When he was seventeen....  He was not at all sure that those three years he had spent at sea were not the best time of his life.  It came back to him, the salt enchantment of that time; the excitement in his heart, the ironic serenity of the surrounding world, on that dawn when he stood on the deck of his first ship as it sailed out of the Thames to the open sea.  The mouth of the river was barred by a rosy, drowsy sunrise; the sky had lost its stars, and had blenched, and was being flooded by a brave daylight blue; the water was changing from a sad silver width to a sheet of white silk, creased with blue lines; the low hills on the southern bank and the flat spit between the estuary and the Medway were at first steamy shapes that might have drowned seamen’s dreams of land, but they took on earthly colours as he watched; and to the north Kerith Island, that had been a blackness running weedy fingers out into the flood, showed its farms and elms standing up to their middles in mist.  He went to the side and stared at the ridge of hills that lay behind the island, that this picture should be clear in his mind at the last if the storms should take him.  There were the four crumbling grey towers of Roothing Castle; and eastward there was Roothing Church, with its squint spire and its sea-gnarled yews about it, and at its base the dazzling white speck which he knew to be his father’s tomb.  He hated that he should be able to see it even from here.  All his life that mausoleum had enraged him.  He counted it a kind of cowardice of his father to have died before his son was a man.  He suspected him of creeping into his coffin as a refuge, of wearing its lead as armour, from fear of his son’s revenges; and the choice of so public a sanctuary as this massive tomb on the hillside was a last insolence.

Eastward, a few fields’ length along the ridge, was the belvedere on his father’s estate.  He had not looked at it for years, but from here it was so little like itself that he could bear to let his eyes dwell on it.  It was built at the fore of a crescent-shaped plantation on the brow of the hill, and the dark woods stretched away on each side of the temple like great green wings spread by a small white bird.  And eastward yet a mile or so, at the end of a line of salt-stunted oaks, was the red block of Yaverland’s End.  Under that thatch was his mother.  She would be asleep now.  Nearly always now she dropped off to sleep before dawn.  With a constriction of the heart he thought of her as she would be looking now, lying very straight in her narrow bed, one arm crooked behind the head and the other rigid by her side, the black drift of her hair drawn across her eyes like a mask and her uncovered mouth speaking very often.  Many of her nights were spent in argument with the dead.  At the picture he felt a rush of love that dizzied him, and he cursed himself for having left her, until the serenity of the white waters and the limpid sky imposed reason on his thoughts as it was imposing harmoniousness on the cries of the seagulls and the shouts of the sailors.  Then he recognised the necessity of this adventure.  It was his duty to her to go out into the world and do great things.  He had said so very definitely to himself, and had turned back to his work with a scowl of resolution.  So that boy, thirteen years before....