scarecrow set up on the poop of a death-stricken ship, set up to keep the seabirds from the corpses.
Our story had got about already in town and everybody on shore was most kind.The Marine Office let me off the port dues, and as there hap-pened to be a shipwrecked crew staying in the Home I had no difficulty in obtaining as many men as I wanted.But when I inquired if I could see Captain Ellis for a moment I was told in accents of pity for my ignorance that our deputy-Neptune had retired and gone home on a pension about three weeks after I left the port.So I suppose that my appointment was the last act, outside the daily routine, of his official life.
