The Beach of Dreams

MP3 Audio CD. The Beach of Dreams

CHAPTER I

THE ALBATROSS


The fo'c'sle, lit by a teapot lamp, shewed the port watch in their
bunks, snoring, all but Harbutt and Raft seated on a chest, Harbutt
patching a pair of trousers, Raft smoking.

Raft was a big red-headed man with eyes that seemed always roving over
great distances as though in search of something. He was thirty-two
years of age and he had used the sea since twelve--twenty years. His
past was a long succession of fo'c'sles, bar-rooms, blazing suns, storms
and sea happenings so run together that all sequence was lost. Beyond
them lay a dismal blotch, his childhood. He had entered the world and
literally and figuratively had been laid at the door of a workhouse; of
his childhood he remembered little, of his parentage he knew nothing. In
drink he was quiet, but most dangerous under certain provocations.

It was as though deep in his being lay a blazing hatred born of
injustice through ages and only coming to light when upborne by
balloon-juice. On these occasions a saloon bar with its glitter and
phantom show of mirth and prosperity sometimes called on him to dispense
and destroy it, the passion to fight the crowd seized him, a passion
that has its origin, perhaps, in sources other than alcohol.

He was talking now to Harbutt, scarcely lowering his voice on account of
the fellows in the bunks. Snoring and drugged with ozone a kick would
only have made them curse and turn on the other side, and as he talked
his voice made part of that procession of noises inseparable from the
fo'c'sle of a ship under sail against a head sea. He had been holding
forth on the food and general conditions of this ship compared with the
food and conditions of his last, when Harbutt cut in.