I WAS JUST about to cross over to the Kurt Hansen when from the companion-way opposite me appeared a handsome Zulu face, burned as black as the ship’s Bible by sun and wind at sea. I was so astonished that I stopped to stare until the owner of the face had climbed out on deck and stood there in faded blue overalls, tall, broad, supple, feet planted firmly apart like an experienced sailor, looking at me with an enquiring boldness unusual among his countrymen on shore. Whatever my many associations with Amangtakwena and Zulus, they had not yet included the sea. Both races had, as far as I knew, traditionally a superstitious aversion to the sea. Neither, for instance, would eat its fish because they believed it would turn a warrior’s heart to water. Indeed so out of the national element of his people did the big man in front of me appear to be that I was startled into speaking to him in English instead of Sindakwena as I would normally have done.
“This is the Kurt Hansen, isn’t it?” I asked unnecessarily.
“This is Kurt Hansen,” he answered in good English and a deep but surprisingly gentle voice for so powerful a man, adding with pride: “And I, I am the keeper of Kurt Hansen’s fire.”
I was about to ask him for permission to board, when another voice with a Scandinavian accent and a rather precise, slightly schoolmasterish tone came up the hatch from below: “What’s happening up there, ’Mlangeni?”
Before the black man could answer, a face appeared at the companion-way and the questioner himself stepped on deck.
“I see,” he remarked at once. “I see, a visitor! Come on board, sir, come on board. I think I have been expecting you but I thought there would be two of you.”
All this was uttered in the same manner that I have already mentioned so that I had felt not unlike a new boy being welcomed by a pedantic housemaster to his future school.
The newcomer was almost as tall as ’Mlangeni, the Zulu sailor, but there the grounds for physical comparison ended. He was as slight as ’Mlangeni was massive, had long arms, long hands, and a long face under a broad forehead, which was made to look longer by a neatly trimmed brown beard. His eyes were hazel, with something sad or perhaps slightly weary in them, which belied his ready and incisive manner of speech. He was still dressed in his neat Sunday suit of coarse navy blue serge, white shirt, black tie and black leather boots. And as he raised his hand to wave me on board, I saw the wide band of a gold ring flashing on a second finger.
“Step on board, sir, please step on board,” he urged me. “Which one of the two are you? The agent’s son or his friend?”
I quickly explained who I was and what was happening.
“Ah, I see. Your gear is coming later. I will show you where you are to sleep.”
Taking it for granted I would follow, he walked amidships and vanished through a doorway underneath the deck-house. I climbed aboard the Kurt Hansen at once, brushing by ’Mlangeni who had not moved and was watching all this with eyes brilliant against his dark skin. As I passed him, the smell of his African person came through clear and astringent. It was the ancient, unashamed smell of natural man, as welcome and as African to me as the smell of the red earth after the first rain to break after one of our long droughts, or the smoke of a wood fire at evening on the cow-dung floor of a bee-hive hut. The man’s professional sailor’s stance therefore seemed all the stranger.
Ducking through the doorway in my turn, I went down a narrow steep companion-way as I would down a ladder, my face to the rungs. My guide was waiting for me in the small saloon, his head nearly touching the metal of the ceiling, and everything was as it would be on that Saturday evening four seasons later that I have already described—except that now nothing was out of position and there was no smell of tobacco smoke.
“One of you to sleep there,” he pointed to the plush-covered couch beside the triangular table, “and the other here . . .” He pushed through the heavy curtains over the entrance to the Captain’s cabin as he spoke and I followed, to see him patting a bunk with the flat of his hand. “And here, you both put your clothes.” He opened and shut two mahogany drawers underneath the bunk, before asking: “Where would you like to sleep?”
I said I thought I ought to take the couch in the saloon and let my friend share the cabin with the Captain.
He nodded and then asked: “You know Captain Larsen well?”
I shook my head and explained I had met Thor Larsen only once a week before.
“Ach! I see then. The agent arranged for him to take the two of you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and explained briefly how it had come about.
Happily, that not only satisfied him but seemed to relieve him. I was to find that he, like everybody else who knew Larsen, had learnt from experience that most things imposed on Larsen by outside authority jarred so much that they could sour his mood for days. And the mood of so forceful a master in so small a ship was, to put it at its lowest, of the utmost practical consequence.
“Ach, good! Then he must have liked you very much.”
He uttered this so confidently that I stammered, “Oh, no. It wasn’t me. It was only because of the elephants.”
