“September 20th.—I’ve been chaffed a good deal by the crew for paying such a lot of attention to the stowaway. It’s a good job I didn’t let on that I knew her before I left Tai-o-hae.
“Waylao keeps talking about Father O’Leary and her mother. I’ve promised to go and see them both when I go back to Nuka Hiva. God knows when that will be, I don’t.
“The sailors on this boat are fine fellows. Perfect gentlemen, so far as the opinion of the world doesn’t go. Only one scoundrel on board; he knocked my bow arm up in the air with his fist as I was playing the violin in the forecastle. We had a fight. His lip’s swollen, but I’ve got a lump just over the right eyebrow. The skipper’s put some of his special ointment on my lump; says he’s ashamed to think of a respectable fellow like me fighting on board his ship. I do feel a bit ashamed of the lump, I admit.
“Sighted Tengerewa Isle on the starboard this evening. As we passed by we could distinguish the coco-palms; they looked like the distant masts of some old Spanish galleon derelict, ashore on an unknown isle in an unknown sea—masts that had been there so long that they’d burst into leaf. As the stars came out we could hear the breakers humming on the reefs far away. It’s funny, but the noise of those breakers came very loud once or twice, and made me think of the early workmen’s train that rushed by my bedroom when I last lodged at Battersea, London Town.
“Waylao and I sat on deck till midnight. Saw vast flocks of strange birds going south under the stars. They looked like migrating cranes, had long necks, saw them distinctly fly down the big moon looming on the horizon.
“Never saw such a calm sea; looked like a mighty mirror that was walled round by pale crystalline substance, and vaulted by a dome ornamented with myriads of inexpressibly beautiful stars imaged in the vast mirror beneath, with phantom ships sailing across it, breaking the brittle surface into sparkling foams of phosphorescent light.
“It seemed hard lines that so many millions of worlds were wasting their glory in infinite space, and I so hard up that I had to travel across that ocean for a pittance of two pounds ten shillings a month.
“Thursday, September 21st.—Made it up with boatswain’s mate. He seems to like me since the fight. It’s a fact that it’s only wasting breath to quote the poets to men in an argument. It’s like throwing pearls to swine. Nothing like a good smash in the jaw to convince a man that you are as good as he is.
“The skipper got fearfully drunk last night. I had to play the fiddle till two o’clock in the morning as he sang a song that had no melody in it. He said it was composed by his uncle, a Doctor of Music! I and the cook eventually lifted the Old Man up with due respect and dropped him in his bunk—dead drunk.
“Waylao’s been telling me what she intends to do when she gets to Suva, Fiji. I’m worried about her; she talks like a child. It’s a bit of a job to have a girl like Waylao on one’s hands. I feel that I must look after her. It seems like a dream to me, this girl on a ship with me, lost, far away at sea. I feel quite like some Don Juan, out here in the wide Pacific with a beautiful half-caste girl looking to me for protection. Those old novels that I read as a child were true after all. There is such a thing as romance on earth, or at least on the seas.