The Sea and the Jungle Part 3

sea-chest, and amid a group of mask-like faces-for how could foreigners guess what this mattered to us?-we hunted carefully for Chips his aureole. We found-but I suppose even Victoria Cross heroes must dirty their socks. There were other things also. Yet it was out of one of these very other things, which were, I think, s.h.i.+rts, that there dropped, when the Doctor picked up the garment, a little package wrapped in newspaper. Chips, from his berth, gave a cry of joy. The Doctor and I, smiling too, looked upon the old man feeling that we had acted for you all. Chips, secretive with his sacrosanct emblem, was putting the little packet under his coverlet, when a low foreign sailor s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him. The Cross fell to the deck. I recovered it from the feet instantly in a white pa.s.sion, and chanced to look at it. It confirmed that one, who is named Chips here, was something in the Royal and Ancient Order of Buffaloes.

Coming back from the fo'castle, suddenly I felt as the man of the suburbs does when, bowed with months of black winter and work in a city alley, he is, without any warning, transfigured on his own doorstep one morning. There as before is his familiar shrub, dripping with rain. Yet is it as before? It points a black finger at him. But the finger has a polished green nail.

He is translated. His ears are opened, and there comes for the first time that year the silver whistle of the starlings. A touch of South is in the air. His burden falls.

The cloudy sky was not grey now, but pearly, for it was translucent to the sun. More than day had come; life was born. There was ichor in the day. They were not dark northern waves that baffled us, but we were shoved and rocked by the send of a long nacreous ocean swell, firm but kind, from the south-west. The iron s.h.i.+p which had been repulsive to the touch, for its face had been gla.s.sy and cold, was now drying a warm rust red, like earth of Devon in spring, and was responsive. You could rest against its iron body and feel yourself grow. I saw the Chief outside his cabin in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, gazing overseas between the stanchions of the boat deck, smoking in the evident luxury of full comfort and release. Involuntarily, he danced the two-step as she rolled. "Got anything to read?" he asked.

Now that reminded me. We have no library, of course, but we have a circulation of books on board. There are no common shelves; but the book you left thoughtlessly on the skylight five minutes ago, while you went to find some matches, is gone when you return. And you, if you see a book lying open and unprotected in a cabin, glance round warily, dash in, and take it; very often only to discover to your bitter disappointment that it is one of your own, and not an adventurous and unread stranger. The Chief's question reminded me that the day we left Swansea a lady (and a friend of poor Jack, the public is well aware) sent us a bale of literature. We blessed her when we saw its bulk, looking at it as oxen might look at a truss of hay, for that was its size and shape. Though it proved to be shavings and a cruel blow to the animals, as you shall hear.

Here was the very day to get at that bale, and impatiently I rolled it into the open. It was trussed with great care, so I tore away a corner of the wrappings, dived in a hand, and hauled out a copy of "Joy Bells for Young Christians," the November number of 1899.

Well. Anyhow, it was a clean copy, and I put it by as the portion of our bald-headed German steward.

This disappointment made me pause, though. Here was going to be a long job for the Purser, sorting out this. Supposing there was anything nutritious in the bale I did not mind the labour of the unpacking and the distribution; but if the bulk of the consignment was hailed, so to speak, by "Joy Bells," then it would be better to call a deck hand and get the package overside before the s.h.i.+p was littered with too much of this joy. A Brazilian stoker, as he pa.s.sed, saw me standing in thought, and I suppose imagined-for he could not ask-that I wanted to cut the string, but had no knife. Before I could stop him, he, smiling a knowing and friendly smile, whipped out a blade from his rear; and at once we stood ankle-deep in literature. There was a landslide near me of Infant Methodists (dates unknown) and I gave the Brazilian an armful for his kindness.

Our dear unknown friend at Swansea, with her eye on our sailor-like but yet immortal souls, had heard, no doubt, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Succor of Seamen, at Caxton Hall, Westminster (held on the 29th of every February), what simple and barbarous and yet, in the main, considering our origins and circ.u.mstances, what worthy fellows we were. But she was not told at the meeting that the wealthy s.h.i.+powners, subscribers to the society, and whose presence there made Caxton Hall seem nautical, have a way of signing on crews at continental ports because wages rule lower there; and that consequently not one of our men was moved by Christian English, but only by mates English, and then not so very quickly. The officers and engineers were English, and there the sailors' friend was right in her surmise; but I do not see how she could have done more to put in awful jeopardy the soul of our wise and spectacled chief engineer, for instance, than by approaching him with a winning and philanthropic smile, under the impulse to do him good with a statement of her religion in words of one syllable. He would have met her politely, I know; but after she had gone--

Let her try to imagine her own feelings if our Chief, uninvited and blankly unmindful, invaded the exclusive inner circle of Swansea society, and approached her in the midst of her own with the childish notion of instructing her in the first principles of his p.r.o.nounced Pyrrhonism; or say he went to her as a colporteur of the Society for Instructing the Intelligence and Manners of Leisured Folk. But I must say for our chief that this cannot be even supposed. He would never offer the lowliest being such an indignity.

