Our engine-bell rang for us to part company.  Our little friend dropped astern.  She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keep her alive in that stupendous and hurrying world.  A man on her raised his arm to us in salute, and she vanished.

4

The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered to the subject of Jonah.  We should now have been with our fleet, but were alone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely as another.  “This hasn’t happened to me for years,” he apologized.  He stared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, and whistled reflectively.  He turned to the man at the wheel.  “Take her east for an hour, and then north for an hour,” and went below.

Day returned briefly at sunset.  It was an astonishing gift.  The clouds rapidly lifted and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to a bright horizon, hard and polished, a clear separation of our planet and heaven.  The waves were still ponderous.  The Windhover laboured heavily.  We rolled over the bright slopes aimlessly.  She would rear till the forward deck stuck up in front of us, then drop over, flinging us against the dodger, and the shock would surround her with foam that was an eruption of greenish light.

The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea.  The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble.  There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose.  When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by a glow that was without.  The purple waters took the light from above and the waves turned to flames.  The fountains that mounted at the bows and fell inboard came as showers of gems. (I heard afterwards it was still foggy in London.) And now, having made all I can of sunset and ocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, emeralds, zircons, rubies, peridots, and sapphires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid the saloon, the thought of which, for an obscure reason, my mind loathed.

And our saloon, compared with the measure of the twilight emptiness now about us, was no bigger than the comfort a man feels amid mischance when he remembers that he is still virtuous.  The white cloth on its table, I noticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by a long and sinful life.  But the men round it were good and hearty.  I took my share of ham and fish on the same plate, and began to feel not so hungry as before.  I was informed that ashore we are too particular about trifles, because we have the room for it, but on a trawler there is not much room.  You have to squeeze together, and make do with what is there, because fish is the most important passenger.  My hunk of bread was placed where the cloth bore the imprint of a negro’s hand.  The mugs of tea were massive, and sweetish (I could