Ayrton, I suppose,’ said Derrick, gloomily. ‘My father often talked about him. He was coming out to see us this year.’
‘Yes, that’s the one. He’s a great authority on oriental archaeology, a very learned man, and I don’t suppose that you will be able to escape the advantages of a liberal education with him on your track. We shall be seeing him a few days after we reach Tchao-King, and we’ll have another talk about it then. Now cut along and give Li Han a hand at checking over the stores.’
Derrick left the saloon with a heavy heart and made his way to the galley. The idea of being a schoolboy again after the freedom of the schooner was not a pleasant one.
In the saloon Sullivan leaned back and lit his pipe. ‘I sympathise with the boy,’ he said. ‘I’d feel just the same myself in his place. And there’s a lot in early training: nothing like it for a deep-sea sailor. Still, I suppose he must be educated.’
‘Aye,’ said Ross, ‘though I don’t know anything to beat an apprenticeship under sail to make a sailorman. But this Professor Ayrton probably will not see eye to eye with us there.’
Derrick found Li Han counting piles of bags and tins, trying to make them tally with the total in the store-book.
‘They want to send me to school, Li Han,’ said Derrick, sitting on a tea-chest.
‘Thirty-nine piculs of rice: exactitude only approximate,’ said the Chinese cook. ‘Do they? Very proper too. Thereby you will have inestimable privilege of becoming first-chop scholar.’
‘I don’t want to be a first-chop scholar. A master mariner is good enough for me.’
‘You are talking jestily. Who wishes to be a meagre sailorman if he can be a learned and enter the government service? Why, in time you might be an official and never do anything for remainder of earthly existence. You could grow long fingernails, and become obese and dignified.’
‘I don’t want to be obese and dignified. I’d rather be a meagre sailorman.’
‘Ah, but think of the excessive perils and discomforts of seafaring life. Very often sea is unnecessarily agitated by heavenly blasts, and seafaring persons are plunged beneath surface. It is much better to be the meanest official with firm chair under seat. And maritime persons enjoy no prestige, no face, while government officials are very dignified. You should go to school with rejoicement, labour with unremitting zeal, and become pensionable civil servant. Please excuse.’ He stowed away the chest on which Derrick had been sitting, and went on, ‘Observe the classics: in the Shih King it says, “It is the business of scribes and scholars to correct the government of the people.” You pursue ancient advisement, and correct the government. What face! What daily bribes! What squeeze!’
‘Yes, there’s glory for you,’ said Derrick. ‘But as for me, I’d rather be master of a schooner like the Wanderer.’
‘You like some lichees now?’ asked Li Han. ‘Just one or two?’
‘As many as you like, Li Han. There won’t be any at school, I dare say.’
Li Han piled the fruit on a plate. ‘Exceedingly peculiar thing,’ he said, ‘I run after learning all the time, chasing it in adverse circumstance, and you run away from it when it comes on a tray.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘This morning I reach the letter S in my dictionary.’
‘Gee, Li Han,’ said Derrick, finishing the lichees, ‘you thought it would take you another week to work through R, didn’t you? At this rate you’ll come to Z and the abbreviations before the end of the year. That’s swell. Is there anything I can do to help, apart from eating the lichees? Because if not, I think I’ll vamoose.’
‘Vamoose?’
‘I shall move my person with distinguished agility from this place to another,’ explained Derrick, slipping into the Chinese that he had learned before ever he spoke English.
‘Vamoose – to skip away. Thank you. Will make instantaneous note – colloquial knowledge of English most valuable.’
Derrick came on deck and stood watching the Wanderer’s wake for some time. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in the calmer sea he could see the schooner’s trail stretching far behind her. He looked down, and there, sure enough, was the great dark, torpedo-shaped form of the tiger-shark that had been following since the ship left port. Li Han came up with a bucket of rubbish: he threw it over the side, and at once Derrick saw the little pilot-fish dart forward and follow a lump of spoiled salt pork as it sank. The shark shot out from the shadow of the schooner, and Derrick saw the white gleam of its belly as it turned; there was a swirl in the water, and it was gone. The pilot-fish snapped up the scrap that remained and joined the shark under the stern. Derrick shuddered: sharks were the only things in the sea that he hated. There was something appallingly sinister about the great fish’s silent voracious rush.
He looked away and searched the sky and the horizon for the albatross that was nearly always there, a particularly fine one, with such a vast wing-span that it seemed impossible that it should ever be able to fold them and walk on the ground. But it was not there: nor were the gulls which usually appeared to swoop on the scraps that Li Han threw overboard.
Presently he went along to have a word with Olaf. ‘I say, Olaf,’ he began, ‘if you wanted to be a sailor, would you go to school?’
‘Well, I am a sailor, ain’t I?’ said Olaf. ‘What do you think Ay look like? A film-star, maybe, or a guy that dances on a tight-rope?’
‘No, I mean do you think school is a good thing?’
‘A good thing?’ said the Swede, watching the compass and considering. ‘Well, Ay reckon they wouldn’t teach me much out of a book, eh? Ay can’t read only big print, see? And Ay don’t want to be squinting down my nose at a lot of words Ay can’t understand.’
‘I mean if you were young and wanted to be a ship’s captain.’
‘Hum. That’s another thing. You got to know how to navigate, of course: but Ay don’t know that anything else ban much use to a sailor, except the nautical almanac.’
‘I think you’re right, Olaf. They want to send me to school.’
‘What for, eh? You can read and write and figure, can’t you? Ay never was a one for falals and doodads. My old man, he was the master of a whaler, see? And he never knew any more than navigation by rule of thumb.’ He turned the wheel two spokes, and went on. ‘Now Ay knew a man in Baltimore, could read out of books in Greek and what you say? Uh, Latin, ain’t it? Yes. Well, it worn’t any manner of use to him. He fell in the sea and drownded just the same.’
‘But that might happen to anyone, however much they knew.’
‘Ay don’t know. My old grandma, she was a Finn. Half Lapp, they say; and she was a wise woman. She could read the runes. You know what Ay mean? The old heathen writings, eh? And she could put good luck on a ship with what she knew, and she could sell you a nice little wind if you asked polite. If you went and tipped your hat to her and said, “Good morning, marm, I’ve come for a nice little wind like you can make, marm, if you please,”’ – Olaf imitated himself being polite, with a horrible smirk and a bob of his head – ‘Why, then you’d maybe get it. But if you was to say, “Hey, old girl, give us a wind yust one point off of east and make it snappy,” why, then you would get something more then you bargained for, eh? What she knew, my old grandma! Ay don’t reckon she would have drowned in any sea. Ay t’ink she must have been ninety when Ay remember her. Old, she was, with a beard like a man, and she was a little creature you could of broken like that …’ he snapped his fingers. ‘But they was all afraid of her, even the old pastor, though he hated her worser’n poison. She used to be able to tell the day when a man was going to die, and she could charm the whales out of the sea. But Ay reckon you can’t get that sort of learning in no school. If you could, maybe it’d be some use, eh?’
‘Could she really tell when you were going to die, Olaf?’
‘Well,