“Elephants?” he said. “Elephants?” Far from being confused by the apparent irrelevance of such an explanation, he reiterated the word as if he understood it. Then, noticing my embarrassment, he dropped the subject to ask: “Would you like some tea?”
I explained that I had already eaten.
Well then, he said, would I like to join him on deck, where he was going to smoke a pipe before dark, and wait for Captain Larsen and my friend? He was certain they would not be long because he knew Larsen was putting out of harbour earlier than usual that night.
He paused, his foot on the companion-way, shrugged his shoulders, and remarked with a forced laugh that came near to impatience, “Only Captain Larsen knows why. Captain Larsen does what he does.”
On deck we found ’Mlangeni seated on the hatch cover, his great legs dangling over the edge, and his broad back and shoulders supported on his elbows, while he sang softly to himself a little song that reminded me of the music I had not long before encountered on the heights above the harbour. When my companion signalled to him to make room for us, he did so without interrupting his tune.
“’Mlangeni is a great musician,” my companion remarked, not without affection. “He sings to everything, even to the coal in the bunker and the fire in the boiler. Isn’t that so, you great big stoker?”
’Mlangeni answered him with a flashing smile which, brilliant as it was, failed to stay his song.
We sat on, my companion smoking on my right, ’Mlangeni singing to himself on my left, the smell of Africa high and wide upon him, but added to it was another smell both unfamiliar and pervasive. It was, I knew without asking, the smell of the whale which is so adhesive that, although the little ships merely harpoon the fish and then transport the corpse lashed alongside to the shore, yet that brief contact was enough to make rigging, woodwork and forecastle perpetually reek of it. The smell made my senses reel with a kind of vertigo, as if it had brought them suddenly to the abyss of time out of which the whale, like a great Bedouin of the deep, trailed through the darkness over our beginnings.
Sitting there as interested in this smell of the whale as a puppy encountering a completely new scent, I took a large slab of fruit and nut chocolate out of my pocket. Dividing it into three equal parts, I offered one each to the two men at my side. ’Mlangeni stopped his singing, accepted his in two broad hands cupped together with an exclamation of gratitude. The Norwegian I think was about to refuse (like a confirmed smoker, he was not interested in sweet things), but fearing, I suspect, to refuse one so young and eager to make friends as I was, he took his pipe out of his mouth and accepted the chocolate with a warm expression of thanks, at the same time asking: “Have you been in a whaler before?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never been to sea before. In fact . . .” I hesitated, embarrassed by confessing to such a woeful inadequacy in my experience. “This is the first time ever that I’ve even seen the sea.”
’Mlangeni thought this funny enough to laugh.
But the Norwegian just asked, “How old are you?”
“Over fourteen,” I answered, without mentioning that I had had a birthday just three weeks before.
“Fourteen! Well, you have plenty of time to see more than enough of it,” the Norwegian commented. Then he added: “I went to sea at the age of eleven! There is not a day of my life in which I do not remember looking at the sea. But you know about elephants and I do not. I have not even seen one in a circus!”
“I know about elephants and about whales!” ’Mlangeni laughed.
“Now, ’Mlangeni, no boasting!” the Norwegian remarked good-naturedly. There was something about ’Mlangeni’s laugh that made one feel good. “There is a lot you don’t know about whales yet. God knows, there’s a lot none of us knows or will ever know. I have been whaling for forty years now and every season I feel I know them less and less.”
“Captain Larsen, surely,” I interspersed, “must know a great deal about them?”
“Captain Larsen!” he commented again rather tartly. “Captain Larsen certainly knows a great deal about killing whales.”
Abashed and somewhat amazed at the derogative qualification I asked: “You’re not fond of whaling then?”
My amazement was spontaneous because I had been brought up in an environment where the hunter was one of the most important persons in the community and a number of the great ones were still figures of live and vivid romance on my native scene.
At once his precise mind picked on the word “fond”. “Fond of whaling? Almighty, no! I am not fond of whaling. I do not even like whaling.”
“Why d’you do it then?”
The bald uncomprehending question was out before I knew it and I feared I might have gone too far.
The Norwegian merely shrugged. “A good question! One I have asked myself a thousand times. I can’t answer it except by saying that I was taken fishing first as a young boy to help earn a poor family a living. Then I went whaling because it earned a better living. Then I woke up one day to find that whaling had become my life.”
A few more questions from me and his whole story came out.
