CHAPTER XXII.

GREAVES SICKENS.

This time gives a date to a change that came over Greaves. It was the change of sickness. He grew feverish, irritable, fanciful; his appetite fell away; the light in his eyes dimmed; sometimes he would put on a staring look, as though he beheld something beyond that at which he gazed.

I had been struck by his manner, and more by his manner than by his speech, when he lectured Wirtz and flung at Antonio, the Spaniard, as you have read in the last chapter. Yet of itself this would not have been a matter to rest very weightily upon my mind, seeing that all along I had considered Greaves as a little, just a little, mad at the root. But soon the incident took significance as being a first lifting of the curtain, so to speak, upon a new and somewhat crazy behavior in my friend. I hoped at first it was the heat that unsettled his nerves and that the Horn would give me back my old, odd, hearty, generous shipmate and messmate. Then I feared that the blow he had dealt himself when he stumbled in the hold of the _Casada_ had been silently and painlessly working bitter mischief in the organ of the liver, or in parts adjacent thereto. If the liver was hurt the strangeness of the man might be accounted for. I have suffered from the liver in my time, and know what it is to have felt mad; I say I have known moments--O God, avert the like of them from me and those I love--when I could scarce restrain myself from breaking windows, kicking at the shins of all who approached me, knocking my head against the wall, yelling with the yell of one who drops in a fit; and all the while my brain was as healthy as the healthiest that ever filled a human skull, and nothing was wanted but a musketry of calomel pills to dislodge the fiend that was jockeying my liver and galloping the whole fabric of my being down the easy descent.

It will not be supposed that the change in Greaves was sudden. It uttered itself at capricious intervals, and at the beginning was more visible in the mood than in the man.

For example, it was, I think, about four days after the little incident which brings the last chapter to a close. I had charge of the deck from eight to midnight. Miss Aurora had passed half an hour with me, sometimes asking questions by gestures distinguishable by the light of the moon, sometimes attempting strange sentences in English, all the words correctly pronounced, but so misplaced that with true British politeness I was forever breaking into a laugh at her. A moment there had been when she was in earnest. She came to a stand, her face fronting the moon so that I witnessed the working of it, her eyes with a little silver flame in each liquid depth dark as the sea over the side. She spoke in Spanish, with here and there a word of English. It seemed to me she referred to the voyage. I fancied that I worked out of her words the meaning that she desired to continue in the brig, and was content. How did I gather this, when I tell you in the next breath that I could not understand her? Well, it was my _fancy_ of her meaning that I give you, but whether I understood her or not she motioned with an air of tragic distress, clasped her hands, looked up at the stars, and cried in English, “Sad--sad--not understand--sad.” We then resumed our walk, and presently she left me.

Now it was that Greaves arrived. He smoked a long curled pipe of Turkish workmanship and moved noiseless in slippers. The moonlight whitened his face and silvered his hair and blackened his eyes till, elsewhere, I might have looked twice without knowing him. We were to the southward of the Lima parallel, our course south by west. The Bolivian coast trends inward. Our course gave us to larboard a wide sweep of open ocean and this we should hold down to the latitude of 50°. After which the chance was small of our falling in with anything armed under Spanish colors.

We had made noble progress taking the days all round, and this night we were courtesying onward with a pretty breeze off the larboard beam--a wind that ran the waters gushing white to the bends, and overhead were all the stars and the moon in their midst dimming a circle of them, and under the moon the play of the sea was like a torrent of boiling silver.

“This is a desolate ocean,” said Greaves.

“So much the better for us,” said I.

“Oh, yes, so much the better for us. But the solitude of the sea is a burden that the heart don’t always beat lightly under. Is solitude a material thing? It has the weight of substance when it settles upon the spirits.”

I let him talk on. He was fond of big, fine words, and the stranger he became the more heroic grew his vein.

“Any more rows forward among the men?”

“I have heard of none.”

“I had two men who fought through a voyage. They had sailed together before and fought throughout. ‘They will fight while they meet on earth,’ said the boatswain of the ship to me, ‘and they will fight if they catch sight of each other at the Resurrection.’” He puffed a cloud of smoke upon the wind and looked round the sea. “I am unsettled in my faith,” said he, “I am troubled by doubts. I believe I am almost Roman Catholic, but lack sufficient credulity to enable me to bring up in that faith. I will tell you what I mean to believe in,” continued he, halting in his walk, compelling me to stand, and looking me full in the face; “I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls.”

