This second man, bluff and agreeable, had had various troubles in his time but not ours. And I could see that, like myself, he was no believer in tampering. ‘Keep her going on three cylinders’, he said, ‘till you come to some place.’

I was impressed by the excellence of this advice and thanked him. If our doom was written, at least it was not to be preceded by an undignified and unholy mess.

When the Crew met us, she said, ‘There are no fresh eggs or lettuces to be got anywhere.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘But’, she said, ‘I have got fresh kippers—from Stornoway —Maclver’s.’ She looked at the Mate.

‘Do you want the money now?’ he asked.

‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly remembering. ‘What about the engine?’

We walked in silence for a little way, southward and westward, for now there was no hurry. Indeed, I was aware of the tranquil feeling that is alleged to come upon those who have accepted doom. It is a subdued feeling, perhaps, but not utterly unpleasant. And it conjured up little compensations. For example, the boat had been making a good drop of water. Nothing disquieting. But two pumpings a day were hardly enough. Soon it would be three. And it’s not better it would get. When we sank her—well, there would be no more pumpings.

But the real compensation was one of detachment in which, more than ever, was felt the Columban peace. This was the way the brethren walked to their work, over the back of the island, to the Machair in front of the great western bay. Somewhere hereabouts they had met the ‘incomparable gladness’.

It was fairly easy to picture them in a general way, but I suddenly got an impression of the man whose words were reported so smoothly. Of medium height, he was thin and tough, the face lined, the dark-brown thatch of hair losing its colour, the eyebrows bushy, but the eyes of a lively and penetrating brightness. The creases in the face ran naturally into a smile that was the very net of irony. And the world irony was there, or the mind could never have passed to so expressive and comprehending a serenity.

And then we came back to the knoll where Columba communed with the angels. I could never quite see Columba’s face. I could, in a way, but always, as it were, the outside face with its leadership upon it. Irony to serenity to the true humility, in which the flesh over the bone and the irises of the eyes are purified of the insignia of the boss—it is difficult to get the face of a leader like that, apart, perhaps, from the faces of one or two great religious leaders out of the East. And nothing less quite satisfies a mood grown weary of all the personal humours or manifestations of egoism. As though a modern voice cried with the agony of a pure spirit: ‘Hell, let us be shut of all that egoism meantime.’