Sometimes a sail would heave in sight, or the far-off smoke of a steamer hold the imagination for an hour or two, and then be painted out, leaving nothing but the sea, the sky, and the pearl-white trace of cloud draping the skirts of the warm trade wind.
There is no place in the world where grievances sprout so well and grow so rapidly as on board ship. The Captain had a grievance. It had come to his knowledge that Wolff had a private stock of Pilsener. Some had come in the cases that the wharf rat had carried after him on board, and there was more stowed away in some hole known only to Wolff and Shiner.
Those two worthies would forgather of a morning in Wolff’s cabin and drink Pilsener and then heave the bottles out of the porthole. The Captain had seen a Pilsener bottle going aft, bobbing and bowing to him in the wake, and his fury was excessive and ill contained.
Leaving aside the meanness of proclaiming the ship teetotal and then smuggling drink aboard for private consumption, there was something of cold-blooded inhospitality about the business that struck at the Irish heart.
He was very explicit about the matter to Harman:
“Swine—they and their lager beer! You wait! I’ll pay them out.”
“To think of them sitting there drinking, and we dry!” said the simple-minded Harman. “That’s what gets me. We dry and them chaps drinking. It makes me thirsty. I don’t care a dash about their sitting there and drinking, but when I think of it it makes me thirsty. That’s what gets me.”
“Well, you’ll have to think of something else,” said the Captain. “There’s no use in dwelling on things like that, and the voyage is not for long.”
“It’s long enough to be without a drink in,” said Harman.
Harman, despite his up-to-dateness on San Francisco roguery, was a most extraordinary child for all his manhood. The man part of him had grown up and grown crooked; the child part of him had remained virginal. The moment was everything to him. He could just read and write his name, and sometimes, when he was off duty, you would see him spelling over a San Francisco paper. Houses to let, governess wanted—it was all the same to him. He only read the advertisement columns. They satisfied his craving for literature, and he could understand them. The rest of the paper, from the poetry corner to the foreign-news column, was arid ground for him.