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COMMAND
BY WILLIAM McFEE
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
This book is inscribed to those commanders under whom the author has had
the honour to serve, who have achieved firmness without asperity, tact
and sympathy without interference, and appreciation without fuss. It is
inscribed to these gentlemen because while they lack the gift of
self-advertisement, they have contrived, in spite of the trials and
exasperations of a seafaring existence, to engage the respect and
affections of their lieutenants.
PREFATORY NOTE
This tale is an original invention. It is not founded upon fact, nor are
the characters herein described portraits of actual persons. The
incidents and topography are imaginary.
W. M.
COMMAND
CHAPTER I
She was one of those girls who have become much more common of late
years among the upper-middle classes, the comfortably fixed classes,
than they have ever been since the aristocracy left off marrying Italian
_prime-donne_. You know the type of English beauty, so often insisted
on, say, twenty years ago--placid, fair, gentle, blue-eyed, fining into
distinction in Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Always she was the heroine, and
her protagonist, the adventuress, was dark and wicked. For some occult
reason the Lady Rowena type was the fashion.
Ada Rivers was one of those girls who have come up since. The
upper-middle classes had experienced many incursions. All sorts of
astonishing innovations had taken place. Many races had come to England,
or rather to London, which is in England but not of it; had made money,
had bred their sons at the great public schools and universities and
their daughters at convents in France and Belgium. These dark-haired,
gray-eyed, stylish, highly strung, athletic, talented girls are
phenomena of the Stockbroking Age. They do things Lady Rowena and Lady
Clara Vere de Vere would not tolerate for a moment. Outwardly resembling
the wealthy Society Girl, they are essentially quite different. Some
marry artists and have emotional outbreaks. Some combine a very genuine
romantic temperament with a disheartening sophistication about incomes
and running a home. They not only wish to marry so that they can begin
where their parents leave off, but they know how to do it. They can
engage a competent house-maid and rave about Kubelik on the same
afternoon, and do both in an experienced sort of way. They go everywhere
by themselves, and to men whom they dislike they are sheathed in shining
armour. They can dance, swim, motor, golf, entertain, earn their own
living, talk music, art, books, and china, wash a dog and doctor him.
And they can do all this, mark, without having any real experience of
what we call life. They are good girls, nice girls, virtuous girls, and
very marriageable girls, too, but they have a superficial hardness of
texture on their character which closely resembles the mask of
experience. They are like the baggage which used to be sold in certain
obscure shops in London with the labels of foreign hotels already pasted
on it. It follows that sometimes this girl of the upper-middle,
comfortably fixed class makes a mistake in her choice. Or rather, she
credits with heroic attributes a being of indifferent calibre. She
realizes in him some profound but erratic emotion, and the world in
which she moves beholds her behaviour and listens to her praise of her
beloved with annoyance. They speak, not of a mistake of course, but of
the strangeness of girls nowadays, and incompatibility of temperaments.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these affairs is the blindness
of the girl's friends to her frequent superiority over the being whom
she adores. She isn't good enough for him, they say. The fact is, at the
time of this story, fine women were cheap in England, and gentlemen of
indifferent calibre were picking up bargains every day.
Mr. Reginald Spokesly, a case in point, was accustomed to use this very
phrase when in a mood in which his egotism was lying dormant. "I've
picked up a bargain," he would say to himself as he leaned over the rail
and watched the millions of tiny facets of the sea reflecting the
sunset. "A bargain," he would whisper in an awed voice, nodding gravely
at the opposite bulkhead, as he sat in his room with his feet in a
bucket of hot water, for this was his way with corns. And Mr. Reginald
Spokesly was intensely preoccupied with women. He had often sighed, on
the bridge, as he reflected what he might do "if he only had the means."
Perhaps, when he got a command.... He would halt short at this, suddenly
remembering the bargain he had picked up.
