“Why not?” asked Edward. “When shall I be old enough?”
The captain considered, going over the Rules in his head.
“When you know which is windward and which is leeward, then I will teach you the first rule.”
Edward made his way forward, determined to qualify as soon as he possibly could.
When the worst of the squall was over they got the advantage of it, the schooner lying over lissomly and spinning along like a racehorse. The crew were in great spirits—chaffing the carpenter, who, they declared, had thrown his grindstone overboard as a lifebuoy for the pig.
The children were in good spirits also. Their shyness was all gone now. The schooner lying over as she did, her wet deck made a most admirable toboggan-slide; and for half an hour they tobogganed happily on their bottoms from windward to leeward, shrieking with joy, fetching up in the lee-scuppers, which were mostly awash, and then climbing from thing to thing to the windward bulwarks raised high in the air, and so all over again.
Throughout that half hour, Jonsen at the wheel said not a single word. But at last his pent-up irritation broke out:
“Hi! You! Stop that!”
They gazed at him in astonishment and disillusion.
There is a period in the relations of children with any new grownup in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again.
Jonsen now had done it.
But he was not content with that—he was still bursting with rage:
“Stop it! Stop it, I tell you!”
(They had already done so, of course.)
The whole unreasonableness, the monstrousness of the imposition of these brats on his ship suddenly came over him, and summed itself up in a single symbol:
“If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them?—Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To mend … your … drawers?”
There was a pause, while they all stood thunderstruck.
But even now he had not finished:
“Where do you think you’ll get new ones, eh?” he asked, in a voice explosive with rage. Then he added, with an insulting coarseness of tone: “And I’ll not have you going about my ship without them! See?”
Scarlet to the eyes with outrage they retreated to the bows. They could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips. They assumed an air of lightness, and talked together in studied loud voices: but their joy was dashed for the day.
So it was that—small as a man’s hand—a spectre began to show over their horizon: the suspicion at last that this was not all according to plan, that they might even not be wanted. For a while their actions showed the unhappy wariness of the uninvited guest.
Later in the afternoon, Jonsen, who had not spoken again, but looked from time to time acutely miserable, was still at the wheel. The mate had shaved himself and put on shore clothes, as a parable: he now appeared on deck: pretended not to see the captain, but strolled like a passenger up to the children and entered into conversation with them.
“If I’m not fit to steer in foul weather, I’m not fit to steer in fair!” he muttered, but without glancing at the captain. “He can take the helum all day and night, for all the help I’ll give him!”
The captain appeared equally not to see the mate. He looked quite ready to take both watches till kingdom come.
“If he’d been at the wheel when that squall struck us,” said the mate under his voice but with biting passion, “he’d have lost the ship! He’s no more eye for a squall coming than a suckerfish! And he knows it, too: that’s what makes him go on this way!”
The children did not answer. It shocked them deeply to have to see a grownup, a should-be Olympian, displaying his feelings. In exact opposition to the witnesses at the Transfiguration, they felt it would have been good for them to be almost anywhere rather than there. He was totally unconscious of their discomfort, however: too self-occupied to notice how they avoided catching his eye.
“Look! There’s a steamship!” exclaimed Margaret, with much too bright a brightness.
The mate glowered at it.
“Aye, they’ll be the death of us, those steamers,” he said. “Every year there’s more of them. They’ll be using them for men-of-war next, and then where’ll we be? Times are bad enough without steamers.”
But while he spoke he wore a preoccupied expression, as if he were more concerned with what was going on at the back of his mind than with what went on in the front.
“Did you ever hear about what happened when the first steamer put to sea in the Gulf of Paria?” he asked, however.
“No, what?” asked Margaret, with an eagerness that even exceeded the necessities of politeness in its falsity.
“She was built on the Clyde, and sailed over. (Nobody thought of using steam for a long ocean voyage in those days.) The Company thought they ought to make a to-do—to popularise her, so to speak. So the first time she put to sea under her own power, they invited all the bigwigs on board: all the Members of Assembly in Trinidad, and the Governor and his Staff, and a Bishop. It was the Bishop what did the trick.”
His story died out: he became completely absorbed in watching sidelong the effect of his bravado on the captain.
“Did what?” asked Margaret.
“Ran ’em aground.”
“But what did they let him steer for?” asked Edward. “They might have known he couldn’t!”
“Edward! How dare you talk about a Bishop in that rude way!” admonished Rachel.
“It wasn’t the steamer he ran aground, sonny,” said the mate: “it was a poor innocent little devil of a pirate craft, that was just beating up
