The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Having no thought but this unslumbering thought:

‘Am I not beautiful?  Shall I not be loved?’

Be patient, for they will not understand,

Not till the end of time will they put by

The weaving of slow steps about men’s hearts.”

“But it is well for the world that it is so,” was her comment.

Ah, Symons knew women!  His perfect knowledge she attested when I read that magnificent passage:

“They do not understand that in the world

There grows between the sunlight and the grass

Anything save themselves desirable.

It seems to them that the swift eyes of men

Are made but to be mirrors, not to see

Far-off, disastrous, unattainable things.

‘For are not we,’ they say, ‘the end of all?

Why should you look beyond us?  If you look

Into the night, you will find nothing there:

We also have gazed often at the stars.’”

“It is true,” said Miss West, in the pause I permitted in order to see how she had received the thought.  “We also have gazed often at the stars.”

It was the very thing I had predicted to her face that she would say.

“But wait,” I cried.  “Let me read on.”  And I read:

“‘We, we alone among all beautiful things,

We only are real: for the rest are dreams.

Why will you follow after wandering dreams

When we await you?  And you can but dream

Of us, and in our image fashion them.’”

“True, most true,” she murmured, while all unconsciously pride and power mounted in her eyes.

“A wonderful poem,” she conceded—nay, proclaimed—when I had done.

“But do you not see . . .”  I began impulsively, then abandoned the attempt.  For how could she see, being woman, the “far-off, disastrous, unattainable things,” when she, as she so stoutly averred, had gazed often on the stars?

She?  What could she see, save what all women see—that they only are real, and that all the rest are dreams.

“I am proud to be a daughter of Herodias,” said Miss West.

“Well,” I admitted lamely, “we agree.  You remember it is what I told you you were.”

“I am grateful for the compliment,” she said; and in those long gray eyes of hers were limned and coloured all the satisfaction, and self-certitude and answering complacency of power that constitute so large a part of the seductive mystery and mastery that is possessed by woman.

CHAPTER XX

Heavens!—how I read in this fine weather.  I take so little exercise that my sleep need is very small; and there are so few interruptions, such as life teems with on the land, that I read myself almost stupid.  Recommend me a sea-voyage any time for a man who is behind in his reading.  I am making up years of it.  It is an orgy, a debauch; and I am sure the addled sailors adjudge me the queerest creature on board.

At times, so fuzzy do I get from so much reading, that I am glad for any diversion.  When we strike the doldrums, which lie between the north-east and the south-east trades, I shall have Wada assemble my little twenty-two automatic rifle and try to learn how to shoot.  I used to shoot, when I was a wee lad.  I can remember dragging a shot-gun around with me over the hills.  Also, I possessed an air-rifle, with which, on great occasion, I was even able to slaughter a robin.

While the poop is quite large for promenading, the available space for deck-chairs is limited to the awnings that stretch across from either side of the chart-house and that are of the width of the chart-house.  This space again is restricted to one side or the other according to the slant of the morning and afternoon sun and the freshness of the breeze.  Wherefore, Miss West’s chair and mine are most frequently side by side.  Captain West has a chair, which he infrequently occupies.  He has so little to do in the working of the ship, taking his regular observations and working them up with such celerity, that he is rarely in the chart-room for any length of time.  He elects to spend his hours in the main cabin, not reading, not doing anything save dream with eyes wide open in the draught of wind that pours through the open ports and door from out the huge crojack and the jigger staysails.

Miss West is never idle.  Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering.  Nor will she let the steward touch her father’s fine linen.  In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine.  All hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-chair beside me.  She avers that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things and land-things along with her—even to her pretty china for afternoon tea.

Most essentially is she the woman and home-maker.  She is a born cook.  The steward and Louis prepare dishes extraordinary and de luxe for the cabin table; yet Miss West is able at a moment’s notice to improve on these dishes.  She never lets any of their dishes come on the table without first planning them or passing on them.  She has quick judgment, an unerring taste, and is possessed of the needful steel of decision.  It seems she has only to look at a dish, no matter who has cooked it, and immediately divine its lack or its surplusage, and prescribe a treatment that transforms it into something indescribably different and delicious—My, how I do eat!  I am quite dumbfounded by the unfailing voracity of my appetite.  Already am I quite convinced that I am glad Miss West is making the voyage.

She has sailed “out East,” as she quaintly calls it, and has an enormous repertoire of tasty, spicy, Eastern dishes.  In the cooking of rice Louis is a master; but in the making of the accompanying curry he fades into a blundering amateur compared with Miss West.  In the matter of curry she is a sheer genius.  How often one’s thoughts dwell upon food when at sea!

So in this trade-wind weather I see a great deal of Miss West.  I read all the time, and quite a good part of the time I read aloud to her passages, and even books, with which I am interested in trying her out.  Then, too, such reading gives rise to discussions, and she has not yet uttered anything that would lead me to change my first judgment of her.  She is a genuine daughter of Herodias.

And yet she is not what one would call a cute girl.  She isn’t a girl, she is a mature woman with all the freshness of a girl.  She has the carriage, the attitude of mind, the aplomb of a woman, and yet she cannot be described as being in the slightest degree stately.  She is generous, dependable, sensible—yes, and sensitive; and her superabundant vitality, the vitality that makes her walk so gloriously, discounts the maturity of her.  Sometimes she seems all of thirty to me; at other times, when her spirits and risibilities are aroused, she scarcely seems thirteen.  I shall make a point of asking Captain West the date of the Dixie’s collision with that river steamer in San Francisco Bay .  In a word, she is the most normal, the most healthy, natural woman I have ever known.

Yes, and she is feminine, despite, no matter how she does her hair, that it is as invariably smooth and well- groomed as all the rest of her.  On the other hand, this perpetual well-groomedness is relieved by the latitude of dress she allows herself.  She never fails of being a woman.  Her sex, and the lure of it, is ever present.  Possibly she may possess high collars, but I have never seen her in one on board.  Her blouses are always open at the throat, disclosing one of her choicest assets, the muscular, adequate neck, with its fine-textured garmenture of skin.  I embarrass myself by stealing long glances at that bare throat of hers and at the hint of fine, firm-surfaced shoulder.

Visiting the chickens has developed into a regular function.  At least once each day we make the journey for’ard along the bridge to the top of the ’midship-house.  Possum, who is now convalescent, accompanies us.  The steward makes a point of being there so as to receive instructions and report the egg-output and laying conduct of