It was, he thought, typical of himself. He had decided to make a fortune of some sort after the first bitter rage over his debacle at Webster had abated in his heart. He realized that without wealth his position in the world would be more difficult and more futile than his fates had decreed. Poverty, at least, he was not forced to bear. He could wrest fortune from nature by his might. That he had begun that task by diving for pearls fitted into his scheme. It was such a method as no other man would have considered and its achievement robbed no one while it enriched him.

When the Katrina turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with his shipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was no more despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked his earliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried that slowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toil on the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himself alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck. Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, his valiant dreams all dead.

One day he had saved a man’s life. The reaction to that was small, but it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that could succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was a kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he might be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fire engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He had counted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for the boy who had fallen on the field at Webster could be stifled eventually. Human life seemed very precious to Hugo then.

He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities—a handful here and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a bank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was a voyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and know the world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shifts in the history of the world put an abrupt end to it. When the Katrina rounded the Bec d’Aiglon and steamed into the blue and cocoa harbour of Marseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria, France, Russia, England....

XI