llow
myself to hint in any other way at the appalling magnitude of the
disaster. The whole world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember,
of my seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its
soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's silver-mine,
and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, whose name,
cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham heard it pass over his head--in
Linda Viola's voice), dominated even after death the dark gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and love--all that had come down
crashing about my ears.

I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment I was
saying, "Won't you sit down?"

The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck training even
in a merchant ship will do! This episode should give you a new view of
the English and Scots seamen (a much-caricatured folk) who had the last
say in the formation of my character. One is nothing if not modest,
but in this disaster I think I have done some honour to their simple
teaching. "Won't you sit down?" Very fair; very fair, indeed. She sat
down. Her amused glance strayed all over the room.

There were pages of MS. on the table and under the table, a batch of
typed copy on a chair, single leaves had fluttered away into distant
corners; there were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead
pages that would be burned at the end of the day--the litter of a cruel
battle-field, of a long, long, and desperate fray. Long! I suppose
I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of times. Yes, I
suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me, and talked connectedly
to my household on suitable occasions. But I had never been aware of
the even flow of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent,
watchful, tireless affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been
sitting at that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for
days and nights on end. It seemed so, because of the intense weariness
of which that interruption had made me aware--the awful disenchantment
of a mind realizing suddenly the futility of an enormous task, joined
to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary amount of fairly heavy physical
labour could ever account for. I have carried bags of wheat on my back,
bent almost double under a ship's