The Captain of the Jehovah by H. B. Drake

Author:H. B. Drake [Drake, H. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: .ISBNincl, PerditusLiber, Fiction, Sailing Ships, Voyage, Slavery
ISBN: OCLC: 6596198
Publisher: Greenberg, New York
Published: 1936-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE NIGHT was by no means ended for me yet. When we went on deck at the changing of the watch it was my turn to go to the wheel. Monsieur Louis was on the poop. He gave me the course, and added, “But you’ll not bring her round to it without magic.”

The truth was that with no steerage way on her the ship swung about to every current, entirely independent of the helm. Yet almost mechanically, seeing the ship wide of her course, I put the wheel over; but without result.

“Ha, you have great faith,” Monsieur Louis sneered.

I felt it peculiar that he should-speak to me in this way. Oslo in moments of expansion would explode some gross jest with the deck hands, but Louis always held aloof, not, I think, in disdain, though his manner might have suggested it, but rather as though the medium of intercourse between his world and ours were lacking. Yet now as he stood beside me, hands behind back, rising and falling on his toes, a neat dapper little figure, with clear-cut features presented to me in profile, and dark eyes which glittered to the binnacle light set

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seemingly on the horizon, he appeared to be inviting me to a guarded familiarity.

As I made him no answer he repeated, though without turning his face to me, “‘I observed that you had great faith.”

His tone commanded a reply.

“Faith can move mountains,” I said.

His lips twitched in amusement.

“But it would be more to our purpose,” he replied, “if it could move ships.”

I took it that in his ennui he wanted the refreshment of a little bantering dialogue. I even felt a certain pity for him, for in a flash I could see his loneliness, for his closest affinity on that ship must be the abstract intellectualism of Plasters.

“Monsieur,” I said, “I am not a doctor of divinity, but without faith no ships would ever put to sea.”

“Do you mean faith,” he asked, “or observation?”

“In the first instance, faith,” I declared.

“In the first instance stupidity, in the first instance vanity, in the first instance greed,” he countered. “But faith—” he shrugged his shoulders. “Faith is a monster,” he continued. “Its father is fear, and its child is magic. Where there is faith there is darkness and there is blood, for out of it come religions and revolutions, and these, though their talk is of a new heaven and a new earth, yet their practice is of a very ancient hell. But do you begin to understand me?” he asked, facing me at last with a rather supercilious air.

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“I understand you very well,” I told him, “because I have seen what you only talk about.”

“Indeed,” he replied, smiling on me with an obvious delight, “yet you are not among the emancipated.”

“Because I have faith in other things,” I said.

“Ah,” he replied with a mock sadness, “that’s a pity. For to believe nothing, that is best. You may not be very happy, but you will not be very unhappy; and you will certainly be wise.

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