"Yes," he said, "that part of me is left. It was pricked in on my first voyage." He examined his arms and legs. "Changed," he muttered. He rubbed his knees, and passed his hands over his body.
"What year was it when, as you say, you jumped overboard?" I asked.
"Eighteen seventy-five."
"This is eighteen eighty-four. Matey, you have been nine years out of your head," I said.
"Nine years? Sure? Can you prove that to me? My God, man, think of it! Nine years gone out of my life. You don't know what that means to me."
I showed him a faded and discolored newspaper.
"That paper is about six months old," I said, "but it's an eighteen eighty-four paper."
"Right," he said, sadly and somewhat wildly. "Got a pipe? I want to smoke on this, and think it out. Nine years, and six thousand miles travel! Where have I been, I wonder, and what have I done, to change the very face of me, while I lived with it? It's something like death, I take it."
I gave him a pipe and tobacco, and he smoked vigorously, trembling with excess of emotion, yet slowly pulling himself together. Finally he steadied, but he could not smoke. He put the pipe down, saying that it sickened him. I knew nothing of psychology at the time, but think now that in his second personality he had given up smoking.
I forbore questioning him, knowing that I could not help him in his problem—that he must work it out himself. He did not sleep that night, and kept me awake most of the time with his twitchings and turnings. Once he was up, examining his face in the glass by the light of a match, but in the morning, after a doze of an hour or so, I found him outside, looking at the sunrise and smoking.