Electric lights, a shed-covered wharf, mountains of luggage and freight, the noisy toil of ’longshoremen and sailors, the staccato snorts of donkey engines and the whining sheaves as running lines ran through the blocks, a crowd of white-coated stewards carrying hand-baggage, the quartermaster at the gangway foot, the gangway sloping steeply up to the Umatilla’s promenade deck, more quartermasters and gold-laced ship’s officers at the head of the gangway, and more crowd and confusion blocking the narrow deck—­thus Michael knew, beyond all peradventure, that he had come back to the sea and its ships, where he had first met Steward, where he had been always with Steward, save for the recent nightmare period in the great city.  Nor was there absent from the flashing visions of his consciousness the images and memories of Kwaque and Cocky.  Whining eagerly, he strained at the leash, risking his tender toes among the many inconsiderate, restless, leather-shod feet of the humans, as he quested and scented for Cocky and Kwaque, and, most of all, for Steward.

Michael accepted his disappointment in not immediately meeting them, for from the dawn of consciousness, the limitations and restrictions of dogs in relation to humans had been hammered into him in the form of concepts of patience.  The patience of waiting, when he wanted to go home and when Steward continued to sit at table and talk and drink beer, was his, as was the patience of the rope around the neck, the fence too high to scale, the narrowed-walled room with the closed door which he could never unlatch but which humans unlatched so easily.  So that he permitted himself to be led away by the ship’s butcher, who on the Umatilla had the charge of all dog passengers.  Immured in a tiny between-decks cubby which was filled mostly with boxes and bales, tied as well by the rope around his neck, he waited from moment to moment for the door to open and admit, realised in the flesh, the resplendent vision of Steward which blazed through the totality of his consciousness.

Instead, although Michael did not guess it then, and, only later, divined it as a vague manifestation of power on the part of Del Mar, the well-tipped ship’s butcher opened the door, untied him, and turned him over to the well-tipped stateroom steward who led him to Del Mar’s stateroom.  Up to the last, Michael was convinced that he was being led to Steward.  Instead, in the stateroom, he found only Del Mar.  “No Steward,” might be described as Michael’s thought; but by patience, as his mood and key, might be described his acceptance of further delay in meeting up with his god, his best beloved, his Steward who was his own human god amidst the multitude of human gods he was encountering.

Michael wagged his tail, flattened his ears, even his crinkled ear, a trifle, and smiled, all in a casual way of recognition, smelled out the room to make doubly sure that there was no scent of Steward, and lay down on the floor.  When Del Mar spoke to him, he looked up and gazed at him.