Our skipper no longer appeared at meals. He was on the bridge day and night. He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said no more than: "This has not happened to me for years." He repeated this slowly at reasonable intervals. But he had lost the nimble impulse to chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent curiosity. As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get more coal. From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into port, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing. This gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected. Imagination, which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab in London. A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk it had left behind. But here we were with our ship plunging round the compass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the others,
But at last we had them. We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers. Their admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at six that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west. It was then eleven o'clock. Hopefully the Windhover put about. We held on for three hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves. The skipper then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below. The mate asked what course he should steer. "Take the damned ship where you like," said the skipper. "I'm going to sleep." He was away ten minutes. He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge. The helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the wind had fallen, the seas were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight, insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.
6
There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise than to enjoy it that way instead. What did I care when they complained at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before? What did that matter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last, really open? Fine weather for December! Across that patch of blue, which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity. And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes' thumbs were more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light? Not in the least. For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense. If this was what was meant by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of happiness in the capitals of the rich. Yet mornings of such a quality cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.
On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The wind was steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not have been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with approval of the scene below—melancholy approval, for we would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world, already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the gods, with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came. For the Windhover had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man's highest achievements as is joy of death. The wind and sea were chanting. The riding of the ship kept time to that measure. The vault was turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The white islands of the Olympians were in the sky.
Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the north. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over the seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail, heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a baffling mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. She got abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship of romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when it mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist blown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Her green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows pressed continually onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as though enchanted. Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us under the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body. She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms do.
7
When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke me, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac. "We're bewitched," the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. "I never thought I should want to see our fleet so much."
"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some sleep, "ye'll find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving orders. D'ye think a ship is driven by the man at the wheel? No' that I want to smell Hull."
A kick of the ship overturned the fireshovel, and I woke again to look with surprise at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and was leaving the shovel to its fate when it came to life, and began to crawl stealthily over the floor. It was an imperative duty to rise and imprison it. When that was forgotten the steward arrived, and roused me to watch the method of setting a breakfast-table at sea; but I had seen all that before, and climbed out of the saloon. There are moments in a life afloat when the kennel and chain of the house-dog appear to have their merits. The same wash was still racing past outside, and the ship moving along. The halyards were shaking in the cold. The funnel was still abruptly rocking. A sailor was painting the starboard stanchions. A stoker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and trousers, indifferent to the cruel wind which bulged and quivered his thin rags. The skipper was on the bridge, his hands in the pockets of his flapping overcoat, still searching the distance for what was not there. A train of gulls was weaving about over our wake. A derelict fish-trunk floated close to us, with a great black-backed gull perched on it. He cocked up one eye at me when he drew level, crouched for flight, but perhaps saw on my face the reason why I prefer working tomorrow, and contemptuously stayed where he was. Then I noticed the skipper looking back at the bird. He nodded to it, and cried: "There goes a milestone. The fleet is about somewhere." I danced with caution along the treacherous deck, where one day that voyage a sea picked up two men and stranded them on top of the engine-room casing, and got up with the master. He had just ordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas so swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When the engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Our new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown house-flag ten miles astern. We surged forward again.