s Uncle Robin's letters he would greet with a smile, and perhaps a bit
moistness in the eye; Alan Donn's with a grin, as an elder brother's.
But his mother's letters he would approach with a coldness akin to fear.
He hated to open them. It was like an unpleasant duty.

The realization of her was always a chilling disappointment, but the
dream of her was a great hope. And in the black waters of the China
Seas, or in the night watches off the Azores, where the porpoises played
in the phosphorescence, there would come a sea-change over the knowledge
he had of her. All the spiritual, all the mental angles of her faded
into gracious line, and on the tight French lips of her a smile would
play as a flower opens, and her eyes, hard as diamonds, would open and
become kindly as a lighted house. And the strange things of the heart
would come out, like little shy rabbits, or like the young tortoises,
and bask in that kindly picture. And the things that were between them,
that could not be said, but just sensed, as the primroses of spring are
sensed, not seen, not felt, hardly smelt even, but sensed.... The
hesitant deep things he would say and the dignified, smiling answer, or
the pressure of the hand even, and the inclination of the shoulder....

And the people he would meet who would ask him about his mother, and he
could answer nothing, so that they thought him stupid and unthoughtful.
But really what was there to say?... And once when he sprang into Biscay
Bay after a cabin-boy who had fallen over the taffrail, and the lad's
mother had thanked him in Plymouth for saving the child's life: "Your
mother will be very proud of you," the old woman said. But the reality
of the harsh Frenchwoman came to him like a slap in the face. "Christ,
if she only were!" his heart cried. But the clipped little Scots-Irish
voice replied, "Aye, I suppose she will."

And again the soft mood would come, and then he would have a letter from
her, ending with that harsh command, that was a gust of some bleak
tempest of her own life, where his father had perished: "Pray God to
keep you pure in mind and body!"

And homeward bound again, in the soft murmur of the wind among the
shrouds, and the little laughter of the water at the bows, there would
abide with him again the dream mother of the night watches, until he
said to himself that surely the reality was false, and at the
garden-gate she would be waiting for him with a great depth of kindness
in her