"All this rigmarole about azimuths and amplitudes and zeniths and moons and influence and tides, it's just invented to plague the life out of honest, seafaring folk." This heartfelt plaint of Dirrik's was received with loud applause by the rest of the school. Knap himself was as delighted as the rest, and sang out over our heads: "Well, you can be sure I'd be only too glad to leave out half of it, for it is all a man can do to knock the rest of it into your heads."
Skipper Sartz, the third master, was a very old and very slow, but a thorough-going old salt, who would rather spin us a yarn at any time than bother about navigation. We learned very little of that from him, and he was generally regarded more as a comrade than as a master. Rudolf supplied him with tobacco, free of charge, to smoke in lesson-time, so there was no very strict discipline during those hours. It was a trick of Rudolf's, I remember, when Sartz was going through lessons with him, to get hold of a ruler in his left hand and draw it gently up and down the tutor's back. Sartz would think it was me, and swing round suddenly to let off a volley, ending up as a rule with a recommendation to us generally to "give over these etcetera etcetera tricks, and try and behave as young gentlemen should."
At last the great day came when Dirrik was to go up for his exam. K. G. Smith—he's an admiral now—was the examiner. All of us, teachers included, were fond of Dirrik, and would have been sorry to see him fail again.
"Well, if I do get through this time," said Dirrik, smiling all over his cheery face, "I'll stand treat all round so the mess won't forget it for a week."
And really I think he would rather have faced a four week's gale of the winter-north-Atlantic type, or undertaken to assassinate the Emperor of China, than march up to that examination table.
When the time came for the viva voce, Rudolf and I could stand it no longer, we had to go in and listen.
Never before or since have I seen such depths of despair on any human face. Poor Dirrik mopped his brow, and blew his nose, and we sat there, with serious faces, feeling as if we were watching some dear departed about to be lowered into the grave. I can safely say I have never experienced a more solemn or trying ceremony, not even when I, myself, was launched into the state of holy matrimony before the altar.
The examiner sat bending over his work, entering something or other—of particular importance, to judge by the gravity of his looks.
We heard only the scratching of his pen on the paper.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a curious hissing sound: