Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The
gale had ministered to a heroism as spurious as its
own pretence of terror. He felt angry with the
brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares
and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow
escapes. Otherwise he was rather glad he had
not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement
had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge
more than those who had done the work. When all
men flinched, then—he felt sure—he
alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace
of wind and seas. He knew what to think of it.
Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible.
He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and
the final effect of a staggering event was that, unnoticed
and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted
with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure,
and in a sense of many-sided courage.
CHAPTER 2
After two years of training he went to sea, and entering
the regions so well known to his imagination, found
them strangely barren of adventure. He made many
voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence
between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism
of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic
severity of the daily task that gives bread—but
whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.
This reward eluded him. Yet he could not go back,
because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting,
and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his
prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady,
tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties;
and in time, when yet very young, he became chief
mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested
by those events of the sea that show in the light
of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper,
and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality
of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences,
not only to others but also to himself.
Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse
of the earnestness in the anger of the sea. That
truth is not so often made apparent as people might
think. There are many shades in the danger of
adventures and gales, and it is only now and then
that there appears on the face of facts a sinister
violence of intention—that indefinable something
which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man,
that this complication of accidents or these elemental
furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice,
with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty
that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear,
the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest:
which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all
he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that
is priceless and necessary—the sunshine,
the memories, the future; which means to sweep the
whole precious world utterly away from his sight by
the simple and appalling act of taking his life.
