"'Yes,' I said, patiently, 'but if you want a book on navigation, mathematics and so on, I can let you have it.'
"He nodded, but I don't think he followed me. So I took my screws and washer, and telling him I would return, hurried back to the ship. You know, I felt triumphant. I had scored, not only over my shipmates, but over him, over Africa, over the whole of the universe that wasn't Me, myself. I had taken a step forward. It is curious how difficult it is to describe the simplest evolutions of the soul. But I was no longer oppressed by Mister George and his languages. I had accomplished something far beyond the most abstruse philologies—I had got what I wanted.
"And I took him his book, a big obsolete tome bound in hide. He was rapturous, wiping his hands on some waste and opening it upside down. 'Ah, yes, very good, very good!' he said. 'I read plenty English books, yes. Thank you, I am very much obliged. Knowledge is power, eh?' I smiled, I suppose, for he leaned toward me eagerly. 'No? You think not, eh? Ah, when I had the jaundice, I read many books.' He waved his arms to indicate long galleries of libraries. 'Plenty, plenty, books. Oh, yes.' Once again I had the feeling of listening to an automaton. It seemed so futile talking to such a being. Indeed, that is why I tell you about him. He was my first foreigner. I had always been able to get into some sort of touch with the people I had met. I knew how they lived and loved and thought. But him! He had dressed his mind up in the showy rags and remnants of our speech as a savage will dress his body in incongruous clothing, and of what he was, inside, I could form no conjecture. Between us was an impassable barrier. I was trying to realize what made me so silent before his volubility, when the bell on the forecastle of the Corydon struck eight times. It was midnight and my watch was over. I said good-bye. 'I will visit your ship,' said my friend, Mister George. 'I have been on plenty ships. Oh, yes, plenty....'
"I ran away at last. I daresay he would have practised his English on me till daybreak if I hadn't run away. I went down and found things all quiet, and then I came up and roused old Croasan. He was lying on the settee and the gin-bottle stood on the chest-of-drawers, empty. He raised himself on his elbow and looked at me gloomily. I was so glad to get back and talk to a real human being, drunk as he was, that I patted him on the shoulder and told him we would have the dynamos fixed up in the morning. He blinked, and fell back exhausted. I hoisted him up again and he looked round resentfully. 'Aren't you going to turn out?' I asked him. 'Come on, Mister.' 'Is she all right?' he growled. 'Yes, of course!' I answered, rashly, and he promptly lay down again and declined to move. I was in a hole, but not downhearted. I couldn't turn in unless he turned out, you know. I walked along the alleyway with a crazy idea of calling the Chief half formed in my mind. But that seemed to clash with the school-boy code that forbids sneaking. Poor old chap! I thought. And yet I couldn't keep his watch. I had to get my sleep if I was to be any good next day. I went back and lifted him, snoring, to his feet. 'Come on, Mister,' I said, 'it's your watch.' And I heaved him gently through the doorway and along the alleyway. I was nearly carrying him. I don't know what my intention really was, whether I had a notion the outside air would brace him up or whether I was going to tumble him down the engine-room ladder. Anyhow, we were staggering about the dark alleyway when we both fell with a crash against the Chief's door. It was the most effectual thing I could have contrived. There was a growl of 'what's that?' from the Chief and he suddenly sprang out in his pyjamas. Seeing only me, he shouted, 'What you making all this row about?' And then he stumbled over old Croasan. I laughed. I couldn't help it. All the while I was explaining to that indignant Chief how we came to be there I was uttering cries of joy in my heart over the rich humanity of it all. It was sordid and silly and wrong, but it was real. The Chief lit his lamp and I saw his one bright eye and the empty, blood-red socket glittering in the radiance. To think that I had been mad enough to feel sick of the Corydon! I felt as if I had suddenly got home again. And, just as suddenly, old Croasan had vanished. I looked at the Chief in bewilderment. He eyed me solemnly, but without disfavour, and strode along to our cabin. Throwing the empty bottle through the port-hole, he said briefly, 'Get yourself turned in, Mister,' and went back to his own room. I turned in quick, you can imagine. It had been a great day for me. You may think it strange, but I look back at it as one of the happiest in my life. Work! Work! It is the only thing that keeps us sane when we're young. All else is only bladder—nonsense. Work and the knowledge of it, and the planning of it. Work, and its failures, its bitter anxieties, its gleams of inspiration, its mellow accomplishment, and then the blessed oblivion!
"Well, four voyages I made in that old packet, each one worse than the last, I believe—four voyages after nuts, and palm-oil, and enormous square logs of mahogany, and cages of snarling leopards and screaming parrots, and tanks of stealthy serpents. I used to wonder who found it worth while to hire us to bring such bizarre and useless things into England. Once one of the twenty-five hundred weight barrels of palm oil slipped from the slings and fell on the deck with a soft crash. It smashed like an egg, of course. Indeed, as the mess burst and splashed all over everybody on the after-deck, it was not unlike an enormous yolk in its brilliant gamboge colour, with the split and dismembered staves lying radially round it like dirty white of egg. And someone muttered that 'there was twenty quid gone.' The leopards, too, struck me on the homeward trip. Anything less like the traditional wild beast of the jungle you couldn't imagine. Most of them were mangy and had eye-trouble of some sort. They would stare with a sort of rigid horror and indignation at the dancing blue waves over side for hours, their blank, topaz eye-balls never moving unless you poked with a stick, when the brute would utter a cry of what seemed to me utter despair and settle down once more to keep the ocean under observation.
"We did not always go to the same place. In fact, I saw very little of Mister George. Railheads advance with our sphere of influence. But I stuck it, and put in my year of service for my license. I was saving money and looking forward to a spell in London. All the other people I knew I let go. I realized I had been all the time an alien in that genteel professional world.
"And so, one day, a year after I'd set foot on the deck of that old ship, I said good-bye to the men I'd sailed with and took the train to Paddington. How strange I felt I can't explain. As the cab took me down the familiar streets and I saw the old familiar sights, I felt—well, you'll know when you go back! Something had snapped. I was in it, but not of it. I saw the young men walking in the streets, with their high collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the Corydon and the blue tropic sea!
"I took a room at a hotel and went out to see my mother. I did this as a duty, mind you. If my brother was there still I had no intention of staying long. There was no room for the two of us in the same house. And of course, I had a great desire to know if they were married. Humph!
"I found my mother living alone. He was gone again! She, Gladys, was gone too. They hadn't been married, not a bit of it. He never had any intention of marrying her. It was very difficult to get the actual story out of my mother. She didn't know much, and she was reluctant to tell me even that. But I found out at last that she, Gladys, had followed him. Nobody knew where. He had given up his agency and started on a tour for some patent tyre company. And she, at the lifting of his finger, had gone after him."
Mr. Carville paused and looked towards a figure coming into view on the path. It was Miss Fraenkel. I looked at my watch. It was twelve o'clock.