A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes [37]
"Get below!" muttered the mate furiously. "I can manage her!"
The captain did not, however: still in his socks, he came up on deck and took the wheel out of the mate's hand. The latter went a dull brick-red: walked for'ard: then aft again: then went below and shut himself in his cabin.
In a few moments the wind had combed up some quite hearty waves: then it blew their tops off, and so flattened the sea out again, a sea that was black except for little whipt-up fountains of iridescent foam.
"Get my boots!" bellowed Jonsen at Edward.
Edward dashed down the companion with alacrity. It is a great moment, one's first order at sea; especially when it comes in an emergency. He reappeared with a boot in each hand, and a lurch flung him boots and all at the captain's feet. "Never carry things in both hands," said the captain, smiling pleasantly.
"Why?" asked Edward.
"Keep one hand to lay hold with."
There was a pause.
"Some day I will teach you the three Sovereign Rules of Life." He shook his head meditatively. "They are very wise. But not yet. You are too young."
"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 race-horse. The crew were in great spirits--chaffing the carpenter, who, they declared, had thrown his grind-stone 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 grown-up 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 specter 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