He was so reserved, so self-contained at first, that I wondered if he was not perhaps just a beautiful piece of Teutonic machinery, until one morning we steamed into a harbor where the company he served had met with the most hideous ill luck. He pointed out to me the dismantled hulls of two noble ships that had run ashore and were a total loss. One of them had struck because it was impossible for anyone on board to know that an earthquake had destroyed the lighthouse the day before; the other lay tragically on its side among the breakers because the captain had attempted to hit the channel in the dark without a pilot. The Fourth had been on that ship at the time and, when he told me about it, I had to occupy myself with my field glasses and pretend I didn’t know that two large tears had welled up, slipped over and were finding their way down his face. He had been off duty and asleep when the accident happened, and knew nothing about it until the quartermaster woke him up, told him, and said that the captain could not be found. In spite of the fact that the captain’s room was dark, something impelled the Fourth to enter. “Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and when I turned on the light--”... Well, immediately after the accident the captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle. “Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same thing?” I asked the Fourth. “Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth. His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich, pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the company, he was to have no friendly relations. “On a long voyage like this, where we stop every few days and I stand here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to do.”