Quarterdeck and Fok'sle: Stories of the Sea

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Next him at the table sat a handsome young fellow about his own age. Something in the boy’s fresh, regular features and lithe young figure reminded Brydell of Grubb. Of all his early friends Brydell loved the kindly marine, with his manliness and truth and bad grammar, better than any of them. Although Grubb had done his share of sea duty, he and Brydell had met many times in all those years, and always Brydell felt as if he were a little lad again.

Once, Brydell remembered, Grubb, being about going to sea again, had paid the expenses of a long journey out of his small pay to see him, and Brydell suspected that Grubb’s ticket had taken about all his spare cash, and that he had lived on hard tack and a can of smoked beef most of the way, which was hard on a big fellow like the marine.

It suddenly flashed upon Brydell that this handsome fellow might be Grubb’s son; he was about the right age. Brydell at this pricked up his ears, but in a few minutes one of the professors, happening to address the young man, called him “Mr. Esdaile.” Then he was not Grubb’s boy, and Brydell lost all interest in him, except that he wished he could write the answers off as quickly as Esdaile could. For Esdaile never paused a moment, but with the ease and rapidity of one perfectly accustomed to his subject he answered every question put him.

Not so Brydell. He was well up in history and geography, for he was a great reader. But in mathematics he stumbled woefully and made something very like a fiasco.

When at last it was over and the young fellows each took his way home, Brydell felt a sickening sense of failure. He had really worked hard in preparing for the examination, but he forgot that he had never worked in his life before. His three weeks’ spurt had seemed to him a tremendous effort that must win success, but it had not. And then came a terrible apprehension; if he had failed at this examination, and he felt perfectly sure he had, he might fail at another. He might even fail in getting the appointment from his own district, for the congressman might well hesitate to give it to a boy who could not hold his own in a preliminary examination.

This thought staggered him and almost broke his heart, for he had dwelt so long on the navy that he could not think what to do with his life if his ambition in that way should be balked. He was only kept in suspense a week or two and then the blow fell. Esdaile had got the appointment, and Brydell was at the foot of the list.

Only a proud, sensitive, and inexperienced soul could imagine the pain that Brydell suffered. It was not alone the mortification of failure; he had allowed his passion for the navy to take such possession of him, body and mind, that any serious setback to this cherished hope seemed to him an appalling misfortune.

In his tempest of disappointment he turned for the first time in his life, even in his own mind, against his father.

“It is not my fault,” he thought in sullen fury. “I am bright enough, only I never was made to work. And yet everybody talks about my advantages. Was it any advantage that I should never stay at any school more than a year, and hardly ever more than six months? Was it any advantage to me to be sent to Europe where I picked up a smattering of French and came home to find myself behind every fellow of my age I knew, except in that one thing? Was it any advantage to me to have more money than almost any boy I knew, to squander on athletics and all sorts of rubbish?”

This last reflection brought Brydell suddenly to himself. He remembered poor Grubb’s giving his boy half his pay. “And my poor old dad—poor young dad, rather—gave me, I believe, a good deal more than half his pay.”