a tug hauled us free on the next tide, and rounding a bend in the river, we came upon our adversary in precisely the same predicament, we passed him in silence, the most satisfying silence I have ever indulged in.
Without a dissentient voice, the task of choosing and stowing the provisions was relegated to Peter—— "A woman is so much better at that sort of thing." Steve and I admitted as much, with touching magnanimity.
In due course a cart backed up to the quayside, and an active little grocer proceeded to heap the dream ship's deck with comestibles—tinned, boxed, and jarred. These we passed through the skylights, before an admiring audience of fisher-folk, and Peter, being ambidextrous, contrived to stow them in the lockers with one hand and make a list of them with the other.
I have my own notions about provisioning a dream ship in the future—if for me there is a future in dream ships. During the following year we proved, to our own dissatisfaction, that although tinned food is mighty handy, it is not a healthy continuous diet... No, I see myself laying in salt junk of the windjammer variety, plenty of waterglassed eggs and condensed milk, good ship's biscuits, a "crock" of hand-salted butter, dried fruits, jam or marmalade to taste, pickled beetroot for the blood, flour, raisins, and baking powder, Scotch oatmeal, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and lard, and nothing else whatsoever. It may be asked: "What else could there possibly be?"—to which I make answer: "A hundred and one canned atrocities, such as Somebody's curried giblets, or Somebody Else's evaporated tripe, that it were better if one consigned to the deep than ate." It is extraordinary the number of useless things one can be lured into acquiring while "fitting out," and we of the dream ship bought most of them.
"Barter" was Peter's idea. In her mind the word was inalienably associated with the South Sea Islands, and were we not bound thither? It was only another example of her boundless optimism. Steve and I might furtively discuss the number of miles between ourselves and our goal, the probable discomfitures by the way, even the possibility of not getting there at all. Not so Peter. We were going to the South Sea Islands, and to go to the South Sea Islands without "barter" was a thing undreamed of in her philosophy. Hence a hurried pilgrimage to London, and the purchase, out of our rapidly diminishing capital, of variegated prints, looking-glasses, imitation tortoise-shell hair combs, Jew's harps, and brown paper belts.
On our return, the Skipper, who had remained aboard as watchman during our absence, displayed a certain uneasiness, the cause of which was hard to determine. He expressed his keen admiration for the dream ship, as he had often done before, and then paused, until goaded into the confession that he wished he thought as much of her crew. That is not how he put it, but that was what he meant, and we were inclined to agree with him. In other words, it was on the dear old man's conscience that he was letting us go to sea with insufficient knowledge, a scruple as rare as it is refreshing these days. We immediately and unanimously pointed out that there was only one way out of the dilemma, and that was for him to accompany us. He shook his grizzled head, and smiled wistfully; said it was twenty years since he had been to sea, that he was too old, that his "missus" would never let him go, and finally, with a twinkle in his keen blue eye, that he would come as far as Spain "just to get us into the hang of longitude," whereat we fell upon him in a pæan of gratitude.
Behold, then, the crew of the dream ship ready to sail, with a combined capital of one hundred pounds sterling, and a clearance for Brisbane, Australia.
AT VIGO, OFF THE COAST OF SPAIN
Some confessions and a few morals
Chapter III headpiece
CHAPTER III
Some confessions and a few morals
At six o'clock the next morning a small, depressed-looking procession wended its way to the quay, followed by the sidelong glances and whispered comments of the fish-market fraternity.
It was the noble army of dream merchants setting forth on its quest. And why depressed? I do not know, except that, personally, on the eve of any problematical undertaking I feel that way, and so, apparently, do others. Perhaps it was that the enthusiasm of ignorance had momentarily deserted us, and we were awed by a rational glimpse of the task that lay ahead. Such moods vanish the instant one gets down to work, the great panacea, but until then they crouch on the shoulders, a dour company.
In silence we rowed out to the dream ship, and hoisted sail. I was going to say that in silence we lowered the dinghy on to its chocks, but, as a fact, the keel descended on the Skipper's toe, extracting a shout of anguish from that usually restrained mariner.
Almost simultaneously, and for no apparent reason, Steve took an involuntary seat on the open skylight, which shut with a crash on one of his fingers.
The moorings were cast off prematurely, and, getting under way on the wrong tack, we sailed, with the utmost precision, into a neighbouring fishing-smack, nearly breaking our bowsprit.
I could imagine the grinning heads of the fisher folk lining the breakwater wall.
"They be goin' ter the South Sea Islands, they be!" I could almost hear them saying, and dived below to show them what a motor auxiliary could do. There were one hundred and fifty vessels moored in that harbour, and I should not like to say how many we fouled during the next half hour. Indeed I could not, for throughout the process I was wrestling with the engine, which refused to budge—until we had rounded the breakwater, and there was no further use for it. Such is the way of these necessary evils aboard a sailing ship.
Coming on deck, I was confronted with a sorry spectacle. Our port light-board was in splinters. Relics of vessels we had caressed in parting littered the deck. The Skipper was in the steering well, with the tiller in one hand and his toe in the other; and Peter was administering iodine and lint to Steve's crushed finger.
"She goes!" I triumphed, tactlessly referring to my Herculean labours with the engine.
"D'you think it's broken?" demanded the Skipper, extending an enormous, bootless foot.
"Flat as a pancake," muttered Steve.
Which gives a fair idea of the trend of individual thought on occasions.
But at long last we were off! Off before a seven-knot nor'-wester, and with only twelve thousand miles to go! What else mattered?
Sailboat, flying fish
By the time we had picked up an intermittent pallor on the horizon that was Ushant light at a distance of thirty miles, the wind had strengthened to half a gale, and there was nothing the dream ship loved more dearly than half a gale on the quarter. In a series of exhilarating swoops, it flung her down into the Bay of Biscay; but what she did not like was being left there to roll helplessly in a windless swell. I have to call it a "swell," just as I have to say we "rolled," though neither word conveys our subsequent acrobatics in the least.
"The Bay" has an unsavoury reputation anyway, but for sheer unpleasantness commend me to the mood in which the dream ship made its acquaintance.
Literally from beam end to beam end we lurched. The engine was useless. Our propeller was out of the quarter, and under present circumstances as much out of the water as in it.
Any one aboard capable of sea-sickness, promptly was. The Skipper who, it must be confessed, had not been able to eat since setting sail, though he clung to his duties like a Stoic, was as near plaintive as I have ever seen him. Curiously enough, his malady took the form of conjuring visions of his good wife's cooking. I honestly believe that if we had been able to produce the roast beef, cabbage, and "figgy dough" of his own home table, he would have eaten. But all we could offer him was bovril, tongue, and tinned asparagus. We did not know how to live, he assured us. On the schooner in the old days he had a stove, not one of these newfangled tin contraptions. And his wife cooked. And when she cooked, she cooked! Figgy dough that melted in the mouth.
At