The Narcissusnoise increased. Little Belfast seemed, in the heavy heat of the forecastle, to boil with facetious fury. His eyes danced; in the crimson of his face, comical as a mask, the mouth yawned black, with strange grimaces. Facing him, a half-undressed man held his sides, and, throwing his head back, laughed with wet eyelashes. Others stared with amazed eyes. Men sitting doubled up in the upper bunks smoked short pipes, swinging bare brown feet above the heads of those who, sprawling below on sea-chests, listened, smiling stupidly or scornfully. Over the white rims of berths stuck out heads with blinking eyes; but the bodies were lost in the gloom of those places, that resembled narrow niches for coffins in a whitewashed and lighted mortuary. Voices buzzed louder. Archie, with compressed lips, drew himself in, seemed to shrink into a smaller space, and sewed steadily, industrious and dumb. Belfast shrieked like an inspired Dervish:--... So I seez to him, boys, seez I, Beggin yer pardon, sorr, seez I to that second mate of that steamer--beggin your-r-r pardon, sorr, the Board of Trade must ave been drunk when they granted you your certificate! What do you say, you------! seez he, comin at me like a mad bull... all in his white clothes; and I up with my tar-pot and capsizes it all over his blamed lovely face and his lovely jacket.... Take that! seez I. I am a sailor, anyhow, you nosing, skipper-licking, useless, sooperfloos bridge-stanchion, you! Thats the kind of man I am! shouts I.... You should have seed him skip, boys! Drowned, blind with tar, he was! So...
Dont ee believe him! He never upset no tar; I was there! shouted somebody. The two Norwegians sat on a chest side by side, alike and placid, resembling a pair of love-birds on a perch, and with round eyes stared innocently; but the Russian Finn, in the racket of explosive shouts and rolling laughter, remained motionless, limp and dull, like a deaf man without a backbone. Near him Archie smiled at his needle. A broad-chested, slow-eyed newcomer spoke deliberately to Belfast during an exhausted lull in the noise:--I wonder any of the mates here are alive yet with such a chap as you on board! I concloode they aint that bad now, if you had the taming of them, sonny.