We pulled and dragged at the escaped ma.s.s of periodicals, looking for something good, but found no pearls had been cast before us. There were parish magazines and temperance monthlies, there were religious almanacs for the years we have lost; by some sporting chance there were even a few back numbers of the "Monumental Mason." It is plain the latter could be considered an added grievance, even though they were put in as a kindly reminder of our narrow lease here. It was an aggravation of the original offence to sailors who, when their short term here closes, have to make s.h.i.+ft with some firebars at their heels. What is Aberdeen granite and indelible gold lettering to such men but a hint of the hards.h.i.+ps which follow them even beyond the end?

So overboard went the lot-I may as well tell the whole truth, overboard also went the evangelical hymn books, new though they were. I will only suppress the advice cried to the gulls astern as the literature went floating and flying in their direction. We had to rely for our reading on what had been brought aboard by our crowd, a collection which gradually revealed itself in single books and magazines.

There was, for example, the "Morphology of the Cryptogamia," an exhaustive work which gave me much pleasure in wondering how it got aboard at all. The chief mate used it as a wedge between his open door and the bulkhead, to prevent the miserable knocking as the s.h.i.+p lolled about. He would not lend me that book, because it jammed into the opening nicely; but I borrowed from him "Three Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles," and I made him a complete gift in return of "Robert Elsmere" which I found marooned on a bunker hatch as I came along. There you see the delightful chance and hazardous character of our literature.

I prided myself on the select reading I had brought aboard with me. But what devilish black art the sea air worked on those choice volumes, however, I cannot explain. I have no means of knowing. But there they are, their covers bitten by c.o.c.kroaches, and the words inside bleached and sterilised of all meaning. There they will stop; Henry James, too.

For what is the use of him when big seas are running? He would be a magician indeed who could capture our minds then. You get the right amplitude of leisure and the flat undistracting circ.u.mstances he demands, the emptiness and the immobility necessary, when you are waiting for cargo long in coming at a low seaboard. I suppose we want the representation of life only when we are not very much alive. In heavy weather there is no doubt old newspapers make the best reading, especially if they have good bold advertis.e.m.e.nts. For I know it requires the same courage and concentration needed ash.o.r.e for reading Another Great Speech by the Premier; indeed, the steel blue quality of deadly resolution used only by men of letters who write biographies and spin literary causeries, to manage even novels when great billows are moving.

The mind is inclined to absent itself then. Then it is you put all reading aside with a promise of a long and leisurely festival of books when the s.h.i.+p is steaming uniformly down the unvarying "trades."

But when you get near the neighbourhood of the constant sun, during the day you fall asleep over "Three Fingered Jack" and the old magazines which you had on your knees while musing on the colours of the sea and the mounting architecture of the clouds; and beyond sundown listen to the mate's accordion or the engineer's flute. Perhaps, moved by the hu-s-s-h of the waves, the silky and purple dark, and the loneliness of your little company under the mid-ocean stars, tentatively (though your s.h.i.+pmates are very forgiving) lift a ballad yourself; for something is expected of you, and singing seems right.

Of all the books aboard the "Capella" I got most out of the Skipper's sailing directories and his charts. Talk of romance! There was that chart-room under the bridge, across its open doors on either side creaming waves going by in the moonlight, and the steamer inclining each side alternately, and the shadows of the rigging sliding back and forth on the pale deck. You cannot know what romance is till you are in seas you have never sailed before, where the marks will be few when landfall comes; that ocean where the Skipper is to find his own way by his lore of the sea, and may even ask your opinion about alternatives; and there read sailing directories. The romance of these books cannot be translated or quoted. It would leave them, as though a glimmer went out, if you attempted to take them from that chart-room where pendant things are swaying leisurely, where you can hear the bells tell the watches, and the skipper's gold-laced cap is on the mahogany table. The South Atlantic Sailing Directions, our own guide, is fine, especially when it gets down to the uninhabited islands in far southern lat.i.tudes. I do not think this n.o.ble volume is included in the best hundred books, but I know it can release the mind from the body.

