of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative. The fury of the New South
Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim,
faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could
get below: the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a
gun that hangs fire; those men did not belong to the world of heroic
adventure; they weren't bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself . . .
His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued
gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was
too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The
quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but
they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was
different. . . . Would the skipper go for the engineer? . . . The life
was easy and he was too sure of himself--too sure of himself to . . .
The line dividing his meditation from a surreptitious doze on his feet
was thinner than a thread in a spider's web.