Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get more coal.  From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into port, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing.  This gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected.  Imagination, which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab in London.  A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk it had left behind.  But here we were with our ship plunging round the compass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the others,

But at last we had them.  We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers.  Their admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left “ours” at six that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west.  It was then eleven o’clock.  Hopefully the Windhover put about.  We held on for three hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves.  The skipper then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below.  The mate asked what course he should steer.  “Take the damned ship where you like,” said the skipper.  “I’m going to sleep.”  He was away ten minutes.  He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge.  The helmsman grinned at the mate.  By then the wind had fallen, the seas were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight, insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.

6

There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise than to enjoy it that way instead.  What did I care when they complained at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before?  What did that matter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last, really open?  Fine weather for December!  Across that patch of blue, which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity.  And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes’ thumbs were more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light?  Not in the least.  For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense.  If this was what was meant by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of happiness in the capitals of the rich.  Yet mornings of such a quality cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.