“Oh, we don’t go in for brass-bound uniforms on our ships. Ten pounds a month and bonus. What?”
“Where is she going to?”
“China. You may call at Japan for coal with luck. See the world, you know. That’s what most of you fellows are after. You’ll have to go aboard to-night. Birkenhead Docks.”
“I’ll he there.”
And with trembling hands he signed his contract.
In a wintry evening he crossed the Mersey ferry. A salt wind from the west boomed up the channel. Edwin, in the bows, felt his face drenched with spray. “It’s clean,” he thought. “It will make me cleaner. That’s what I need. I don’t believe I shall ever feel anything again, until I’m washed clean. I’m old . . . old and numb. I’ve lost my sense of enjoyment. I wonder if it will ever come back to me!”
As he stood there in the salt breeze, some words of Traherne, his mother’s countryman, came into his mind:
“You shall never enjoy this world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.”
Perhaps they were true. He wondered.