The skipper began to speak.  At that moment I was gazing at the funnel, trying to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapid and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making the crooked straight.  It was the man with the brown paper parcel.  That was still under his arm—­in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas, and there was hardly enough paper.  The respect of the mate was not lessened by this.

The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway.  He walked to the other side of the ship, and inspected something there.  Conned her length, called up in a friendly but authoritative way to an engineer standing by an amid-ship rail above.  He came back to the mate, and with an easy precision directed his will on others, through his deputy, up to the time of sailing.  He beckoned to me, who also, apparently, was under his august orders, and turned, as though perfectly aware that in this place I should follow him meekly, in full obedience.

Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a drive of wind and rain.  There were bewildering and unrelated lights about us.  Peremptory challenges were shouted to us from nowhere.  Sirens blared out of dark voids.  And there was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement at home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an immense insentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands in his pockets, and turned to tell me what a cold night it was.  The pier-head searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his brows knitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign of the pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, and care not at all.  In my berth that night I searched for a moral for this narrative, but went to sleep before I found it.

VI.  The Ship-Runners

1

The Negro Boy tavern is known by few people in its own parish, for it is a house with nothing about it to distinguish its fame to those who do not know that a man may say to his friend, when their ships go different ways out of Callao, “I may meet you at the Negro Boy some day.”  It is in a road which returns to the same point, or near to it, after a fatiguing circuit of the Isle of Dogs.  No part of the road is better than the rest.  It is merely a long road.  That day when I first heard of Bill Purdy I was going to the tavern hoping to meet Macandrew, Chief of the Medea.  His ship was in again.  But there was nobody about.  There was nothing in sight but the walls, old, sad, and discreet, of the yards where ships are repaired.  The dock warehouses opposite the tavern offered me their high backs in a severer and apparently an endless obduracy.  The Negro Boy, as usual, was lost and forlorn, but resigned to its seclusion from the London that lives, having stood there long enough to learn that nothing can control the ways of changing custom.  Its windows were modest and prim in green curtains.