“Oh, you’ll wish to choose your next body before deciding, won’t you?” said I. “You wouldn’t be a flea or a cockroach?”

“The flea and perhaps the cockroach have short lives,” said he gravely, “and the next entry might be into something noble. But stop till I tell you why I am going to believe in the transmigration of souls. I had a dream a few nights since. I dreamt that I was a Jewess. I beheld my face in a glass and admired it vastly. My eyes flashed and were full of fire; my lips were scarlet. I wore something white about my head. I knew that I was a Jewess. Shadowy faces of many races of people approached, looked me close in the eye, felt my face with their hands, accosted me, and I could not speak. I was suffocated with the want of speech. But on a sudden I obtained relief. I opened my mouth and spoke, and the words I spoke were Hebrew.”

“D’ye know Hebrew?” said I.

“A stupid question to ask a sailor.”

“How do you know you spoke in Hebrew?”

“Because it wasn’t Greek; because it wasn’t Welsh; because--because--man, it was just Hebrew.”

“And how does transmigration offer here?” said I.

“I was my own soul, informing the body of a Jewess. My soul, of course, couldn’t utter itself, as it was fresh from the body of an Englishman, until it had filled up, as smoke might, every cranny and brain cell of the shape it possessed; until it had penetrated to the crypts and dark foundations of the woman’s heart. Then, seeking vent, my soul broke through the lips of the Jewess. In what tongue, d’ye ask? In what but the tongue of her nation?”

“This,” thought I, “is the lady Aurora’s doing. She it is who’s the Jewess of my poor friend’s dream. The fiery eyes, if not the scarlet lips, are hers, and hers the arrest and suffocation of speech.”

But I guessed it would anger him to put this; yet it grieved me to hear this nonsense in his mouth, and the more because his looks by the moon, that shone upon us while he discoursed, gave a gloomy accentuation of--what shall I call it? not yet madness; not yet craziness; let me rather speak of it as wildness--to his words.

He walked with me for above an hour, talking on this absurdity of transmigration, and reasoning illogically, and often with irreverence, on points relating to the salvation of man. It is a bad sign when religion gets into a man’s head and acidly turns into windiness and nightmare imaginations, as a sweet milk hardens into curdy flatulence in the belly of the suckling.

I sought to shift the helm of his mind by talking about the dollars below; by speaking about the crew and my secret distrust of Yan Bol; by calling his attention to the look of his brig as she floated, with aslant spars, through the moonlight, flowing lengths of the sails curving in alabaster beyond the shadow in their hollows, the water, black as ink under her bowsprit, pouring aft in fire and snow. But all to no purpose. He looked and seemed not to see; he repeated, in a mouthing, absent way, my sentences about Bol and other matters, and immediately struck back again into his talk about heaven, his soul, the Jewess he had dreamt of, and the like.

But, even without seeing him, even without hearing him, I should have known that there was something wrong with the man by the behavior of his dog. I do not say that all dogs have souls; but I am as sure that Galloon had a soul of his own, after its kind, as that my eyes are mates. As a change slowly came over Greaves, so slowly changed Galloon. I would notice the dog watching his master’s face at table, and found a score of human emotions in the creature’s expression. I’d see him lying at Greaves’ door if the captain was within, when formerly he would be on deck cruising about among the men or skylarking aft with me. If I called him, he’d come slowly. There was no more capering up to me, no more buoyant greetings, no leapings and lickings and short, eager yelps of salutation in response to the many things I’d say to him. We make much of human love, I would think while caressing the dog or looking at him, and the love of man we call a passion; but the love of the dog we call an instinct. Yet is not the instinct nobler than the passion? Purity it has that is faultless. Is human passion pure to faultlessness? There is selfishness in human passion, but the love of yonder dog for its master is without selfishness. Many qualities enter into the passion of love; but the love of yonder dog is a primary quality in him. It is as gold among metals. Supposing analysis possible, then analyze the brute’s affection, and you find not a hair’s weight, not a dust-grain’s bulk, of vitiating element.

