A Hero for Leanda

said.
    “But I want it to be real.”
    “If we kept on sailing for a month or two you probably wouldn’t care any more. You’d get the cosmic view.”
    “Like you?”
    “That’s right. Human antics seem pretty trivial in the middle of an ocean.”
    “Including the antic of trying to earn twenty thousand pounds?” Leanda said. “I’d say that was pretty small beer against the background of the universe. You’re not very consistent.”
    Conway said, “Let’s change the subject! How’s the coffee?”

    They continued to run down the latitude, and by the end of the first week they had made good nearly four hundred and eighty miles. They had had one excellent day s run of ninety miles, when the wind had freshened, still from the same quarter, and they had enjoyed an exhilarating beat through a choppy sea with salt spray flying over the bows and the mainsail hard as a drum. They had had one poor day of thirty-five miles, when the trade wind had seemed to be dying away altogether. But the average had been high, partly because of an east-going current which, in good winds and poor, carried them steadily toward their objective.
    Leanda, by now, was shaping up into quite a promising sailor. She no longer pointed the ship so close to the wind that it lost way and wallowed sluggishly, or pulled in the jib sheet when Conway told her to haul in the main. She watched everything that he did, and, when she didn’t understand why, she asked. He responded to her interest, explaining and demonstrating with the patience of a devotee. They got on excellently together. After a week of close companionship they were both more friendly and more personally interested in each other.
    One evening, when Leanda was steering and Conway was sitting opposite her in the cockpit, whipping a piece of codline, he suddenly said, “You know, I’m glad I brought you.”
    Leanda said, “Because I can cook, I suppose!”
    “No—but you’re a nice person to have around. I’ve kind of got used to you.”
    “You’ll look well if I’ve spoiled you for sailing alone,” she said.
    “It’ll certainly be very different.”
    Leanda gazed around the empty sea. “I simply don’t know how you can bear it on your own. Nothing to look at, week after week, except water! It’s not my idea of seeing the world.”
    Conway grinned. “Wasn’t it John Stuart Mill who said that the best way to see the world was to get away from it ?“
    “Was it? You’re always quoting funny little tags.”
    “Pearls of wisdom, accumulated at Tara ’s tiller!”
    “Well, I still think it’s an extraordinary way to five .“
    “For that matter,” Conway said, “I find your way of living pretty extraordinary—sneaking about with leaflets, rioting in the streets, being sent to jail, organizing political propaganda... You can’t say it’s natural. Most girls of your age would be thinking of getting married and raising a family.”
    “I’ve plenty of time for that,” Leanda said. “I’m only political about Spyros, you know. Once it’s free, I shall turn to other things. I’ll be glad to.... But you—what happens to you in the end? Are you going to be an Ancient Mariner?”
    “I might be.... Old Joshua Slocum never got tired of it.”
    “Who was he?”
    “He was a man who sailed round the world on his own —till he disappeared. He was supposed to have been run down in the dark.”
    “What a dismal prospect!” Leanda said.
    “Oh, well, maybe I’ll get fed up with it in the end.... Perhaps I’ll be like the sea captain who retired.”
    “What sea captain?”
    “He’d spent forty years afloat. One day he put an oar over his shoulder and walked straight inland. He walked and walked, until one morning, after many weeks, a boy stopped him in the street and said, ‘Hi, mister, what’s that thing over your shoulder?’ Then the sea captain knew he’d reached a place where he could spend the rest of his days in peace!”
    Leanda smiled. “It’s a nice story.... Perhaps you’ll go back to Ireland in the end. People say it’s lovely.”
    “It is indeed,” Conway said. “Pretty as a picture... I remember a place my father and mother used to take me to for picnics sometimes—the wild pansies grew so thick on the dunes you could scarcely move for them, and the fuchsia flowers in the hedges were as big as plums.”
    “What did your father do, Mike?”
    “Oh, he did a lot of things, but toward the end he was keeping a small hotel, a holiday