He saw Captain Whalley turn his head quickly to speak to his Serang; the wind whipped the whole white mass of the beard sideways.  He would be directing the chap to look at the compass for him, or what not.  Of course.  Too much trouble to step over and see for himself.  Sterne’s scorn for that bodily indolence which overtakes white men in the East increased on reflection.  Some of them would be utterly lost if they hadn’t all these natives at their beck and call; they grew perfectly shameless about it too.  He was not of that sort, thank God!  It wasn’t in him to make himself dependent for his work on any shriveled-up little Malay like that.  As if one could ever trust a silly native for anything in the world!  But that fine old man thought differently, it seems.  There they were together, never far apart; a pair of them, recalling to the mind an old whale attended by a little pilot-fish.

The fancifulness of the comparison made him smile.  A whale with an inseparable pilot-fish!  That’s what the old man looked like; for it could not be said he looked like a shark, though Mr. Massy had called him that very name.  But Mr. Massy did not mind what he said in his savage fits.  Sterne smiled to himself—­and gradually the ideas evoked by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas of aid, of guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his mind:  the word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land in the dark:  groping blindly in fogs:  feeling their way in the thick weather of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown up from the sea, contract the range of sight on all sides to a shrunken horizon that seems within reach of the hand.

A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local knowledge, like a sharper vision, completes the shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed; penetrates the veils of mist spread over the land by the storms of the sea; defines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under the pall of fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a starless night as in a shallow grave.  He recognizes because he already knows.  It is not to his far-reaching eye but to his more extensive knowledge that the pilot looks for certitude; for this certitude of the ship’s position on which may depend a man’s good fame and the peace of his conscience, the justification of the trust deposited in his hands, with his own life too, which is seldom wholly his to throw away, and the humble lives of others rooted in distant affections, perhaps, and made as weighty as the lives of kings by the burden of the awaiting mystery.  The pilot’s knowledge brings relief and certitude to the commander of a ship; the Serang, however, in his fanciful suggestion of a pilot-fish attending a whale, could not in any way be credited with a superior knowledge.  Why should he have it?  These two men had come on that run together—­the white and the brown—­on the same day:  and of course a white man would learn more in a week than the best native would in a month.  He was made to stick to the skipper as though he were of some use—­as the pilot-fish, they say, is to the whale.  But how—­it was very marked—­how?  A pilot-fish—­a pilot—­a . . .  But if not superior knowledge then . . .