broken water.

[11]

Martin has been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last things have come to pass.

And very faintly, like music heard across the water in the evening, blurred into strange harmonies, his old watchwords echo a little in his mind. Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jericho would fall down, stirs and broods in the womb of his grey lassitude. The bow rises and falls gently in rhythm with the surging sing-song of the broken water, as the steamer ploughs through the long swell of the Gulf Stream, eastward.

[12]"See that guy, the feller with the straw hat; he lost five hundred dollars at craps last night."

[12]

"Some stakes."

It is almost dark. Sea and sky are glowing claret colour, darkened to a cold bluish-green to westward. In a corner of the deck a number of men are crowded in a circle, while one shakes the dice in his hand with a strange nervous quiver that ends in a snap of the fingers as the white dice roll on the deck.

"Seven up."

From the smoking-room comes a sound of singing and glasses banged on tables.

"Oh, we're bound for the Hamburg show,

To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,

An' we'll all stick together

In fair or foul weather,

For we're going to see the damn show through!"

On the settee a sallow young man is shaking the ice in a whisky-and-soda into a nervous tinkle as he talks:

"There's nothing they can do against this new gas.... It just corrodes the lungs as if they were rotten in a dead body. In the hospitals they just stand the poor devils up against a wall and let them die. They say their skin turns green and that it takes from five to seven days to die—five to seven 

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