The track she had made when drifting while her heart stood still within her iron ribs looked like a tangled thread on the white paper of the chart. It was shown to me by a friend, her second officer. In that surprising tangle there were words in minute letters—“gales,” “thick fog,” “ice”—written by him here and there as memoranda of the weather. She had interminably turned upon her tracks, she had crossed and recrossed her haphazard path till it resembled nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pencilled lines without a meaning. But in that maze there lurked all the romance of the “overdue” and a menacing hint of “missing.”
“We had three weeks of it,” said my friend, “just think of that!”
“How did you feel about it?” I asked.
He waved his hand as much as to say: It’s all in the day’s work. But then, abruptly, as if making up his mind:
“I’ll tell you. Towards the last I used to shut myself up in my berth and cry.”
“Cry?”
“Shed tears,” he explained briefly, and rolled up the chart.
I can answer for it, he was a good man—as good as ever stepped upon a ship’s deck—but he could not bear the feeling of a dead ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening feeling which the men of some “overdue” ships that come into harbour at last under a jury-rig must have felt, combated, and overcome in the faithful discharge of their duty.
XX.
It is difficult for a seaman to believe that his stranded ship does not feel as unhappy at the unnatural predicament of having no water under her keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded.