“That damned old sea horse thought he could get away from me but I got him,” I called up, grinning in my success.
“Come up this rope at once,” roared Father.
Hand over hand I climbed up the piece of halyard he lowered over to me. My hair was streaked in wet strings over my face as I stood on deck dripping in front of Father. Before he could say a word I put my hand in my pocket to bring out my beautiful anemone when to my dismay the thing I brought forth in my fist was no dainty colored flower but a dirty piece of seaweed that looked like a hunk of rotten sponge. In the water in its bed of blue sea it had the beauty of a lace-like piece of coral, but in my hand it was a brutal disillusion—just ugly seaweed. My heart sank in disappointment—the thing I had wanted to possess for its loveliness didn’t exist. Whatever philosophic reflections this might have started were checked abruptly by my father’s voice.
“Turn over that skylight,” he said.
Obediently I draped my body over the skylight with my back part exposed heavenwards.
“This will teach you to run away from this ship,” and he gave me a whipping with the end of the rope he had thrown to me to climb aboard with. The licking didn’t really hurt. It took a pretty healthy whack to hurt me anywhere physically. But the comedown! The blow to my pride! To be turned over a skylight and licked on the pants before a circle of grinning sailors—and for what? Merely for jumping overboard in mid-ocean and stopping the ship. I could hear the mate who had chased me in the lifeboat laughing the loudest. Would I ever recover? As if the sea horse and the anemone hadn’t treated me badly enough.
“Now you get the Bible and copy a verse twenty times,” he added. It was the familiar finish to a licking. Father used the Bible as a text book for me—spelling, grammar and composition. If you’ve ever had to learn to spell all the words in the Bible you can see what I was up against. I had to copy verses out of the Bible every day, but Father could never make me do it voluntarily—so he gave it to me to do as punishment.
I got the Bible, and lying down on my stomach on the hot deck in the sun so my pants would dry, I began my penmanship lesson. I was darned if I was going to do Revelations again. I knew them by heart—all about roasting in Hell and being eaten by snakes and never being able to die and get out of it—besides which the verses in Revelations were too long. I wanted to get it over with. I thumbed the New Testament over until I found the shortest verse in it—“Jesus Wept.” That suited my frame of mind too, so I copied that one twenty times and turned my homework in to Father. He was so pleased at my promptness in doing my lesson that he looked as if he had forgotten my latest offense.
“Here it is,” I said to him, with the air of a martyr, and disdaining even to look at that bunch of sailors who were occupied doing various jobs around the deck. As I handed him the paper I began to make a discreet retreat to the main deck. I got as far as the poop deck ladder when I heard him explode like a firecracker. And then I got a real licking to “teach me to be funny again.”
Studying was the hardest thing I had to do. It wasn’t only because I didn’t want to study that I looked upon knowledge-getting as a curse, but I had so much physical energy that I just couldn’t sit still long enough. So Father used all sorts of schemes to make me work at my lessons. He had one that never failed, no matter how often he tried it. He would call me into his cabin and tell me with a grave face he had made a mistake in his navigation problem and would I work it over and catch his mistake, because otherwise the result might be very serious to all of us on the ship. I didn’t care a hang about the seriousness to all of us on the ship, but how I did want to catch him. So I would tie into that problem tooth and nail and at the end of half an hour or an hour be able to go to Father with a very superior air and tell him that no matter what he thought I knew he had not made a mistake. Then he’d always thank me with an expression of great relief and I’d go away very proud—never realizing that I had done my arithmetic lesson.