His name was Leif Fügelsang, his age sixty-one years. He was the eldest of seven children of a family farming on the edge of a fiord in northern Norway. His description of the fiord delivered with the light fading round us, the gulls overhead crying like a bosun’s pipe summoning a night-watch on deck, the creaking of the ships all around, and the sound of the tremendous ocean pounding over the breakwaters and no doubt turning the level sand beyond into a mirror filled to its brim with emerging stars, made an awesome impression on me.
The steep cliffs at the back of the small and difficult family holding, Leif said, were black; the waters in front were as black as the cliffs and deep, fanatically still, so that they all welcomed any wind that drew a ripple of movement, or blew a fleck of kapok away from their glowering surface. Most sinister of all, they seemed blacker by sunlight than by night, in summer more so than in winter, which, thank God, brought some white to land and water. Living there, it was easy to believe the legend that the waters were full of trolls, the dark cliffs bedevilled with sprites. If ever there was a haunted moon-scape hostile to the sun, this was one.
The thin soil not surprisingly was no living in itself; the family had to fish as well as farm, and both pursuits brought in little enough. Born in every one of their people there was, Leif believed, an unacknowledged desire to escape, and the most cherished means of escape was education. But with such limited resources the advanced education necessary was possible only for the younger ones, when the older children, and Leif was the eldest, could help the parents pay for it. Then his father, aged only forty, had died and Leif had become head of the family. “Which meant the end of education for me,” he concluded. Later I was to see the photographs of his favourite sister and her son kept in two oval frames of embossed metal backed with red velvet. The photograph of the mother was altogether charming. She stood there, a young girl in national dress with two long thick plaits of shining hair over her shoulders, a sensitive, open face and large eyes, solemn with a sense of the occasion. The photograph was printed not in black and white, but brown and cream, which in some odd way seemed to be the tone of the young day in their lives when it was taken.
I found this sacrifice hard to stomach and asked Leif what he would have liked to do.
“Not farming,” he replied after some hesitation. “Not fishing, certainly not whaling . . . I think . . .” He paused. “I’d have liked to be a librarian, to have looked after lots and lots of books . . .” He smiled at me. “You see, as you would say I’m fond, very fond of books. Only here I am, cook, house-keeper, part accountant even and a dozen other things in a whaler and no chance of ever being anything else.” Perhaps he felt in danger of feeling sorry for himself, because he abruptly went on to dismiss the subject. “But there’s nothing unusual about that. The world is full of seamen who would rather have been something else . . . What is strange, is ’Mlangeni’s story. But he won’t say much. Why not try to get it out of him?”
’Mlangeni had stopped singing, so I suspected he had heard and was prepared for questioning. When I did ask, his account began very much like the Norwegian’s: too little money, too poor a land, and too many mouths to feed. He would have left it at that but, plausible as it all sounded, the Norwegian would not accept it.
“Yes, I know all that,” he remarked impatiently. “You’ve told me that many times before. But what made you go to sea, ’Mlangeni? To sea? You are the only Zulu in the whole fleet?” He turned to me. “You see, he is working with a lot of strangers when the docks are full of men of his own kind earning regular wages: and he could get a job among them tomorrow. How and why did he become a stoker?” He looked once more at ’Mlangeni with fierce curiosity.
’Mlangeni broke out laughing but I thought it went on too long to be altogether convincing.
“I ’Mlangeni, you see, I am fond of fire!” was all he said.
A moment of impasse had obviously been reached. Suddenly, almost without thought, I decided to try and break it. I interrupted his laughter and, speaking to him in his native tongue, Sindakwena, I asked him the name and place of his home town.
He was so astonished to be addressed thus that he leapt upright, looked down at me from his full height, shook his head at himself and me, and then remarked in tones of admiration: “’Nkosan, you are a great trickster. Your face is pale but you speak like the child of a black mother!”
“A trickster!” Leif exclaimed, when I translated the remark at his request.
I explained that the remark was intended as a compliment since a magical trickster was one of the best loved heroes of Zulu and ’Takwena imagination. Then I reminded ’Mlangeni that he had not answered my question yet.
Suddenly grave and once more seated on the hatch beside me, he told me he came from the place called Icoco, the Zulu name for the ring the wise men of the tribe wear on their heads. His home was so called because it lay against a great hill which carried a ring of smooth rock around its crown like a halo.