But it must not be for one moment imagined, when I speak of Mr. Spokesly
as being at that time a gentleman of indifferent calibre, that he was so
regarded by himself or his world afloat or ashore. Indeed, he was a
rather magnificent person. He played his cards very well. He "kept his
ears open and his mouth shut," as he himself put it. He had once
confided to Mr. Chippenham, the third officer, that "there was jobs
goin' just now, soft things, too, if y' only wait." The third officer
was not directly interested, for he knew well enough that he himself
stood no chance in that gamble. But he was impressed by Mr.
Spokesly's--the second officer's--exquisite fitness for any such jobs.
Even the Old Man, taciturn, distant, and dignified as he was, was not up
to Mr. Spokesly. Who had so slow and so deliberate a walk? Who could
treat the common people of the ship, the sailors, the firemen, the
engineers and wireless boys, with such lofty condescension? It was a
lesson in deportment to see him stroll into the chief engineer's room
and extend himself on that gentleman's settee. It was unfortunately true
that some of those common people treated Mr. Spokesly, not as a
commander _in posse_, not as one of those select beings born to rule,
but as one of themselves. Mr. Chippenham remembered with pain one
incident which showed this only too clearly. They were watching a
destroyer coming into port, her decks lined with bluejackets, her three
funnels belching oil-smoke, her semaphore working. As she swung round
astern of them, Mr. Spokesly, who had been pacing to and fro paring his
nails, joined the little group at the rail, nodding in majestic
approval.
"Ah," he remarked in his loose-lipped, husky drawl, "I sh'd like to
'andle one o' them little things meself."
And to this the third engineer, his greasy arms asprawl on the rail, had
looked over his shoulder and remarked:
"You! I'd like to see you! You'd pile her up on the beach before you'd
had her five minutes, that's what _you'd_ do."
It was a vile, gratuitous insult, the third officer had thought hotly,
and he had watched Mr. Spokesly do the only thing possible, walk grandly
away. That was the worst of those beastly engineers. If you gave them an
inch they'd take a mile. And he made a mental note of what _he_ would do
when he attained to command--some twenty years ahead.
But this was, I am glad to say, an exceptional incident. Circumstances
as a rule favoured the development of Mr. Spokesly's _amour propre_ and
he brooded with intense absorption upon his own greatness. Now this
greatness was a very intricate affair. It was inextricably tangled up
with the individual soul known as Reginald Spokesly, Esquire, of Thames
Road, Twickenham, England, and the unit of the Merchant Service known as
R. Spokesly, second officer, S. S. _Tanganyika_, a member of what is
called "the cloth." Perhaps it would be better to include another
manifestation of greatness, which was Mr. Spokesly's tremendous power
over women. His own explanation of this last phenomenon was that he
"kept them in their place." To him they were mere playthings of an idle
hour. Perhaps his desire was most aroused by stories of Oriental
domesticity, and he almost regretted not being born a pasha, where his
abilities as a woman tamer could have had more scope. However, he did
not read a great deal. In fact, he could hardly be said to read at all.
He patronized a book now and then by falling asleep over it.
In the early days of the war, Mr. Spokesly's light had been hidden for
some years in the Far East. Indeed, when I think of the sort of life he
was gradually subsiding into out there, I sometimes wonder if he would
ever have attained to such a capacity for moral effort as he afterwards
displayed unless the war had evoked the illusion that he ought to go
home and enlist, and so had opened to him the wealth of bargains to be
picked up in England. That, at any rate, had been his ostensible reason
for quitting the peculiar mixture of tropical languor and brisk
modernity which had been his life for nearly four years. Perhaps it was
not so much love of country as personal destiny, for Mr. Spokesly had a
very real belief in his destiny. Here again his greatness, which was of
course the warp and woof of his destiny, showed a pattern of perplexing
intricacy. He regarded himself with approval. He was putting on weight.
A vigorous man of thirty-odd, coming thousands of miles across the ocean
to fight for his country! He read the roll of honour each week in the
papers that met them on the homeward voyage, and the page blurred to his
sight as he _gazed_ through it into the future. You might almost, he
reflected, count out those who were wounded and missing as well! Whether
he had ever had any genuine intention of becoming a soldier I do not
know. He had a remarkably strong instinct of self-preservation; but then
many soldiers have that. As the liner neared home, however, Mr.
