At the old man's command, Paul ran up to the poop and threw out a sounding line to which one of the deckhands, amiably—and a little patronizingly—smiling, attached a bundle of newspapers. Paul drew the packet aboard, with professional gestures, and the tug, with a clang of bells and a churning of the propeller, plunged forward, preparing to let out her thick hawser.
Paul spread the newspaper on the chart-room desk. Such strange-looking sheets they were—not a bit like the Halifax Herald! The captain's form loomed in the companion-way, and Paul ran off to make the beds, debating the mighty, jubilant, breathless alternatives: should he go first to see Veronique, or Hamlet, or Miss Dolly Castles in Pinafore?
Never had trees been so green, roofs so red, nor life itself so promising. Even the bare island that lay off the coast had a personality, for "There," said the pilot, "is where the Orizaba went down."
The sails were furled. The tow-boat had dropped back and made fast at the side to guide the helpless vessel through the channel of the river. Had water ever been as utterly flat as this? Paul wondered that it could float tall ships.
That vivid brick building on the bank, surmounted by a short mast on which was a time-ball—those vines with purple-blue flowers like the clematis that split down the walls of Gritty's brown house thousands and thousands of miles away—but of a blueness!
The gigantic black-funnelled liner moored to the quay—a P. and O. And ahead of her was a real battle cruiser! The only warship Paul had seen was a wheezy revenue cutter in Halifax. "That's the Euryalis," explained the pilot, most satisfactory of men, "the flagship of the Australian squadron."