But what's this talk of landfalls? as the old man would say. There will be no landfall yet for us; and this is Christmas Eve. I knew it was an auspicious occasion of some kind, for the steward just went aft with two big plum cakes cuddled in his ap.r.o.n. That made me look at the calendar.

We are now 800 miles out, and the steamer has reached six knots. This was the best night we had yet found. The steamer was on an even keel, with but occasional spasms of sharp rolling, for there was no sea, but only old ocean breathing deeply and regularly in its sleep, and sometimes making a slight movement. The light of the full moon was the s.h.i.+ning ghost of noon. The steamer was distinct but immaterial, saliently accentuated, as a phantom. A deep shadow would have detached the forecastle head but for a length of luminous bulwark which still held it, and some quiet voices of men who were within the shadow, yarning. The line of bulwark and the murmuring voices held us together.

The prow as it dipped sank into drifts of lambent snow. The snow fled by the steamer's sides, melting and musical. Two engineers off duty leaned on the rails amids.h.i.+ps, smoking, looking into the vacancy in which the moonlight laid a floor of troubled silver. As if drawn by its light a few little clouds were poised near the moon, grouped round the bright heart of the night. There was the moon and its small company of clouds, and ourselves below in our own defined allotment of sea. The only thing outside and far was Sirius, burning independently in the east, looking unwinking through the wall of night into our world.

On such a night and with Christmas morning but sixty minutes away it would have been wasting life to go to bed. I glanced expectantly at the door of the Chief's cabin, and saw indeed it was open, a yellow rectangle within which was the profile of the Chief beneath his lamp, talking to somebody. The Doctor was there, and he made room for me on the settee. Then the captain joined us, and I perched myself on the washstand.

"Well, we can undress to-night when we turn in," said the Chief. (None of us had, so far.) In a long silence which filled the cabin with tobacco smoke I could hear the engines below uplifted in confident song.

"Now they're walking round," said the Skipper, nodding his head. "Now she feels it."

When we met thus, between the hours of nine and midnight, as was our irregular habit, the talk first was always desultory, and about our own s.h.i.+p and our own circ.u.mstances, for the concerns of our little world strangely occupied our minds, as you would think, and the large affairs of that great world we had left, of which we heard now no sound nor rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and vanished, all the huge consequence and loud clangour of it, so that now there was an empty horizon astern, and nothing between us and that void but a few gulls, like small and pursuing recollections. Our little microcosm, afloat and sundered in the wastes, was occupied in its own polity. We talked of the carpenter's bad leg; complained of the cook's bread; heard that Tinker the dog, being young, had the habit at night, while honest folk slept, of eating the saloon mats; grumbled that the s.h.i.+p's tobacco was mouldy.

The deck was getting dry, the Skipper said, and now we could get the men chipping it, and then it could be tarred.

"That donkeyman," said the Skipper, "that man wastes the fresh water.

I'll have a lock put on the pump handle. He works it as if we were laid out to the main. I spoke to him about it this morning." The fresh water is a vital affair with us. We may not drink the water of the country to which we are bound, so eighty tons of Welsh mountain spring is in our cleansed and whitewashed tanks. Woe to the man caught overflowing his can, if an officer sees him. "The handle can't be locked," said the Chief, "because it's next to the galley. The cook wants it all day long."

"Well, let me catch anyone wasting it. We'd look all right with a lot of dysentery, drinking that river water out there."

This common meeting-place of ours, the Chief's cabin, is on a highway of the s.h.i.+p, being on the direct route from the p.o.o.p to the bridge, and so it is a hostel, for the Chief is a kindly and popular man, big and robust in body and mind; though he has a knack, at odd and unexpected times, of being candid in a way that shocks, treading on corns without ruth, the Skipper's particularly, when their two departments are at a difference.

