'You give that hull a chance then, captain?'
'I give her this chance: first, as to the ice; she's a naked swimmer, light as a cask, with the wind for a buffer 'twixt her and the ice, and a backwash of sea which she'll make the most of. And then this: if a whaler falls in with her and she's sound they'll tow her clear. She was worth thirty-two thousand pounds, ship and cargo, when she left the Thames. There's sights of grease, mon, in that money.'
He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and his wife who were singing a duet.
CHAPTER XXII THE PHOTOGRAPHS
It was three or four days after this conversation with Captain Robson, a soft, blue glowing afternoon, the sparkling heaves of water lifting south along the course of the steamer, with a pearly feathering of the salt foam going straight as the metals of a railway astern where, in the distant blue air, hung the slowly dissolving shadow of the island of Madeira quitted by us that morning.
Many had gone ashore; we were now a thin company aft, the poop and saloon almost yacht-like with room and comparative privacy.
The name of the master of the steamer was Captain Strutt. I had been having a short chat with Captain Robson on the quarter-deck whilst the skipper of the steamer was on the bridge talking with the first mate; I went slowly aft and got upon the poop, and whilst I was there, looking over the side into the exquisitely pure liquid recess of ocean on the port-beam, with some orange star of sail glowing in it, whilst all between the burnished swell was working in glassy swathes rich with the gleams of the splendour in the south-west, Captain Strutt joined me.
'Robson,' said he, with a face of amusement, 'is a comical old gentleman. In my boyhood they called that sort of thing a sea-dog. It's a dying type. The skipper who wears the hat of the London streets and comes on deck in galoshes when the men are washing down, decays apace. We should take a long look at Robson, for when he is gone we shall not easily behold his like again.'