Spokesly's thoughts centred more and more truly about himself and his
immediate future. The seraglios he had quitted in Singapore and Kobe and
Rangoon were, in his own words, "a thing o' the past." The time, "the
psychological moment," as he phrased it without in the least knowing
what the word meant, was come when he would have to marry or, at any
rate, become engaged. He was not, he told himself, "pertickler." He
reckoned he could fall in love with almost anybody who wasn't too old or
too ugly, and providing always that she had "a dot." He was a stern
believer in a dot, even though he did not know how to pronounce it.
Looming behind the steep hill leading to a command were the happy
mountain valleys of a comfortable independence. To marry money! Now he
came to think of it, it had been the pervading ambition of his life. And
here was his chance. He pulled down his vest and settled his tie as he
thought of the golden future before him. He had a vision of an England
full of consolable fiancées, young ladies of wealth, beauty, and
position, sobbing gently for departed heroes, but willing to be
comforted....
It did not turn out that way, of course. Indeed, his first experience on
arrival was of an England of brisk, determined young women making
munitions, clipping tickets, and conducting street cars, and he was
angered at the unwomanliness of it all. Woman's place, he had always
believed, was in the harem. He had held, when lying in his hammock out
East and lazily reading the home news of suffrage riots, that the
Government "ought to have tied some of 'em up and horse-whipped 'em."
But he left the Metropolis behind as soon as possible, and went down to
stay with his family at Twickenham. And it was here, on a perfect day in
late autumn, that Ada Rivers, living with her married sister at
Richmond, brought balm to his wounded spirit.
From the very first day, spent in a punt at Kingston, she had struck the
right note of adoration. He had been telling her how his last ship had
been sunk by the _Emden_, and was going on to say he had providentially
left her just before, when she broke in ecstatically: "And you went
through it all?" He hesitated for a moment, and she followed this up
with, "How glorious! You _have_ been doing your bit!" She leaned back on
the cushions and gazed at him with shining gray eyes as he poled her
gently along, his large hairy arms, one of them clasped by a wrist
watch, outstretched above her, as though in some mystic benediction, his
loose mouth and double chin pendulous with the delicious flattery. For
she was a fine girl--he realized that immediately his sister had
introduced him. She made him feel his masculinity. He liked to think
afterwards of how deliberately he had made his choice.
He floated for a time in a dream of sensuous delight, for she was one of
those girls who will obey orders, who like orders, in fact, and whose
proud subservience sends a thrill of supreme pleasure through the minds
of their commanders. They were soon engaged.
There was not as much difference between this courtship and that of an
average coal or ice man as one might suppose. Mr. Spokesly's emotional
output so far had been, if I may say so, limited. But this was all grist
to Ada's mill. It was put down to the strong, deep, English sailor
nature, just as his primitive methods of wooing were credited to the
bluff English sailor nature. She was under an illusion all the time. All
that her married sister could say was useless. The married sister was
married to a man who was a woman-tamer himself in a way. He was now at
the Front, where he had won a medal for extraordinary bravery, and his
wife was dreading the day of his return. She used the interval of peace
and quiet to warn her sister. But who can fight against an illusion? The
married sister had to shrug her shoulders, and point out that Mr.
Spokesly was throwing himself away on a silly chit. She admired Mr.
Spokesly herself, to tell the truth, and liked to have him in the house,
where he was often to be found during his six weeks' vacation. It was
she who told him his was "a man's work" in a low contralto voice with a
thrill in it. This was really unfair to the husband in Flanders who had
displayed extraordinary bravery in holding an isolated post for goodness
knows how many hours. It would not do to assert that Mr. Spokesly ever
played with the idea of consoling a possible widow who already admired
him. He had not sufficient imagination for this. And Ada herself was
quite able to hold up her end. She made Mr. Spokesly feel not only
great, but good. It was she who led him to see where his weakness lay, a
success possible only to a clever girl. Unconscious of her promptings,
he came to the conclusion that, to do himself justice, he must make an
effort and "improve his education." When he heard the sisters rattling
away in a foreign tongue he made a mental note that "he must rub up his
French." The London School of Mnemonics, however, did the trick. It was
just what he wanted. This school had a wonderful system of
memory-training which was endorsed by kings and emperors, merchant
princes and famous mezzo-sopranos. By means of this system, learned in
twelve lessons, you trebled your intellectual power, quadrupled your
earning power, and quintupled your general value to yourself and to the
world. The system was comprised in twelve books of aphorisms, slim
volumes in gray-green paper covers, daintily printed and apparently
addressed straight to Mr. Spokesly's heart. First, he was told, he was
capable of anything. He knew that, and with an almost physical feeling
of pleasure he read on. Second, came a little story about a celebrated
philosopher. Mr. Spokesly was charmed.
