chart in a drawer under the table and left the wheelhouse.

[27]

Evans looked out the window. He could think of nothing very important to be done before they sailed. They had fuel. Smitty would get rations. The charts were up to date. He rubbed his face to see if he needed a shave. He did.

Evans went into his cabin and turned on the water in his basin. He noticed that his eyes looked a little better, though they still hurt him. He sighed and tried to look at his profile in the glass. This he knew would exercise his eyes, also in the back of his mind he wondered if he might not be able to see his profile. He had seen it once in a tailor’s three-way mirror. He had been greatly interested, and he hoped vaguely that he might see it again sometime. Strange things like that obsessed people who had been to sea for a long time.

Someone turned on the radio. A deep sterile radio voice staccatoed in the air for a moment and was gone. The air was filled with static, and then the voice came back again. Evans could not make out what the voice was saying but he could guess from the tone that our “forces were smashing ahead on all fronts”: the usual thing. He was bored by the war.

Methodically he shaved himself. He wondered who had turned on the radio. Probably Martin, his first mate.

A light wisp of fog came into the room through the half-open window; quickly Evans shut it. He shivered. The cold was penetrating.

“I’m cold as gold is old,” he muttered to himself. It was a jingle that went occasionally through his mind. For several[28] years he had known it. Queer phrases and jingles often came to him when he had been too much alone. Sometimes they worried him. Evans often wondered if he might not be a little crazy. They say, though, that when you are crazy you never know it, he thought. There was consolation in that and he murmured again to himself, “I’m cold as gold is old.” Then he finished shaving.

[28]

He looked much older than twenty-five, he noticed, looking at himself intently in the mirror. When he was eighteen he had worked alone in a lighthouse. He used often to look at himself in the mirror then. He felt less alone when he did that and the habit had stayed with him. He yawned and turned away from the mirror. Neatly he put his shaving equipment away, then he sat down at his desk and looked at the papers on it. Most of the papers were memorandums from the 

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