You fellows know there are those voyages that
seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol
of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do
kill yourself, trying to accomplish something--and you can't. Not
from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor
little--not a thing in the world--not even marry an old maid, or get a
wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.
"It was altogether a memorable affair. It was my first voyage to the
East, and my first voyage as second mate; it was also my skipper's first
command. You'll admit it was time. He was sixty if a day; a little man,
with a broad, not very straight back, with bowed shoulders and one leg
more bandy than the other, he had that queer twisted-about appearance
you see so often in men who work in the fields. He had a nut-cracker
face--chin and nose trying to come together over a sunken mouth--and it
was framed in iron-grey fluffy hair, that looked like a chin strap of
cotton-wool sprinkled with coal-dust. And he had blue eyes in that
old face of his, which were amazingly like a boy's, with that candid
expression some quite common men preserve to the end of their days by
a rare internal gift of simplicity of heart and rectitude of soul.
What induced him to accept me was a wonder. I had come out of a crack
Australian clipper, where I had been third officer, and he seemed to
have a prejudice against crack clippers as aristocratic and high-toned.
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