It was but a step from his cabin door to the deck. He stood beneath the break of the poop, looking out upon the dimness; he heard the cocks crowing ashore.
“I’ll put these dreams in their place,” he said to himself. “But when they come, they are shaking experiences. As long as I know that they mean nothing, I can steer a compass course.”
He brought a towel to the waist, stripped and called the watchman to pour some buckets of salt water over him. As he dressed in his cabin afterwards, the steward brought him some coffee; he carried it out on deck, and heard the cocks crowing far inland in clearings of the forest. “It is a marvellous noise,” he muttered; “they shout for the sun before there is a glimmer, and the sun comes. To-day, to-day, to-day.”
The deck was wet with dew, which was dripping from the eaves of the deckhouses. The port was not yet awake, though lights were burning. The ship was awake: there was a light at the galley door; the boatswain was standing there, yarning with the cook; and from time to time a drowsy man shambled into the light from forward to fetch coffee or to ask a light.
Sard put his cup between two pins and stared at the line of the coast to the north of the town, some two or three miles from him. There, in the dimness of the dawn, the white of Los Xicales just showed against the blackness of the forest. He looked at it intently. It was one small patch of paleness, becoming clearer from minute to minute.
“That is it,” he said to himself. “I’ve thought of it every day for ten years, and stared at it ever since we moored, and been to it twice; and now that I am sailing I am warned again that I am to meet her there again. I am warned just as I was warned ten years ago, on this very day of the year, at this very time of the day, in this very berth of Las Palomas, just as I was sailing as I am to-day, for Santa Barbara, on that cruise when we saved Don Manuel. The second of the three times is to be to-day and I am to be ready.”
Looking over the water at the house, the emotion which had woken him surged back upon him, so that he had to grip the pins.
“It is all madness,” he said. “A man must go by intellect and will. These dreams fight against both. Life has settled the matter: I am not to meet her. My task here is to sail this ship wherever the old man bids me. Now I will do my task.”
He walked forward to the port half deck door where the boys stood waiting for a call.
“On deck; turn-to here. Get the colours up, ready for bending, two of you,” he said. “Huskisson, get the Blue Peter.” As they came trooping out behind him, he turned to the boatswain, who was hanging about in the waist waiting for the word.