“Yes.”
I prepared myself then, as a last hope for the ship, to let them both go in the most effectual manner, when his infernal system of testing resourcefulness came into play again.
“But there’s only one cable. You’ve lost the other.”
It was exasperating.
“Then I would back them, if I could, and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing.
She would have to go.”
“Nothing more to do, eh?”
“No, sir. I could do no more.”
He gave a bitter half-laugh.
“You could always say your prayers.”
He got up, stretched himself, and yawned slightly. It was a sallow, strong, unamiable face. He put me, in a surly, bored fashion, through the usual questions as to lights and signals, and I escaped from the room thank fully—passed! Forty minutes! And again I walked on air along Tower Hill, where so many good men had lost their heads because, I suppose, they were not resourceful enough to save them. And in my heart of hearts I had no objection to meeting that examiner once more when the third and last ordeal became due in another year or so. I even hoped I should. I knew the worst of him now, and forty minutes is not an unreasonable time. Yes, I distinctly hoped. . . .
But not a bit of it. When I presented my self to be examined for master the examiner who received me was short, plump, with a round, soft face in gray, fluffy whiskers, and fresh, loquacious lips.
He commenced operations with an easy going “Let’s see. H’m. Suppose you tell me all you know of charter-parties.” He kept it up in that style all through, wandering off in the shape of comment into bits out of his own life, then pulling himself up short and returning to the business in hand. It was very interesting. “What’s your idea of a jury-rudder now?” he queried, suddenly, at the end of an instructive anecdote bearing upon a point of stowage.
I warned him that I had no experience of a lost rudder at sea, and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a text-book. In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had invented himself years before, when in command of a three-thousand-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest contrivance imaginable. “May be of use to you some day,” he concluded. “You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes into steam.”
There he was wrong. I never went into steam—not really. If I only live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the dark ages who had never gone into steam—not really.
Before the examination was over he imparted to me a few interesting details of the transport service in the time of the Crimean War.
“The use of wire rigging became general about that time, too,” he observed. “I was a very young master then. That was before you were born.”
“Yes, sir. I am of the year of 1857.”
“The Mutiny year,” he commented, as if to himself, adding in a louder tone that his ship happened then to be in the Gulf of Bengal, employed under a government charter.
Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that sea life into which I had stepped from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as though he had been an ancestor.
Writing my long name (it has twelve letters) with laborious care on the slip of blue paper, he remarked:
“You are of Polish extraction.”
“Born there, sir.”
He laid down the pen and leaned back to look at me as it were for the first time.
“Not many of your nationality in our service, I should think. I never remember meeting one either before or after I left the sea. Don’t remember ever hearing of one. An inland people, aren’t you?”