This cabin was one which I always visited first, for, especially in the morning when other folk had not rubbed the night out of their eyes, and so looked darkly upon their fellows, my friend the Chief had the early eye of a child and the soaring spirit of the lark. I never met him when he had got out of bed on the wrong side. His cabin became a refuge to me, for, unlike the Doctor's and my own place (we both were birds of pa.s.sage, therefore our cabins were cold and stark), the Chief's was comfortable with settled furniture, cosy and habitable, like a fixed home. There was a wicker chair, with cus.h.i.+ons, and a writing-desk where the engineer's log lay handy and bearing some plug tobacco, freshly cut, on its cover, and a pipe rack above the desk carrying a most foul a.s.sortment waiting their turns again for favour. Portraits of the Chief's family were on the walls, smiling boys and girls, with their mother in a chief place, looking upon daddy by proxy. There was a bookshelf bearing some engineering manuals, a few novels and magazines, a tape measure, some gauge gla.s.ses, some tin whistles, a flute, and a palm leaf fan. Above the washstand was a rack with gla.s.ses and a carafe.

A settee ran along one side, and his bunk upon the other side. There we sat on Christmas Eve, while the wicker chair bent and complained with the Skipper's weight as he swayed to the leisurely rocking of the s.h.i.+p.

The tobacco smoke floated in coils and blue smears in the room. A bottle of Hollands rested for security on the bed, and we held our gla.s.ses on our knees.

The pallid and puffy face of the steward, a very honest man secretly free with his small store of apples on my account because I am green and my palate not yet used to the flatness of tinned provisions, looked in on us from the right. "Vhere is der dog, sir? I haf not seen der dog."

"Must be about," we cried. "We had seen him," we said, "nosing about the p.o.o.p for rats, or asleep on the saloon mat, or padding round the casing looking for friends." "But no, I haf looked. He is not found. Vhere is der dog?" A hole in our little community, it was apparent from our intent looks, could not be thought of with equanimity. Tinker's importance became quite large. The second engineer pa.s.sed the door, caught the drift of our anxious converse, and turned to say the dog was then asleep in his room. "Ach! zat is all right." We struck matches for our pipes again.

"That dog, I shouldn't like to lose him," said the Skipper, stroking his beard. "There's no luck in that. I shot a dog once on a s.h.i.+p; and first we ran into a blow and lost a lot of gear, and then the mate got his hand smashed, and then everything got cross-grained till I'd have paid, ah, fifty pounds to have had the brute back again, and an ugly customer he was. Ah, you can smile, Doctor, but there it is. I'm not superst.i.tious and never was. But you can't tell me. Look at the things that happen. When I was a youngster, my s.h.i.+p was off Rio, and I dreamt my father was dead. I took my bearings and the time. I dreamt my father died in a red brick house with a laylock tree by the door and that tree was in blossom plain enough to smell. I didn't know the house. There was a path of clean red bricks leading up to the porch, through a garden. I didn't see my father. But you know what dreams are like-no sense in them-there the house was and not a soul in sight. I knew he was dying inside it."

"How do you account for that? Have you got it down in your books? I lay you haven't. I forgot all about that dream. Long after I was at Cape Town and met my brother. That reminded me. After a bit I said to him, 'Father's dead.' 'Yes,' he said, 'but how did you know?' Said I, 'Was the house like this?' and I told him. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was like that.

A place he was staying at in Ess.e.x. But how did you know?' I didn't tell him. What's the good? He wouldn't have believed it. People don't."

All through the anxious time when we were being soused and buffeted I noticed how our company, every man of them, even the Pyrrhonist, saw omens in all the chance variety of the vast menace under the frown of which we huddled in our iron box; porpoises alongside; one of Mother Cary's dark brood accompanying us, glancing about the vagaries of the flowing hills with swift precision; the form of a cloud; a loom far out, as though day were there at least. The fall of a portrait in the Chief's room once set him wondering and melancholy. Again, when the dog whined and moped, the Skipper eyed the animal narrowly, as though the creature had prescience but could tell us what it knew only by drooping and quivering its hind quarters. You might have thought that Fate, dumb and cruel, but a little relenting for something inevitably to come to our mishap, were trying to stretch a point, and so induced the Skipper to put his s.h.i.+rt on inside out one morning, after dreaming he saw drowned rats, in case the horse were not too blind to see both the nod and the wink.

The Sphinx makes subtle dumb motions, as it were, when closely regarded.

I do not wonder if it does. Sometimes in those dark days I thought I got a hint or two. I cannot tell you what they were. The weather grew brighter afterwards and I forgot them. From our narrow and weltering security, where the wind searched through us like the judgment eye, I know, looking out upon the wilderness in turmoil where was no help, and no witness of our undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though the very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw the filmy shapes of those things which darken the minds of primitives. While the sky is changeful, and there are storms at sea when our fellows are absent, and mischance and death are veiled but here, we shall have G.o.ds and ghosts. The sharp-sighted collectors of old brain-lumber and such curios may still keep busy, and tie up their dry bundles of mythology and religions; but I myself could make plenty more.

