“I suppose you’re glad it turned out so you couldn’t,” she said miserably, her words broadening off into an unquenchable yawn which seemed somehow, half pathetically, a keynote to her whole nature.
“I think,” he replied coldly, though in tones rather melancholy than bitter, “it’s a good thing for both of us.” And he concluded, getting to his feet: “I’m going up on deck for a smoke. It’s too stuffy to try to sleep down here.”
He left her without looking back.
III
On deck it was so dark that, until his eyes grew accustomed, he could see nothing at all. The few stars had gone under again and the bank of cloud ahead was higher in the sky. Jerome listlessly threw himself down on deck close to one of the gunwales and lighted his pipe. The voices of Bearman and his mate nearby made him feel drowsy. Captain Bearman was just issuing the last of his instructions before turning in. The ship’s bell sounded half past midnight.
“As I figure it now,” concluded the ship’s master through his fiery bush, “we ought to get in a little after dawn. We’ll be making good headway, and I want to try a flying moor. Of course,” he added whiningly, “I expect to see those fools make a mess of it and get the cables all tangled, the way they did off Port Phillip. But the harbour’s very good here, and we know every inch of it. We’ll try a flying moor, Mr. Nelson. And I wish you’d get the lashings off the anchors some time between now and daylight. You’ll have your hands full without going to work on the hatch covers. Besides, I think we’ll run into a thunder storm before morning.” He turned and walked off without saying good-night.
Jerome heard the mate mutter to himself, just once, in a disgusted tone: “A flying moor!” He thought of going over and talking with the mate; for the mate was a very decent chap. But he felt so comfortable and drowsy where he was that he decided not to move, even for the sake of learning what a flying moor was.
As a matter of fact, Captain Bearman wanted to enter with the finest flourish known to the profession because he had a firm persuasion that the Star of Troy would be found riding at anchor in the harbour. What a triumph to come dashing in at dawn, full sails, “a bone in her teeth,” and achieve a flying moor! But the mate was disgusted because he guessed the reason and he knew his skipper. It might very possibly be that the mate hadn’t carried his analysis far enough to know that his skipper possessed an inferiority complex. But he knew him for a disappointed and embittered man; had seen him play the satellite.
IV
Jerome slept. He could breathe up here under the open sky, and wanted to be alone. For the first time, consciously, in his life, he felt a full sufficiency in his own being. He had made a mess of wedding his destiny to other destinies. He was through with women, and wanted to feel himself free of them, quite free. It was sweet to lie up here in the dark all alone and mourn his baby’s death, and begin to pull himself together a little, and look toward the future.