“If a book be interesting, it is apt to dominate the mind, and sometimes to mislead the judgment. I think it well to suspend the reading now and then, and give myself a chance to shake off the glamour of the narrative, and to think out for myself what it means and to what it tends. One must do that, indeed, if one doesn’t want to surrender himself or herself completely to the dominance of an author’s thought, but chooses instead to do his or her own thinking.”
So Dorothy took an hour or two for thinking before going on with the reading of Evelyn’s book. Evelyn knew her habit, and she had recognised it by changing chapters at this point.
When Dorothy took up the pages again, she read as follows:—
Chapter the Tenth
WE stayed a long time among the whaling people, and they taught me many things. I learned from them how to tie all sorts of knots, and how to catch sea fish, and how to row, and best of all, how to sail a boat.
They were a curious kind of men. They swore all the time, in almost every sentence. But their swearing didn’t mean anything, and so it didn’t shock me in the least. They were not at all angry when they swore. They swore, I think, merely because they hadn’t any adjectives with which to express their thoughts. They called me a “damned nice gal,” and they meant it for a compliment. In the same way, they spoke of a tangle in a fish-line as “a damned ugly snarl,” or of a fish as “a damned big catch.” I suppose one might cure them of swearing by teaching them some adjectives. But nobody ever took the trouble to do that.
They were good fellows—strong and brave, and wonderfully enduring. When I went out fishing with them, and the tide was out on our return, so that we couldn’t come up to a pier, one of them would jump overboard in the mud, pick me up, swing me to his broad shoulders, and carry me ashore dry-shod, without seeming to think anything of it.
One day we had a storm while I was out in a fishing-boat. As soon as it came on, all the boats came to the side of ours, though it was dangerous to do so, just to make sure of my safety. The boat I was in was swamped, and I was spilled overboard. But I was no sooner in the angry sea than I was grabbed by the arms of a stout young fellow who gallantly bore me toward a little sloop that lay at hand. A mast broke off and fell. It hit the poor fellow, and, finding himself unable to do any more, he called to a comrade to take me, and he sank in the water and was drowned. He didn’t seem to care for himself at all, but only to save me, and all the rest of them seemed to think that that was a matter of course. I got my father to give me some money, and I hired a stone-cutter to put up a monument over the poor fellow’s grave; for we recovered his body, with both arms broken by the blow from the falling mast. There are lots of heroes, Dorothy, who are never engaged in wars.
At last my father took me away from the whaling town, and we went to New York in a little schooner. It took us a long time, because the winds were adverse, but we got there after a while, and went to a hotel. It was the Astor House, I think, and it had a beautiful little park nearly in front of it. I don’t think that is of any consequence, but, you see, I am trying to tell you everything. You can skip anything you don’t care for.