protruding above. We went aloft to furl the sails. We coughed on the
yards, and were careful about the bunts. Do you see the lot of us there,
putting a neat furl on the sails of that ship doomed to arrive nowhere?
There was not a man who didn't think that at any moment the masts would
topple over. From aloft we could not see the ship for smoke, and
they worked carefully, passing the gaskets with even turns. 'Harbour
furl--aloft there!' cried Mahon from below.

"You understand this? I don't think one of those chaps expected to get
down in the usual way. When we did I heard them saying to each other,
'Well, I thought we would come down overboard, in a lump--sticks and
all--blame me if I didn't.' 'That's what I was thinking to myself,'
would answer wearily another battered and bandaged scarecrow. And, mind,
these were men without the drilled-in habit of obedience. To an onlooker
they would be a lot of profane scallywags without a redeeming
point. What made them do it--what made them obey me when I, thinking
consciously how fine it was, made them drop the bunt of the foresail
twice to try and do it better? What? They had no professional
reputation--no examples, no praise. It wasn't a sense of duty; they all
knew well enough how to shirk, and laze, and dodge--when they had a mind
to it--and mostly they had. Was it the two pounds ten a month that sent
them there? They didn't think their pay half good enough. No; it was
something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don't
say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn't
have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same
way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle,
and masterful like an instinct--a disclosure of something secret--of
that hidden something, that gift, of good or evil that makes racial
difference, that shapes the fate of nations.