“I’m lying a little way down the fiord, you see,” said Davies. “I hate to be too near a town, and I found a carpenter handy here— There she is! I wonder how you’ll like her!”
I roused myself. We were entering a little cove encircled by trees, and approaching a light which flickered in the rigging of a small vessel, whose outline gradually defined itself.
“Keep her off,” said Davies, as we drew alongside.
In a moment he had jumped on deck, tied the painter, and was round at my end.
“You hand them up,” he ordered, “and I’ll take them.”
It was a laborious task, with the one relief that it was not far to hand them—a doubtful compensation, for other reasons distantly shaping themselves. When the stack was transferred to the deck I followed it, tripping over the flabby meat parcel, which was already showing ghastly signs of disintegration under the dew. Hazily there floated through my mind my last embarkation on a yacht; my faultless attire, the trim gig and obsequious sailors, the accommodation ladder flashing with varnish and brass in the August sun; the orderly, snowy decks and basket chairs under the awning aft. What a contrast with this sordid midnight scramble, over damp meat and littered packing-cases! The bitterest touch of all was a growing sense of inferiority and ignorance which I had never before been allowed to feel in my experience of yachts.
Davies awoke from another reverie over my portmanteau to say, cheerily: “I’ll just show you round down below first, and then we’ll stow things away and get to bed.”
He dived down a companion ladder, and I followed cautiously. A complex odour of paraffin, past cookery, tobacco, and tar saluted my nostrils.
“Mind your head,” said Davies, striking a match and lighting a candle, while I groped into the cabin. “You’d better sit down; it’s easier to look round.”
There might well have been sarcasm in this piece of advice, for I must have cut a ridiculous figure, peering awkwardly and suspiciously round, with shoulders and head bent to avoid the ceiling, which seemed in the half-light to be even nearer the floor than it was.
“You see,” were Davies’s reassuring words, “there’s plenty of room to _sit_ upright” (which was strictly true; but I am not very tall, and he is short). “Some people make a point of head-room, but I never mind much about it. That’s the centreboard case,” he explained, as, in stretching my legs out, my knee came into contact with a sharp edge.