Over the years of living together with the merman, Robert began to notice a strange attraction. At first he didn't understand it, denied it, but soon he stopped lying to himself and recognised that it was love. The discovery horrified him. He drank his grief with rum for a long time and tried to understand why. His first love was Betty, the golden-tailed mermaid, but she was smarter, more human, but Schatz.... He was insanely handsome, but he was also insanely beastlike in his behaviour, albeit very intelligent. Robert had spent long evenings at the table with a bottle of rum, and in the end he had come to the conclusion that Schatz was not human, but certainly not an animal.

What saddened the captain most was the realisation that his feelings could not a priori be reciprocated. Merman considered him part of his pack, but it was not love. The unreciprocity of this love was killing him, and Robert muffled his pain with barrels of rum.

Even more disgusting was the fact that he felt arousal, especially when drunk, and looked at the mermaid for a long time, which with great distrust squinted at the captain, who was doing something, according to Schatz, strange with his body. And afterwards Robert was killing himself with thoughts of how dirty and short he was compared to the mermaid. The latter was as beautiful as a sea deity and didn't defile his body with base needs for intimacy, he could express his devotion without it.

"No, I don't want to fall in love...with you." were the words Robert had been repeating to himself for a long long time. On another evening, as the ship drifted across the sea through a haze of cool fog, Robert in his melancholic state stood at the side of the ship and watched the waves crash against the stem. He was sipping from a bottle of rum, his gaze was tired and rather blank.