"There ought to be something to eat," he roared.

An hour passed before words were exchanged again. Their conversation during the last two days had been like that, consisting of brief interpellations between long pauses, as though the weightiness of their remarks required profound deliberation before utterance, and thereafter much insalivating. During the silences the professor might have devised and ratified several adequate schemes for running the universe, and it is a fact that he had several in view when he went aboard the Salvarak. Had the poet been ashore, he could not have spent his time more profitably; for he waited -he was used to it-without anxiety or cynicism, indifferently, as though for a notice of rejection from some tardy-minded editor. Jerry industriously evolved new forms of blasphemous indignation toward the Almighty, Who had been unthinking enough to let the Salvarak go down, in that dim age of blessed, well-fed memory, five days before, just at daybreak, before any one had breakfasted heartily.

"A damned rotten time to sink a ship," he had said at sundown of their third day adrift on a calm sea, when the final remnant of tinned meat was apportioned "a damned rotten time, just before mess."

He had come to miss that meal mightily, and referred to it with unabated growls.

The professor in philosophy had never had so great an amount of meditative leisure before, though he had always chafed for an opportunity to pursue original work. There had been examinations to conduct, students' papers to ponder, and by far too many positing works old and new, a flotsam and jetsam of changing hypotheses upon which to check up, to make the evolution of a satisfactory, original system easily possible. Moreover, the mouths of three babies had made the thought of throwing over the obligations of his assistant professorship untenable. They were not ripe to be fed upon philosophy. Everything in its time and place this might have been a casual summary of a certain practi

cal, but superficial, philosophy which the professor scorned and by which he lived just the same. He would explain in polysyllables that it was a philosophy fit only for amateurs to live by, but the truth was that he selfishly preferred to keep on with the assistant professorship to hearing the chant of starving, pragmatic infants. Then, too, there was the babies' mother. She loved philosophy; she could not eat it. So, when toward nightfall of the first day, after long study of the fleckless sea, the professor had observed, "At last there 's time to think," the poet had nodded appreciatively at the brief, mordant click of his friend's ironic speech.

He was something more than of middle age, the professor, with a stout, muscular waist. His hair was almost black, thriving in rather plentiful disorder. He wore a mustache. It was dark except where the drooping ends branched into foam, and the droop was quite melancholy. The eyebrows thatched into a punctuation of unflagging interest in the things that had made him a little weighty, tiresome, and dry. His heavy spectacles, with bluesteel rims, gave him the look of a shortsighted hunter; and in fact he had been much of a hunter, quiet and strongnerved, in stalking the insoluble. In the voyage aboard the Salvarak he had expected a setting-up experience that would forward the purpose of another year's endless trek of the unknown.

As for the poet, he was indolent. When it had been decided that without a compass in this vast expanse of middle ocean it was useless to work the oars, he had settled himself indolently in a rather comfortable position at the bow. He had not seen much sense to the exertion, but with three in the boat he had not wanted to dissent from the will of the majority; poet that he was, he had always cursed and then indolently surrendered his individualist creed. He had never been anything but indolent. He had been too indolent to marry; too indolent to proceed in matters of verse on any theory of laborious, refined, lapidarian inspiration; too indolent even always to set down the blessings of his muse. His

books were few, slight, fragile, but continuous in their projection of beautybeauty of a sensitive, refined, tensile strength, without a hint of didacticism or any philosophical conviction. He had a slow-burning, languorous flame of enthusiasm for life, esthetic form, youth-above all for youth, though this enthusiasm was really a passion. There had been some danger of his playing the courtezan with life through a native sensuousness and a tendency to savor rather than through license. He was young, and often, at the thought of turning thirty, suffered little shocks that were sour to the taste, as when zinc and silver touch between the lips.

Jerry himself was not without solid convictions. They appertained chiefly to the advantages of mess at regular intervals and an inexhaustible supply of chewing-tobacco and to a hard-working seaman's right to enjoy all the creature comforts between voyages. He had a wife ashore, and in other ports was not a monk. He knew a dive or two where the entertainment was without the benefit of cowl and cassock. "For the love of God," he exclaimed, with sudden pettishness, "is n't it time to eat?"

