To this fact, as it were of nature, I responded instinctively; which may be taken as a proof that for a moment I must have been robbed of my reason.

I was certainly off my balance, a prey to impulse, for at the bottom of the stairs I turned and flung myself at the doorway of Mr. Burns’ cabin.  The wildness of his aspect checked my mental disorder.  He was sitting up in his bunk, his body looking immensely long, his head drooping a little sideways, with affected complacency.  He flourished, in his trembling hand, on the end of a forearm no thicker than a walking-stick, a shining pair of scissors which he tried before my very eyes to jab at his throat.

I was to a certain extent horrified; but it was rather a secondary sort of effect, not really strong enough to make me yell at him in some such manner as:  “Stop!” . . .  “Heavens!” . . .  “What are you doing?”

In reality he was simply overtaxing his returning strength in a shaky attempt to clip off the thick growth of his red beard.  A large towel was spread over his lap, and a shower of stiff hairs, like bits of copper wire, was descending on it at every snip of the scissors.

He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams, one cheek all bushy as if with a swollen flame, the other denuded and sunken, with the untouched long moustache on that side asserting itself, lonely and fierce.  And while he stared thunderstruck, with the gaping scissors on his fingers, I shouted my discovery at him fiendishly, in six words, without comment.

V

I heard the clatter of the scissors escaping from his hand, noted the perilous heave of his whole person over the edge of the bunk after them, and then, returning to my first purpose, pursued my course on the deck.  The sparkle of the sea filled my eyes.  It was gorgeous and barren, monotonous and without hope under the empty curve of the sky.  The sails hung motionless and slack, the very folds of their sagging surfaces moved no more than carved granite.  The impetuosity of my advent made the man at the helm start slightly.  A block aloft squeaked incomprehensibly, for what on earth could have made it do so?  It was a whistling note like a bird’s.  For a long, long time I faced an empty world, steeped in an infinity of silence, through which the sunshine poured and flowed for some mysterious purpose.  Then I heard Ransome’s voice at my elbow.

“I have put Mr. Burns back to bed, sir.”

“You have.”

“Well, sir, he got out, all of a sudden, but when he let go the edge of his bunk he fell down.  He isn’t light-headed, though, it seems to me.”

“No,” I said dully, without looking at Ransome.  He waited for a moment, then cautiously, as if not to give offence:  “I don’t think we need lose much of that stuff, sir,” he said, “I can sweep it up, every bit of it almost, and then we could sift the glass out.  I will go about it at once.  It will not make the breakfast late, not ten minutes.”