The lady Aurora was quick to notice the change in Greaves. Her lids moved swiftly upon her eyes, and their lashes were a veil, and she had an art of glancing without seeming to glance. She did not like him, and would not appear to see him more often than courtesy obliged. Her rapid glances, therefore, on occasions when she would have found other occupation for her eyes, told me that she was struck by the man’s looks, that she wondered at them and guessed their significance. I was no doctor. For all I could tell she might have some knowledge under that head. I fancied this from her manner of looking at Greaves.

So one day, when she and I were alone in the cabin, Bol on the lookout above, and the captain in his berth, I endeavored to converse with her about my friend; but to no purpose. Intelligibility vanished in signs, shakes of the head, dumb pointings to the brow and ribs. She had, indeed, picked up a little English. She was able to pronounce the names of various articles of food, also had several English nautical terms at her tongue’s end; but when it came to trying to talk about Greaves’ state of health, there was nothing for it but to crook our brows, hunch our backs, and work meaning into nonsense with postures.

Yet I managed to discover that the lady and I were agreed in this; that Greaves had received some internal injury from his fall, that it was slowly sickening him, and affecting his mind.

Nevertheless, he went about as usual, punctually took sights, attended at meals, was up and down during the day and night. He was very rational in all the orders he gave to the men, in all direct instructions to me respecting shipboard discipline and routine. It was by fits and starts that his growing wildness showed, and always when he had me alone; and then the matter of his discourse was dreams and religion and death. Not that he talked as though he supposed his end was approaching; upon his words lay no shadow of the melancholy that is cast by the dread event when the heart knows, dimly and mysteriously, that it is coming. He chattered as if for argument’s sake; postulated to disprove his own assertions, but he was seldom logical, often devout, filled to the very twang of his nose with fervor, and at other times, and on a sudden, as impious as young John Bunyan.

What think you of this character of a seaman, of a plain north-country merchant seaman; _you_ whose ideas of the nautical man are gotten from Smollett’s studies, from the delightful portraits of dear Captain Marryatt? But, Jack, bless ye! _you_, who have been to sea, _you_ who have sailed ten times round the world, who have swung your hammock in a score of forecastles, and who have outweathered Satan himself in a dozen different aspects of ship’s captains, _you_, mate, will approve this sketch, will recognize its truth, will tell the landlubbers that at sea are many varieties of men--men who swear not, who are gentle, faithful in their duty below; men who are a little crazy, who drink deeply and are devils in their thoughts and madmen in their behavior, but trucklers and slaverers to those who hire them; men who are hearty, pimpled, broad of beam, verdant with the grog blossom and green in naught else, moist in the weather eye, and bow-legged by great seas.

One Sunday morning, when we had left the island a little more or less than three weeks behind us, Greaves said to me at the breakfast table:

“I shall hold divine service this morning on deck.”

I stared, but said nothing.

“I’ll read a portion of the Church of England liturgy to the men,” said he, “and a chapter out of the Bible. What chapter do you recommend?”

I was at a loss.

“Give them something interesting,” said I, “something that will carry them along with you.”

“Right,” he exclaimed, with a little light of vivacity in his somewhat sunken and somewhat leaden eye, “what d’ye say to a fight out of Joshua?”

“I do not think,” I answered, “that a good fight out of Joshua could be bettered.”

“I’ll give ’em that chapter,” said he, “in which the son of Nun corks the five kings up in a cave and then hangs them. Not that there’s any moral that I can see in that sort of narrative. It is an Ebrew Gazette extraordinary--a pitiful, bloody business from beginning to end. But if the reading of a chapter of it causes even one of the sailors to take an interest in the Bible I shall have done some good.”

“So you will.”

“Do you know the men’s persuasions?”

“Not I, captain.”

“The Spaniards are Roman Catholics, of course. The Dutchmen and the others will be of us if they’re of anything. When you go on deck tell Bol to see that the crew clean themselves, and let him muster and bring them aft for divine service at half-past ten.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

Miss Aurora sat over against me at this meal as at most others; she stared at me as though something was wrong. I did not wonder; I had been unable to conceal my astonishment at Greaves’ orders for divine service. Down to this moment he had never read a prayer to the men, never exhibited the least disposition to do so, never imported the faintest shadow of anything religious into the dull and swinish routine of the brig. It was somewhat late in the day to lay up on _that_ tack, methought. But it was for me to obey, and I went on deck, leaving Greaves sitting. Miss Aurora followed, and touched my elbow as I passed through the companion hatch.

