Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity.  The gale had ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror.  He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes.  Otherwise he was rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement had served the turn.  He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who had done the work.  When all men flinched, then—­he felt sure—­he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas.  He knew what to think of it.  Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible.  He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage.

CHAPTER 2

After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure.  He made many voyages.  He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water:  he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread—­but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.  This reward eluded him.  Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.  Besides, his prospects were good.  He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.

Only once in all that time he had again a glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea.  That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think.  There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—­that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest:  which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary—­the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.