Day before we sailed, down came two trunks and a hat box, and the next day down came the girl herself with the old Kanaka mammy and Pat.
He stood on the wharfside and waved to us as we were tugged out, and Sadie stood and waved back to him. She had a lot of good points that girl, though straight dealing wasn’t one of them, and she didn’t seem to mind, no more than if she was going on a picnic. She took the tumble at the bar as if she was used to it, and she settled to the life of the ship same as a man might have done.
She was always wanting to know things—names of the ropes and all such, and she hadn’t been a week on board before she began to poke her nose into the navigating and charts. She used to cough sometimes at first, but after a while she dropped all that, saying the sea air had taken her cough away.
Now you wouldn’t believe unless you’d been there, the down we took on that piece before a week had gone.
It wasn’t anything she said or anything she did, it was just the way she carried on. She was civil and she gave no more trouble than another might have done, but we weren’t her style, and she made us feel it. Only a woman can make a strong and straight man feel like a worm. It wasn’t even that she despised us for being below her class, she didn’t; she never thought of us, and she made us feel we weren’t men but just things—get me?
“Buck,” I says to him one day, “if you could hollow that piece out, stick her on a pivot and put a lid on her, she’d make an A 1 freezing machine.”
“She would,” said Buck, “and if you were to plate her with gold and set her with diamonds, you couldn’t make a lady out of her.”
“That’s so,” said I, “but all the same she’ll be an A 1 navigator before she’s done with us.”
One evening, somewhere north of Palmyra—we’d been blown a bit south of our course—I was on deck. Buck was below and a Kanaka was at the wheel, and a moon like a frying pan was rising up and lighting the deck so’s you could count the dowels. I’d turned to have a look over the after rail, and when I turned again there was Buck just come on deck and an hour before his time.
He came up and took me by the arm and walked me forward a bit.