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Updated: May 16, 2025
Halvard said instinctively: "I'd better start scraping the mahogany tomorrow, it's getting white." Woolfolk nodded. Halvard was a good man. He had the valuable quality of commonly anticipating spoken desires. He was a Norwegian, out of the Lofoden Islands, where sailors are surpassingly schooled in the Arctic seas.
"I came ashore to discover if you had a large water supply and if I might fill my casks." "Rain water," she informed him; "the cistern is full." "Then I'll send Halvard to you." He withdrew a step, but paused at the incivility of his leaving. A sudden weariness had settled over the shoulders of Millie Stope; she appeared young and very white.
A gladness like the white flare of burning powder swept over him, and then he became conscious of other, minor sensations his head ached intolerably from the fall down the stair, and a grinding pain shot through his shoulder, lodging in his torn lower arm at the slightest movement. He slipped the sounding pole into its loops on the cabin and hastily made his way aft to the relief of Poul Halvard.
Halvard was as absolutely lost as if he had dropped, with all the world save the bare, wet spot where Woolfolk stood, into a nether region from which floated up great, shuddering gasps of agony. He followed this idea more minutely, picturing the details of such a terrestrial calamity; then he put it from him with an oath. Black thoughts crept insidiously into his mind like rats in a cellar.
But Halvard, in crisp white, standing behind the steaming supper viands, brought his thoughts again to the day's familiar routine. The cabin was divided through its forward half by the centerboard casing, and against it a swinging table had been elevated, an immaculate cover laid, and the yacht's china, marked in cobalt with the name Gar, placed in a polished and formal order.
He was all pumped out. Missed his hand at first the dark a scratch." He rested on the oars, fingering his shoulder. The tender swung dangerously near the corrugated rock of the shore, and Woolfolk sharply directed: "Keep way on her." "Yes, sir," Halvard replied, once more swinging into his short, efficient stroke.
He moved to the cockpit and from there said: "That will do for today." Halvard followed, and commenced once more the familiar, ordered preparations for supper. John Woolfolk, smoking while the sky turned to malachite, became sharply aware of the unthinkable monotony of the universal course, of the centuries wheeling in dull succession into infinity.
What was the use? I might as well have hit a pudding. Even talk didn't move him. In a little it sent me cold." He stopped abruptly, grew sullen; it was evident that he would say no more in that direction. Woolfolk opened another subject: "Life, Halvard," he said, "is uncertain; perhaps tonight I shall find it absolutely unreliable.
He descended to supper with an expression of abstraction, and ate mechanically whatever was placed before him. Afterward he rolled a cigarette, which he neglected to light, and sat motionless, chin on breast, in the warm stillness. Halvard cleared the table and John Woolfolk roused himself. He turned to the shelf that ran above the berths and secured a small, locked tin box.
There was no immediate response, and he peered over the obscured deck in search of Halvard. The man rose slowly from a sitting posture by the main boom. "Very good, sir," he replied in a forced tone.
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