So it was my s.h.i.+pmates' yarns were most of the dire kind, with some dim warning precedent. I do not recall a story that was gay, except those of the wanton sort. They were of close calls and of women, as, I suppose, have been those of all hard livers, from the cave men on.

Eight bells were rung on the bridge, and, like a faint echo in a higher pitch, answered from the fo'castle. Christmas morning! By my pocket compa.s.s we toasted the folk at home. We had heard a good many stories of wreck this night, and the Chief was now at his contribution to the unseasonable memories. ("I've had enough of it. Here goes," said the Doctor; and he went.) "Don't leave us. It lets in the draught. Well, the compliments to you. This typhoon-I had had four others-but this one made me think it was good-bye. She was a small steamer, that 'Samuel Plimsoll,' and old, but well-behaved. But her light nearly went out in that blow. It was that dark you could find nothing but the noise, and we were just the same as a chunk of wood under a waterfall, because the Lord knows how many feet of water were in the engine-room, for she was rolling so. Her fires were out. She had a list of 22 degrees to port.

She simply lay in it, and it went over her. Every time she rolled over on the deep side, thinks I, this is the last of her. All this, mind you, went on for two days, and the skipper was in the chart-room, waiting.

I've found that when the danger is not much you get excited, but when there seems no chance you get cool and cunning and try to make one. One time I thought she seemed easier, and I was able to get the donkey engine going. I felt better as soon as I heard the steam, even though it was only in the donkey. Thinks I, there's power, and it's mine-a canful of steam to a typhoon. It was a chance to laugh at. Then I took the other engineers with me and we went below. The water there, full of cinders and trash, pouring through the gear as she turned from side to side, made it look a pretty poor show. You see, the donkey wouldn't work the pumps, for the coal and muck were sucked in. So I took a basket and got into the tank, holding the basket under the pump. The water was up to my neck, and every time she rolled I was ducked. But the dodge worked, and that list of hers to port was a bit of luck in its way, for it helped us to get the starboard boiler going. When I saw the throws moving, and the wash angry when it splashed on the hot metal, I said, 'So much for your old typhoon.' We were not counted out then. We crawled under the lee of an island, and lay for four days repairing her. The funny thing was when we got to Hong Kong the papers were full of our loss. '"Samuel Plimsoll" lost with all hands.' It was funny to see a bill like that. I met the placard as it came running round a corner, and it made me stand and shuffle my feet on the ground to see if the earth was all right. I knew the editor of that paper, and I was then going up to give him something good. And here he was making money out of us like that. He stood at the door of his office and saw me coming. I went up laughing, waving his paper in my hand. He looked quite surprised. His mouth was wide open. 'You're a nice sort of chap,' I said."

Christmas Day. In case it has become necessary for me to show again the symbols of verity, as this is a book of travel, here they are: "Lat.

37.2 N., long. 14.14 W. Light wind and moderate swell from S.W. Vessel rolling heavily at intervals. 961 miles out. Miles by engines 226.

Actual distance travelled (because of the swell on our starboard bow) 197 miles." I cannot see that these particulars do more than help me out with the book, but as they have been considered essential in narratives of voyaging, here they are, and much good may they do anybody. Th.o.r.eau, in one of his quaintly superior moods when speaking of travel, said, "It is not worth while going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar."

In nearly every book of travel this is proved to be true. They show it was not worth the while, seeing it was either to shoot cats or to count degrees of lat.i.tude. (As for me, I have no reason whatever for being at sea.) Consider Arctic travel. I have read long rows of books on that, but recall few emotional moments. The finest pa.s.sage in any book of Arctic travel is in Warburton Pikes' "Barren Grounds," where he quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who had been speaking of heaven.

The Indian asked, "And is it like the land of the Musk-ox in summer, when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?"

You feel at once that the country the Indian saw around him would be easily missed by us, even when in the midst of it. For taking the bearings of such a land, the s.e.xtant, and the miles already travelled, would not be factors to help much. Now the Indian knew nothing of artificial horizons and the aids to discovering where they are which strangers use. But in summer the mists of his lakes were but the vapour of his musings, the penumbra of the unfathomed deeps of his mind whereon he paddled his own canoe; and when the wild-fowl called, it was his memory heard; it was his thought become vocal then while he dreamed on.

