Thinking their thoughts they went their ways. Edward Ambrose crossed in a black mood to St. James Street. For a reason he could not explain a sudden depression had come upon him. A sharp sense of life's tragic complexity had entered his mind. In order to correct its dire influence he lit a pipe and started to read a manuscript which had come to him that morning. It was called, "A Master Mariner," Book the First.
"Damn it all," he thought a few minutes later. "There can be no possible doubt about that boy. If he can only put the whole thing through in this style, what a book it will be!"
XIII
In the meantime, the Sailor was walking home to Brinkworth Street, distributing largesse.
"Poor, broken mariners," he said, when his pockets were finally empty. "Poor marooned sailormen. I expect all these have seen the Island of San Pedro. I expect some of them are living on it now."
He went to bed, but not to sleep. He had begun to realize that he was getting into very deep waters. The truth was, he was growing a little afraid. He had been a little afraid ever since that magical Sunday in the wilds of Surrey. And now tonight, as he lay tossing on his pillow, a very definite sense of peril was slowly entering into him. If he was not very careful, the tide of affairs would prove too much, and he would find himself carried out to sea.
As he lay awake through the small hours, the sinister truth grew clear that grim forces were closing upon him again. His will was in danger of being overpowered, if it was not overpowered already. Mary Pridmore had come to mean so much to him that it seemed quite impossible to hold life on any terms without her. Yet it was morbidly weak to admit for a single moment anything of the kind.
During the week that followed, Mary and "the sailorman" undertook several harmless little excursions. One afternoon she called for him with Silvia in her mother's car and drove by way of Richmond Park to Hampton Court. For the Sailor that was a very memorable day. He had a walk alone in the palace garden with Athena, while Silvia, with a keen sense of the fitness of things, paid a call upon some friends of hers in what she impudently called the Royal Workhouse.
This enchanted afternoon, Mary and the Sailor didn't talk divorce. Many things in earth and heaven they talked about, but that subject was not among them. They scaled the heights together, they roamed the mountain places. She told him that the first book of "A Master Mariner," which she had been allowed to read in manuscript, had carried her completely away, and she most sincerely hoped that he would be able to sustain a soaring eagle flight through the hundreds of pages of the two books to follow.