“But with man,” he went on, “more is to be hoped from. He should not let his thoughts dwell too much on the necessity of his getting married and propagating his species. It is natural for a woman to wish to get married for many reasons; but a man should not let this be the principal object in his life. That this is, unfortunately, not always the case is proved by his thoughts and actions.
“When you get to be an old shellback, like me, you will see that, while love of women is good enough to a certain extent, there are other duties for an honest man to perform before his cruise is out.
“Now, take yourself, for instance. You never made a fool of yourself about women. And that’s the reason you had the Southern Cross—before you lost her. Whereas, if you were like O’Toole, who is always reading story-books, where would you be to-day? Story-books and women have kept him down, and one is about the same thing as the other. I’ve had hundreds of story-books sent aboard here by those women folks at the sailors’ mission, and one and all had the getting married and propagation of species as the central object for the yarn. Sometimes the hero would differ a little in regards to the details of getting the weather gauge of the sweet, beautiful, fine, handsome girl—but the ends were all alike.
“No, sir, Mr. Gore, take my word for it, story-books and women, women and story-books—they are all the same in the end. They’ve kept O’Toole down for having them and you’ve worked your way up—to a certain extent—by not having them. A man should stick to his duty and let them alone until he gets old enough to understand them as I do.”
He was a rough, outspoken man, was old Captain Crojack.
CHAPTER VIII.
During the next week the ship held her course to the eastward, carrying all sail, and as the lumpy gulf clouds disappeared on the western horizon, we hauled to the southward to pick up the northeast trade.
The effects of the storm were no longer visible. The dead sailor we buried the day after we ran out of it. The loss of this man and the one who was swept overboard by the sea that pooped us caused every one to be depressed in spirit for several days. But a man is soon forgotten when he loses the number of his mess. Great and small they drop out, and are never missed long afterward. In a little while the songs and croakings that accompanied an accordion belonging to the starboard watch told plainly that the few tears shed for a lost shipmate among our men were soon dried and forgotten. Miss Waters repeated her visits to the sick sailor when his watch were on deck, and several times I saw her going forward with the third mate, carrying some gruel she had made for him.
Since her remarks to me about having been a sailor and living in a black hole of a fo’castle, she had said little to me. Her mother still kept to her bunk during meal hours, and I had escaped facing her, but the girl’s studied coldness more than outweighed this pleasure.
I could hardly understand why she should object to a man who was a sailor, when her father and grandfather had both worked their way from the fo’castle to the quarter-deck. But, then, the woman’s reasoning, I argued, was peculiar to herself and none the less obstinate for being illogical.