A significant glance passed between the professor and the poet, who understood each other to mean, "He 's right; we may as well." Thereupon the professor took a pail from the locker under his seat. He handed one of the biscuits to Jerry, who seized it eagerly; another he handed to the poet, and when he had refitted the cover to the empty pail, he gazed meditatively at the biscuit in his own hand. He bit into it and began chewing slowly. The poet eyed the professor as he pushed his own morsel back under the bowdeck.

"Not yet?" queried the professor, and his masticating came to a full stop. "I'm not quite ready," the poet answered, turning on his side and peering through half-closed eyes at the gentian hills.

The professor made a slight backward gesture with his head, which was easily interpreted to mean, "You'll want to look out for him." The answer

was a shrugging little crawl of negation over the poet's outstretched form. He meant "Harmless!" but he pushed the biscuit back farther under the deck.

There was a noise in the stern just then, the rattle of Jerry feasting. He had torn away half his ration at a bite; a trail of saliva ran from one corner of his mouth. His eyes were normally of a blue-gray color that turned in certain lights to a winnish red, and his inflamed lids seemed now to spread over them this carmine film as he dived beneath his seat and then brought up an empty three-pound beef tin. With what remained of his biscuit he wiped out the rancid tin, running it along the edges and into the soldered grooves. He crammed the fragment, discolored and tainted with the precious juice, into his mouth, and made away with the last swallow. The professor, watching him lick the edges of the tin and attempt to reach every crevice, said calmly, "You'll cut yourself, Jerry." But Jerry paused in his ravening only long enough to turn his eyes, filled to the brim like bowls of red blood, upon the professor. When he had picked out a tiny shred that stuck to the bottom, he swabbed the tin repeatedly with his fingers, putting them into his mouth, two or three at a time, then sedulously one at a time, after which he gave them a most critical examination to see that no edible item had escaped notice. He scrutinized the seat beside him and the bottom of the boat for crumbs, then hurled the tin with all his might.

"Thief! thief!" he shouted, and sat down, gripping the sides of the rocked boat and staring angrily, with his sanquinary eyes fixed on the back of the professor's neck.

The two men forward seemed to have entered a conspiracy to disregard Jerry's strange behavior. The poet watched the tin float and balance easily in the swell of its own disturbance, until finally it tipped too much, gurgled once, and sank with an inaudible bubbling, an effervescent, blue-green, crystal trail. The professor continued to chew methodically, with philosophic calm. It was his well-ordered plan to make the biscuit last till sundown. He caught the poet's eye.

"You'd better eat yours," he said, with a motion of his head toward the stern; "it makes me uneasy." But the poet, dreaming of actualities more essential to his nature than pancreatic juices, shook his head and smiled.

Jerry's wolfishness seemed for a while the chief menace before the occupants of the boat, more threatening in its restrained possibilities than the slow, undulating stir that awoke in the bosom of the ocean as the afternoon wore away. The professor still thought with certainty of reaching shore, optimism having increased within him gradually as he consumed the biscuit. Furthermore he was really of a bucolic turn of mind; his grass would be badly in need of cropping, and it might be advisable to manure the lawn that fall. There was no one to attend to it but himself, and at the moment this seemed reason enough for counting upon a safe return, if Jerry could be induced to behave. The professor was quite disturbed over Jerry and the unreasoning, violent animosity with which he had come to look upon the professor's very presence in the boat. The professor tried to allay suspicion by engaging him in amicable converse with regard to wind, weather, and trade routes; but this only deepened Jerry's distrust, and embittered him in the belief that he was being taken advantage of, as was shown by his retort:

"There's no use talking. get to shore without me."

