A serang is a person of importance, far above a stoker, though the stoker draws better pay.  He sets the chorus of ’Hya!  Hulla!  Hee-ah!  Heh!’ when the captain’s gig is pulled up to the davits; he heaves the lead too; and sometimes, when all the ship is lazy, he puts on his whitest muslin and a big red sash, and plays with the passengers’ children on the quarter-deck.  Then the passengers give him money, and he saves it all up for an orgie at Bombay or Calcutta, or Pulu Penang.  ’Ho! you fat black barrel, you’re eating my food!’ said Pambe, in the Other Lingua Franca that begins where the Levant tongue stops, and runs from Port Said eastward till east is west, and the sealing-brigs of the Kurile Islands gossip with the strayed Hakodate junks.

’Son of Eblis, monkey-face, dried shark’s liver, pigman, I am the Sultan Sayyid Burgash, and the commander of all this ship.  Take away your garbage;’ and Nurkeed thrust the empty pewter rice-plate into Pambe’s hand.

Pambe beat it into a basin over Nurkeed’s woolly head.  Nurkeed drew his sheath-knife and stabbed Pambe in the leg.  Pambe drew his sheath-knife; but Nurkeed dropped down into the darkness of the hold and spat through the grating at Pambe, who was staining the clean fore-deck with his blood.

Only the white moon saw these things; for the officers were looking after the coaling, and the passengers were tossing in their close cabins.  ‘All right,’ said Pambe—­and went forward to tie up his leg—­’we will settle the account later on.’

He was a Malay born in India:  married once in Burma, where his wife had a cigar-shop on the Shwe Dagon road; once in Singapore, to a Chinese girl; and once in Madras, to a Mahomedan woman who sold fowls.  The English sailor cannot, owing to postal and telegraph facilities, marry as profusely as he used to do; but native sailors can, being uninfluenced by the barbarous inventions of the Western savage.  Pambe was a good husband when he happened to remember the existence of a wife; but he was also a very good Malay; and it is not wise to offend a Malay, because he does not forget anything.  Moreover, in Pambe’s case blood had been drawn and food spoiled.

Next morning Nurkeed rose with a blank mind.  He was no longer Sultan of Zanzibar, but a very hot stoker.  So he went on deck and opened his jacket to the morning breeze, till a sheath-knife came like a flying-fish and stuck into the woodwork of the cook’s galley half an inch from his right armpit.  He ran down below before his time, trying to remember what he could have said to the owner of the weapon.  At noon, when all the ship’s lascars were feeding, Nurkeed advanced into their midst, and, being a placid man with a large regard for his own skin, he opened negotiations, saying, ’Men of the ship, last night I was drunk, and this morning I know that I behaved unseemly to some one or another of you.  Who was that man, that I may meet him face to face and say that I was drunk?’