There was something strange in his voice, an eagerness, a sharp pain.
'Full twenty,' I answered, dreaming.
'When I was young it seemed as if a man would forget anything in twenty years, sir.'
There were things one couldn't forget. I knew that, and I knew that here was an unforgetful heart of pain. My curiosity seemed most unworthy, and I was ashamed of it. But the old man spoke, and I knew he was not old.
'It's yesterday, sir,' he said in a low voice, 'and this very night in November—twenty years ago! A dark night enough, and yet a strange light in it. Did you ever play Jack-all-alone at sea, sir? was you ever by yourself at sea? That's the terror of the sea, sir. A sticky, wet, clammy terror. For we've mates in ships, even if we don't speak. Have you ever felt the big sea and the sky, sir, spread out and spread over for you alone?'
I had spent one night at sea alone in the English Channel in the fine but foolhardy game of single-handed sailing. He brought it back to me now, and I sat in a little fifteen-foot cutter-rigged open boat in a great and gorgeous calm to the south and east of Dungeness Point. At sunset the wind failed, and left me at the will of the tides. For a long hour the golden west was a wonder of fine colour, and the sky overhead a most heavenly pale blue. The low coast towards Romney was a faint dark line, submerged in the sea. Elms ashore looked like massed shipping; a church-tower was dark against the sunset. Dungeness light glared over me, and I drifted on the last of the north-west curve of the tide into its red sector shining like blood on the lip of the moving water. An infinite and most infinitely deep silence oppressed and purified me. This was the purification of the ancient and immortal tragedy of the sea. I sat in a red flood and the day died. The piety of the great darkness buried the earth. Till midnight came I was alone and was nothing; a mere fleck of foam; I was all things; I was the world itself. Then a great fishing-smack drifted to me. I spoke to a dim shadow in the heavy shadow of great sails that hung motionless. I lost that voice again in the drifting of the tide and in a faint light air. Then at last the dawn broke, and the winking lights of land died down and the day and the land arose, and I was no longer alone.
'I knew it for a night,' I said. It is the rarest thing for any seaman to know. In this was his disastrous story. 'How did it happen to you? Would it hurt you to tell me, or would it help?'
There was no more unworthy curiosity in me, and that I was purified of it he must have felt. For this was a man who could feel and remember. God's great gift of forgetfulness is mostly given to the highest and to the lowest only. I drifted for a moment on my own sea of memory, and when I came back I heard him speaking. Those who have been long silent come some day to an hour of strange and easy speech.
'I and my brothers——'
I heard his voice catch on the word and get over it with a bitter jar, as a vessel might slide over a shoal in uncharted waters. Yet he knew those waters of Marah well.