The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that Artemis would be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep.
He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity—oh, it was harmless too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was gray—under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood—that was a solid mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn—be that there thing a sailor?"
"Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of God, and you kissing his boots one day."
Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching. The cackler was another mass of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.
Shawn—the same Shawn and somehow not the same—was coming forward, the green coat flapping about him as he swayed with perfect casual ease to the sloop's leaning and rise and fall. "Your head'll be paining you, Beneen, I know it and sorry I am for it, but without a bit of persuasion you'd never have consented to come with old Shawn at all, I could see that, the way I was forced to it entirely. O the poor landside dreams that do hold a man, the pull of a hearthstone and the clutch of women! You're free, Beneen—old Shawn hath set you free. Never you mind all that now. Back below, man dear, and tell Dummy I said to give you a jolt of rum. You'll not be standing watch the day. Tomorrow you shall, beginning with the forenoon watch, that'll be eight o'clock of the morning the way you measured time in the old days, man dear, the old days you was a landsman, but now you go with Shawn, now you go with old Shawn that knows the brave heart of you, and that better than you'll be knowing it yourself, now that's no lie."
The Irishman was virtually singing. It penetrated the whirling agony of Ben's head—a little. He mumbled uncomprehendingly, not understanding with his brain, but understanding the event in his marrow maybe as clearly as he had ever done in the year since then. Shawn watched him, smiling, firm on the crazy deck like a weighted doll: let the world swing upside down, that'll stay upright, no fear. "It was the drinks. You drugged me," said Ben, not believing it, praying for denial.
"Ben, go below!" Shawn said that firmly but softly, not unkindly, and moved away forward in rolling ease, the green back vanishing beyond the mainsail, the dark riddle of him immediately replaced by the black riddle of someone else. This also Ben would not believe, this gaunt thing striding aft, its black eye-patch and its frozen smile. With no effort, the one-eyed man of the Lion Tavern detached Ben's hands from the rail. "Captain said go below," said Judah Marsh, and struck him in the face.
Ben tumbled sprawling into the cabin. There Dummy supported him kindly and fed him rum. There, presently, Ben understood how Jan Dyckman had died. He began, a little, to understand why.
The gray haze of that day wore itself out to evening with no questions answered except in the privacy of Ben's mind, and those without finality. Rain was falling when he went on deck again. The headache was receding, his body learning balance. He could not find the sun that would have told him what way the sloop was bound. Now and then Shawn passed him on the deck as if totally unaware of him. No one indeed acknowledged his existence at all except a bulky black-haired man, smooth-faced and young, who grinned at him in vacuous amiability. The others called that man Manuel. But when Ben dared to ask him: "Where are we bound?" Manuel shrugged and grinned and spread his hands, and shook his head until Ben feared he might be another mute, and then said at last: "Rain stop soon."
Manuel was right. Toward evening the drizzle ended, the overhanging clouds receded, and a white ball appeared—low in the sky and standing, as Ben faced the bow, on Ben's right hand. Manuel at that time was at the helm, and Shawn stood near him, arms folded, disdaining any support. He had been gazing off to the southwest, but now, since the blue-eyed stare had swung around to Ben, Ben asked: "Mr. Shawn, are we tacking?"