Dry Fish and Wet Part 53

Dirrik ran her up into the wind as well as he could, but was afraid of going about. Then: Crack! from aloft, and crack! went the jibboom, and the flying jib was off and away to leeward like a bat. The skipper thrust up his head to take in the situation.

"Got her clear?" he asked. "Ay," says Dirrik calmly, "clear enough, and all we've got to do now is pull in the rags that's left, and paddle home as best we can."

We were not a pretty sight when we made Drobak, but the guns were landed safely, and that was the main thing.

After that, I saw no more of Dirrik till I met him at the Seaman's School in Piperviken in 1872.

There were three of us chums there: Rudolf, a great big giant of eighteen, with fair curly hair and smiling blue eyes. A good fellow was Rudolf, but uncommonly powerful and always ready to get to hand grips with anyone if they contradicted him.

Dirrik was fifteen years our senior at least. He had been twenty years at sea already, and reckoned the pair of us as "boys."

Dirrik had never got beyond the rank of "first-hand" on board; it was always this miserable exam that stood in his way. It was his highest ambition to pa.s.s for mate, and then perhaps some day, with luck, get a skipper's berth on some antiquated hulk along the coast. But Dirrik was unfortunate. It counted for nothing here that he had been several times round the Horn, and received a silver knife from the Dutch Government for going overboard in a gale, with a line round his waist, to rescue three Dutchmen whose boat was capsizing on the Dogger.

It was as much as he could do to write. I can still see his rugged fingers, misshapen after years of rough work at sea, gripping the penholder convulsively, as if it had been a marlin-spike, and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his mouth up, now to one side, now to the other, as he painfully scrawled some entry in the "log."

"No need to look as if you were going to have a tooth out," said Rudolf.

"I'd rather be lying out on Jan Mayen, shooting seal in forty degrees of frost," said Dirrik, wiping his brow.

"Devil take me, but I've half a mind to s.h.i.+p for the Arctic myself next spring," said Rudolf.

"Got to get through with this first," I said.

"Ay, that's true," said Dirrik. "I've been up four times now, and if I don't pa.s.s this time, my girl won't wait any longer."

"Girl?" said Rudolf, with sudden interest.

"Margine Iversen's her name. We've been promised now eleven years, and we _must_ get married this spring."

"Must, eh?" said I.

"He's been drawing in advance, what!" said Rudolf, nudging me in the ribs.

"No more of that, lads," said Dirrik. "Womenfolk, they've their own art of navigation, and I know more about it than you've any call to do at your age."

Just then Captain Wille, the princ.i.p.al of the school, came up.

"Well, boys, how goes it?"

"Nicely, thank ye, Captain," answered Dirrik. "But this 'ere blamed azimuth's a hard nut to crack." Dirrik wiped the sweat from his brow with a blue-checked handkerchief, and blew his nose with startling violence. "You won't need a foghorn next time you get on board," said Wille slyly.

"I say, though, Captain," said Rudolf, "we must get old Dirrik through somehow. If he doesn't pa.s.s this time, he'll be all adrift."

"Oho!" said the Captain, smiling all over his kindly face. "And how's that?"

"Why, he's got to get married this spring, whether he wants to or no."

"But he doesn't need that certificate to get married."

"Ay, but I do, though, Captain," said Dirrik earnestly. "For look you, navigation's badly needed in these waters, and I'll sure come to grief without."

"Why, then, we must do what we can to get you through," said Wille.

And, seating himself beside Dirrik, he began to explain the mysteries of sine, cosine and tangent.

Dirrik sat with all his mental nerves strained taut as the topmast shrouds in a storm. But the more he listened to Wille's explanations the more incomprehensible he seemed to find the n.o.ble art and science of navigation.

Presently Lt. Knap, the second master, came up, and relieved Captain Wille at his task. Knap was quite young in those days, an excitable fellow with a sharp nose that gave him an air of self-importance. But a splendid teacher, that he was. I can still hear his voice, after vain attempts to ram something into Dirrik's thick head: "But, d.a.m.nation take it, man, I don't believe you understand a word!"

No, Dirrik didn't understand a word, or, at any rate, very little.

One thing he did know, however, and that was, if a man can take his meridian and mark out his course on the chart, he can find his way anywhere on the high seas.

"All this rigmarole about azimuths and amplitudes and zeniths and moons and influence and tides, it's just invented to plague the life out of honest, seafaring folk." This heartfelt plaint of Dirrik's was received with loud applause by the rest of the school. Knap himself was as delighted as the rest, and sang out over our heads: "Well, you can be sure I'd be only too glad to leave out half of it, for it is all a man can do to knock the rest of it into your heads."

Skipper Sartz, the third master, was a very old and very slow, but a thorough-going old salt, who would rather spin us a yarn at any time than bother about navigation. We learned very little of that from him, and he was generally regarded more as a comrade than as a master. Rudolf supplied him with tobacco, free of charge, to smoke in lesson-time, so there was no very strict discipline during those hours. It was a trick of Rudolf's, I remember, when Sartz was going through lessons with him, to get hold of a ruler in his left hand and draw it gently up and down the tutor's back. Sartz would think it was me, and swing round suddenly to let off a volley, ending up as a rule with a recommendation to us generally to "give over these etcetera etcetera tricks, and try and behave as young gentlemen should."

At last the great day came when Dirrik was to go up for his exam. K.

G. Smith--he's an admiral now--was the examiner. All of us, teachers included, were fond of Dirrik, and would have been sorry to see him fail again.

"Well, if I do get through this time," said Dirrik, smiling all over his cheery face, "I'll stand treat all round so the mess won't forget it for a week."

And really I think he would rather have faced a four week's gale of the winter-north-Atlantic type, or undertaken to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Emperor of China, than march up to that examination table.

When the time came for the viva voce, Rudolf and I could stand it no longer, we had to go in and listen.

Never before or since have I seen such depths of despair on any human face. Poor Dirrik mopped his brow, and blew his nose, and we sat there, with serious faces, feeling as if we were watching some dear departed about to be lowered into the grave. I can safely say I have never experienced a more solemn or trying ceremony, not even when I, myself, was launched into the state of holy matrimony before the altar.

The examiner sat bending over his work, entering something or other--of particular importance, to judge by the gravity of his looks.

We heard only the scratching of his pen on the paper.

Suddenly the silence was broken by a curious hissing sound:

"Fssst--fssst!" and then, a moment later, from the direction of the stove: "Sssss!"

It was Rudolf, who had squirted out a jet of tobacco juice between his teeth over on to the stove in the corner. Both the censors looked up, and the examiner laid down his pen, flas.h.i.+ng a fiery glance at Rudolf from under his bushy brows.

"Pig!" said I, loud enough for the examiner to hear, and was rewarded with a nod of approval.

This saved the situation, for if the old man had lost his temper, it would have been all up with Dirrik's exam.

Rudolf sat staring before him, entirely unconcerned.

At last they began. I can still see the examiner's close-cropped hair and bushy eyebrows.

"Well, sir, can you tell me why a compa.s.s needle invariably points towards the north?"

Dirrik had not understood a syllable, but felt he ought in common decency to make pretence of thinking it out for a bit, then he said: