awake all those nights
he had looked after her and that the same brain that could sleep and
sleep and sleep could put sleep entirely away, just as the great body
that lolled about like the sea elephants, could, like the sea-elephants,
become a thing, tireless, and capable of infinite endurance.

Then again, he would smoke in silence for ages as though oblivious of
her existence. She had observed the same thing in Bompard and La Touche
who would sit cheek by jowl without a word, as though they had
quarrelled. This trait pleased her, and she fell in with it
unconsciously as though his mind had moulded hers and were teaching it
the taciturnity of the sea.

One day, during a brief spell of calm when they were seated in the sun,
dinner over and nothing to do, she tried the effect of literature upon
him. She told him the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk and was delighted
to find him interested when he had got his bearings and knew that a
"giant" was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant--it
occurred in her version--pleased him immensely. Then when she had
finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he
considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She
did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that
she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said
to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible
means could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in cold
blood for the amusement of others a yarn about what never happened; no,
it would have struck him as one of those lying personal yarns heard in
the fo'c'sle sometimes and likely to produce a boot aimed at the
teller's head. He had seen men reading books in the fo'c'sle
occasionally and old newspapers, but of literature, fictional or
otherwise, he had no more idea than the bull sea elephants of astronomy.

This she intuitively felt and so held her tongue. But she had interested
him, and she went on, producing from her memory the story of the Forty
Thieves.

Now he had accepted the bean stalk explanation, for he had never to his
knowledge seen a bean stalk, but the jars in the Forty Thieves he
revolted at, for a jar to him was a demijohn, or a thing of that size. A
man could not get into that.

However, on explanation, he passed the jars, and the boiling oil repaid
him. He seemed to delight in torture and blood.

"Where did you get that yarn f