This was wonderfully perplexing to me, and, out of my curiosity, I must persuade him to make one more attempt.  His late efforts, I assured him, were nothing but an endeavour to cure nausea with sweet syrups.  He would not get his change out of nature by such pitiful wooing.  Let him, rather, emulate, if he could not feel, the spirit of his remote forbears, and rally his nerves to an expedition into the harsh and awful places of the earth.  I would accompany him, and watch with and for him, and supply that of the fibre he lacked.

“He consented, and, after some difficulty (for there is an economy of room in whalers), we obtained passage in a vessel and sailed into the unknown.  Our life and our food were simple and rugged; but the keen air, the relief from luxury, the novelty and the wonder, wrought upon my companion and renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note in him signs of a moral preening—­some smug resumption of that arrogant air of superiority that is a tradition with your race.”

Miss Groom here puckered her lips, and breathed a little destructive laugh upon her cigarette ash.

“It did not last long,” she said.  “We encountered very bad weather, and his nerves again went by the board.  That was in the 60th longitude, I think (where whales were still to be found in those years), and seven hundred miles or so to the east of Spitzbergen.  On the day—­it was in August—­that the storm first overtook us, the boats were out in pursuit of a ‘right’ whale, as, I believe, the men called it—­a great bull creature, and piebald like a horse; and I saw the spouting of his breath as if a water main had burst in a London fog.  The wind came in a sudden charge from the northwest, and the whale dived with a harpoon in its back; and in the confusion a reel fouled, and one of the boats was whipt under in a moment—­half a mile down, perhaps—­and its crew drawn with it, and their lungs, full of air, burst like bubbles.  We had no time to think of them.  We got the other boat-load on board, and then the gale sent us crashing down the slopes of the sea.  I have no knowledge of how long we were curst of the tempest and the sport of its ravings.  I only know that when it released us at last, we had been hurled a thousand miles eastwards.  The long interval was all a hellish jangle in which time seemed obliterated.  Sometimes we saw the sun—­a furious red globe; and we seemed to stand still while it raced down the sky and ricocheted over the furthermost waves like a red-hot cannon ball.  Sometimes in pitch darkness the wild sense of flight and expectation was an ecstasy.  But through all my friend lay in a half-delirious stupor.

“At length a morning broke, full of icy scud, but the sea panting and exhausted of its rage.  As a child catches its breath after a storm of tears, so it would heave up suddenly, and vibrate, and sink; and we rocked upon it, a ruined hulk.  We were off a flat, vacant shore—­if shore you could call it—­whose margin, for miles inland, it seemed, undulated with the lifting of the swell.  It was treeless desolation manifest; and on our sea side, as far as the eye could reach, the water bobbed and winked with countless spars of ice.