She laughed.
After a pause he said suddenly, “I am a brute to you, you dear, unaccommodating little thing. Somehow my will and my deed have got disconnected in my dealings with you. It is curious that having such good intentions I should still remain the villain of the piece. Yet I meant—if ever I had a woman—to make up to her for all I have seen my mother go through.”
“When you have a woman—perhaps you will ...” said the suffragette. “You must wait and see.”
“Come up and see land,” shouted Courtesy, running in with a semi-buttoned coat in her hand.
The gardener shot up the companion-way, and, behold, the gods had touched the sea, and fairyland had uprisen.
A long vivid island, afire in the ardent sun. Its mountain was golden and eccentric in outline, its little town and fortresses had obviously been built by a neat-fingered baby-god out of its box of bricks. The tiny houses had green shutters and red roofs. There was no doubt that the whole thing had only been created a minute or two before, it was so neat and so unsullied. It was nonsense to call the place by the name of a common liqueur, as the quartermaster did, any one could see it was too sudden and too faery to have a name or to make a liqueur. There was something very exciting in the way it had leapt out of a perfectly empty sea, and in the way it sped over the horizon, as if shrinking from the gaze of the proud Caribbeania.
It passed. The gardener had looked at a dream. Courtesy had looked at good dry land. Captain Walters had looked at the monastery from which the liqueur emanated. Mrs. Rust had not looked at all. It is surprising that there should be so much difference in the material collected by such identical instruments as one pair of human eyes and another.
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. The Caribbeania, her appetite for speed checked, began to stalk them with bated breath.
“We’ll be going through the Hair’s Breadth to-morrow at seven,” said the Captain, in a fat, selfcongratulatory voice, as though he had himself created the channel he referred to. “You must all get up early to see her do it.”
There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in the hot square cube that is your cabin. Your ear is tickled by the sound of the activities of food in the saloon outside; you can hear the sea singing in a cheerful, beckoning way past your inadequate porthole. You emerge from your cabin and find men in pyjamas, and ladies in flowered dressing-gowns and (if possible) thick pig-tails, or (if impossible) pleasing head-erections of lace, sitting in rows at sparkling tables, and being fed by stewards with apples and sandwiches. There is scarcely ever any need to remind the voyager by sea about the tiresome superiority that distinguishes the ant.