Panting a little he grew silent, with clenched fists, face flushed and veins swollen on neck and brow. The old man, staring, shivered at sound of the strange Malay words, now suddenly spoken again after half a century—words that echoed ghostlike in the empty chambers of the past. He peered at Hal, as at an apparition. His face, pale under its weather-beaten tan, drew into lines of anguish.
“Let me go!” the boy flung at him again. “You’ve got to let me go!”
“Sit down, sir!” the captain made shift to answer. “This is sheer lunacy. What, sir? You want to give up your career, your family, everything? You want to take a small boat and go sailing off into nowhere? Why, sir, Danvers Asylum is the place for you. No more such talk, sir; not another word!”
“I don’t care what you say, I’m going, anyhow,” Hal defied him. “I’m not going to rot in this dump. It’s no place for a live man, and you know it!”
“You’ve got no money to be buying boats, Hal! No, nor no skipper’s papers, either. By the Judas priest, sir, but you’re crazy! You’ll be talking piracy next, or some such nonsense.”
“I don’t care what I talk,” the boy retorted. “I’m sick of this! I’m through! I’m going to live, and be myself, and be—”
“You’ll be a corpse or a jail-bird, if that’s the course you’re sailing!” the captain cut in. “This is a civilized world you’re living in now.”
“Civilized! My God, civilized! That’s all I hear—civilized! When you were my age were you always civilized? Were you kept on dry land instead of going to sea? Were you buried in college, learning damned, dry rubbish?”
“Dry rubbish? Your Oriental studies dry rubbish?”