“What is it?” said she, in English.

“Nothing, nothing,” I answered, smiling and shaking my head, for it would have given me a deal too much to act, with Yan Bol and the fellow at the wheel as spectators, to gesticulate Greaves’ intention to collect all hands to prayers.

“No danger?” said she, speaking again in English.

“No, no,” I responded heartily.

She touched her forehead, clasped her hands, and turned up her eyes to heaven with one of her incomparable expressions of tragic melancholy, sighed heavily, and returned to the cabin.

“Bol,” said I, stepping up to the great Dutchman where he stood near the wheel, “you will see that the men clean themselves and muster aft by half-past ten for divine service.”

“What’s dot?” said he.

“Prayers.”

He looked at Teach, who was at the helm, and a smile crawled over his face, as wind creeps over a surface of sea. His smile wrinkled his massive visage to the line of his hair.

“Brayers, Mr. Fielding! Dot vhas strange after all dese months. For vhat vhas ve to pray now dot der dollars vhas on boardt?”

“Reason the matter with the captain, if you choose. You have your instructions.”

“Ay, ay, sir. Mr. Fielding, may I hov a verdt mit you?”

He spoke respectfully, and moved from the wheel. He was a man I had been careful to give a wide berth to throughout the voyage; but also was he a man whom, for my own peace sake, I had been at some pains not to give offense to. The familiarity of the fellow was Dutch. I never could make sure that it was more than a characteristic of his countrymen with him, and that he meant insolence when he spoke insolently. I bore in mind, moreover, that secretly he, and no doubt the rest of the crew, viewed me as an interloper--as one who would, probably, share far more handsomely than they in the treasure without having entered at Amsterdam or having formed a part of the original scheme of the expedition. This consideration, then, made me wary in my relations with Yan Bol.

He moved from the wheel out of earshot of the fellow there, and said, in a rumbling voice of subdued thunder:

“I oxbects dot der captain vhas not fery vell, Mr. Fielding?”

“He is not very well.”

“She vhas a bad shob if he vhas to took und die.”

“Yaw; but what is it you wish to say to me?”

“I hov nothing to say, Mr. Fielding, oxcept vhat I hov said. Der men likes to know how her captain vhas. Vhen I goes forwardt und tells dem dot dey most lay aft und bray, dey vhas for vanting to know if der captain vhas all right mit his headt. Oxcuse me, Mr. Fielding, but vhas it all right mit der captain’s headt?”

“We are talking of the captain,” said I.

“Ay, ay, sir; and I shpeaks mit all respect. You vhas first mate; I oct second. It vhas right ve shpeaks together, vhen der capt’n’s health vhas in trouble.”

“You are able to judge of his state as well as I, Bol.”

“No; you live close mit him. My end of der ship vhas yonder.”

His voice seemed to deepen yet as he spoke these words, while he pointed with his vast square hand to the forecastle. I held my peace, sending a look to windward and at the wheel, as a hint to him to go. He stood a while viewing me and appearing to consider, all with a heavy Dutch leisureliness of manner and expression, as though his thoughts rose slow, like whales, to the surface of his intelligence, spouted, and sunk before he could harpoon them; then, saying, “Vell, brayers at half-past ten. Dot vhas a strange idea now der money vhas on boardt,” he walked forward.

This being Sunday morning, the men had nothing to do, and lounged about the galley, smoking and conversing. I watched Bol approach them. He stood abreast of a knot and delivered his orders. _That_ I gathered from the stares, the starts, the hoarse laugh, the rude forecastle joke sent in a growling shout across to a mate at a distance. A little later, however, the fellows came together in a body, somewhat forward of the caboose, some of them out of my sight until my steps carried me to the gangway. Yan Bol stood among them. It was clear to me that they were talking over this new scheme of a prayer meeting aft. I kept well away, and heard nothing but the rumbling of their voices; but it was easy to guess that the most of their talk ran on the captain’s health and intellect, and I reckoned that, if they had already noticed any strangeness in him, this call to prayers would go further to prove him mad in their eyes than the insanest shipboard order he could have delivered.

Some while, however, before there was need for Bol to send the men to clean themselves, Jimmy came out of the cabin and said that the captain wished to speak to me. The morning was fine, the breeze steady, and the sea smooth. The deck was to be safely left for a short interval. I called an order to the helmsman and went below.