You can't

Fortitude sat with the professor amidships. He stared at the sheer realism of the oarlock while reflecting on the insoluble. It would have made an interesting classroom problem, this picture of creation whirling on toward its own design, with man clinging tenaciously to the periphery: the most facetious-minded student might have been induced to take a serious view of life and to come to a grapple with some of the professor's immutable values. Once a mouse had betrayed the professor into a momentary belief that circumstances alter cases, but as a competent philosopher he had cured himself quickly of this apostasy, which would have compelled him to revise

many laboriously acquired convictions. He could not permit himself to be alienated from the sublime, diaphanous imperatives, and he rejected substitute earthenware inconsistencies. If the universe did not click regularly, what was to keep it from running down? It was the professor's idea to destroy amalgams, to restore what had been lost, to chalk out the stains on the virgin white mantle of the eternal verities, which had been soiled by selfindulgent thinkers. He rather accepted the view that life was a foolproof lock, and that he himself would fit the right key. For the professor's turn of mind it was essential that the answer to the quandary of the ages should be reduced to an impregnable finality, as logical as a syllogism, as comprehensive as a paradigm, as triumphant as an epigram. He held by the view that no other key than that to be found by refilling the old lamps of philosophy could fit the lock, wherefore he had continued in the chair of an associate professor and seemed likely, barring a change in his philosophy or discovery of the missing key itself, to occupy that seat until the bottom fell out.

He had once sturdily contended against the rigidity of all philosophies, but this radical inspiration was lost to him as he was not hit hard enough on the head by a brick before he was thirty. By the time he was thirty-five he had begun to store away the observed facts of life against the day when his own demonstration would everlastingly rout all other rigidities. It was not strange, therefore, that he was able at first to get a certain satisfaction out of the curious significance of his present predicament. He had not run a lawn-mower across his grass without a meditative attitude toward the universe. He had not trapped mice with cheese in his oat-bin without indulging a few subtle distinctions. At one time the professor would argue that his success in catching mice was due to the omnipotence of men over the rodents; at another time he would see that this could be only a comparative omnipotence, wherefore illogical in the very statement of the case and hence

illustrative of nothing more than a mere preference in diet.

He had been weak enough, nevertheless, to experiment with omnipotence and the quarry far out behind the barn. A mouse had refused to leave the trap, and, when the professor shook it out, it declined to race away as the others had done. It squatted in its tracks, breathless, palpitant. And the pro

fessor had warded off the cat! That behavior on the part of the mouse meant something. The professor had decided that the furry gray creature should live, and was already considering the philosophical phases of the spectacle when he accidentally stepped on the mouse and killed it. He had never ceased to think fondly of the creature, and often mused as to how it might have figured in his ultimate demonstration if it had lived. Obviously, it was a philosophical mouse that had preferred cheese to oats not, as other mice, from whimsy, but from principle. Assume similarly that a man allowed himself to walk into a trap of presumably inevitable consequences. Assume that he drifted for many days in an open boat with a taste of meat, a biscuit or two, and a smell of fresh water; that during this time no sail or puff of smoke graced the horizon. He was a little weary of assumptions, and faint, for they were not sustaining. It was just as well that he had no supply of writing materials handy. He was not able to connect just now all his ideas in a way to lead to the great demonstration, the ineluctable, irreducible, clarifying theorem for which he had hungered and thirsted with his wife's consent while keeping close to the associate professor's salaried position.

A point had been reached in his reasoning where it seemed a manifest absurdity to keep the poet's lavender pajama shirt flying from the oar at the bow. It was somehow like flaunting levity in the face of the unknowable, with which the professor was on such terms of intimacy that he knew better than to expect any change of heart. If mercy did intervene, there was always the chance of an accident.

The pro

fessor had figured it out; rescue would

not respond to the pajama shirt. Keeping the signal up was a proceeding less well reasoned than the conduct of the mouse that had squatted and survived temporarily the mice that had scurried into the jaws of the cat. The signal's indiscriminate appeal greatly offended the transcendental tendency of the professor's reasoning faculties. By and by he would reduce it all to a theorem in a proper way that would be delightful and appeal even to children and make them happy. It would be a philosophy that could be given to children very early indeed, and it would not hurt their mothers. After all, philosophy must be for children, to illuminate at once the quandary into which they were born and to appease the crepuscular, brooding hours of women. It was a mistake to think that the world was in need of anything so inconsistent as what was going loosely by the name of freedom. Children wanted an answer; women wanted their minds made up. Men must have something to do. The really important thing was that the house had to be painted before the fall opening, and a leader set in the eaves-trough; it was a job that would have to be done. He would relish doing it, and meanwhilePlainly there should be something to do meanwhile; a few minutes more, and the professor had shipped the oars and was rowing madly. His reach was wide, and his strength superhuman; so that he actually lifted the boat along in advance of the swells. His shirt was open to the waist; his chest rose and fell with deep respiration in a way to suggest that the bones of his emaciated frame would in time wear through their covering. Sweat ran over his forehead, drenched the hollows of his eyes, and fell at last in a pearly avalanche, glistening in the hairy cleft of his bosom. He rowed on with his eyes shut; his lips, straining taut, drew back and bared his teeth as the speed of his awkward strokes increased. He splashed much water, but held a straight course toward the sinking sun. His knuckles bulged through the skin of his great pale hands, but his grip, tense, fierce, desperate, as though cemented to the oars for a race against

