The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.
"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case—I could read to you," he cried—"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth—oodles of truth! I'll show you old boy—"
And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over into merriment....
"Where's the chief?"
"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."
"Saved anybody yet?"
"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce. He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"
But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.
For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we were coaling at Calcutta—seven weeks before, you remember—they broke suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a long-drawn lip over his pipe.
"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper. "Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool in his heart! He's young—he's ower young. What he needs is to come to gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod an' a staff to comfort him—an' by this an' that," he breathed through the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we lost Wickwire....