The mandoline began to play again “La Donna e Mobile.”  Louis’s voice broke into the music and the lashing water.

“They’re cowards, my people, mean little cowards.  That’s why I’m a coward!  I’m a beastly, bally sort of half-breed, don’t you know!  Do you know why they give me a pound a week?  Partly, of course, it’s to bribe me to keep away.  They’ve no other weapon but that.  But mostly it’s because they’re so miserably sentimental they can’t bear to think of me starving or sleeping out all night!  Ough!  If they weren’t such miserable cowards they’d know I’d be better dead than chained to the end of a row of pound-notes.  They’d have kicked me out, and let me either buck up or die.”

“But—­oh, I do wish Dr. Angus or Wullie were here!  I know there’s an answer to all that, but I’m such an idiot I can’t find it,” she cried despairingly.

“I’ll do them!  I’ll get my own back on them!  I’m damned if I’ll do as they expect me to.  If they’d only seen me last time in Auckland,” and he gave an ugly laugh.  “Do you think I lived on their bally pound a week?  Why, I spent that in half a day!  Sometimes I wouldn’t call for it for five weeks.  I’d go past the Post Office every day, knowing it was there, and torturing myself with the thought of what I could buy with it, and leaving it there till I’d got five pounds and could drink myself to hell!”

She shivered.  She could hear him grinding his teeth as he sat close to her.  She felt the same inarticulate helplessness that she had felt about all the miseries of Lashnagar.  She wanted, most passionately, to do something for him.  His telling her about it was, in itself, a challenge.

“But how did you live all the time, wasting your money like that?”

He laughed harshly.

“It’s easy to live south the line—­in Australasia, anyway, if you’re a drunkard.  There’s a lot of money about, you know.  Men come from up-country with a big cheque to knock out—­shearers and men like that, who live in the backblocks for months, hundreds of miles from hotels.  They come down from the backblocks with perhaps a hundred pounds to spend on a week of blissful unconsciousness.  Sailors come in and get paid off too.  There’s a lot of freehandedness.  They treat the whole bar.  If you won’t drink with them, they knock you out of time before you know where you are, sit on your chest and pour it down your neck.  Once you’re in a pub in Australia you can stay in all day on nothing.  And you can get in for threepence—­the price of a pint of beer.  And you don’t get out till you’re kicked out drunk.”

“Oh—­” she gasped.

“The devil of it is getting hold of the threepence.  Sometimes you meet a pal and borrow it.  Sometimes you pawn something and get it.  If the Home boat’s in, you go down to the quay, pick out a new chum—­that’s anyone from the Old Country—­offer to show him round a bit, and he naturally treats you.  Then you’re in the haven.”