The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood beside me. He put his nose inside the galley. "I smell coffee," he said. His charge reared, and pitched him against the bulwarks. "Whoa, you bitch," he cried cheerfully. "Our fleet ought not to be far off," he explained. "Ought to see something of them soon." He glanced casually round the emptinesss of the dawn. He might have been looking for some one with whom he had made an appointment at Charing Cross. He then backed into the hatch and went below. The big mate appeared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashed spar, did not give the sunrise so much as a glance, did not allow the ocean to see that he was even aware of its existence, but went forward to the bridge.
The clouds lowered during the morning, and through that narrowed space between the sea and the sky the wind was forced at a greater pace, dragging rain over the waters. Our fleet might have been half a mile away, and we could have gone on, still looking for it. The day early surrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had made its brief existence a failure. It had nearly gone when we sighted another trawler. She was the Susie. She was smaller than the Windhover. We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep in the wash on her deck. It would not be easy to forget the Susie. I shall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shout through his hands at her. She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her. Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted clear. She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan of her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to us. They said the Susie had sighted nothing.
Our engine-bell rang for us to part company. Our little friend dropped astern. She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keep her alive in that stupendous and hurrying world. A man on her raised his arm to us in salute, and she vanished.
4
The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered to the subject of Jonah. We should now have been with our fleet, but were alone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely as another. "This hasn't happened to me for years," he apologized. He stared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, and whistled reflectively. He turned to the man at the wheel. "Take her east for an hour, and then north for an hour," and went below.
Day returned briefly at sunset. It was an astonishing gift. The clouds rapidly lifted and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to a bright horizon, hard and polished, a clear separation of our planet and heaven. The waves were still ponderous. The Windhover laboured heavily. We rolled over the bright slopes aimlessly. She would rear till the forward deck stuck up in front of us, then drop over, flinging us against the dodger, and the shock would surround her with foam that was an eruption of greenish light.
The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by a glow that was without. The purple waters took the light from above and the waves turned to flames. The fountains that mounted at the bows and fell inboard came as showers of gems. (I heard afterwards it was still foggy in London.) And now, having made all I can of sunset and ocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, emeralds, zircons, rubies, peridots, and sapphires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid the saloon, the thought of which, for an obscure reason, my mind loathed.
And our saloon, compared with the measure of the twilight emptiness now about us, was no bigger than the comfort a man feels amid mischance when he remembers that he is still virtuous. The white cloth on its table, I noticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by a long and sinful life. But the men round it were good and hearty. I took my share of ham and fish on the same plate, and began to feel not so hungry as before. I was informed that ashore we are too particular about trifles, because we have the room for it, but on a trawler there is not much room. You have to squeeze together, and make do with what is there, because fish is the most important passenger. My hunk of bread was placed where the cloth bore the imprint of a negro's hand. The mugs of tea were massive, and sweetish (I could smell that) with condensed milk. Did I want my tea? I noticed there were two men between me and the exit, and no room to pass. The room was hot. The bench was rising and falling. My soul felt pale and faintly apprehensive, compelling me, now I was beset, to take hold of it firmly, and to tell it that this was not the time to be a miserable martyr, but a coarse brute; and that, whether it liked it or not, I was going to feed at once on fish, ham, and sickly liquor, and heaven help us if it failed me before these sailors. It made no response, being a thin nonconformist soul, so I had to leave it, and alone I advanced on the food. As so often happens, the conquest was a little less hard than it appeared to be. I progressed, though slowly, and at last was sufficiently disengaged from my task to count the minutes moving at their funeral pace to the end of the meal. The heat of the room mounted. The movements of the ship continued to throw my stomach against the edge of the table.
My companions, however, were in no hurry to move. They discussed, among other things, Hull, and its unfortunate system of sanitation. While this gossip, which was explicit with exuberant detail, was engaging us, I summoned my scientific mind, which is not connected with my soul, to listen to what was being said, and the rest of me was deaf. They went on to tell each other about other trawlers and other crews. Other ships and men, I heard, had most of the luck. "The fish follow some of 'em about," complained the skipper. "I should like to know how it's done."
"They ought to follow us," replied the second engineer. "When I went down to take over this morning, Mac was singing Scotch songs. What more could we do below?"