Greaves was pacing the cabin floor. The lady Aurora was in her berth, perhaps at her devotions. Galloon was upon a chair, wistfully watching his master as he measured the cabin.

Greaves’ face worked with excitement and agitation; his walk was equally suggestive of distress and disorder. Were there such a thing as news at sea, I might have supposed that something heart-shaking had come to him.

“Fielding,” he cried, as I stood viewing him from the bottom of the companion ladder, “I can’t read prayers to the men. The devil’s right. He’s put it into my head that I’m too wicked, that I’ve been too great a sinner in the past, and am still altogether too vile to read prayers.”

“Do not attempt to do so then,” said I.

“I might be struck dead for profanity,” said he. “There’s a feeling here”--he laid his hand upon his heart--“that warns me I shall drop if I open my lips in the recital of a prayer to the men. Look how nervous I am!” he exclaimed, with a wild, hard smile; and approaching me close he extended his hands, which trembled violently, and then, turning up the palms, he disclosed the channels or lines in them wet with perspiration. “Tell the men,” said he, “that I am too ill to read prayers. Next Sunday, perhaps----”

He threw himself upon a locker, and hid his face upon the table. I watched him for a few minutes, then, going on deck, beckoned to Bol and told him there would be no prayers that morning. The Dutchman threw a suspicious look at the skylight and walked forward.

After this incident anxiety increased upon me until it became indescribably great. I had supposed that the hurt Greaves had done himself, through the connection which exists between the liver and the brain, affected his mind; but now, when he was growing worse, I reckoned he had struck his head as well as his side. Be this as it will, his intellect was giving way, his health every day decaying, and I say that when I grew sensible of this, when I understood that unless he took a turn and mended apace he must die, anxiety made my days bitter.

My old fear of the crew revived. That fear had been hushed somewhat by the behavior of the men, but it grew clamorous when I thought of Greaves as dead and buried in the sea, of the treasure of half a million of dollars in the lazarette, of myself as standing alone in the brig, with no man in authority to support me, without even the moral backing of good-will I might have got from the men had I shipped at Amsterdam and formed one of the Tulp party.

The dead days became dreams and visions to my memory when I thought backward and recalled the _Royal Brunswicker_, Captain Spalding, my arrival in the Downs, the gibbet on the sand hills, the press-gang, the long outward passage to the island, and the hopes and fears which came and went when Greaves talked rationally of the dollars, then irrationally of dreams and the like, and so on, and so on. I did pray very eagerly in my heart that he would be spared. Indeed, I loved the man. He had saved my life, he had enriched me, he had proved a generous, cordial, and cheery shipmate and messmate. I say I loved him, and on several occasions, when I was on deck alone, walking out the weary hours of the night watch, did I look up at the stars and ask of God to deliver my friend from the death whose hand was closing upon him. These petitions would I murmur till my eyes were wet. It was hard that he should be called away in the prime of his time, after years of the stern and barren servitude of the sea, at the moment when a noble prize, gained, as I would think, with high adventurous skill, was his.

But I never could discover, at this time at all events, that he had the smallest idea he was in a bad way. What was visible to me and the sailors, to the Spanish lady, yes, and to his own dog, himself did not see--at least, by never a word that fell from his lips did he give me to guess he knew he was ill. Sometimes he’d complain of weakness and keep his bed; he’d wonder what had become of his appetite, that was all; he never went further. It was I, mainly, who took sights and kept the ship’s reckoning, who, in fact, navigated the brig, and did the work of her master. Miss Aurora’s sympathies with him were strong at the start--that is, when she saw how ill he was and how his illness was increasing upon him. She’d make efforts to anticipate his wants at table; with her own hands she’d boil chocolate for him in the caboose and bring it to the cabin; she let me understand she wished to nurse him. But whether it was because of simple dislike, or because his poor head, muddling the fine woman whom he had rescued with the speechless Jewess of his dream, excited in him some inscrutable fear or aversion I know not; he would have nothing to say to her, looked away when she spoke, repelled whatever she offered, often shrank when she approached--was so crazily discourteous, in a word, that I was obliged to take the girl aside and, by signs and such words as were now current between us, advise her to keep clear of him.

