“Oh, damn it!” he cried in a thick voice. “Bring me a light, I can’t see where dey are!”
It was the voice of the captain — but how altered! There was a sort of suppressed excitement in it. Some one lit a lantern and held it up in the middle. Captain Jonsen stood on his legs half like a big sack of flour, half like a waiting tiger.
“What do you want?” Emily had asked kindly.
But Captain Jonsen stood irresolute, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if he was steering.
“You’re drunk, aren’t you?” Rachel had piped, loudly and disapprovingly.
But it was Margaret who had behaved most queerly. She had gone yellow as cheese, and her eyes large with terror. She was shivering from head to foot as if she had the fever. It was absurd. Then Emily remembered how stupidly frightened Margaret had been the very first night on the schooner.
At that moment Jonsen had staggered up to Emily, and putting one hand under her chin had begun to stroke her hair with the other. A sort of blind vertigo seized her: she caught his thumb and bit as hard as she could: then, terrified at her own madness, dashed across the hold to where the other children were gathered in a wondering knot.
“What have you done!” cried Laura, pushing her away angrily: “Oh you wicked girl, you’ve hurt him!”
Jonsen was stamping about, swearing and sucking his thumb. Edward had produced a handkerchief, and between them all they had managed to tie it up. He stood staring at the bandaged member for a few moments: shook his head like a wet retriever and retreated on deck, dangdanging under his breath. Margaret had then been so sick they thought she must really have caught fever, and they couldn’t get any sense out of her at all.
As Emily, with her new-found consciousness, recapitulated the scene, it was like re-reading a story in a book, so little responsibility did she feel for the merely mechanical creature who had bitten the captain’s thumb. Nor was she even very interested: it had been queer, but then there was very little in life which didn’t seem queer, now.
As for Jonsen, he and Emily had avoided each other ever since, by mutual consent. She indeed had been in Coventry with everybody for biting him; none of the other children would play with her all the next day, and she recognized that she thoroughly deserved it — it was a mad thing to have done. And yet Jonsen, in avoiding her, had himself more the air of being ashamed than angry…which was unaccountable.
But what interested her more was the curious way Margaret had gone on, those next few days.
For some time she had behaved very oddly indeed. At first she seemed exaggeratedly frightened of all the men: but then she had suddenly taken to following them about the deck like a dog — not Jonsen, it is true, but Otto especially. Then suddenly she had departed from them altogether and taken up her quarters in the cabin. The curious thing was that now she avoided them all utterly, and spent all her time with the sailors: and the sailors, for their part, seemed to take peculiar pains not only not to let her speak to, but even not to let her be seen by the other children.
Now they hardly saw her at alclass="underline" and when they did she seemed so different they hardly recognized her: though where the difference lay it would be hard to say.ﾠ
Emily, from her perch at the mast-head, could just see the girl’s head now, through the cabin skylight. Further forward, José had joined the children at their game, and was crawling about on hands and knees with all of them on his back — a fire-engine, of course, such as they had seen in the illustrated magazines from England.
“Emily!” called Harry: “Come and play!”
Down with a rush fell the curtain on all Emily’s cogitations. In a second she was once more a happy little animal— any happy little animal. She slid down the shrouds like a real sailor, and in no time was directing the firefighting operations as imperiously as any other of this brigade of superintendents.
III
That night in the Parliament of Beds there was raised at last a question which you may well be surprised had not been raised before. Emily had just reduced her family to silence by sheer ferocity, when Harry’s rapid, nervous, lisping voice piped up:
“Emily Emily may I ask you a question, please?”
“Go to sleep!”
There was a moment’s whispered confabulation.
“But it’s very important, please, and we all want to know.”
“What?”
“Are these people pirates?”
Emily sat bolt upright with astonishment.
“Of course not!”
Harry sounded rather crestfallen.
“I don’t know…I just thought they might…”
“But they are !” declared Rachel firmly. “Margaret told me!”
“Nonsense!” said Emily. “There aren’t any pirates nowadays.”
“Margaret said,” went on Rachel, “that time we were shut up on the other ship she heard one of the sailors calling out pirates had come on board.”
Emily had an inspiration.
“No, you silly, he must have said pilots .”
“What are pilots?” asked Laura.
“They Come On Board,” explained Emily, lamely.
“Don’t you remember that picture in the dining-room at home, called The Pilot Comes On Board?”
Laura listened with rapt attention. The explanation of what pilots were was not very illuminating; but then she did not know what pirates were either. So you might think the whole discussion meant very little to her, but there you would be wrong: the question was evidently important to the older ones, therefore she gave her whole mind to listening.
The pirate heresy was considerably shaken. How could they say for certain which word Margaret had really heard? Rachel changed sides.
“They can’t be pirates,” she said. “Pirates are wicked.”
“Couldn’t we ask them?” Edward persisted.
Emily considered.
“I don’t think it would be very polite.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,” said Edward. “They’re awfully decent.”
“I think they mightn’t like it,” said Emily. In her heart she was afraid of the answer; and if they were pirates, it would here again be better to pretend not to know.
“I know!” she said. “Shall I ask the Mouse with the Elastic Tail?”
“Yes, do!” cried Laura. It was months since the oracle had been consulted; but her faith was still perfect. Emily communed with herself in a series of short squeaks.
“He says they are Pilots ,” she announced.
“Oh,” said Edward deeply: and they all went to sleep.
7
I
Edward often thought, as he strode scowling up and down the deck by himself, that this was exactly the life for him. What a lucky boy he was, to have tumbled into it by good fortune, instead of having to run away to sea as most other people did! In spite of the White Mouse’s pronouncement (whom secretly he had long ceased to believe in), he had no doubt that this was a pirate vesseclass="underline" and no doubt either that when presently Jonsen was killed in some furious battle the sailors would unanimously elect him their captain.
The girls were a great nuisance. A ship was no place for them. When he was captain he would have them marooned.
Yet there had been a time when he had wished he was a girl himself. “When I was young,” he once confided to the admiring Harry, “I used to think girls were bigger and stronger than boys. Weren’t I silly?”