He gave me all the cakes to eat which were left over from the tea. And a couple of shillings beside.
"I wonder if there's anything else I can do?"
"Yes, I'm a poet," I ventured, "and I'd like to get Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to read again." I said this as much to startle the man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I was hungry for Chaucer.
Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.
He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed religion with him.
It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed myself full on Chaucer.
I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she must convert.
"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.