It is Christmas Day, and I begin it with the clock as usual. George the Fourth punches me in the ribs, grunts, “Merry new Christmas, Mac,” and vanishes. There is not a breath of air stirring. Through the sultry night air the stars burn brightly. A cluster of blurred lights on the horizon show me where a liner is creeping past us in the darkness—a ship passing in the night. Clad only in dungaree trousers and singlet, I go below, on watch. The windsail hangs limp and breathless, and the thermometer stands at 120° Fah. Christmas Day!

Slowly in the hot air the hours drag on. One, two, three o’clock. Then, “one bell.” No breeze yet. I finish up, score my log on the black-board—Sea water 90°, discharge 116°—and call the Second. He is awake, panting in the hot oven of his berth. If I wish him a merry Christmas he will murder me. I slink below again, and have a sea bath. Even salt water at 90° Fah. is a boon after four hours in that inferno.

A mug of cocoa—strange how hot cocoa cools one—and I turn in. I hear the Skipper padding up and down in his sandals on the poop, clad only in pyjamas. At last, as the stars are paling, I fall asleep.

At seven o’clock I am aroused by the mess-room steward leaning over me, closing my ports. They are flooding the decks with sea-water to cool them, and if my ports are open I am also flooded.

Still no relief. There is a deathly quiet in the mess-room as we assembled to our Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, coffee, cocoa, and marmalade. Imagine such a menu in the tropics! The butter is liquid, and from each of us, clad in singlets and white ducks, the sweat streams. The day begins unpropitiously. John Thomas, the mess-room steward, balancing himself on the top step of our companion-way with three cups of boiling cocoa in his hands, slips and thunders to the bottom. There is a chaotic mixture of scalded boy, broken cups, and steam on the floor, and we giggle nervously in our Turkish bath.

George the Fourth goes on watch, and we lie listlessly under our awning, praying for a breeze. On the face of the blazing vault there is not a single cloud, on the face of the waters not a ripple. The sea is a vast pond of paraffin. The hot gases from the funnel rise vertically, and the sun quivers behind them. The flaps of the windsail hang dead, the sides of the canvas tube have fallen in like the neck of a skinny old man. Slowly the sun mounts over our heads and the air grows hotter and hotter. From the galley come sounds of quacking, and a few feathers roll slowly past us. Now and then an agonized trimmer will stagger out of a bunker hatch into the open air, his half-naked body black with coal-dust and gleaming with sweat. The Mate, in a big straw hat, paces the bridge slowly. The cook emerges from the galley and hastens aft for provisions—they are preparing our Christmas dinner. Roast duck, green peas, new potatoes, plum pudding—and the temperature is 105° Fah. on deck.

One bell. I rise, and go below to change for my watch—12 to 4.

“Will you take any dinner, sir?” John Thomas rubs the sweat from his forehead and sets the soup on the table. I ponder on the madness of eating Christmas fare in that oven-like mess-room, but sentiment wins, and I sit down with the others.

“Hoondred an’ twenty oonder t’ win’s’le,” whispers George to me huskily.

“What’s the sea-water?” asks the Chief.

“Eighty-nine, sir.”

We push the soup aside, and John Thomas brings in the roast ducks. How appetizing they would be at home! The Chief wrenches them apart in perspiring silence, and we fall to. We peck at the food; the sweat drops from our faces into the plates, the utensils slide from our hands, and so we make the best of it. But when the pudding arrives our courage fails us. We cannot face plum pudding, sentiment or no sentiment. We gulp down some lime-juice and stagger away like dying men—I to four hours’ purgatory below.

Slowly (oh, so slowly!) the time drags on. The greaser draws his tattooed arm across his eyes and whispers, with the triumph of a lost soul bragging of the Circle of Fire, that he has known it “’otter’n this in the Red Sea, sir.” He is an entertaining man. Often I hear tales from the wide world of waters from his lips. This is his last voyage, he tells me. He is going “shore donkeyman” in future—what you call longshoreman. His wife has a nice little business in Neath now, and “she wants ’im ’ome.” Have I noticed how that high-press guide is leaking? Should he tighten up the tap-bolts in the bottom plate? I dissent, because one cannot reach them safely while she is running. It is only a trifle; better let it go. He acquiesces doubtfully, and resumes greasing. And the hours drift by.

At four o’clock the Second relieves me, looking reproachfully at the slackened windsail. Still no breeze. And the greaser, who does not go off till six o’clock, observes, “Oh, wot a—’appy Christmas!” Which would be profane if the temperature were lower.

I change into white ducks again and saunter up to the bridge to talk to my friend the Mate. If I were to paraphrase Johnson’s burst of energy, I should say, “Sir, I love the Mate!”

“Merry Christmas, Mr. McAlnwick!” he shouts cheerfully from the upper bridge, and a chorus of yelping dogs joyfully take up the cry. They are the “Old Man’s,” but they follow the Mate up and down until they drop with fatigue. Black silky spaniel, rough-red Irish terrier, black and grey badger-toed Scotch half-breed, nameless mongrel—they all love the Mate. “Come here,” he says, and I climb up to his level.

“The Old Man had a letter this mornin’,” he says.

“Eh?” I remark blankly.

“Ah! His wife gave it me before we sailed an’ I left it on his table this mornin’! Says he, at breakfast, ‘Pshaw!’ says he, ‘it’s a waste o’ paper.’”

