'Oh, nonsense, Bartels, it's quite safe.'

'Safe! And have I not found you fast on Hohenhörn, in a storm, with
your rudder broken? God was good to you then, my son.'

'Yes, but it wasn't my f--' Davies checked himself. 'We're going
home. There's nothing in that.' Bartels became sadly resigned.

'It is good that you have a friend,' was his last word on the
subject; but all the same he always glanced at me with a rather
doubtful eye. As to Davies and myself, our friendship developed
quickly on certain limited lines, the chief obstacle, as I well know
now, being his reluctance to talk about the personal side of our
quest.

On the other hand, I spoke about my own life and interests, with an
unsparing discernment, of which I should have been incapable a month
ago, and in return I gained the key to his own character. It was
devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism
struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical
expression; a humanity, born of acute sensitiveness to his own
limitations, only adding fuel to the flame. I learnt for the first
time now that in early youth he had failed for the navy, the first of
several failures in his career. 'And I can't settle down to anything
else,' he said. 'I read no end about it, and yet I am a useless
outsider. All I've been able to do is to potter about in small boats;
but it's all been _wasted_ till this chance came. I'm afraid you'll
not understand how I feel about it; but at last, for once in a way, I
see a chance of being useful.'