"Yes, anywhere, so long as we get close to the shore. It frightens me out here."
"Sure, what call have you to be afraid when I'm with you?" asked Mr. Giveen in a tender tone of voice, turning the boat's head and making for the desired shore.
"I don't know. Let us talk of something else. Why do they call it the Devil's Kitchen?"
"Faith, you wouldn't ask that if you heard the hullabaloo that comes out of it in the big storms. You'd think, by the frying and the boiling, it was elephants and whales they were cooking. But in summer it's as calm as a—calm as a—what's-its-name. Musha, I'll be remembering it in a minit."
Mr. Giveen grumbled to himself in thought as he lay to his oars. Sometimes the brogue of the common people with whom he had collogued from boyhood, and which underlay his cultivated speech as a stratum of rock underlies arable land, would crop up thick and strong, especially when he was communing with himself, as now, hunting for a metaphor to express the sea's calmness.
Miss Grimshaw, passionately anxious to be on land again, was not the less so as she watched him muttering and mouthing and talking to himself. She had now been contemplating him at close quarters in the open light of day for a considerable time, and her study of him did not improve her opinion of him, in fact, she was beginning to perceive that in Mr. Giveen there was something more than a harmless gentleman rather soft and with a passion for flirtation.
She saw, or thought she could see, behind the Sunny Jim expression, behind the jocularity and buffoonery and soft stupidity which made him sometimes mildly amusing and sometimes acutely irritating, a malignant something, a spirit vicious and little, a spirit that would do a nasty turn for a man rather than a nice one, and perhaps even a cruel act on occasion. Whatever this spirit might be, it was little—a thing more to dislike than fear.
They were now in close to the cliffs, and the entrance to the Devil's Kitchen loomed large—a semicircular arch beneath which the green water flooded, washing the basalt pillars with a whispering sound which came distinctly to the boat. The cliff above stretched up, immense, and the crying of the cormorants filled the air and filled the echoes.