As to _her_, she spent much of her time in sewing and in attempting to master the English tongue out of some books which I borrowed from Greaves’s cabin, and with such help as I had time to give her. We had plenty of needles and thread on board. Greaves, before his illness grew, had given Miss Aurora a handsome roll of pure white duck, or drill--I forget now which it was--to do what she pleased with. I had found some remnants of bunting, of different colors, that she might amuse herself, if she chose, with Greaves’s notion of trimming her dresses; then I had borrowed a thimble from the forecastle. You will suppose that it was not a _tight_ fit; but she managed with it. And so she went to work, sewing in the cabin or in her own berth; and I see her now, with my mind’s eye, as she sits under the skylight, stitching away like any seamstress earning a living, the jewels upon her fingers flashing as her hand rises and falls.

One morning she came out of her berth dressed in a gown of her own manufacture. It was built on original lines, and it suited her. I believe she had shaped it to enable her to get about with ease, to allow her to step without inconvenience up the companion ladder and through the hatch, to pass through the cabin betwixt the table and the lockers without being dragged, and sometimes held, by the folds of her skirt, and to freely move in her little bedroom. The dress she had been cast away in had hardly permitted this liberty. It was voluminous enough to have yielded her three clinging skirts; it caught the wind when she was on deck, and blew out like a topsail in a squall when the yard is on the cap. I admired her vastly in this costume of her own making. The cut answered something to my own taste in female apparel; the waist rose high, the sleeves were tight, the dip and swell of her shape were defined. I had always suspected that a nobly proportioned woman lay awkwardly hid in the dress that had heretofore clothed her, and I guessed I had been right when I looked at her this morning and marked the curve of the breast, the width of the shoulders, the fine, swinging, lofty carriage.

The dress was snow white; it fell in with the color of her face. Her cheeks seemed the whiter for the whiteness of her clothes. She had trimmed her dress with triple lines of red bunting, and, for my part, I should never want to see a prettier or more effective gown on a maiden for sea use.

She stood in the door of her berth, looking archly at me. Galloon growled, scarce knowing her for the moment. Greaves was in his berth, for by this time he was ailing badly. She looked down her dress, colored slightly, then walked up to me and said:

“How you like it? How you like it?” turning herself about a little coquettishly.

Admiration will often make a man laugh; and I laughed to see her in that dress and laughed to hear her address me in English; and laughed yet again, but always admiringly, at her spirited, courting manner of turning her figure about, that I might get a view of her clothes.

“It is very good, indeed,” said I.

“_Si_, it is very good,” she repeated after me.

She then sought to express herself further, and, failing, signed to let me know that she had now two dresses, and that presently she would have three. I pronounced some word of applause in Spanish, which she obliged me to repeat, that I might catch the correct pronunciation, and we then sat down to breakfast.

I have told you that she wore some very handsome rings, and on this occasion it was that I took particular notice of a remarkable ring which she carried on her left hand. She followed my gaze, and stretched out her hand to my face. I imagined she intended that I should kiss her hand, for I was a fool in the customs of nations, and honestly knew not but that a man’s kissing a woman’s hand thus held out to him, almost to his lips, as it were, was some Spanish fashion of significant civility which she would expect me to attend to; so I bent my head and put my mouth to her hand.

She colored, her eyes flashed, she looked confused; then smiled, shook her head, and pointed to the ring. I was young and ingenuous, and the blood rose to my face when I understood that I had blundered; but I held my peace, and looked at the ring. A moment later she pulled it off and put it into my hand. It was a very rich ring, formed of ten precious stones of different sorts and a medallion of the crucifix. I turned it about, admiring it. She watched me earnestly, and then, with a smile and a sigh, said:

“You are not Catolique.”

“No,” said I.

She motioned to let me know she could tell as much by my ignorance of the use of that ring; and then, taking the thing from me, she went through a pretty and dramatic pantomime, reciting “Aves” while she touched the ring, and winding up with a sentence out of the “Paternoster.” She put on the ring after she had made an end of her pretty pantomime, and, looking again at me earnestly, repeated, with the same dramatic sigh:

“You are not Catolique.”

“No,” said I.

“You will be Catolique?” she exclaimed, in very fairly pronounced English, still wearing a wistful and impassioned expression.

I slowly shook my head. She sighed again and looked very downcast; but I was wanted on deck and could sit at table no longer, and so I left her.