It was a terribly lifeless afternoon.For several days in succession low clouds had appeared in the distance, white masses with dark convolutions rest-ing on the water, motionless, almost solid, and yet all the time changing their aspects subtly.To-ward evening they vanished as a rule.But this day they awaited the setting sun, which glowed and smouldered sulkily amongst them before it sank down.The punctual and wearisome stars re-appeared over our mastheads, but the air remained stagnant and oppressive.
The unfailing Ransome lighted the binnacle-lamps and glided, all shadowy, up to me.
"Will you go down and try to eat something, sir?" he suggested.
His low voice startled me.I had been standing looking out over the rail, saying nothing, feeling nothing, not even the weariness of my limbs, over-come by the evil spell.
"Ransome," I asked abruptly, "how long have Ibeen on deck? I am losing the notion of time.""Twelve days, sir," he said, "and it's just a fortnight since we left the anchorage."His equable voice sounded mournful somehow.
He waited a bit, then added: "It's the first time that it looks as if we were to have some rain."I noticed then the broad shadow on the horizon, extinguishing the low stars completely, while those overhead, when I looked up, seemed to shine down on us through a veil of smoke.
How it got there, how it had crept up so high, Icouldn't say.It had an ominous appearance.The air did not stir.At a renewed invitation from Ransome I did go down into the cabin to--in his own words--"try and eat something." I don't know that the trial was very successful.I sup-pose at that period I did exist on food in the usual way; but the memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant exciting and consuming at the same time.
It's the only period of my life in which I at-tempted to keep a diary.No, not the only one.
Years later, in conditions of moral isolation, I did put down on paper the thoughts and events of a score of days.But this was the first time.I don't remember how it came about or how the pocket-book and the pencil came into my hands.It's in-conceivable that I should have looked for them on purpose.I suppose they saved me from the crazy trick of talking to myself.
Strangely enough, in both cases I took to that sort of thing in circumstances in which I did not ex-pect, in colloquial phrase, "to come out of it."Neither could I expect the record to outlast me.
This shows that it was purely a personal need for intimate relief and not a call of egotism.
Here I must give another sample of it, a few de-tached lines, now looking very ghostly to my own eyes, out of the part scribbled that very evening:
***
"There is something going on in the sky like a decomposition; like a corruption of the air, which remains as still as ever.After all, mere clouds, which may or may not hold wind or rain.
Strange that it should trouble me so.I feel as if all my sins had found me out.But I suppose the trouble is that the ship is still lying motionless, not under command; and that I have nothing to do to keep my imagination from running wild amongst the disastrous images of the worst that may befall us.What's going to happen? Probably nothing.
Or anything.It may be a furious squall coming, butt end foremost.And on deck there are five men with the vitality and the strength, of say, two.
We may have all our sails blown away.Every stitch of canvas has been on her since we broke ground at the mouth of the Mei-nam, fifteen days ago...or fifteen centuries.It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day is in-finitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow.
