bears eight points off the wind; but we haven’t got any wind, for all the barometer falling. Where’s his centre now?’

‘We will get the wind presently,’ mumbled Jukes.

‘Let it come, then,’ said Captain MacWhirr, with dignified indignation. ‘It’s only to let you see, Mr Jukes, that you don’t find everything in books. All these rules for dodging breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr Jukes, seem to me the maddest thing, when you come to look at it sensibly.’

He raised his eyes, saw Jukes gazing at him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his meaning.

‘About as queer as your extraordinary notion of dodging the ship head to sea, for I don’t know how long, to make the Chinamen comfortable; whereas all we’ve got to do is to take them to Fu-chau, being timed to get there before noon on Friday. If the weather delays me—very well. There’s your log-book to talk straight about the weather. But suppose I went swinging off my course and came in two days late, and they asked me: ‘Where have you been all that time, Captain?” What could I say to that? “Went around to dodge the bad weather,” I would say. “It must’ve been dam’ bad,” they would say. “Don’t know,” I would have to say; “I’ve dodged clear of it.” See that, Jukes? I have been thinking it all out this afternoon.’

He looked up again in his unseeing, unimaginative way. No one had ever heard him say so much at one time. Jukes, with his arms open in the doorway, was like a man invited to behold a miracle. Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance.

‘A gale is a gale, Mr Jukes,’ resumed the Captain, ‘and a fullpowered steam-ship has got to face it. There’s just so much dirty weather knocking about the world, and the proper thing is to go through it with none of what old Captain Wilson of the Melita calls “storm strategy”. The other day ashore I heard him hold forth about it to a lot of shipmasters who came in and sat at a table next to mine. It seemed to me the greatest nonsense. He was telling them how he—outmanoeuvred, I think he said, a terrific gale, so that it never came nearer than fifty miles to him. A neat piece of headwork he called it. How he knew there was a terrific gale fifty miles off beats me altogether It was like listening to a crazy man. I would have thought Captain Wilson was old enough to know better.’

Captain MacWhirr ceased for a moment, then said, ‘It’s your watch below, Mr Jukes?’

Jukes came to himself with a start. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Leave orders to call me at the slightest change,’ said the Captain. He reached up to put the book away, and tucked his legs up on the couch. ‘Shut the door so that it don’t fly open, will you? I can’t stand a door banging. They’ve put a lot of rubbishy locks into this ship, I must say.’

Captain MacWhirr closed his eyes.

He did so to rest himself. He was tired, and he experienced that state of mental vacuity which comes at the end of an exhaustive discussion that has liberated some belief matured in the course of meditative years. He had indeed been making his confession of faith, had he only known it; and its effect was to make Jukes, on the other side of the door, stand scratching his head for a good while.

Captain MacWhirr opened his eyes.

He thought he must have been asleep. What was that loud noise? Wind? Why had he not been called? The lamp wriggled in its gimbals, the barometer swung in circles, the table altered its slant every moment; a pair of limp seaboots with collapsed tops went sliding past the couch. He put out his hand instantly, and captured one.