I had gone below, preparatory to turning in, after another disastrous encounter with Marjorie. When I came off the bridge after taking my turn at the wheel, I found her standing alone at the rail. Since our little passage at arms the first night out, while she had not ostensibly avoided me, she had not given me the opportunity of another tête-à-tête. Her father, it appeared, had told her that she could not go ashore with us on Cock Island and she wanted me, as leader of the expedition, to intercede with him.
We were going to rough it on the island and a woman would have been impossible. And so I told her. I also thought it quite likely that the surf-bar mentioned by Adams (one always finds something of the sort round isolated islets like this) would make landing dangerous and we should be lucky, I surmised, if we escaped with nothing worse than a good soaking.
Marjorie was at first pleading, then indignant and at last angry. There was a good deal of the plethoric temperament of her father in the toss of her head with which, in disgust at my obstinacy, she turned and left me on the deck. And I, feeling the criminal every man feels when he has displeased a charming girl, slunk below to my bunk.
I had changed into pyjamas when Custrin, who had the cabin next to mine, put his head in the door.
"I'm just going up to get a 'peg,'" he said. "You look as though you could do with one yourself. Shall I bring you one down?"
A drink was emphatically what I needed in the frame of mind in which I found myself, so I gratefully accepted his offer.
"And make it a stiff one!" I called out after him. Then Carstairs, who had been working like a Trojan all the evening, packing, oiling guns and greasing boots, fetched me away to the little sort of pantry-place at the end of the flat which was his especial domain, to consult me about the clothes I was taking. When I got back to my cabin my drink in a long glass stood on the chest of drawers. There was no sign of Custrin.
Carstairs, in shirt and trousers, was simply dripping with perspiration. He looked absolutely all in.
"Here," I said, "you seem to be more in need of a 'peg' than I am, Carstairs. Suppose you take hold of that glass and show what you can do with it!"
The offer was scarcely in accordance with the discipline of the Naomi and Carstairs glanced cautiously up and down the corridor before he seized the glass and with a whispered "Here's luck, sir!" drained it.