“Oh, she’ll take it all right. It’s no worse than Nantucket water. It couldn’t be. You’ll see.”
We did see. In half an hour we were in the middle of upper Narragansett Bay, trying to make a diagonal across it to the southwest, while the long rollers came in steadily from the south, broken by a nasty chop of peaked, whitecapped waves. We rowed carefully, our heads over our right shoulders, watching each wave as it came on, with broken comments:—
“That’s a good one coming—bring her up now—there—all right, now let her off again—hold her so—there’s another coming—see?—that big one, the fifth, the fourth, away—row, now—we beat it—there it goes off astern—see it break! Here’s another—look out for your oar—we can’t afford to miss a stroke—oh, me! Did that wet you too? My right shoulder is soaked—my left isn’t—now it is!”
But half an hour of this sort of thing brought about two results—confidence in the little boat, which rode well in spite of her load, and confidence in each other’s rowing. We found that the four oars worked together, our early training told, and we instinctively did the same things in each of the varied emergencies created by wind and wave. There was no need for orders, and our talk died down to an exclamation now and then at some especially big wave, or a laugh as one of us got a drenching from the white top of a foaming crest.
It was not an easy day, that first one.… It seems, sometimes, as if there were little imps of malignity that hovered over one [pg 190] at the beginning of an undertaking—little brownies, using all their charms to try to turn one back, discouraged. If there be such, they had a good time with us that long afternoon. First they had said that we shouldn’t load our boat. Then they sent us rough water. Then they set the boat a-leak.
For leak it did. The soaking over night had done no good. It had, indeed, been “thoroughly overhauled” and pronounced seaworthy, but there was the water, too much to be accounted for as spray, swashing over the bottom boards, growing undeniably and most uncomfortably deeper. The imps made no offer to bale for us, so we had to do it ourselves, losing the much-needed power at the oars, while one of us set to work at the dip-and-toss, dip-and-toss motion so familiar to any one who has kept company with a small boat.
“I wish my mother could see me now—” hummed Jonathan.
“I wouldn’t wish that.”
“Why not?”
“What would they all think of us if they could see us this minute?”