Presently something dropping through the dense air settled for a moment on the damp rope of the companion ladder, and one of the passengers recognised it.
“My gough! It's a bird, a sparrow,” he cried.
At the same moment there was a rustle of wind, the mist lifted, and a great round shoulder rose through the white gauze, as if it had been the ghost of a mountain.
“That's the Isle of Man,” the passenger shouted, and there was a cry of incredulity. “It's the Calf, I'm telling you, boys. Lave it to me to know.” And instantly the engines were reversed.
The passenger, a stalwart fellow, with a look as of pallor under a tawny tan, walked the deck in a fever of excitement, sometimes shouting in a cracked voice, sometimes laughing huskily, and at last breaking down in a hoarse gurgle like a sob.
“Can't you put me ashore, capt'n?”
“Sorry I can't, sir, we've lost time already.”
There was a dog with him, a little, misshappen, ugly creature, and he lifted it up in his arms and hugged it, and called it by blusterous swear names, with noises of inarticulate affection. Then he went down to his berth in the second cabin and opened a little box of letters, and took them out one by one, and leaned up to the port to read them. He had read them before, and he knew them by heart, but he traced the lines with his broad forefinger, and spelled the words one by one. And as he did so he laughed aloud, and then cried to himself, and then laughed once more. “She is well and happy, and looking lovely, and, if she does not write, don't think she is forgetting you.”
“God bless her. And God bless him, too. God bless them both!”
He went up on deck again, for he could not rest in one place long. There was a breeze now, and he filled his lungs and blew and blew. The island was dying down over the sea in a pale light of silver grey. An engineman and a stoker were leaning over the bulwark to cool themselves.