It must not be supposed, however, that this was all bunkum to Mr.
Spokesly. It was, on the contrary, deadly earnest. Like many Englishmen
of his day, he knew there was something wrong with him. He was aware of
people in the world who used their brains and held clear notions about
things and ideas, very much as a man groping along a foggy street is
aware of a _conversazione_ in one of the mansions. To him the London
School of Mnemonics was a sound commercial proposition. In twelve
lessons, by correspondence, they offered to develop his memory,
stimulate his will power, and increase his salary. He had picked up the
first half-dozen pamphlets in his fiancée's home. The husband of the
married sister had taken the course as far as Number Six, which was:
"How to Dominate Your Friends," with a chatty essay on Hypnotism and
Matrimony, before leaving for Flanders and glory. Mr. Spokesly read them
with an avidity unknown to him since he had spent a month in London many
years before studying for his master's license. He felt on the highroad
to success. He joined the London School of Mnemonics. He bought an
engagement ring for Ada and a handsome bracelet for the married sister.
He left them for a while, he said, "to join up." He meant to do it, too,
for there is something pathetically appealing in the atmosphere of late
autumn in England. It goes to the heart. It is not quite so piercing a
call as the early spring, when one's very soul goes out in a mystical
passionate union with the spirit of the land, but it is very strong, and
Mr. Spokesly, without understanding it, felt the appeal. But at
Paddington he stopped and had a drink. For all his years at sea, he was
a Londoner at heart. He spoke the atrocious and barbarous jargon of her
suburbs, he snuffed the creosote of her wooden streets and found it an
admirable _apératif_ to his London beer. And while the blowsy spirit of
London, the dear cockney-hearted town, ousted the gentler shade of
England, Mr. Spokesly reflected that neither the army nor the navy would
have any use for a man of commanding powers, a man whose will and memory
had been miraculously developed. The army would not do, he was sure. The
navy would probably put him in charge of a tug; for Mr. Spokesly had no
illusions as to the reality of the difficulties of life in his own
sphere. And he had been long enough at one thing to dread the wrench of
beginning at the bottom somewhere else. This is the tragic side of
military service in England, for most Englishmen are not adaptable. Mr.
Spokesly, for example, had gone to sea at the age of twelve. Unless he
won a lottery prize he would be going to sea at seventy, if he lived so
long. So he reflected, and the upshot was that he applied--quite humbly,
for he had not as yet developed any enormous will power--and secured a
billet as second officer on the _Tanganyika_. He told his people and Ada
that there was "a chance of a command," which of course was perfectly
true. "It is a man's work," she thrilled softly, echoing her sister, and
she closed her eyes to enjoy the vision of him, strong in character,
large in talent, irresistible in will power, commanding amid storms and
possibly even shot and shell....
* * * * *
Having kept the middle watch, which is from twelve to four, Mr. Spokesly
was sitting in his cabin abaft the bridge of the _Tanganyika_, his feet
in a white-enamelled bucket of hot water, contemplating the opposite
bulkhead. He was thinking very hard, according to the System of the
London School of Mnemonics. The key of this system was simplicity
itself. You wanted to remember something which you had forgotten. Very
well; you worked back on the lines of a dog following a scent. From what
you were thinking at the present moment to what you were thinking when
you came in the door, which would lead you by gentle gradations back to
the item of which you were in search. Very simple. Unfortunately, Mr.
