and came back clinging to the bulkheads. The gratings underfoot were
nearly afloat; with every sweeping blow of a sea, water squirted
violently through the cracks all round the door, and the man at the
helm had flung down his cap, his coat, and stood propped against the
gear-casing in a striped cotton shirt open on his breast. The little
brass wheel in his hands had the appearance of a bright and fragile
toy. The cords of his neck stood hard and lean, a dark patch lay in the
hollow of his throat, and his face was still and sunken as in death.

Captain MacWhirr wiped his eyes. The sea that had nearly taken him
overboard had, to his great annoyance, washed his sou'-wester hat off
his bald head. The fluffy, fair hair, soaked and darkened, resembled a
mean skein of cotton threads festooned round his bare skull. His face,
glistening with sea-water, had been made crimson with the wind, with
the sting of sprays. He looked as though he had come off sweating from
before a furnace.

"You here?" he muttered, heavily.

The second mate had found his way into the wheelhouse some time before.
He had fixed himself in a corner with his knees up, a fist pressed
against each temple; and this attitude suggested rage, sorrow,
resignation, surrender, with a sort of concentrated unforgiveness. He
said mournfully and defiantly, "Well, it's my watch below now: ain't
it?"

The steam gear clattered, stopped, clattered again; and the helmsman's
eyeballs seemed to project out of a hungry face as if the compass card
behind the binnacle glass had been meat. God knows how long he had been
left there to steer, as if forgotten by all his shipmates. The bells had