I must render him the justice that this sort of pride was his only weakness.
But he got no suggestion from me.I understood his psychology.
Besides, I had my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it is a different one now), and amongst them was the conceit of being remarkably well up in the psychology of the Westerly weather.Ibelieved - not to mince matters - that I had a genius for reading the mind of the great ruler of high latitudes.I fancied I could discern already the coming of a change in his royal mood.And all I said was:
"The weather's bound to clear up with the shift of wind.""Anybody knows that much!" he snapped at me, at the highest pitch of his voice.
"I mean before dark!" I cried.
This was all the opening he ever got from me.The eagerness with which he seized upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety he had been labouring under.
"Very well," he shouted, with an affectation of impatience, as if giving way to long entreaties."All right.If we don't get a shift by then we'll take that foresail off her and put her head under her wing for the night."I was struck by the picturesque character of the phrase as applied to a ship brought-to in order to ride out a gale with wave after wave passing under her breast.I could see her resting in the tumult of the elements like a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the raging waters with its head tucked under its wing.In imaginative precision, in true feeling, this is one of the most expressive sentences I have ever heard on human lips.But as to taking the foresail off that ship before we put her head under her wing, I had my grave doubts.They were justified.That long enduring piece of canvas was confiscated by the arbitrary decree of the West Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and the contrivances of their hands within the limits of his kingdom.With the sound of a faint explosion it vanished into the thick weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout substance not so much as one solitary strip big enough to be picked into a handful of lint for, say, a wounded elephant.Torn out of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered and torn by the shift of wind.For the shift of wind had come.The unveiled, low sun glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a confused and tremendous sea dashing itself upon a coast.We recognised the headland, and looked at each other in the silence of dumb wonder.