Captain Cary became silent as was his way when vexed. Sard was left with his own thoughts, which were of “her” and of his chances of getting to the house, as he meant, before he left the shore. His mind went over various schemes for getting rid of Captain Cary, but none seemed very hopeful. “He will have to come along,” he thought, “and at half-past four at the latest, I shall go from here.”
Then the hope of meeting her merged in his mind into an expectation of meeting her, in perhaps less than two hours. All his life, since he had met her as a boy, when sex was beginning to be powerful in him, had been a hope of meeting her again by some divine appointment. He was weary of waiting and waiting.
He was also weary of loneliness, for he was as lonely as a captain, although he had not yet come into command. He was the most hated, feared, and respected man he knew: men were afraid and boys terrified of him. He knew what was said of him: “He is not a companion ashore and sets too high a standard afloat.” “He’s a damned sardonic devil with a damned sardonic way.” “He may be a good sailor, but he’s an ass with it, staying on in sail, and he hasn’t a friend between Hull and Hades.”
He had, however, two friends, an Australian surgeon, whom he had met in Sydney, and a friar whom he had met in the Church of Saint John Lateran in Rome, during his one real holiday. That gaunt and burning soul, the friar, was the likest to himself in all the world.
Women he hardly spoke with from year’s end to year’s end. He had not been six months ashore in eleven years. His mother was alive, but they had not been good friends since her second marriage; he disliked his stepfather. The second marriage had been much of a shock to him in many ways. His only woman friend was an austere old lady with a gaunt and glittering mind, of whom he had been fond ever since his childhood. This was Agatha, Lady Crowmarsh, who lived in Berkshire. She was very proud of Sard and was ambitious for him in her own way and world, which were not his. They used to spar when they met, because he would not give up his power for her advantages. She wished him to be a part of her world of ruling families and permanent officials. He wanted to be himself, pitted against the forces which he understood, in a world of elements.
Sitting in the arena waiting for these boxers, he asked himself what his future held for him. How long was he going to be “an ass with it, staying on in sail?” He had indeed “passed in steam,” but there was something hateful to him in the thought of steam. It meant being subject to an engine-room: it came down to that: which seemed a fall after being a master of two elements on the deck of a clipper-ship. He knew very well that the sailing ship was doomed. He had watched the struggle for ten years, and had seen line after line give up the fight and “go into steam.” The tea-clippers had gone before he came to sea: the wool-clippers and big four-masters were being squeezed out: they were starved and pinched and sent to sea hungry, but even so they did not pay. “They can’t pay,” he said to himself, “they ought not to pay: they are anachronisms. The steamship is cheaper, bigger, safer, surer, pleasanter, and wiser. The sailing ship is doomed and has to go.”
He knew that his own owners, Wrattson and Willis, were feeling the pinch acutely, and that they were both too old to change the habits of a lifetime in time to avail. He had watched their struggle at close quarters, for their struggle was passed on to their ships without delay. They had been pinching their ships for some years; cutting down the crews to danger-point; cutting their officers’ wages; making old gear serve till it was junk, and grudging even a pint of oil for the decks. He had seen them become mean. When he first went to sea, the Pathfinder had carried four boys in the half deck: now she carried eleven. Each paid twenty or thirty pounds for their three or four years’ service; each did the work of an ordinary seaman, and the better trained of them worked with the sailmaker and made every sail they set. Yet all this would not serve. The steamship was beating them in spite of it all, and Wrattson and Willis were being squeezed out. There was no doubt of it; the fleet was going. The Venturer had been wrecked; the Voyager was being broken up; the Wayfarer had been sold to the Norwegians; the Loiterer had been sold to the Italians; the Intruder had been sold to the Portuguese; the Scatterer was up for sale; the Messenger and the Roysterer had been barque-rigged and sent to the West Coast; the Endeavourer and Discoverer were said to be going the same road; the Pathfinder, the glory of the fleet, would surely follow before long: the line would “go into steam,” or into liquidation.
Captain Cary spoke suddenly from the depths of his silence, as though he had followed the same lines of thought to another conclusion.
“Did you ever see the Petrella, Mr. Harker?”
“Yes, sir, I did; when she was lying for sale in the George’s Dock, in 1885. I went all over her and over her masthead.”