death, never relaxed. The poet watched the swing of his back, and a gleam of sympathetic inquiry that was almost intelligent appeared between his fluttering eyelids. Jerry, aroused to one moment of curious scrutiny, settled back indifferently, while the professor rowed and rowed and rowed.

When he had started to row, his feet were encased in bath-room slippers, with which he had hurried from his berth to the deck of the stricken Salvarak. One of these had fallen off, and the bare foot now braced itself against a rib of the boat, so that the long, thin, prehensile toes resembled the claw of a bird gripping a perch. His face shrank visibly, and it was grimed with the sediment of perspiration that filtered down the furrows of his cheeks amid a stiff wilderness of iron-gray stubble. The mustache was grayer, too; the melancholy droop was gone. It straggled unkempt, soaked, over his mouth, and sparkled so with the drops of his exertion that at a distance it might have been taken for foam. With his eyes closed, he was an epitome of blind, haggard struggle. The significance of his accumulated culture vanished before the fury of his titanic idiocy. The pathos of his latter state was vexed by the stark, inquiring interest of the thatched eyebrows which the sweated avalanche could not subdue. He spent himself in an effort to heighten speed. He breathed stertorously, and quivered in the second's rest between strokes; but his force was unbroken. Once when he had gained his second wind and was plowing steadily through heavier seas, his eyes were emboldened to open; but what he saw only nerved him to shake the spray from his face and hair and to bend again to the oars. The sun reddened and sank lower, purpling the cloud-like gentian hills, and still the professor rowed, rowed, rowed.

The swells had been very gradual at first, supplementing the professor's determination to do something. Then a change had come over the low-lying hills. They had sent up wisps of smoke, streamers as from a volcano. A strange heaviness charged the atmosphere; it was as though the air had curdled. But

for a time yet the rollers were 1 and gradual, and if nature smiled th it was with the sour appreciation distasteful comedy.

The poet's pajama shirt began to f stiffly, like a galvanic scarecrow fr the oar at the bow; but the profess rowed, and observed nothing. T wind increased; the rollers shortene the chopped spray flew; the crest of t rollers foamed. The setting sun bur through the volcanic hills. Ahead th rollers turned to wine; and beyon rafters of the sunset, red and gra trusses, appeared to be resting the great weight precariously upon th hills. The roof was falling.

Then the poet awoke, and for a mo ment observed idly the swaying back of the frantic oarsman. Jerry lifte his head, knocked the spray from his eyes, and stared incredibly at the shrunken, engine-working dervish before him. He became aware of the perilous toss and roll of the boat.

"You '11 swamp us!" he cried hoarsely.

But the professor rowed on.

Jerry scanned the waters apprehensively. His stare fixed upon a huge roller, and he clutched his seat. Blindly the professor labored. The crest of the wave foamed in over the gunwales, buffeting Jerry and rinsing the poet.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" cried Jerry.

And still the professor rowed.

Jerry was not anxious just then to test supremacy in the uneasy boat. He waited. The squall that seemed threatening proved to be a passing sunset wind. The white caps fell away, and the professor's course became more regular. He drove ahead as steadily as an engine plunger. He was on a course straight for the sun when his eyes opened, and the light of recognition returned.

"You'll row into that red hell ahead if you keep on," said Jerry, unconcernedly.

The professor smiled, paused, drew in the oars.

"That, Jerry," he said, "could be used as a demonstration of the freedom of the will, though I seem to recall that