He was surprised I had not heard of it because the main wagon road from the capital into the interior wound round and over the shoulder of this hill. It was famous among all transport men because the road was so steep there that the oxen hauling their wagons had to strain at their yokes so much that the holes in their behinds yawned like old men fighting their sleep: hence it was also called ‘Make-the-oxen’s-arse-holes-yawn’: but its real, its ancient name was Icoco.
’Mlangeni’s homely phrase was so vivid that I burst out laughing, saying “Oh, man of Icoco, you have spoken!”
Leif, of course, immediately wanted to know what had made me laugh and, to my annoyance, I found myself hesitating. I knew from experience that a literal translation of African speech often shocked Europeans. Having lost their own innocence long since, they failed to recognise what innocence there was still left in the mind of Africans. Yet the Norwegian was so insistent that I had no option. My fears were partly justified. At first, Leif could hardly believe his ears; then, when he grasped the full picture, to my great relief he smiled at ’Mlangeni, who was looking at us, proud of this proof of his powers of speech, and said, “Surprised at you, ’Mlangeni! Thought you too civilised to speak like that!”
Again I was glad that ’Mlangeni did not know the word “civilised”, for I am certain it would have hurt him, and as far as I was concerned, the process of making Africans as ashamed of their natural selves as we were of our own had already gone far enough. But well as ’Mlangeni spoke and understood English, the word “civilised” apparently had not yet come his way, for flushed by his success he started immediately to continue.
Unfortunately the first sentence was hardly out of his mouth when the sound of voices on the Erik Hayerdahl and the noise of someone clambering aboard stopped him. We all three looked up. We had not switched on our deck lights in Kurt Hansen yet but the Erik Hayerdahl had hers full on, so it was possible for us clearly to see a man crossing the gang-plank on to the ship next to us and coming with a quick step across the deck.
’Mlangeni recognised him, leapt to his feet and, raising his right hand high above his head, gave him a loud histrionic version of his native salute for a king: “Bayede ’Nkosi! Gezizandhla, Bayede!”
“Cheers, Langenay,” replied the newcomer, who unlike Leif could not pronounce ’Mlangeni’s name properly. His voice somehow matched his quick step. I would say he both walked and talked with a slight lisp. I looked at him closely as he came on board not merely because he was a newcomer but because of the name ’Mlangeni had given him. Most Zulus ignore the names we give ourselves and give us a name of their own which somehow expresses our salient characteristics, and ’Mlangeni’s name for the newcomer meant literally ‘One-who-is-always-washing-his-hands’.
As the newcomer stepped on board, ’Mlangeni, still in his pose of exaggerated deference, pointed dramatically at the man, and said by way of introducing him to me: “’Nkosi Gorgeous! He was not born! He was belched up by a cow.”
Gorgeous clearly had no idea of what ’Mlangeni had said. He thought merely that he was being teased and disliked it.
“I keep on telling you, ’Mlangeni, that my name is Georghius; Georghius . . .” he said in a rather vexed tone. Then noticing me he added, “Georghius is the Latin for George.” Then once more addressing ’Mlangeni, he protested, “I won’t have you calling me names in a language I can’t understand. It isn’t fair, is it, Leif?”
I had to struggle hard not to laugh. Georghius’s appearance, for instance, was as over-fastidious as the Zulu nickname implied. He was a smallish man, fine-boned, narrow-hipped and yet oddly broad-shouldered. His face was round and smooth, and his eyes big and blue. His head was unusually well-shaped and covered with thick yellow hair of a wiry texture worn exceptionally long even for these days. On the second finger of his left hand he had a gold ring, with a big green-coloured semiprecious stone which completely covered the knuckle. He wore a pair of white shoes with toes of black patent leather, known popularly then as “co-respondent’s shoes”. His trousers were an exaggerated version of what was considered the height of fashion among young men at the time and were known far and wide as “Oxford Bags”. For a year or more everyone at my school had coveted a pair but no one was allowed to wear them. A short double-breasted navy-blue coat had a pink silk kerchief in the breast pocket, a pink silk tie, and an immaculate stiff white collar with long tapering points. Starched white cuffs protruded well beyond the sleeves of the coat and were held together by a pair of ornate platinum and black stone links. The pink tie was held bulging to his shirt with a gold pin endorsed with the letters “G. Grieg.”
I could well understand ’Mlangeni’s admiration because among war-like Zulus such as the brave Amangtakwena paradoxically it is the man not the woman who goes in for fine clothes and jewellery.
