Part 3 (1/2)

After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded wisely. If I had seen the sight, he a.s.sured me, I would never forget it as long as I lived. The weather was too bad to give the corpse a proper sea burial.

So next day at dawn they took it up on the p.o.o.p, covering its face with a bit of bunting; he read a short prayer, and then, just as it was, in its oilskins and long boots, they launched it amongst those mountainous seas that seemed ready every moment to swallow up the s.h.i.+p herself and the terrified lives on board of her.

”That reefed foresail saved you,” I threw in.

”Under G.o.d--it did,” he exclaimed fervently. ”It was by a special mercy, I firmly believe, that it stood some of those hurricane squalls.”

”It was the setting of that sail which--” I began.

”G.o.d's own hand in it,” he interrupted me. ”Nothing less could have done it. I don't mind telling you that I hardly dared give the order.

It seemed impossible that we could touch anything without losing it, and then our last hope would have been gone.”

The terror of that gale was on him yet. I let him go on for a bit, then said, casually--as if returning to a minor subject:

”You were very anxious to give up your mate to the sh.o.r.e people, I believe?”

He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected of ”countenancing any doings of that sort.” Seven-and-thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation.

”And you know,” he went on, groping shame-facedly amongst his feelings, ”I did not engage that young fellow. His people had some interest with my owners. I was in a way forced to take him on. He looked very smart, very gentlemanly, and all that. But do you know--I never liked him, somehow. I am a plain man. You see, he wasn't exactly the sort for the chief mate of a s.h.i.+p like the Sephora.”

I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the chief mate of a s.h.i.+p like the Sephora. I had no doubt of it in my mind.

”Not at all the style of man. You understand,” he insisted, superfluously, looking hard at me.

I smiled urbanely. He seemed at a loss for a while.

”I suppose I must report a suicide.”

”Beg pardon?”

”Suicide! That's what I'll have to write to my owners directly I get in.”

”Unless you manage to recover him before tomorrow,” I a.s.sented, dispa.s.sionately.... ”I mean, alive.”

He mumbled something which I really did not catch, and I turned my ear to him in a puzzled manner. He fairly bawled:

”The land--I say, the mainland is at least seven miles off my anchorage.”

”About that.”

My lack of excitement, of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of p.r.o.nounced interest, began to arouse his distrust. But except for the felicitous pretense of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything. I had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and therefore was afraid to try. It is also certain that he had brought some ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a strange and unnatural phenomenon. And yet how else could I have received him? Not heartily! That was impossible for psychological reasons, which I need not state here. My only object was to keep off his inquiries. Surlily? Yes, but surliness might have provoked a point-blank question. From its novelty to him and from its nature, punctilious courtesy was the manner best calculated to restrain the man. But there was the danger of his breaking through my defense bluntly. I could not, I think, have met him by a direct lie, also for psychological (not moral) reasons. If he had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of ident.i.ty with the other to the test! But, strangely enough--(I thought of it only afterwards)--I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded him of the man he was seeking--suggested a mysterious similitude to the young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the first.

However that might have been, the silence was not very prolonged. He took another oblique step.

”I reckon I had no more than a two-mile pull to your s.h.i.+p. Not a bit more.”

”And quite enough, too, in this awful heat,” I said.

Another pause full of mistrust followed. Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions. And I was afraid he would ask me point-blank for news of my other self.

”Nice little saloon, isn't it?” I remarked, as if noticing for the first time the way his eyes roamed from one closed door to the other. ”And very well fitted out, too. Here, for instance,” I continued, reaching over the back of my seat negligently and flinging the door open, ”is my bathroom.”