A STUDY IN PIRACY
It might not have occurred to you to find the Head Captain terrible to look upon, had you seen him first without his uniform. There seems to be something essentially pacific in the effect of a broad turn-over gingham collar, a blue neck-ribbon, and a wide straw hat; and you might be pardoned for thinking him a rather mild person. But could you have encountered him in a black cambric mask with pinked edges, a broad sash of Turkey red wound tightly about his waist, and that wide collar turned up above his ears—the tie conspicuous for its absence—you might have sung another tune. His appearance was at such a time nothing short of menacing.
The Lieutenant was distinctly less impressive. His sash, though not so long as the Head Captain’s, was forever coming untied and trailing behind him, and as he often retreated rapidly, he stumbled and fell over it twice out of three times. This gave it a draggled and spiritless look. Moreover, he was not allowed to turn his collar up except on Saturdays, and the one his sister had made him from wrapping paper had an exotic, not to say amateur theatrical, effect that was far from convincing. The eye-holes in his mask, too, were much too large—showing, indeed, the greater part of both cheeks, each of which was provided with a deep dimple. Seen in the daytime, he was not—to speak confidentially—very awesome.
As for the Vicar—well, there were obstacles in the way of her presenting such an appearance as she would have liked. In the first place, there was not enough Turkey red to go evenly round, and to her disgust she had been obliged to put up with a scant three-quarters of a yard—not a wide strip at that. What was by courtesy called the Vicar’s waist was not far from three-quarters of a yard in circumference, which fact compelled her to strain her sash tightly in order to be able to make even a small hard knot, to say nothing of bows and ends. She had no collar of any kind—her frocks were gathered into bands at the neck—and she was not allowed to imitate the Lieutenant’s; who, though generally speaking a mush of concession, held out very strongly for this outward and visible sign of a presumable inward and spiritual superiority. So the Vicar, in a wild attempt at masculinity, had privately borrowed a high linen collar of her uncle. The shirts in her uncle’s drawer had printed inside them, “wear a seventeen-and-a-half collar with this shirt,” so you will not be surprised to learn that the Vicar occasionally fell into the collar, so to speak, and found herself most effectually muzzled.
The Vicar.
But the worst was her mask. Her hair came down in a heavy bang almost to her straight brown eyebrows; her round, brown eyes were somewhat shortsighted; her eye-holes were too small. In consequence of these facts, whenever it was desirable or necessary to see an inch before her nose she was obliged to push the mask up over her bang, when it waved straight out and up, and looked like some high priest’s mitre.
Her title was due to her uncle, who, to do him justice, was as innocent of his influence in the matter as of the loss of his collar.
“When a person isn’t the head of the Pirates, but is an officer just the same, and has some say about things, what do you call that?” she asked him abruptly one day. He was reading at the time, and not unnaturally understood her to say “the head of the parish.”
“Why, that’s called a vicar, I suppose you mean,” he answered.