CHAPTER 11

’He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being.  The dim candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for a moment, glowed and expired.  “You are an awful good sort to listen like this,” he said.  “It does me good.  You don’t know what it is to me.  You don’t” . . . words seemed to fail him.  It was a distinct glimpse.  He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat! . . .  Yes; I had a glimpse of him then . . . and it was not the last of that kind. . . .  “You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed—­make a clean breast of it to an elder man.  It is so difficult—­so awfully unfair—­so hard to understand.”

’The mists were closing again.  I don’t know how old I appeared to him—­and how much wise.  Not half as old as I felt just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be.  Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire.  There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward.  What we get—­well, we won’t talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile?  In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—­in no other is the beginning all illusion—­the disenchantment more swift—­the subjugation more complete.  Hadn’t we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation?  What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling—­the feeling that binds a man to a child.  He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile.  And he had been deliberating