Hawaii - James Michener [115]
"I didn't think about it that way, Reverend," an unbeliever said. "But in another way I did. Suppose I'm married, and when I leave Boston my wife is ... well ... if you'll excuse me . . . expecting. Now I never see that baby for four years, but when I come home he looks like me, has my habits, and in some unknown way has come to love me."
"Only sometimes he don't look like you," the old whaler observed from his own experience. "What then?"
"Have you converted Captain Janders?" Cridland asked.
"No," Abner replied sorrowfully. " ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.'"
"Wait a minute, Reverend!" an old hand corrected. "Cap'n believes. When you ain't aboard he conducts services."
"True believing requires that you submit your will entirely to God's," Abner explained. "Captain Janders will not confess that he lives in a state of abject sin."
"I don't classify him as no sinner," the old whaler reflected. "Not a proper, hard-working sinner, that is. Now you take a man like Cap'n Hoxworth of the whaler Carthaginian ... I seen Cap'n Hoxworth get four naked Honolulu girls into his cabin at one time . . . Well, as a sinner, our cap'n just don't compare."
Nevertheless, Abner waged relentless campaigns against Captain Janders, particularly in the matter of novels, which the captain read ostentatiously immediately after each Sabbath sermon. "You will learn to call such books aborninations," Abner mournfully predicted.
Janders fought back with irony: "You converting any more old whalers, Brother Hale?"
The question infuriated Abner, symbolizing as it did the world's pernicious habit of rejoicing over the downfall of sanctimonious men. Actually, he could have turned the tables on the captain, so far as the old whaler was concerned, for the man was agonizingly eager to win back his Bible before reaching Cape Horn. "Many's a sailor's been lost at the Horn, Reverend," he constantly pleaded. "Don't make me round the Horn without a Bible!”
But Abner had absorbed one fundamental lesson on this trip: the established church must not be maneuvered into a position of danger by the backsliding of fools who were never truly saved in the first place. It is such who have the greatest power to damage the church and they must be denied the opportunity of doing so. Frequently, on the long leg south Abner would sit on a trunk in his stateroom and analyze this case with his seven companions: "I was too prompt to accept this man . . . too eager for merely another number rather than for a secured soul. We must never repeat this foolish mistake in Hawaii."
And then, on the evening of November 24, just as Keoki placed on the half-moon table the Saturday night suet pudding, an unexpected gale from the southwest struck the Thetis port-side and threw her well onto her beam ends. Since the storm had come without warning, the after hatch had not been closed and torrents of cold gray water cascaded into the cabin. The lamp swung parallel to the decking. Food and chairs and missionaries were swept into a jumble and buried in new floods ripping down the hatchway. There were screams, and from the stateroom where Jerusha lay ghastly ill, Abner heard a plaintive cry, "Are we sinking?"
He stumbled to her and found her berth drenched with water, and everything in confusion. "We shall be safe," he said firmly. "God is with this ship."
They heard the hatchway being hammered into place and smelled the loss of air. Then the cook shouted, "Cape Horn is rushing out to meet us."
"Will the storm last long?" Brother Whipple inquired.
"Maybe four weeks," the cook replied, picking up the debris of his meal.
On Sunday, November 25, Abner ventured on deck