Chapter 10 - Page 2

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