down so as to give no more than
steerage-way until oil lamps could be substituted for the binnacle,
masthead, and side-lights, also for the engine room."

"And there would be excitement and confusion, eh? Everybody would make
for the deck, even the captain would leave his cabin unguarded long
enough..."

"I get you"--with a sigh. "It's wrong, all wrong, but--well, I suppose
it's got to be done."

Lanyard treated himself to a smile of triumph, there in the darkness.

XXVI

THE BINNACLE

It would have been ungrateful (Lanyard reflected over his breakfast) to
complain of a life so replete with experiences of piquant contrast.

It happened to one to lie for hours in a cubicle of blinding night,
hearkening to a voice like that of some nightmare weirdly become
articulate, a ghostly mutter that rose and fell and droned, broken by
sighs, grunts, stifled oaths, mean chuckles, with intervals of husky
whispering and lapses filled with a noise of wheezing respiration, all
wheedling and cajoling, lying, intimating and evading, complaining,
snarling, rambling, threatening, protesting, promising, and in the end
proposing an unholy compact for treachery and evil-doing--a voice that
might have issued out of some damned soul escaped for a little space of
time from the Pits of Torment, so utterly inhuman it sounded, so
completely discarnate and divorced from all relationship to any mortal
personality that even that reek of whiskey in the air, even that one
contact with a hard, hot hand, could not make it seem real.

And then it ceased and was no more but as a thing of dream that had
passed. And one came awake to a light and wholesome world furnished
with such solidly comforting facts as soaps and razors and hot and cold
saltwater taps; and subsequently one left one's stateroom to see, at
the breakfast table, leaden-eyed and flushed of countenance, an
amorphous lump of humid flesh in shapeless garments of soiled white
duck, the author of that mutter in the dark; who, lounging over a plate
of broken food and lifting a coffee cup in the tremulous hand of an
alcoholic, looked up with lacklustre gaze, gave a surly nod, and
mumbled the customary matutinal greeting:

"'Morning, Monseer Delorme."

It was all too weird....

To add to this, the chief engineer paid Lanyard no further heed at all,
though they were alone at table, and having noisily consumed his
coffee, rubbed his stubbled lips and chin with an egg-stained napki