One cannot wish for a more comfortable seat than an acquiescent pig.
“If I was the Queen,” said Emily, “I should most certainly have a pig for a throne.”
“Perhaps she has,” suggested Harry.
“He does like being scratched,” she added presently in a very sentimental tone, as she rubbed his scurfy back. The mate was watching:
“I should think you ’d like being scratched, if your skin was in that condition!”
“Oh how disGUSTing you are!” cried Emily, delighted. But the idea took root.
“I don’t think I should kiss him quite so much if I was you,” Emily presently advised Laura, who was lying with her arms tight round his neck and covering his briny snout with kisses from ring to ears.
“My pet! My love!” murmured Laura, by way of indirect protest. The wily mate had foreseen that some estrangement would be necessary if they were ever to have fresh pork served without salt tears. He intended this to be the thin end of the wedge. But alas! Laura’s mind was as humorsome an instrument to play as the Twenty-three-stringed Lute.
When dinner-time came, the children mustered for their soup and biscuit.
They were not overfed on the schooner: they were given little that is generally considered wholesome, or to contain vitamines (unless these lurked in the aforesaid peck of dirt): but they seemed none the worse. First the cook boiled the various non-perishable vegetables they carried in a big pot together for a couple of hours. Then a lump of salt beef from the cask forward, having been rinsed in a little fresh water, was added, and allowed to simmer with the rest till it was just cooked. Then it was withdrawn, and the captain and mate ate their soup first and their meat afterwards, out of plates, like gentlemen. After that, if it was a week-day, the meat was put to cool on the cabin shelf, ready to warm up in to-morrow’s soup, and the crew and children ate the liquor with biscuit: but if it was Sunday, the captain took the lump of meat and with a benevolent air cut it up in small pieces, as if indeed for a nursery, and mixed it up with the vegetables in the huge wooden bowl out of which crew and children all dipped. It was a very patriarchal way of feeding. Even at dinner Margaret did not join the others, but ate in the cabin; though there were only two plates on the whole ship. Probably she used the mate’s when he had finished.
Laura and Rachel fought that day to tears over a particularly succulent piece of yam. Emily let them. To make those two agree was a task she was wise not to undertake. Besides, she was very busy over her own dinner. Edward managed to silence them, however, by declaring in a most terrible voice: “Shut up or I’ll SABER you!”
Emily’s estrangement from the captain had reached by now a rather uncomfortable stage. When these things are fresh and new the two parties avoid meeting, and all is welclass="underline" but after some days they are apt to forget, find themselves on the point of chatting, and then suddenly remember that they are not on speaking terms and have to retire in confusion. Nothing can be more uncomfortable for a child. The difficulty of effecting a reconciliation in this case was that both parties felt wholly in the wrong. Each repented the impulse of a momentary insanity, and neither had an inkling the other felt the same: thus each waited for the other to show signs of forgiveness. Moreover, while the captain had far the more serious reason for being ashamed of himself, Emily was naturally far the more sensitive and concerned of the two: so it about balanced. Thus, if Emily rushed blithely up to the captain embracing a flying-fish, caught his eye and slunk round the other side of the galley, he put it down to a permanent feeling of condemnation and repulsion: blushed a deep purple and stared stonily at his wrinkling mainsail — and Emily wondered if he was never going to forget that bitten thumb. But this afternoon things came to a head. Laura was trotting about behind him, striking her attitudes. Edward had at last discovered which was windward and which was leeward, and had come hot-foot to learn the first of the Sovereign Rules of Life: and Emily, with one of her wretched lapses of memory, was all agog at his elbow. Edward was duly catechized and passed.
“Dis is the first rule,” said the captain: “ Never throw anything to windward except hot water or ashes .”
Edward’s face developed exactly the look of bewilderment that was intended.
“But windward is…” he began: “I mean, wouldn’t they blow…” then he stopped, wondering if he had got the terms the right way round after all. Jonsen was delighted at the success of this ancient joke. Emily, trying to stand on one leg, bewildered also, lost her balance and clutched at Jonsen’s arm. He looked at her — they all looked at her. Much the best way of escaping from an embarrassing rencontre, when to walk away would be an impossible strain on the nerves, is to retire in a series of somersaults. Emily immediately started turning head over heels up the deck.
It was very difficult to keep direction, and the giddiness was appalling; but she must keep it up till she was out of sight, or die.
Just then, Rachel, who was up the mainmast, dropped, for the first time, her marline-spike. She uttered a terrible shriek — for what she saw was a baby falling to dash its brains out on the deck.
Jonsen gave an ineffectual little grunt of alarm — men can never learn to give a full-bodied scream like a woman. But Emily gave the most desperate yell of all, though several seconds after the other two: for the wicked steel stood quivering in the deck, having gouged a track through her calf on the way. Her wrought-up nerves and sickening giddiness joined with the shock and pain to give a heartrending poignancy to her crying. Jonsen was by her in a second, caught her up, and carried her, sobbing miserably, down into the cabin. There sat Margaret, bending over some mending, her slim shoulders hunched up, humming softly and feeling deadly ill.
“Get out!” said Jonsen, in a low, brutal voice. Without a word or sign Margaret gathered up her sewing and climbed on deck.
Jonsen smeared some Stockholm tar on a rag, and bound up Emily’s leg with more than a little skill, though the tar of course was agonizing to her. She had cried herself right out by the time he laid her in his bunk. When she opened her streaming eyes and saw him bending over her, nothing in his clumsy face but concern and an almost overpowering pity, she was so full of joy at being at last forgiven that she reached up her arms and kissed him. He sat down on the locker, rocking himself backwards and forwards gently. Emily dozed for a few minutes: when she woke up he was still there.
“Tell me about when you were little,” she said. Jonsen sat on, silent, trying to project his unwieldy mind back into the past.
“When I was a boy,” he said at last, “it wasn’t thought lucky to grease your own sea-boots. My Auntie used to grease mine before we went out with the lugger.”
He paused for some time.
“We divided the fish up into six shares — one for the boat, and one for each of us.”