"And so she went to sea?" said Bill in gentle sarcasm. Bill's aversion to the sea amounts almost to malevolence. She is a bad sailor.
"For the time being, and to see the world," said Mr. Carville. "She had seen nothing, remember. Well, she saw it. They were away five years. You can imagine my father's feelings when the first child was a girl. She was born off the Ladrone Islands in the Pacific on the way to Hong Kong. I suppose he got over the disappointment somehow, for I never heard my mother say anything about quarrels except on the subject of living ashore. I told you my mother had ambitions. She wanted to live in England and have an establishment. But my father couldn't see the use. If she wanted to live ashore, he argued, why couldn't she live in Hong Kong or Bombay or Colombo until he was ready to retire? She would see him just as often. No, she had no intention of doing that. She saw exactly how much ice a skipper's wife cut in a community of skippers' wives. She was after higher game. She settled it finally that if she couldn't live in London, she'd stay aboard the ship all her life.
"She got her way, but not all at once. One voyage she left the ship in Bombay and travelled across India, rejoining at Calcutta. Then she lived in Antwerp a good while, but got sick of it and shipped again when the ship sailed for Callao. That was the last of her voyages, my mother's I mean. For all I know the _Erin's Isle_ swims yet. My sister was drowned and I was born before she dropped her anchor in London River."
"Going ashore in Callao," said Mr. Carville, turning to her, "there was a 'roller' started. I believe it's caused by the sea-bed shifting; slight earthquake in fact. The roller was a big wave and struck the ship's boat as they were rowing across the harbour. Accidents will happen, no matter how careful you are."
"They went from Callao to Brisbane and loaded again in Melbourne for home. My mother used to say she thought they would _never_ get round the Cape of Good Hope. My father had done the voyage once in sixty-two days, almost a record; but this time everything went dead wrong. They were driven as far as the Crozets, somewhere down near the South Pole, I believe. The grub gave out, and even my mother had to eat bread from corn that was ground in the coffee mill. The crew got restless and sulky. I've often tried to imagine it, the Skipper and his two mates, talking it over in the cuddy, keeping the men working to stop their thinking, running for days under reefed courses and double reefed topsails. And all the time with something else on his mind, something that materialized finally, into _me_!