For at least nothing seems more certain finally than the loneliness of one’s own self, which no mass hysteria, or political creed, or religious faith, can save from the last lonely departure that is death. It seems more than a pity to go out into that final dark without making some sort of effort to discover what glimmerings of harmony may visit the mind if we give it a reasonably receptive chance.

When the average man goes away in his yacht, be he wealthy or poor, what is the driving force behind his desire? And when his brother who cannot go envies him, why the envy? What is being searched for beneath all the ordinary human reactions? What has been lost, what is being missed? And, anyway, how can one answer honestly for oneself without time for personal experience and dispassionate thought?

Time again! Then one night Eoin called on me about midnight in Inverness and took me apart with the air of a man at a funeral. ‘I wanted to tell you by yourself,’ he said. ‘I have just had a ’phone message from Skye. The Thistle dragged both her anchors yesterday in a terrific gale and went ashore on the rocks of Hulm Island.’

III

Cutting the Painter

Those jagged rocks, fused dark and hard as iron, beneath the brown weed. My spirit sank in me as I looked at him.

‘No, they got her off after an hour or two, I’m told,’ said Eoin, ‘and she hasn’t been greatly damaged, though I cannot say how much.’ He seemed sad and disappointed about it. We discussed the matter back and fore and then went in and told the Crew.

Within a day or two I got fairly accurate information. Her rudder had been broken and one side scraped, but by some miracle the hull itself was sound, not even a plank having been started. The slimy cushion of brown seaweed must have helped.

The trouble had lain not only with the storm, but with the heavy anchor, for when I came to investigate the matter on the spot, I discovered that this anchor had lost its hold because the stock had shifted—when the pin came out.

A carpenter from Kilmuir, who had served on ships in his time, got on to the job, and in due course I was informed that she was sounder than ever.

But my restlessness was increasing. There had been nothing but delays and trouble ever since I got her, and a feeling was beginning to grow that nothing would go right until I took her over myself. All along, too, I had been disturbed by the age of the engine, and the mechanic’s report that two of the gudgeon pins were perhaps not too tight did not help. Fifteen years is old even for a Kelvin, but I had the faint hope that I might get word from the makers, to whom I had sent the number of the engine, that she might be no more than ten. On the back of the news of the beaching on Hulm came a letter from the makers informing me that the engine was installed in 1912. Twenty-five years old!