III

The first thing I saw down there was the upper part of a man’s body projecting backward, as it were, from one of the doors at the foot of the stairs.  His eyes looked at me very wide and still.  In one hand he held a dinner plate, in the other a cloth.

“I am your new Captain,” I said quietly.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he had got rid of the plate and the cloth and jumped to open the cabin door.  As soon as I passed into the saloon he vanished, but only to reappear instantly, buttoning up a jacket he had put on with the swiftness of a “quick-change” artist.

“Where’s the chief mate?” I asked.

“In the hold, I think, sir.  I saw him go down the after-hatch ten minutes ago.”

“Tell him I am on board.”

The mahogany table under the skylight shone in the twilight like a dark pool of water.  The sideboard, surmounted by a wide looking-glass in an ormulu frame, had a marble top.  It bore a pair of silver-plated lamps and some other pieces—­obviously a harbour display.  The saloon itself was panelled in two kinds of wood in the excellent simple taste prevailing when the ship was built.

I sat down in the armchair at the head of the table—­the captain’s chair, with a small tell-tale compass swung above it—­a mute reminder of unremitting vigilance.

A succession of men had sat in that chair.  I became aware of that thought suddenly, vividly, as though each had left a little of himself between the four walls of these ornate bulkheads; as if a sort of composite soul, the soul of command, had whispered suddenly to mine of long days at sea and of anxious moments.

“You, too!” it seemed to say, “you, too, shall taste of that peace and that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self—­obscure as we were and as supreme in the face of all the winds and all the seas, in an immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives.”

Deep within the tarnished ormulu frame, in the hot half-light sifted through the awning, I saw my own face propped between my hands.  And I stared back at myself with the perfect detachment of distance, rather with curiosity than with any other feeling, except of some sympathy for this latest representative of what for all intents and purposes was a dynasty, continuous not in blood indeed, but in its experience, in its training, in its conception of duty, and in the blessed simplicity of its traditional point of view on life.

It struck me that this quietly staring man whom I was watching, both as if he were myself and somebody else, was not exactly a lonely figure.  He had his place in a line of men whom he did not know, of whom he had never heard; but who were fashioned by the same influences, whose souls in relation to their humble life’s work had no secrets for him.

Suddenly I perceived that there was another man in the saloon, standing a little on one side and looking intently at me.  The chief mate.  His long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.