Bertolt Brecht by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Stories Written in Exile (1933–1948)

Safety First

At a stag party the conversation came round to cowardice. Having had plenty to drink we were brimming over with wisdom. We served up almost every episode in our lives when our behaviour had been ‘somehow cowardly’. We realised how bad it was when others found this weakness in us, but that it was ten times worse when we discovered cowardice in ourselves. At that point somebody told the following story.

Mitchell was captain of one of those colossal ships that ply between Brazil and England, a so-called floating hotel. You must not, of course, picture these captains as the rough old sea-dogs of our grandparents’ days, standing on the bridge amid spray and towering waves, and bellowing orders. Mitchell was a big, powerful fellow, but in a drawing room nobody would have taken him for a sailor, more likely an engineer, which he in fact was. Or perhaps a hotel manager.

Now something very remarkable happened to him. Towards the end of a voyage, not far off Scotland, his ship struck a small fishing boat in fog – through no fault, by the way, of Mitchell or his men. But the giant ship, she was called the Astoria, sprang a leak and shipped water. The gentlemen on the bridge took stock of the damage and decided to send out an SOS. They estimated the time she would stay afloat as no more than an hour, and every cabin in the ship was occupied.

SOS messages were sent and two ships responded. To them the passengers were transferred.

While in London the passengers’ relatives were falling upon each other’s necks, Mitchell was having a rough time in the Transatlantic Company’s offices. He and his officers and crew had stayed aboard the Astoria which surprisingly, in spite of the forecasts, had not sunk. Nor did she sink in the hours that followed, but reached port without further incident.

Mitchell viewed the behaviour of his craft with mixed feelings, to say the least. He followed the state of the old tub and the progress of that water in the hull with real desperation. He was quite disgusted that the goddamned ship wouldn’t sink.

When he docked, his own family was on the quay to meet him – his father and his sisters, one of them with her fiancé. They had been worried to death when the papers reported the SOS from the Astoria. He was their support. Now they were very happy, and also very proud. They bored him to tears with their questions. How did you manage to nurse the ship home? Etc. Being laymen they believed he had performed an heroic feat.

The next day he went to face the music.

His hopes were not exactly high when he reached the Transatlantic Company’s offices. He had called for assistance from other ships too soon and without necessity, very expensive assistance too. But the reception that awaited him was worse than anything he had anticipated.

The owner of the Transatlantic Company was the great J. B.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.