way of doing. At the least they had won him a powerful ally in the forecastle.
Those floors! The saloon and the captain's bedroom and bathroom were spotless—a pleasure to do them out. But the mates! They chewed tobacco. On the floor, within convenient reach, were brass receptacles—but the mates were appallingly bad shots! Whenever it came time to scrub those two tiny floors, Paul found it necessary to think about something miles away, or hum strenuously—not too strenuously, for in this new world somebody was always asleep—while he slathered and brushed and slaped; for if he let himself dwell on the situation in hand—well, it meant another hasty exit, and one couldn't always pretend to be looking over the side for jelly-fish!
After the third or fourth day, the see-sawing had become less annoying, and the emergency pilot-crackers crumbled to powder in his pockets. But every day he discovered new areas of brass to be polished. The people who had fitted forth the Clytemnestra had shown a maddening partiality for this metal. It covered the silly dashboards that blocked progress from cabin to cabin; it embellished every door; it encircled every porthole; it was twisted into fantastic settings for lamps and barometers, with myriad angles and crevices that caught the white paste and defied your efforts to dislodge it, whereupon you delivered yourself, sotto voce, of robust oaths which would have startled the eaves of Hale's Turning, but which seemed meet and fitting at sea.
That he could swear with an untroubled conscience illustrated the quality of this new plane of existence. Here oaths and ribaldries that would formerly have crisped his hair had no more consequence than the spray which leapt over the sides. Like spray they evaporated, leaving a tang of salt which was not unpleasant—he