I myself learned that the treasures found in travel, the chance rewards of travel which make it worth while, cannot be accounted beforehand, and seldom are matters a listener would care to hear about afterwards; for they have no substance. They are no matter. They are untranslatable from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to sleep on the tumulus where the little people dance on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when he tries. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They are but filmy, high in the ceiling of your thoughts then, rosy and sunlit by the chance of the light, transitory, melting as you watch. You come down to your lead again. These occasions are not on your itinerary.

They are like the Indian's lakes in summer. They have no names. They cannot be found on the best maps. Not you nor any other will ever discover them again. Nor do they fill the hunger which sent you travelling; they are not provender for notebooks. They do not come to accord with your mood, but they come unaware to compel, and it is your own adverse and darkling atoms that are changed, at once dancing in accord with the rare incidence of that unreasonable and transcendent moment of your world, the rhythm of which you feel, as you would the beat of drums.

And what are these things?-but how can we tell? A strip of coral beach, as once I saw it, which was as all other coral beaches; but the s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed close in, and by favour of the hour and the sun this strand did not glare, but was resplendent, and the colours of the sea, green, gold, and purple, were not its common virtues, but the emotional and pa.s.sing attar of those hues. There was the long, slow labouring of our burdened tramp in the Atlantic storm. Or one April, and a wild cherry-tree in blossom by an English hedge, a white cloud tinctured with rose, and in it moving a dozen tropical chaffinches; the petals were on the gra.s.s.

And now, this is Christmas morning. I am in the Chief's bunk, and he still sleeps on the settee. We fell asleep where we lay yarning on our backs after midnight. I wake at the right moment, opening my eyes with the serene and secure conviction that things are very well. The slow rocking of the s.h.i.+p is perfect rest. There is no sound but the faint tap-tap of something loose on the desk and responding to the s.h.i.+p's movements. The cabin is strangely illuminated to its deepest corner by an extraordinary light, as though the intense glow of a rare dawn had penetrated even our ironwork. On the white top of the cabin a bright moon quivers about, the s.h.i.+ne from live waters sent up through the round of our port. When we lean over, the port shows first the roof of the alleyway dappled with bright reflections; then a circle of sky, which the horizon soon halves; and then the dazzling white and blue of the near waves; we reverse.

This is life. This is what I have come for. I do not repose merely in a bunk. I am p.r.o.ne and easy in the deepest a.s.surance of good. This conviction has penetrated even the unconsciousness of the Chief; he snores in profound luxury. If in a s.h.i.+p you are brought sometimes too cruelly close to the scrutiny of the terms of your narrow tenure, expecting momentarily to see the doc.u.ment torn across by invisible fingers, yet nowhere else do you feel those terms to be so suddenly expanded in the sun. And nowhere else is got such release, secure and absolute, from the nudging of insistent trifles. There is nothing between your eyes and the confines of your own place. Empty day is all round. In the entire circle there is not the farthest impertinent interruption-through all the degrees there is not one fool standing in the light; and you yourself are on n.o.body's horizon. No history stains that place. There is not a black doubt anywhere. It is the first day again, and no need yet for a rubbish heap.

Yet when, singing to myself, I went outside to matins, I found Sandy our third engineer with the toothache. So much of truth is got from being a gymnosophist and regarding your own toes with aloof abstraction on a sunny Christmas morning. I became Sandy's courage for him instead, took his arm firmly, and led him aft to the doctor. We would start a rubbish heap for a pristine world with a decayed tooth. Something to be going on with.

Seeing we were almost off Madeira we had some amount of right to the July sun under which we had run. For the first time since the Mumbles our decks were quite dry, and cherry red with rust. There were glittering crusts of salt in odd places. At eight bells (midday) the captain ordered a general holiday, except for the routine duties; and the donkeyman appeared to startle us as the apparition of a stranger on the s.h.i.+p, for he had a clean face, though his eyes still were dark and spectral, and he wore a suit of new dungarees, stiff and creased from a paper parcel, but just opened, out of a Swansea slop shop. His mates were some seconds realising him. Then they made derisive signs, and the boldest some ribald cries. I thought their resentment was really aroused by Donkey's new s.h.i.+rt; it was that touch which pushed matters too far, and made him unfriendly. He saw this himself. Soon he changed the new s.h.i.+rt for one that had been rendered neutral in the stoke-hold and the bucket.