"That's right," said one of the men. "You keep your mouth shut this morning!" And the gunsel and his special cronies kept quiet, for it was unfitting that those who skulked in a corner during a gale should cheek Rafferty the morning after merely because they found that the swing and sweep of the tossing stern were back a little more to the normal. The gale had indeed blown itself out, or nearly so. It was a tremendous morning in the North Atlantic. A fountain of gold, preceding sunrise, shot up eastwards. A sound of hissing and of breaking foam was round the ship, and echoed in every corner. The waves soared, great and curving, blue and purple, veined like marble in their forward curves with the foam of other broken waves, soared higher, curled their tops, broke, and as they broke the wind took the foam and whirled it broadcast. There was a wonderful purple and blue and windy hilarity over that great expanse, so high a sea running that even the horizon line was ragged.
The grub that day seemed painfully scanty. The uneaten shares of the one or two seasick men made no difference, so great were the appetites of the fit. Cockney admitted, after the meal was over, that he sympathised with those persons who chummed with, or intimidated, Pierre and Four Eyes, for the sake of what food they might smuggle away from the galley—though his phrasing of this comprehension was of course all his own.
"Are they cadgin' off Frenchy and that object in the coat?" asked Mike.
"'Aven't you seen 'em?" said Cockney. "'O, Frenchy, bring hus along some pie!'" he cried out in a fleering voice.
"I quite belave it," said Mike. "I see some of 'em cadgin' tobacco. There's men aboard this ship I know I wouldn't prisint me plug of tobacco to. If they took a bite out of it you'd be thinkin' the plug was in their mouth, and the chaw they axed for was the piece they gave back to ye." There was an attempt at a laugh, an obvious attempt, for the shot had gone home. "'Have ye got a piece of chewing on ye?'" mocked Mike. "'Me pipe's empty, have you a fill about ye?'—'Have ye a ceegareet about ye?'" He paused. "'After you wid the ceegareet!'" he mocked.
And he lived up to his opinion. There are people who arrange their moral code according to what they can do and cannot do. There are people to whom a fall from fealty to their code is occasion for renouncing and deriding that code. Mike was not of these. He disliked cadging, but had his love of a smoke or a chew driven him to cadge he would not have relinquished his opinion; he would have smoked and chewed as a defeated man.
All day now there was sign of better weather. Even the wind aided to calm the seas, swinging round a point or two and besoming the wave-tops, flattening them. There was hash and pea-soup that day—the pea-soup drunk in the tin mugs, of course, along with, or after, the hash—and the "Push" were glad of it. It was a great tonic day. By night all the clouds seemed to have been blown away; stars by the billion filled the vault; the Milky Way was like a whirl of triumph, like a gesture of joy across the heavens. The wake of the tiny little Glory (she seemed tiny now) was as an imitation of that Milky Way, full of balls, large and small, and smaller, down to the size of sparks even, of phosphorus—dancing and bursting and thinning out. Mike, coming on deck a trifle disgusted by a surfeit of what he called "soup-kitchen palaver" that was in progress amid a group of "youse," looked down at that wake, moody, and furrowed, that kind of half-broken look upon his face, like a wondering beast, a puzzled beast. He stood there at the stern, lifted high and brought low, till his back went cold.
"Bejabbers, it's all very strange," he said to himself; and being cold he looked round for shelter. Some wisps of hay, blown from windward, had been brought up against the lee rail, and he gathered them together. The sheep bleated.
"I'm using this for me own comfort," he said, addressing the sheep in the end cote; "go to sleep!" And he squatted down with his back against the cotes, and stretched out his legs—sat there a long time while the ship pulsed and pulsed on, tossing her stern and the engines racing and steadied, racing and steadied, as she slid through the sea, churning the water into foam, in which whirls of gold began like nebulas of stars, whirled into complete little globes, danced away as entrancing as opals, and then suddenly went out.
Now it happened that, below, Scholar felt he might almost suffocate, and remembering that he had been some time out of the weather, for which he had always a great friendliness, never liking to be too long out of touch with it—blow high, blow low, rain, mist or sunshine—he too came on deck. The poop companion-way had been closed these last few days, and that made the cabin all the more asphyxiating. He came up that narrow staircase, feet clattering on the worn brass edges, turned the handle; eddies of wind did the rest. He wrestled a spell with the door, then came on deck, closed the door, and looked up in awe at all these stars—stood there balancing, now drawn away from them down and down, next moment soaring and swinging up with a sensation as if he might be swung on and come up through that golden dust and see some explanation. Then down he was borne again, or felt as though his body was borne down and his spirit left up there. Explanation, or no explanation, it was good—all good, the crying of the sea, the whistle and shriek of the wind in the cordage, the feel of the wind, the scud of the spray—good!