Half-past one, and early aboard. With the help of moon-faced, smiling Nakata, all luggage has been stowed shipshape in our wee staterooms, and we await a few belated deliveries from the uptown shops, and the friends who are to see us off.
Frankly, I am nervous. All forenoon, doing final packing, I have startled at every ring of the telephone, apprehensive of some new message of the Inconceivable and Monstrous quivering on the wire. And Jack—has done his thousand words as usual on the novel, Martin Eden.
He now stands about the shining, holystoned deck, unconsciously lighting cigarettes without number, and as unconsciously dropping them overboard half-smoked or dead full-length. He is not talking much, but nothing of the spic-and-span condition of his boat escapes his pleased blue sailor eye. And he hums a little air. Over and above the antic luck that has stalked her since the laying of her iron keel, the Snark indubitably remains, as Jack again assures, “the strongest boat of her size ever built”; and we both love her every pine plank, and rib of oak, and stitch of finest canvas.
Later: We got over the good-byes somehow—even the Shipmans’ Uncle Alec came to see us off. I hope nothing better than to have a kiss of welcome from the old, old man years hence when we come again to beautiful Hilo, which means “New Moon,” fading yonder against the vast green mountain in a silver rain.
“And there isn’t one of them ever expects to lay eyes on us again,” Jack laughed low to me as the captain pulled the bell to the engine-room for Martin to start the bronze propeller, and the little white yacht began to stand out from the wharf on her outrageous voyage. They tried their best to look cheerful, dear friends all, and Mrs. Balding’s “Do you really think you’ll ever come back alive?” would have been funny but for the unshed tears in her violet eyes. Little convinced was she, or any soul of them, by Jack’s vivid disquisition on this “safest voyage in the world.”
Waving our hands and calling last good-byes, we made our way out through no floating isles of amethyst lilies from the Waiakea River’s marshes, for Hilo Bay lies clear and blue, in a fair afternoon that gives herald of a starry night. The captain of the Bark Annie Johnson, in port, a favorite poker antagonist of Jack’s the past week, accompanied us a distance in the Iron Works engineer’s launch, and the big American-Hawaiian freighter, Arizonan, unloading in the stream, with a Gargantuan sonorous throat saluted the tiny Snark, who answered with three distinct if small toots of her steam-whistle.
A westering sun floods with golden light the city brightening from a silver shower, and we know that some at least of her thoughts are with us happy estrays on the “white-speck boat” adventuring the pathless ocean.
And one beside me in a hushed voice repeats:
“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,