The After House

He was more moved than I had ever seen him, and ate a gum-drop to

cover his embarrassment. Soon after that he took his departure,

and the following day he telephoned to say that, if the sea was

still calling me, he could get a note to the captain recommending

me. I asked him to get the note.

Good old Mac! The sea was calling me, true enough, but only dire

necessity was driving me to ship before the mast--necessity and

perhaps what, for want of a better name, we call destiny. For what

is fate but inevitable law, inevitable consequence.

The stirring of my blood, generations removed from a seafaring

ancestor; my illness, not a cause, but a result; McWhirter, filling

prescriptions behind the glass screen of a pharmacy, and fitting out,

in porcelain jars, the medicine-closet of the Ella; Turner and his

wife, Schwartz, the mulatto Tom, Singleton, and Elsa Lee; all thrown

together, a hodge-podge of characters, motives, passions, and

hereditary tendencies, through an inevitable law working together

toward that terrible night of August 22, when hell seemed loose on

a painted sea.