‘Quarter less twain! Nine and a half!’
We were drawing nine! My hands were in
a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell
intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube
and shouted to the engineer—
’Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!
Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal soul
out of her!’
I heard the door close gently. I looked around,
and there stood Mr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet
smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck
sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter.
I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest
man in human history. I laid in the lead, set
the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and
said—
’It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, wasn’t
it? I suppose I’ll never hear the last
of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head
of 66.’
’Well, no, you won’t, maybe. In
fact I hope you won’t; for I want you to learn
something by that experience. Didn’t you
know there was no bottom in that crossing?’
‘Yes, sir, I did.’
’Very well, then. You shouldn’t
have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence
in that knowledge. Try to remember that.
And another thing: when you get into a dangerous
place, don’t turn coward. That isn’t
going to help matters any.’
It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned.
Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months
I so often had to hear a phrase which I had conceived
a particular distaste for. It was, ’Oh,
Ben, if you love me, back her!’
In my preceding chapters I have tried, by going
into the minutiae of the science of piloting, to carry
the reader step by step to a comprehension of what
the science consists of; and at the same time I have
tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful
science, too, and very worthy of his attention.
If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising
thing, for I loved the profession far better than any
I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride
in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in
those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent
human being that lived in the earth. Kings are
but the hampered servants of parliament and people;
parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency;
the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but
must work with one hand tied behind him by party and
patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds
of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak
the whole truth, regardless of his parish’s
opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants
of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly,
but then we ‘modify’ before we print.
In truth, every man and woman and child has a master,
and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day