Mr. Grieg however, as I now took him to be, again repeated his question, “It isn’t fair, is it, Leif?”
“I don’t know,” Leif replied, taking the pipe out of his mouth, and smiling gently. “We’d better ask our young friend here. He speaks the language.”
I hesitated because I knew instinctively that the way I answered would determine my future relationship with ’Mlangeni. I did not want him to feel that I would ever use my knowledge of his language to spy on his mind. Much as I was drawn to Leif, I had experienced immediately a certain sense of kinship with ’Mlangeni, the kinship which comes alive in the children of Africa whatever their colour when they are among foreigners. I wanted him to know that I would both welcome and honour his confidence.
“Well then,” I replied, “’Mlangeni said merely that you were not born Mr. Grieg.” I thought it best not to add he had “been belched up by a cow” as well. “He was paying you a great compliment. It is an expression his people use when they find someone unusually impressive. He’s suggesting your arrival must have been almost miraculous.”
“I say!” Grieg exclaimed both taken aback and appeased. “But that’s going a bit far, isn’t it? I wish it could have been explained to me before.” He held out his hand to ’Mlangeni who took it shyly. “I wouldn’t have been nearly so irritable with you all these years if I’d known what you meant.”
Leif merely smiled enigmatically and then went on puffing at his pipe.
’Mlangeni, having dropped Grieg’s hand, remarked to me in a way that made me feel I had passed the test: “You are indeed a trickster, ’Nkosi!”
“Well, I must be off,” Grieg said before I could reply. “Got to change and wash.” He looked straight at me. “Whaling’s a dirty business.”
Leif and ’Mlangeni just thought this highly amusing and grinned openly, Leif remarking: “Gorgeous comes from Bergen. His family was related to the composer Grieg.”
Grieg heard him, and turned quickly. “Daddy was a fifth cousin. And the name is not Gorgeous but Georghius, the Latin for George.”
With that he vanished into the forecastle.
“Odd thing about the people of Bergen,” Leif went on, ignoring the interruption. “They tend to think they’re superior to the rest of us. Take Grieg, there. He assumes that he is a kind of missionary bringing the light of culture to the dark souls in the whaling fleet. But he is a very nice man for all that; and first class at his job.”
“And what is his job?” I asked.
“Helmsman. And by far the best in our fleet. Wait until you’ve seen him take the Kurt Hansen stalking a whale and you’ll know what I mean. We like him, don’t we, ’Mlangeni?”
’Mlangeni agreed with a nod of his great head.
“You’ll find,” Leif continued, “that Gorgeous will have been to the Sunday orchestral concert in the City Hall tonight. He goes there regularly. The rest of us poor dark souls merely go to church—that is, all of us except Captain Larsen, of course.”
“He speaks jolly good English!” I remarked.
“His mother was English,” Leif replied. “And he learnt his trade first in English ships. That’s where the Gorgeous comes from. Oh, I know the sea looks vast. But the world of the sailor is very small and sooner or later all our secrets come out. With only one exception, this fellow here . . .” He pointed at ’Mlangeni.
I wanted there and then to ask ’Mlangeni to go on with his story, but at that moment the rough murmur of many male voices and the sound of many heavy footsteps reached us from the quay. The noise rapidly became louder and soon all round us we heard the other whalers hailing men on shore, followed by the sound of men clambering on board their ships.
“Church is over,” Leif remarked, getting up. “I had better turn on the lights.”
In the next few minutes I watched the remaining thirteen members of the crew board the Kurt Hansen. I do not propose describing them in detail, because they had no particular influence on me and none of them were with me in the Kurt Hansen during all four of the seasons that I served in her. They were all men brought out on a four months’ contract from Norway by mail steamer and at the end of the whaling season went back to their homes again. Some of them would reappear the following year but many would skip a season reappearing only the year after and then not necessarily in the ships they had left. Only a hard core remained regularly with their ships and an even smaller number would volunteer to go straight on for whaling in the Antarctic summer, as did about a quarter of the ships in the fleet, including the Kurt Hansen. I would only say this about the Norwegian crews, that they were an exceptionally decent and inoffensive lot of men. They were sober, thrifty, conscientious, hard-working and God-fearing, and they made whaling appear an oddly respectable affair. Certainly as they came on board this Sunday evening, every one of the thirteen dressed in a rough but neat suit of navy-blue serge, they looked the church-goers they had just been and not the ‘catchers of Leviathan’ that they were about to become. Among them only ’Mlangeni, Leif and Gorgeous served in Kurt Hansen all the time with me, and they were not of the regular pattern of behaviour and character in the fleet.
