“And who knows,” said Lestrange, remembering a conversation he had had with Stanistreet, “whether we aren’t the shadows of our real selves, Kearney? Knowing nothing, and just following the movements and the dictates of our souls; have you ever thought of these matters, Kearney?”
“No, sir,” replied the sailor. “I was never any good at l’arnin’.”
Lestrange was about to reply when a fish took his bait, a thing like a rock cod with a bright red band across its back, weighing four or five pounds, and beating the water to spray as it was hauled up.
Lestrange, as he brought this “soul” on board, to Kearney’s relief, seemed to have cast speculative philosophy over the other gunnel. Excited as a boy with his catch, he rebaited and the fishing resumed.
Here on this island there was one thing steadfast as the sun, insistent as hunger and merciful as death—sleep. Sleep with no bad taste in its mouth, no feverish dreams in its hand. Sleep as God made it and before man spoiled it.
Dick on board the _Ranatonga_ had astonished Bowers by his capacity for slumber and his facility in “dropping off” even in the midst of play. Here it was the same. This afternoon, dinner over, there was not a conscious soul on the island. Lestrange had retired with a book, and a half a page had drowned him in oblivion; Kearney, under a tree, was lost to the world, and Dick, curled like a leaf, was gripping in oblivion the toy the sailor had cut for him, a tiny boat no bigger than a forefinger, rough-hewn in a few minutes, but still a boat.
Just before sunset that evening the wind fell to a dead calm. Living in the open the faintest breathing of wind makes itself felt; there is no anemometer like the sense of man, and a dead calm affects not only the sense of man, but his soul.
You feel it below decks just as you feel it above. It is the one unnatural thing in Nature whose soul is movement, stress, storm.
The groves stood in stereoscopic stillness and the great sea beyond the reef had lowered its song. The rumour of the surf seemed far away, yet in reality was only diminished.
Lestrange, before going to bed, was sitting having a talk with the sailor.
Kearney, well fed, with a pipe in his mouth and his back to a tree, was in the mood for talk, unknowing of the things that might come, released from that fear of life and the future which is the birthright of every man who changes a dollar. Released from the drudgery of shipboard life, Jim Kearney was as communicative as though he had been in a bar on the Bombay coast. The push of whisky was absent, but—and as this is a story which would fall to pieces at once if truth were absent—the push of Lestrange was present. Lestrange to Kearney was not only a poor gentleman who had to be looked after, but “a wonderful rich man.” A man who could commission a schooner like the _Ranatonga_ was in himself a person to command respect, but the fo’c’sle had embroidered on this, true to the instincts of the mass that will debase an individual or exalt him beyond fact and truth. The fo’c’sle of the _Ranatonga_ had elevated Lestrange to the height of Nobs Hill. He wasn’t as high as this, and—give Kearney his due—the height of Lestrange in the financial world had had nothing to do with his decision to remain with him. That decision had been born in a moment, and maybe sickness of the sea and love of Dick had been the core. All the same, the “richness” of Lestrange was a powerful underlying factor in his present contentment with his surroundings.