To see him coming aft to the wheel comforted one.  The blue dungaree trousers turned up the calf, one leg a little higher than the other, the clean check shirt, the white canvas cap, evidently made by himself, made up a whole of peculiar smartness, and the persistent jauntiness of his gait, even, poor fellow, when he couldn’t help tottering, told of his invincible spirit.  There was also a man called Gambril.  He was the only grizzled person in the ship.  His face was of an austere type.  But if I remember all their faces, wasting tragically before my eyes, most of their names have vanished from my memory.

The words that passed between us were few and puerile in regard of the situation.  I had to force myself to look them in the face.  I expected to meet reproachful glances.  There were none.  The expression of suffering in their eyes was indeed hard enough to bear.  But that they couldn’t help.  For the rest, I ask myself whether it was the temper of their souls or the sympathy of their imagination that made them so wonderful, so worthy of my undying regard.

For myself, neither my soul was highly tempered, nor my imagination properly under control.  There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but that I had gone mad already; so that I dared not open my lips for fear of betraying myself by some insane shriek.  Luckily I had only orders to give, and an order has a steadying influence upon him who has to give it.  Moreover, the seaman, the officer of the watch, in me was sufficiently sane.  I was like a mad carpenter making a box.  Were he ever so convinced that he was King of Jerusalem, the box he would make would be a sane box.  What I feared was a shrill note escaping me involuntarily and upsetting my balance.  Luckily, again, there was no necessity to raise one’s voice.  The brooding stillness of the world seemed sensitive to the slightest sound, like a whispering gallery.  The conversational tone would almost carry a word from one end of the ship to the other.  The terrible thing was that the only voice that I ever heard was my own.  At night especially it reverberated very lonely amongst the planes of the unstirring sails.

Mr. Burns, still keeping to his bed with that air of secret determination, was moved to grumble at many things.  Our interviews were short five-minute affairs, but fairly frequent.  I was everlastingly diving down below to get a light, though I did not consume much tobacco at that time.  The pipe was always going out; for in truth my mind was not composed enough to enable me to get a decent smoke.  Likewise, for most of the time during the twenty-four hours I could have struck matches on deck and held them aloft till the flame burnt my fingers.  But I always used to run below.  It was a change.  It was the only break in the incessant strain; and, of course, Mr. Burns through the open door could see me come in and go out every time.

With his knees gathered up under his chin and staring with his greenish eyes over them, he was a weird figure, and with my knowledge of the crazy notion in his head, not a very attractive one for me.  Still, I had to speak to him now and then, and one day he complained that the ship was very silent.  For hours and hours, he said, he was lying there, not hearing a sound, till he did not know what to do with himself.