When we had quite finished, we had the anchor chain dealt out to us in fathoms, and scraped, pounded and polished that. These were indeed days full of labour.
Being busy from morning until night we knew but little of what was about us. We saw the open sea and the waves tumbling over the reef outside. We saw the headlands, and the bow of the bay and the surf with its watching seals and the curve of yellow sands. We saw the sweep of coast and the downs and the strange huts we had built out of departed magnificence. And that was all; that constituted our world.
In the evening sometimes we lit a big bonfire, sailor fashion, just at the edge of the beach. There we sat at ease and smoked our pipes in silence, too tired to talk. Even Handy Solomon's song was still. Outside the circle of light were mysterious things--strange wavings of white hands, bendings of figures, callings of voices, rustling of feet. We knew them for the surf and the wind in the grasses: but they were not the less mysterious for that.
Logically Captain Selover and I should have passed most of our evenings together. As a matter of fact we so spent very few. Early in the dusk the captain invariably rowed himself out to his beloved schooner. What he did there I do not know. We could see his light now in one part of her, now in the other. The men claimed he was scrubbing her teeth. "Old Scrubs" they called him to his back: never Captain Selover.
"He has to clean up after his own feet, he's so dirty," sagely proffered Handy Solomon. And this was true.
The seaman's prophecy held good. Seven weeks held us at that infernal job--seven weeks of solid, grinding work. The worst of it was, that we were kept at it so breathlessly, as though our very existence were to depend on the headlong rush of our labour. And then we had fully half the stores to put away again, and the other half to transport painfully over the neck of land from the cove to the beach.
So accustomed had I become to the routine in which we were involved, so habituated to anticipating the coming day as exactly like the day that had gone, that the completion of our job caught me quite by surprise. I had thrown myself down by the fire prepared for the some old half hour of drowsy nicotine, to be followed by the accustomed heavy sleep, and the usual early rising to toil. The evening was warm; I half closed my eyes.
Handy Solomon was coming in last. Instead of dropping to his place, he straddled the fire, stretching his arms over his head. He let them fall with a sharp exhalation.
"'Lay aloft, lay aloft,' the jolly bos'n cried. Blow high, blow low, what care we! 'Look ahead, look astern, look a-windward, look a-lee.' Down on the coast of the high Barbare-e-e."
The effect was electrical. We all sprang to our feet and fell to talking at once.