ho found it
worth while to hire us to bring such bizarre and useless things into
England. Once one of the twenty-five hundred weight barrels of palm oil
slipped from the slings and fell on the deck with a soft crash. It
smashed like an egg, of course. Indeed, as the mess burst and splashed
all over everybody on the after-deck, it was not unlike an enormous yolk
in its brilliant gamboge colour, with the split and dismembered staves
lying radially round it like dirty white of egg. And someone muttered
that 'there was twenty quid gone.' The leopards, too, struck me on the
homeward trip. Anything less like the traditional wild beast of the
jungle you couldn't imagine. Most of them were mangy and had eye-trouble
of some sort. They would stare with a sort of rigid horror and
indignation at the dancing blue waves over side for hours, their blank,
topaz eye-balls never moving unless you poked with a stick, when the
brute would utter a cry of what seemed to me utter despair and settle
down once more to keep the ocean under observation.

"We did not always go to the same place. In fact, I saw very little of
Mister George. Railheads advance with our sphere of influence. But I
stuck it, and put in my year of service for my license. I was saving
money and looking forward to a spell in London. All the other people I
knew I let go. I realized I had been all the time an alien in that
genteel professional world.

"And so, one day, a year after I'd set foot on the deck of that old
ship, I said good-bye to the men I'd sailed with and took the train to
Paddington. How strange I felt I can't explain. As the cab took me down
the familiar streets and I saw the old familiar sights, I felt--well,
you'll know when you go back! Something had snapped. I was in it, but
not of it. I saw the young men walking in the streets, with their high
collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and
gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just
as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the _Corydon_ and the
blue tropic sea!

"I took a room at a hotel and went out to see my mother. I did this as
a duty, mind you. If my brother was there still I had no intention of
staying long. There was no room for the two of us in the same house. And
of course, I had a great desire to know if they were married. Humph!

"I found my mother living alone. He was gone again! She, Gladys, was
gone too. They hadn't been married, no