This was folly, no doubt. I was in a bad state of mind, and had disaster behind me, and the shadow of it before me. There have been hours in many a man's life when the thought that he could end it was his only comfort. Without being in that state, my frame of mind was not wholly enviable, and I wanted some kind of help that I could not find. What was it that sent me to old Silent, if not the intuition that he had known worse than I?
We talked at last, at midnight, for I had found the clue to his heart in some inscrutable way beyond my knowledge. Perhaps he saw something in me that invited confidence. Oddly enough, strangers have often enough opened their hearts to me, when I least expected it. There is some deep necessity of confession in men's hearts, and in speech they compel sympathy—or at least they can plead their own cause.
''Tis a black night, sir,' said the old man, whose real name was Gilby, ''tis a black enough night.'
He was on the look-out, and it was the first hour after midnight. I climbed up and stood beside him close against the windlass, which looked in the dark like a stiff, distorted corpse covered with merciful canvas. The heavens were low and there was not one star visible. Wind there was none, and the sea was a dulled plate of pale dark steel. What air blew on the fo'castlehead we made ourselves. The cargo derricks on their platforms held watch with us: they looked diabolical and all alert. Under the straight stem of the Hindoo the sea hissed lightly like water escaping from a cock. The vibration of the engines was muffled for'ard; but it beat like a steady pulse.
'Ay, it's a very dark night,' I answered, as I stood alongside him in the very eyes of her.
I glanced up at the mast-head light, and what glow came to me blinded me still more. But the light was a kind of comfort. And so were the side lights. One could believe with the Chinese that a vessel might see with painted eyes on the bow. Neither of us spoke a word for full ten minutes.
'You've been a seaman, sir?' he asked presently.
'Twenty years ago.'
I went back twenty years, and was no more than a boy. Now was my 'Twenty Years After.' My old companions were dead or lost in the years.
'Twenty years you say, sir?'