"Don't ye see what a foolish question that is," he said quietly, "and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie...? I can only tell you," and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, "that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived--forever."
"That," he added, "was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an inner catastrophe that might be Death--that it would be out of the body, I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a way to Life."
And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted--or had word brought to him perhaps--that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.
It may have been--O'Malley wondered without actually asking--that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.
"Your present gompanion geds off at Naples," he said. "Berhaps you would not object. I think--they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They go alzo to Batoum?"
This proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.
"I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing," he said the next minute, hedging.
"Oh, you have! And he would like it--not object, I mean?" he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.
"Pleased and flattered on the contrary," was the reply, as he handed him the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.
O'Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction--danger. He had taken the plunge.