2

What the time was next morning when I woke I do not know, for the saloon was too dark to show the clock, over the fireplace.  But the skylight was a pale cube of daylight, and through it I could see a halyard quivering and swaying, apparently in a high wind.  My bench was in a continuous tremor.

We were off again.  Somebody appeared at the doorway, a pull of cotton waste in his hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugubrious by white lines which sweat had channelled downwards through its coal dust.  It looked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant yet full of unutterable reproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly.  It was the second engineer.  He said it was a clear morning.  We had been under way an hour.  He had got sixty revolutions now.  He then receded into the gloom beyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of two disembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had won seventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny about the way the skipper shuffled cards.

Feeling as though I were in one piece, I got up, made my joints bend again, and went on deck.  Our ship, tilting at the immobile world, might have upset the morning, which was pouring a bath of cold air over us.  The overcoat of the skipper, who was pacing the bridge, flapped in this steady current.  A low coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior to the flawless glass of the Thames.  By the look of it, we were the first ever to break the tranquillity of that stream.  We ourselves made scarcely a sound; we could have been attempting a swift, secret and, so far, unchallenged escape.  The shores unfolded in a panorama without form.  Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights following us like eyes.  In the horny light of that winter dawn we overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern.  We made a course east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin and Gunfleet lights winked in their iron gibbets.  Above the shallows of the Burrows Shoal the masts projected awry of the wreck of a three-masted schooner, and they could have been the fingers of the drowned making a last clutch at nothing.

We got abreast of Orfordness, and went through the gate of the North Channel upon a wide grey plain.  We were fairly at sea.  We were out.  The Windhover, being free, I suppose, began to dance.  The sun came up.  The seas were on the march.  Just behind us was London, asleep and unsuspecting under the brown depression of its canopy; and as to this surprise of light and space so near to that city, so easily entered, yet for so long merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our streets to which the ships and the wharves gave credence—­how shall the report of it sound true?  Not at all, except to those who still hold to a faith, through all foul times, in the chance hints of a better world.