“Which did you lose first down there, your nerve or that shoe?”
When I hesitated, he snapped, “Give me the truth, now, or we sha’n’t get
along after this!”
“My nerve!” I told him.
“So I knew--for I lashed on that shoe with my own hands. Very well! What
good are you as a diver without your wits or your nerve?”
“No good, sir.”
“You can buy an eighteen-pound shoe at any equipment loft. But how about
buying nerve?”
“I reckon it can’t be bought, sir,” I confessed.
“Still, you were almighty _particular_,” he sneered, “to bring back that
shoe with you even if you didn’t bring your nerve. Left your nerve on
the bottom, eh?”
He was mighty nasty in his tone and his manner, and the men standing
around were grinning. Perhaps even all that would not have put grit back
into me, for I was dizzy and scared and was owning up to myself that I
was better fitted for dry ground than a wet sea-bottom. But just then
Anson C. Doughty bellowed from the wharf:
“Say, look here, Vose, let that coward go back upcountry to his steers!
We have no time to fool away on greenhorns.”
“If I did leave my nerve on the bottom I’m going back after it, and I’m
going right now!” I told the diver. I was holding the shoe and I dropped
it on deck and shoved my foot into it. Captain Vose kneeled and began to
lash it.
“What are you doing, there?” demanded the manager.
“Making a diver,” stated my teacher, calmly.
“I’m paying you fifty dollars a day to do what I tell you to do, Vose.”
“That’s right, sir!” The captain kept right on with the lashings.
“There’s a contract between you and this young man which tells me to
teach him how to be a diver, if he shows the capacity.”
“He hasn’t shown it.”
“He is going to in about five minutes, sir.”
He picked up the helmet and bent over me.
“I had a reason for twitting you about that shoe,” he said, in my ear.
“You showed what was in you by bringing it back If you hadn’t brought
it back I would have stripped this suit off you and sent you hipering!
You’ve got it in you! You’re all right! Now go down, son, and set that
chain where I told you to set it. The first scare is the vaccination for
this kind of work. You’re in a way to be immune from now on!”
The last sound I heard was the snarl of Anson C. Doughty. That sound
helped me to go to my job that day. I went down and did what was
required of me, and, as I worked below there and became convinced that
there was nothing to harm me if I kept my head, I found my nerve, I
reckon, for good and all, in the diving business.
And now that this story seems to be settled into a rut of adventure in
my chosen line of work, hold breath with me and prepare for a couple
of most “jeeroosly jounces,” as old Wagner Bangs used to term his
occasional falls from his state of natural grace.
First, I leap as nimbly as I can over three years and a half of hard
work, the story of which would hold as little interest as the biography
of a mud-clam. I slipped and slid and dug in slime, I shagged granite
blocks and dragged chains, I pried into wrecks and had my whack at
fumbling in the watery shadows for the drowned--pitiful bundles floating
as if they were attempting posthumous gymnastics, head down and fingers
trying to touch toes.