“Mr. Honna,” I say, “perhaps he’ll be sorry for saying that, eh?”

“He will, he will—some day, Mr. Mac,” and he walks up and down the bridge for a bit, smoking the pipe his children gave him for a present last Christmas. I ask him:

“When shall we strike the trade wind, Mr. Honna?”

“Soon, soon. ’T ought to be here in the morning.”

I climb down again, and sniff eagerly for the first beginnings of a breeze. Nothing, unless you are optimistic and like to stare at a brown streak away southward, between sky and sea.

I reach the engineers’ awning aft of the engine-room, and see the Chief in his chair, the Fourth in his hammock, and the Second just come up for tea. I open my mouth and speak, when the regular throb of the engines is broken by a scream. Like a flash each one springs to his feet and looks at the others. The regular throb goes on as before, and George laughs, but the Second disappears through the door, I following. I shall not easily forget that scream.

Half-way down, a fireman, his face blanching under the coal-dust and sweat, meets us.

“What’s up?” snaps the Second.

“Donkeyman, sir. In the crankpit!” He plunges downward again, and we do the same. Down into the fierce oily heat illuminated by the electrics in front of each engine. The second puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles shrilly to those above. And then we fall to work. The telegraph is flung over to “Stop,” the throttle is closed, ash-pit damper put on, and the regular throb slackens, hesitates, stops. With a dexterous flick of the reversing engine the Second catches the high-press engine on the stop centre and locks her there. And then we look.

Far better for him, poor lad, if he had taken my tip and left those tap-bolts to leak. The Second says “Hand-lamp,” and I give him one. People are coming down the stairs in numbers now, and the Chief rushes up to us, looks down, and turns away sickened. The ponderous cranks have blood dashed across them, the rod is streaked and lathered with it. From the bottom of the pit comes no sound, no movement. Lying on the plates is the spanner which must have spun from his hand as he fell to destruction.

“Now then, how many more?” snarls the Second. Sweat streams from his face as he pushes the intruders away and lifts a man-hole plate in the platform. I seize the hand-lamp and get down on to the tank, and the Second follows. It is not pleasant, understand, down there, where bilge collects and rats run riot, and grease is rolled into filthy black balls, and the stench is intolerable. I push on towards the pit.

---

A full moon, blood-red and enormous, hangs just above the eastern sky-line. In the west still burns the glow of the vanishing sun, and the pale sky is twinkling with innumerable stars. The regular throb of the engines drives the ship forward again, a sailor is hauling down the red ensign from the poop, and another moves to and fro, silhouetted against the southern sky, on the foc’sle-head. Just ahead of the bridge two more sailors sit busily sewing. The Old Man stands by the chart-house door talking to the Mate. The dogs lie quietly on the lower deck, their heads between their paws.

In the after-hatch, covered by the flag, lies that which is about to be committed to the deep.

The red glow fades from the west, and the moon swings upward, flooding the sea with silver light. Away southward lies a black streak on the sky-line and the windsail flickers a little. The two sailors have finished sewing, and go aft. A fireman breaks the deck silence as he hoists two firebars up from the for’ard stokehold and carries them aft. Up on the poop, under the awning, the Second Mate has removed the hand-rails on the starboard quarter, and the carpenter is lashing some hatches in an inclined position.

We by the engine-room door are silent, for there is nothing to say. We wait for the Stand by bell in silence. A heavy footfall, and the Skipper, his bronzed face hard-drawn, his snowy hair uncovered, passes us. I think, even now, he is sorry for that sneer at his wife’s little trick. He is going to get the Prayer Book that lies close to his revolver in his chest.

George and I go below and make all ready. I think the Second is glad of our company, in the terrible heat. We potter about in silence: then “Stand by—Half—Slow—Stop.” A few minutes’ swift toil, a hurried wash, and we climb up on deck again into the moonlight. A white, silent world of waters is about us as we join the crew going aft to the poop. The awning has been partly folded back, and we see the Skipper resting his book on the tiller-gear, while the Steward stands by with a lantern. I look curiously into the faces I know so well, seeking, in the presence of death, a little more knowledge of life. I look at the Skipper, with his white hair and fierce moustache gleaming in the silver radiance of the moon, his hands fumbling with the leaves of the book. I look at the Chief, fidgeting about in the rear, meeting no one’s eye, his mouth working nervously. I look at George the Fourth; he is staring like a schoolboy at the flag-covered thing on the hatch, with the firebars lashed to its sides. And then the silence is broken by the harsh, unsteady voice:

“I am the resurrection and the life.”

The tension is almost unbearable now. We have not been educated to this. We are like soldiers suddenly flung into the face of the enemy.

“We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead), and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”

A pause, and he closes the book. Two of the men quietly slacken the ropes which hold the body in position, another pulls off the flag, and the dark mass on the planks plunges downward into the oily sea. Another pause, while I picture it rushing “down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are,” and the Chief motions furtively with his fingers.

In a few minutes we are under way.

---

It is eight bells, midnight, once more. The sky to the southward is a jet-black mass of clouds, and the windsail is yawing in a strong, cool breeze. Away to the westward the moon still throws her glory over the face of the waters and I go below, thinking of the night coming, when no man shall work.

And so ends our Christmas Day.

---