for a minute, then he added, “Mind, I don’t say – I don’t say that it mayn’t be as you say. You’re a very nice young fellow… But what I say is – I am a public man – you ought to clear yourself.” He was beginning to recover his military bearing.
“Oh! don’t be absurd,” I said.
One of the Spaniards came up to me and whispered, “You must come now. We are going to cast off.” At the same time Tomas Castro prowled to the other side of the ship, within five yards of us. I called out, “Tomas Castro! Tomas Castro! I will not go with you.” The man beside me said, “Come, señor! Vamos!”
Suddenly Castro, stretching his arm out at me, cried, “Come, hombres. This is the caballero; seize him.” And to me in his broken English he shouted, “You may resist, if you like.”
This was what I meant to do with all my might. The ragged crowd surrounded me; they chattered like monkeys. One man irritated me beyond conception. He looked like an inn-keeper in knee-breeches, had a broken nose that pointed to the left, and a double chin. More of them came running up every minute. I made a sort of blind rush at the fellow with the broken nose; my elbow caught him on the soft folds of flesh and he skipped backwards; the rest scattered in all directions, and then stood at a distance, chattering and waving their hands. And beyond them I saw old Cowper gesticulating approval. The man with the double chin drew a knife from his sleeve, crouched instantly, and sprang at me. I hadn’t fought anybody since I had been at school; raising my fists was like trying a dubious experiment in an emergency. I caught him rather hard on the end of his broken nose; I felt the contact on my right, and a small pain in my left hand. His arms went up to the sky; his face, too. But I had started forward to meet him, and half a dozen of them flung their arms round me from behind.
I seemed to have an exaggerated clearness of vision; I saw each brown dirty paw reach out to clutch some part of me. I was not angry any more; it wasn’t any good being angry, but I made a fight for it. There were dozens of them; they clutched my wrists, my elbows, and in between my wrists and my elbows, and my shoulders. One pair of arms was round my neck, another round my waist, and they kept on trying to catch my legs with ropes. We seemed to stagger all over the deck; I expect they got in each other’s way; they would have made a better job of it if they hadn’t been such a multitude. I must then have got a crack on the head, for everything grew dark; the night seemed to fall on us, as we fought.
Afterwards I found myself lying gasping on my back on the deck of the schooner; four or five men were holding me down. Castro was putting a pistol into his belt. He stamped his foot violently, and then went and shouted in Spanish:
“Come you all on board. You have done mischief enough, fools of Lugarenos. Now we go.”
I saw, as in a dream of stress and violence, some men making ready to cast off the schooner, and then, in a supreme effort, an effort of lusty youth and strength, which I remember to this day, I scattered men like chaff, and stood free.
For the fraction of a second I stood, ready to fall myself, and looking at prostrate men. It was a flash of vision, and then I made a bolt for the rail. I clambered furiously; I saw the deck of the old barque; I had just one exulting sight of it, and then Major Cowper uprose before my eyes and knocked me back on board the schooner, tumbling after me himself.
Twenty men flung themselves upon my body. I made no movement. The end had come. I hadn’t the strength to shake off a fly, my heart was bursting my ribs. I lay on my back and managed to say, “Give me air.” I thought I should die.
Castro, draped in his cloak, stood over me, but Major Cowper fell on his knees near my head, almost sobbing: “My papers! My papers! I tell you I shall starve. Make them give me back my papers. They ain’t any use to them – my pension – mortgages – not worth a penny piece to you.”
He crouched over my face, and the Spaniards stood around, wondering. He begged me to intercede, to save him those papers of the greatest importance.
Castro preserved his attitude of a conspirator. I was touched by the major’s distress, and at last I condescended to address Castro on his behalf, though it cost me an effort, for I was angry, indignant, and humiliated.
“Whart – whart? What do I know of his papers? Let him find them.” He waved his hand loftily.
The deck was hillocked with heaps of clothing, of bedding, casks of rum, old hats, and tarpaulins. Cowper ran in and out among the plunder, like a pointer in a turnip field. He was groaning.
Beside one of the pumps was a small pile of shiny cases; ship’s instruments, a chronometer in its case, a medicine chest.
Cowper tottered at a black dispatch-box. “There, there!” he said; “I tell you I shall starve if I don’t have it. Ask him – ask him – ” He was clutching me like a drowning man.
Castro raised the inevitable arm towards heaven, letting his round black cloak fall into folds like those of an umbrella. Cowper gathered that he might take his japanned dispatch-box; he seized the brass handles and rushed towards the side, but at the last moment he had the good impulse to return to me, holding out his hand, and spluttering distractedly, “God bless you, God bless you.” After a time he remembered that I had rescued his wife and child, and he asked God to bless me for that too. “If it is ever necessary,” he said, “on my honour, if you escape, I will come a thousand miles to testify. On my honour – remember.” He said he was going to live in Clapham. That is as much as I remember. I was held pinned down to the deck, and he disappeared from my sight. Before the ships had separated, I was carried below in the cabin of the schooner.
They left me alone there, and I sat with my head on my arms for a long time, I did not think of anything at all; I was too utterly done up with my struggles, and there was nothing to be thought about. I had grown to accept the meanness of things as if I had aged a great deal. I had seen men scratch each other’s faces over coat buttons, old shoes – over Mercer’s trousers. My own future did not interest me at this stage. I sat up and looked round me.
I was in a small, bare cabin, roughly wainscotted and exceedingly filthy. There were the grease-marks from the backs of heads all along a bulkhead above a wooden bench; the rough table, on which my arms rested, was covered with layers of tallow spots. Bright light shone through a porthole. Two or three ill-assorted muskets slanted about round the foot of the mast – a long old piece, of the time of Pizarro, all red velvet and silver’ chasing, on a swivelled stand, three English fowling-pieces, and a coachman’s blunderbuss. A man was rising from a mattress stretched on the floor; he placed a mandolin, decorated with red favours, on the greasy table. He was shockingly thin, and so tall that his head disturbed the candle-soot on the ceiling. He said: “Ah, I was waiting for the cavalier to awake.”
He stalked round the end of the table, slid between it and the side, and grasped my arm with wrapt earnestness as he settled himself slowly beside me. He wore a red shirt that had become rather black where his long brown ringlets fell on his shoulders; it had tarnished gilt buttons ciphered “G. R.,” stolen, I suppose, from some English ship.
“I beg the Señor Caballero to listen to what I have to record,” he said, with intense gravity. “I cannot bear this much longer – no, I cannot bear my sufferings much longer.”
His face was of a large, classical type; a close-featured, rather long face, with an immense nose that from the front resembled the section of a bell; eyebrows like horseshoes, and very large-pupilled eyes that had the purplish-brown lustre of a horse’s. His air was mournful in the extreme, and he began to speak resonantly as if his chest were a sounding-board. He used immensely long sentences, of which I only understood one-half.
“What, then, is the difference between me, Manuel-del-Popolo
