"Why not? You're the man for the job."
"No, I'm not the man. You haven't got me quite right. I can point out
errors, but I'm not the man to correct them. I'm not a good executive."
"You certainly were the good executive in the bosun's case."
"N-no, no. You mustn't count him. If he was a John L. Sullivan, say, in
his good days, it would prove something. Besides, I don't care for
fighting--for beating people up. I do hate though to see a bully or a
faker getting the best of it, and maybe having had time to knock around
and study people, I can pick out a bully or a faker quicker than most
people, and seeing somebody getting too much the best of it, why,
sometimes I can't help butting in."
"And because of that faculty of seeing things, once you made up your
mind to settle down to it, you'd make good on this job I'm offering
you."
"No, you've got me wrong again. I'm not a reformer, and never will be,
I hope. Reformers, or most that ever I met, are only men who first tried
to play politics and got licked at it. I'm only an observer."
"But you like a fight?"
"M-m-m-n not me. And I never did. Any man, of course, likes the
excitement once he's into it, but what man enjoys smashing another man
in the face? What fights I've been into I couldn't side-step--not
without crawling, I mean. No, no, I wouldn't make good on your job. I'd
go along all right in your office back in New York for awhile,--for a
month, two months, six months,--who knows, maybe a year, and then one
day I'd look out the window, take a look down on the Battery, say at the
elevated railroad or the Aquarium Building, and the Coney Island steamer
dock with the barkers yelling and gesturing, and the loafers on the
benches in between, and from that I'd look down the bay and see the
Statue of Liberty--some morning that would be, maybe, when the sun was
lighting up New York Bay as it does some mornings, or maybe it would be
on a late afternoon, with the sun setting over on the Jersey shore, the
dark smoke from a hundred chimneys smooching across the pink and purple
of it, and, if 'twas summer, a haze like a bridal veil over it all, and
between that and the Battery the life of a hundred craft--ferry-boats,
tow-boats, lighters, windjammers, steam-yachts, ocean-liners, harbor,
coastwise and foreign bound, a hundred different kinds coming and going,
the Lord knows where, but to where no four walls will bound 'em for a
time, be sure of that. And if ever I did look and looked long enough, be
sure the earth would look like it was rolling by too slow and I'd want
to get out and give it a push to speed it up. No, no. That"--he looked
up at the serene blue--"for my ceiling. And that"--he pointed to the
dimpling green sea--"for my office floor. And that"--he waved a hand to
space--"for a window. And let all the bruising bosuns and bucko ship's
officers afloat jump on me, but give me that and I'll take a chance.
And--"
He stopped short and sighed. "I do get going sometimes, don't I?" He
looked around the deck. In a bucket of water by the rail the bosun was
bathing his battered features. "The bosun reminds me. To-day I promised
him I'd finish my Flying Walrus song."
"Go ahead and finish it--that first verse was pretty good."
"The second's better--or I think so. And"--he grinned at the
passenger--"I composed it myself, too, to an air running in my head. And
I suppose I ought to finish it. And yet"--the bosun was pouring, very
quietly, his bucket of wash water into the scuppers--"that would be
sort of rubbing it in, wouldn't it?"
"What of it? It will do them all good."
"I don't know about that. If it"--and just then three bells struck, and
three bells on the _Rapidan_ meant supper for the watch below.
Kieran left to go to supper, and the passenger noted the deference of
the crew toward him. Not one who found himself in his way but hopped
swiftly aside to give him gangway.
"How conducive to high judgment, how accelerating to respect is
success," mused the passenger. "Two hours ago hardly one of them who did
not set him down for a half-crazy, or, at least, an over-sanguine
visionary--but now--they bound like stags before him, and none more
propitiatingly agile than the former satellites of our deposed bosun. A
Don Quixote"--murmured the passenger--"maybe, but a 20th century Don
Quixote--with a wallop in each hand. If the Don Quixotes generally had
his equipment, it would not be windmills alone which would suffer, and
some joy then for honest men to watch the tilting."