heart flaming with anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts

that seem blown from a breast turned to ice with a sudden revulsion
of feeling. Instead of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul

with a terrible apparatus of cloud and mists and seas and rain, the
King of the West turns his power to contemptuous pelting of your

back with icicles, to making your weary eyes water as if in grief,
and your worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But each mood of the

great autocrat has its own greatness, and each is hard to bear.
Only the north-west phase of that mighty display is not

demoralizing to the same extent, because between the hail and sleet
squalls of a north-westerly gale one can see a long way ahead.

To see! to see! - this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest
of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the

aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous
existence. I have heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves to

speak of, after three days of hard running in thick south-westerly
weather, burst out passionately: "I wish to God we could get sight

of something!"
We had just gone down below for a moment to commune in a battened-

down cabin, with a large white chart lying limp and damp upon a
cold and clammy table under the light of a smoky lamp. Sprawling

over that seaman's silent and trusted adviser, with one elbow upon
the coast of Africa and the other planted in the neighbourhood of

Cape Hatteras (it was a general track-chart of the North Atlantic),
my skipper lifted his rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a

half-exasperated, half-appealing way. We have seen no sun, moon,
or stars for something like seven days. By the effect of the West

Wind's wrath the celestial bodies had gone into hiding for a week
or more, and the last three days had seen the force of a south-west

gale grow from fresh, through strong, to heavy, as the entries in
my log-book could testify. Then we separated, he to go on deck

again, in obedience to that mysterious call that seems to sound for
ever in a shipmaster's ears, I to stagger into my cabin with some

vague notion of putting down the words "Very heavy weather" in a
log-book not quite written up-to-date. But I gave it up, and

crawled into my bunk instead, boots and hat on, all standing (it
did not matter; everything was soaking wet, a heavy sea having

burst the poop skylights the night before), to remain in a
nightmarish state between waking and sleeping for a couple of hours

of so-called rest.
The south-westerly mood of the West Wind is an enemy of sleep, and

even of a recumbent position, in the responsible officers of a
ship. After two hours of futile, light-headed, inconsequent

thinking upon all things under heaven in that dark, dank, wet and
devastated cabin, I arose suddenly and staggered up on deck. The

autocrat of the North Atlantic was still oppressing his kingdom and
its outlying dependencies, even as far as the Bay of Biscay, in the

dismalsecrecy of thick, very thick, weather. The force of the
wind, though we were running before it at the rate of some ten

knots an hour, was so great that it drove me with a steady push to
the front of the poop, where my commander was holding on.

"What do you think of it?" he addressed me in an interrogative
yell.

What I really thought was that we both had had just about enough of
it. The manner in which the great West Wind chooses at times to

administer his possessions does not commend itself to a person of
peaceful and law-abiding disposition, inclined to draw distinctions

between right and wrong in the face of natural forces, whose
standard, naturally, is that of might alone. But, of course, I

said nothing. For a man caught, as it were, between his skipper
and the great West Wind silence is the safest sort of diplomacy.

Moreover, I knew my skipper. He did not want to know what I
thought. Shipmasters hanging on a breath before the thrones of the

winds ruling the seas have their psychology, whose workings are as
important to the ship and those on board of her as the changing

moods of the weather. The man, as a matter of fact, under no
circumstances, ever cared a brass farthing for what I or anybody

else in his ship thought. He had had just about enough of it, I
guessed, and what he was at really was a process of fishing for a

suggestion. It was the pride of his life that he had never wasted
a chance, no matter how boisterous, threatening, and dangerous, of

a fair wind. Like men racing blindfold for a gap in a hedge, we
were finishing a splendidly quick passage from the Antipodes, with

a tremendous rush for the Channel in as thick a weather as any I
can remember, but his psychology did not permit him to bring the

ship to with a fair wind blowing - at least not on his own
initiative. And yet he felt that very soon indeed something would

have to be done. He wanted the suggestion to come from me, so that
later on, when the trouble was over, he could argue this point with

his own uncompromising spirit, laying the blame upon my shoulders.
I must render him the justice that this sort of pride was his only

weakness.
But he got no suggestion from me. I understood his psychology.

Besides, I had my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it is a
different one now), and amongst them was the conceit of being

remarkably well up in the psychology of the Westerly weather. I
believed - not to mince matters - that I had a genius for reading

the mind of the great ruler of high latitudes. I fancied I could
discern already the coming of a change in his royal mood. And all

I said was:
"The weather's bound to clear up with the shift of wind."

"Anybody knows that much!" he snapped at me, at the highest pitch
of his voice.

"I mean before dark!" I cried.
This was all the opening he ever got from me. The eagerness with

which he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had
been labouring under.

"Very well," he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if
giving way to long entreaties. "All right. If we don't get a

shift by then we'll take that foresail off her and put her head
under her wing for the night."

I was struck by the picturesquecharacter of the phrase as applied
to a ship brought-to in order to ride out a gale with wave after

wave passing under her breast. I could see her resting in the
tumult of the elements like a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather

upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing. In
imaginative precision, in true feeling, this is one of the most

expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips. But as to
taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head under her

wing, I had my grave doubts. They were justified. That long
enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrarydecree of

the West Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances
of their hands within the limits of his kingdom. With the sound of

a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily,
leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary

strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a
wounded elephant. Torn out of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a

whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by
the shift of wind. For the shift of wind had come. The unveiled,

low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a confused and
tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast. We recognised the

headland, and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder.
Without knowing it in the least, we had run up alongside the Isle

of Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint evening red in the salt
wind-haze, was the lighthouse on St. Catherine's Point.

My skipper recovered first from his astonishment. His bulging eyes
sank back gradually into their orbits. His psychology, taking it

all round, was really very creditable for an average sailor. He
had been spared the humiliation of laying his ship to with a fair

wind; and at once that man, of an open and truthful nature, spoke
up in perfect good faith, rubbing together his brown, hairy hands -

the hands of a master-craftsman upon the sea:
"Humph! that's just about where I reckoned we had got to."

The transparency and ingenuousness, in a way, of that delusion, the
airy tone, the hint of already growing pride, were perfectly

delicious. But, in truth, this was one of the greatest surprises
ever sprung by the clearing up mood of the West Wind upon one of

the most accomplished of his courtiers.
XXVIII.