Anxious to change their clothes as soon as possible, the crew hardly seemed to notice me and hurried past the three of us, greeting Leif and ’Mlangeni with a brisk nod of their heads. I thought it merely a sign of their haste to get ready for sea, since Leif had told me we were putting out early. But I was to find it was just because they were men incapable of many words. In fact if ever they had a common issue that they wanted to take up with the Captain, they usually got Leif to do their speaking for them.
The last man had hardly vanished down the companion-way when Thor Larsen, followed at some distance by my friend and a Zulu chauffeur carrying our gear, appeared on board.
Larsen spotted me at once and, as always after a Sunday with the owner’s representative, he was full of gin and high spirits, and bellowed: “Good, very good, there you are, my young Boher! You come below, we open at once the elephant-whale credit account! Not?”
Then his eyes fell on ’Mlangeni, and suspicion was immediately written large over his face. “What you doing here, Langenay! I told engineer we putting out early. What about your boilers? You’re not to tell me you not ready yet, not?”
Without giving ’Mlangeni a chance to reply, he walked to the hatch and roared down it: “Mr. Engineer!”
Almost at once a large plump man, without a coat but still in Sunday trousers, black braces and white shirt, came up the steep companion-way.
Larsen threw a series of vehement questions in Norwegian at him. Fortunately the engineer’s answers satisfied him, for soon he dismissed him, came back to us and, ignoring Leif and ’Mlangeni, said in his hearty, rasping Sunday evening voice: “Come on, my young Boher. Below, below! Down below!”
Leif and ’Mlangeni, no doubt used to their Captain’s manner, had remained unperturbed beside me.
“I’d better go, hadn’t I?” I whispered to Leif.
“Yes. Of course, you must go,” he answered. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Fügelsang,” I said. “Goodnight, ’Mlangeni.”
’Mlangeni looked at me solemnly. He did not say goodnight but gave me that enigmatic parting utterance of Zulu and Amangtakwena which can mean so many things. “Hamba gahle!” Literally it means “May you go slowly,” and somehow I knew that ’Mlangeni was not only saying “goodnight” but advising me to watch my step.
Meanwhile Eric, too, had come on board, got the chauffeur to put our gear on deck, dismissed him and now stood watching me. Aware of the fact that I had ignored him, I rushed up to him, put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Oh, I’m jolly glad you’ve come at last! We are going to have such fun. These chaps . . .” I indicated ’Mlangeni and Leif, intending to introduce him to them.
He interrupted me rather brusquely. “Come on, pick up your gear and let’s get down below or Larsen’ll be annoyed.”
As he spoke he gathered up his own bag and walked by Leif and ’Mlangeni without a glance.
Abashed, I picked up mine and, calling out “Goodnight” to my new friends, I too went below.
“I see you’ve not lost any time making yourself at home,” he remarked to me, not without a hint of sarcasm, when I joined him in the small saloon. “Who were those two?”
Somewhat dismayed, I explained. “The cook and the Zulu stoker.”
“Lord!” exclaimed my friend with such scorn that I felt quite speechless.
He was immediately contrite. “Sorry. As a matter of fact I’m a bit rattled. Suppose I’m sea-sick again? Everyone says I’ll have grown out of it now. But I wonder. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have come. . . . Besides, Dad’s furious about us going with Larsen and not the other captain.”
“Oh, gosh, how awful,” I said. Then added impulsively: “Look, would you rather call the whole thing off and go back home? If you’d rather, I don’t mind.”
Had Eric taken me at my word I would have minded more than I can possibly say. But though the spoilt and only son of rich parents, he was generous enough at heart to say he wouldn’t hear of it.
At that moment Larsen, full of energy, burst through the curtains over his cabin entrance like an anthropoid through a paper hoop in a circus.
“Ach, there you are, there you are!” he uttered with satisfaction. “At 2 a.m. I put to sea. If you like, you both come to wheelhouse with me. If not, you sleep till morning. Which would you like to do?”
“I’d love to come,” I answered readily, and got a look of approval from Larsen.
“Thank you.” My friend’s response was far from clear to me, though Larsen appeared to understand. Slapping him on the shoulder with his broad hand, the Captain told him:
“Not to mind! To decide when time comes! Now I go to make ready for sea, and you, you two, you better go to sleep!”