How it got there, how it had crept up so high, I couldn’t say.  It had an ominous appearance.  The air did not stir.  At a renewed invitation from Ransome I did go down into the cabin to—­in his own words—­“try and eat something.”  I don’t know that the trial was very successful.  I suppose at that period I did exist on food in the usual way; but the memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant exciting and consuming at the same time.

It’s the only period of my life in which I attempted to keep a diary.  No, not the only one.  Years later, in conditions of moral isolation, I did put down on paper the thoughts and events of a score of days.  But this was the first time.  I don’t remember how it came about or how the pocketbook and the pencil came into my hands.  It’s inconceivable that I should have looked for them on purpose.  I suppose they saved me from the crazy trick of talking to myself.

Strangely enough, in both cases I took to that sort of thing in circumstances in which I did not expect, in colloquial phrase, “to come out of it.”  Neither could I expect the record to outlast me.  This shows that it was purely a personal need for intimate relief and not a call of egotism.

Here I must give another sample of it, a few detached lines, now looking very ghostly to my own eyes, out of the part scribbled that very evening: 

*****

“There is something going on in the sky like a decomposition; like a corruption of the air, which remains as still as ever.  After all, mere clouds, which may or may not hold wind or rain.  Strange that it should trouble me so.  I feel as if all my sins had found me out.  But I suppose the trouble is that the ship is still lying motionless, not under command; and that I have nothing to do to keep my imagination from running wild amongst the disastrous images of the worst that may befall us.  What’s going to happen?  Probably nothing.  Or anything.  It may be a furious squall coming, butt end foremost.  And on deck there are five men with the vitality and the strength, of say, two.  We may have all our sails blown away.  Every stitch of canvas has been on her since we broke ground at the mouth of the Mei-nam, fifteen days ago . . . or fifteen centuries.  It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow.  Yes, sails may very well be blown away.  And that would be like a death sentence on the men.  We haven’t strength enough on board to bend another suit; incredible thought, but it is true.  Or we may even get dismasted.  Ships have been dismasted in squalls simply because they weren’t handled quick enough, and we have no power to whirl the yards around.  It’s like being bound hand and foot preparatory to having one’s throat cut.  And what appals me most of all is that I shrink from going on deck to face it.  It’s due to the ship, it’s due to the men who are there on deck—­some of them, ready to put out the last remnant of their strength at a word from me.  And I am shrinking from it.  From the mere vision.  My first command.  Now I understand that strange sense of insecurity in my past.  I always suspected that I might be no good.  And here is proof positive.  I am shirking it.  I am no good.”