a certain indefinable charm. I remember that I reached back to the headboard of my bed, seized there the enamel rail and stretched myself in the warm luxury of the tropic night. I felt remade—a new thing. I felt that in some indefinable way nature had poured into me renewed health, renewed youth. I wanted to arise, to pace about my cabin; I wanted to go to the decks of the Nautilus, to race up and down, cloaked only in the star-spangled robe of the equatorial night. I felt that I had the power to reach out and embrace the whole world.
For a time I lay there enjoying to the full this entirely new reaction and speculating on the psychological aspect of my new inspiration. In a little while, however, I began to grow too warm; the hot blood pounding through my veins became in a very few minutes a source of complete and profound and wholly inexplicable irritation. In vain I attempted to throw off the mood. In vain I attempted all the known tricks of wooing sleep; in vain I tossed and tumbled about with the gentle rolls of the Nautilus. Eventually I arose, drew on my dressing gown (for I had thrown aside my pajamas when the mood first came upon me), and thus attired strode out upon the decks.
Forward I saw a tiny ruby glow, which I took to be the lighted cigarette of the wateh. Above, almost outshone by the brilliance of the Southern Cross, were the riding lights of the Nautilus. All was peace, excepting in my own brain.
I strode forward, my irritable mood pricking me onward, and reprimanded the watch for smoking on duty, although I knew such mild breaches of discipline had been winked at by both captain and mate on these long voyages. I remember how in surprize he flipped it overboard, the glowing end describing a perfect half-circle as it dropped into the sea. Somehow even that bothered me.
Presently I walked back toward the stem, and, rounding the comer of the after deckhouse, I came suddenly upon Dr. Tyrrel. He was standing there, half draped over the rail, and peering intently down into the sea. For some reason unknown to me I paused there watching him. He did not move; he might have been a statue of stone gazing over the rail. Again I felt a wave of unreasonable irritation, a veritable sweep of anger. Why should he be standing there peering so intently down into the sea? Why was he not in his cabin, where he belonged at this hour, gaining rest for the labors of tomorrow? Somehow I did not realize then that I was blaming him for the very thing which I myself was doing.
As I stood there watching him, he slowly straightened up and lifted his eyes to the stars. Ilis lips were moving, and I thought that he sighed. It was then that I noted, seemingly for the first time in all our relationship, what a handsome figure of a man he was, with his clear-cut, aquiline profile, his full molded chin, his crisp, curly hair only slightly tinged with gray at the temples, and that magnificent figure with its tremendous shoulders, flat hips and gently sloping flanks. Somehow it made me feel small and puny and hopeless. All my new-found vigor drained from me in that moment, and I felt a strange, hot resentment against the man. Suddenly I had come to be old and worn and gnarled and terribly weary. Thinking thus, and without disturbing my colleague, I went back to my cabin and a sleepless vigil into the dawn.
That morning, while we were taking breakast, Dr. Tyrrel told me quietly that there would be no need
for my going down that day.
(Continued on page 168)
