" I said this as much to startle the
man as really meaning it. I can go so long without reading certain
poets, and after that I starve for them as the hungry starve for food. I
was hungry for Chaucer.
Such a request, coming from a youth almost in rags, impressed the
sky-pilot so deeply that he insisted on giving me a job pumping the
organ during services and a little room to sleep in at the mission. What
is more, he lent me Skeats' edition of Chaucer, complete. And all the
time I was with him he proved a "good sport." He didn't take advantage
of my dependence on him to bother me so very much about God.
He took it for granted that I was a Christian, since I never discussed
religion with him.
* * * * *
It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed
myself full on Chaucer.
I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in
a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old
maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she
must convert.
* * * * *
"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.
Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving
their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic
visions marched across my mind at the question.
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