PAGE 5
The Cruise Of The "Willing Mind"
by
Before the afternoon the air was dark with a swither of foam and spray blown off the waves in the thickness of a fog. The heavy bows of the smack beat into the seas with a thud and a hiss–the thud of a steam-hammer, the hiss of molten iron plunged into water; the waves raced exultingly up to the bows from windward, and roared angrily away in a spume of foam from the ship’s keel to lee; and the thrumming and screaming of the storm in the rigging exceeded all that Duncan had ever imagined. He clung to the stays appalled. This storm was surely the perfect expression of anger, too persistent for mere fury. There seemed to be a definite aim of destruction, a deliberate attempt to wear the boat down, in the steady follow of wave upon wave, and in the steady volume of the wind.
Captain Weeks, too, had lost all of a sudden all his exhilaration. He stood moodily by Duncan’s side, his mind evidently labouring like his ship. He told Duncan stories which Duncan would rather not have listened to, the story of the man who slipped as he stepped from the deck into the punt, and weighted by his boots, had sunk down and down and down through the clearest, calmest water without a struggle; the story of the punt which got its painter under its keel and drowned three men; the story of the full-rigged ship which got driven across the seven-fathom part of the Dogger–the part that looks like a man’s leg in the chart–and which was turned upside-down through the bank breaking. The skipper and the mate got outside and clung to her bottom, and a steam-cutter tried to get them off, but smashed them both with her iron counter instead.
“Look!” said Weeks, gloomily pointing his finger. “I don’t know why that breaker didn’t hit us. I don’t know what we should have done if it had. I can’t think why it didn’t hit us! Are you saved?”
Duncan was taken aback, and answered vaguely–“I hope so.”
“But you must know,” said Weeks, perplexed. The wind made a theological discussion difficult. Weeks curved his hand into a trumpet, and bawled into Duncan’s ear: “You are either saved or not saved! It’s a thing one knows. You must know if you are saved, if you’ve felt the glow and illumination of it.” He suddenly broke off into a shout of triumph: “But I got my fish on board the cutter. The Willing Mind’s the on’y boat that did.” Then he relapsed again into melancholy: “But I’m troubled about the poachin’. The temptation was great, but it wasn’t right; and I’m not sure but what this storm ain’t a judgment.”
He was silent for a little, and then cheered up. “I tell you what. Since we’re hove-to, we’ll have a prayer-meeting in the cabin to-night and smooth things over.”
The meeting was held after tea, by the light of a smoking paraffin-lamp with a broken chimney. The crew sat round and smoked, the companion was open, so that the swish of the water and the man on deck alike joined in the hymns. Rail, the baker’s assistant, who had once been a steady attendant at Revivalist meetings, led off with a Moody and Sankey hymn, and the crew followed, bawling at the top pitch of their lungs, with now and then some suggestion of a tune. The little stuffy cabin rang with the noise. It burst upwards through the companion-way, loud and earnest and plaintive, and the winds caught it and carried it over the water, a thin and appealing cry. After the hymn Weeks prayed aloud, and extempore and most seriously. He prayed for each member of the crew by name, one by one, taking the opportunity to mention in detail each fault which he had had to complain of, and begging that the offender’s chastisement might be light. Of Duncan he spoke in ambiguous terms.