The old man pushed his spectacles up on to his bald head, and looked out over the sea with eyes flattened by age and faded to the remote blue of an early morning sky when mist is clearing.
“I rackon’t ain’t no use worryin’ ’bout luck, sir,” he said, “so long’s there’s a job o’ work wants doin’.”
From Sydney she went over to Newcastle to load coal for Chile, then on to ’Frisco with nitrates, ’Frisco to Caleta Buena again, over again to Newcastle, and last of all to Sydney once more to load wool for home.
III
Sixty miles west of St. Agnes Light the Unlucky “Altisidora” leaned to the gentle quartering breeze, homeward bound on the last lap of her three years’ voyage.
Anderton stood on the poop, gazing out into the starry darkness that held England folded to its heart. Above him sail piled on sail rose up in the moonlight, like some tall, fantastic shrine wrought in ebony and silver to an unknown and mysterious god. The water slipped past her silently as a swimming seal, with a faint delicate hiss like the tearing of silk as the clipper’s bow cleft it. His mind ran now forward, now backward, as men’s minds do when they are nearing one of the milestones of life.
He remembered almost with a pang of regret the heady exultation which had been his when he stood on this poop alone for the first time, realizing that something had slipped away from him unnoticed which he could never hope to recapture this side the grave. Three years is a long while, especially to the young; but it was not in point of actual time, but in experience, that so wide and deep a gulf yawned between himself and the boy who three years since had left these shores he was now approaching. She had taught him many things, that old ship—more, perhaps, than he himself knew....
Rumbold wandered up on to the poop and began to tell smutty tales. The restlessness which always consumed him when the ship was nearing land was strong on him. Anderton felt a great pity for him. It would be the old tale, he supposed, as soon as the ship was made fast: this man, who had it in him to fight a losing game with death with a laugh on his lips, would become to the casual observer, a lewd, drunken blackguard, wallowing in the lowest gutters of Sailortown. What would become of him, he wondered—picturing him dropping steadily lower and lower on the ladder, driven to take a second mate’s berth, thence dropping to bos’n, last to seaman—so on until some final pit of degradation should swallow him up for ever?
The man was in so queer a mood that Anderton hesitated about leaving the deck to him. But he reflected that he would have little chance of rest when she was fairly in the Channel, and decided to go down for a stretch off the land, so as to have his wits about him when they were most needed.
He did not know how long he had been asleep when he woke with a start. The ship’s bells were just striking. He counted the strokes—three double, one single—seven bells. He might as well go on deck now. She must have made a landfall by now.