“Four months,” said Captain Maturin.

“Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they’ll arrive just in time.”

I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates belonging to a woman who is not my wife.

There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the others practical details, in which I had no share.  A suit of oilskins and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night.  Liosha, aglow with excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide.  We drifted mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Cafe-Restaurant, where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not one of the others took the slightest interest in it.  Jaffery, like a schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth—­it might have been tripe, or bullock’s heart or chitterlings for all he knew or cared.  His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and clatter of the pleasant place.  I have never seen a man exude such plentiful happiness.  Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table, after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight—­I whispered the information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it more piquantly crooked than ever.  Captain Maturin went through the performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty; but his heart—­poor fellow!—­was not in his food.  It was partly in Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of having as cook’s mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century finery, who was sitting next to him.

Captain Maturin took an early leave.  He had various things to do before turning in—­including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook’s mate’s outfit—­and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning.  If his new deck-hand and cook’s mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts, he would see to their adequate reception.

“You wouldn’t like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?” said he, with a grip like—­like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and clamping in a steamer’s machinery—­and athwart his green-grey eyes filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour—­“There’s still time.”

“I would come with pleasure,” said I, “were it not for the fact that all my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet.”