Spokesly, in the course of these retrograde pilgrimages, was apt to come
upon vast and trackless oceans of oblivion, bottomless gulfs of time in
which, as far as he could recall, his intellectual faculties had been in
a state of suspended animation. The London School of Mnemonics did not
seem to allow sufficiently for the bridging of these gaps. It is true
they said in Lesson Three, with gentle irony, _Remember the chain of
ideas is often faulty; there may be missing links_. Mr. Spokesly, who on
this occasion was determined to remember what he was thinking of at the
moment when the Old Man spoke sharply behind him and made him jump, was
of the opinion that it was the chain that was often missing and that all
he could discover were a few odd links! He lifted one foot out of the
grateful warmth and felt the instep tenderly, breathing hard, with his
tongue in one corner of his mouth, as his mind ran to and fro nosing at
the closed doors of the past. What _was_ he thinking of? He remembered
it attracted him strangely, had given him a feeling of pleasant
anticipation as of a secret which he could unfold at his leisure. It
was ... it was.... He put his foot into the water again and frowned.
He had been thinking of Ada, he recalled----Ah! _Now_ he was on the
track of it. He had been thinking not of her but of the melancholy fact
communicated to him by his own sister, that Ada had no "dot," no money
until her father died. Now how in the world did that come to react upon
his mind as a pleasant thing? It was a monstrous thing, that he should
have capsized his future by such precipitate folly! Mr. Spokesly
comprehended that what he was looking for was not a memory but a mood.
He had been in a certain mood as he stood on the bridge that morning
about half-past three, his hand resting lightly on the rail, his eyes on
the dim horizon, when the Old Man, in his irritating pink-striped
pajamas, had spoken sharply and made him jump. And that mood, the
product of some overnight reflections on the subject of will power, had
been rising like some vast billow of cumulous vapour touched with
roseate hues from a hidden sun, and he had been just on the brink of
some surprising discovery, when----It was very annoying, for the Old Man
had been preoccupied by a really very petty matter, after all. (The word
"petty" was a favourite with Mr. Spokesly.) It had, however, broken the
spell, and here he was, a few hours later, hopelessly snarled up in all
sorts of interminable strings of ideas. The business of thinking was not
so easy as the London School of Mnemonics made out. Lifting his feet
slowly up and down, he reached out and took Lesson Number Five from the
holdall (with his initials in blue) which hung above his head. As he
turned the richly printed pages, a delicious feeling of being cared for
and caressed stole over him. _Never despair_, said the Lesson gravely,
_Nil Desperandum. Just as the darkest hour is before the dawn, so
victory may crown your toil at the least likely moment._
And so it was! With a feeling of sombre triumph, Mr. Spokesly "saw the
connection" as he would have said. He saw that the importance of that
lost mood lay in the petty annoyance that followed. For the Old Man had
called him down about a mistake. A trifle. A petty detail. A bagatelle.
It only showed, he thought, the narrowness of mind of some commanders.
Now _he_...
But with really remarkable resolution Mr. Spokesly pulled himself up and
concentrated upon the serious side of the question. There had been a
mistake. It was as though the Old Man's quiet sharpness had gouged a
great hole in Mr. Spokesly's self-esteem, and he had been unconsciously
busy, ever since, bringing excuse after excuse, like barrow-loads of
earth, in a vain attempt to fill it up. It was still a yawning hiatus in
the otherwise flawless perfection of his conduct as an officer. He had
made a mistake. And the London School of Mnemonics promised that whoever
followed their course made no mistake. He felt chastened as he
habituated himself to this feeling that perhaps he was not a perfect
officer. He took his feet out of the lukewarm water and reached for a
towel.
It will not do to laugh at such a discovery on the part of Mr. Spokesly.
Only those who have had responsibility can be fully alive to the
enormous significance of self-esteem in imposing authority upon a
frivolous world. And it must be borne in mind that to Mr. Spokesly
himself, at that moment, to fail in being a perfect officer was a
failure in life. It was part of the creed of his "cloth" that each of
them was without blemish until his license was cancelled by the
invisible omnipotence of the law. It was, if you like, his ethic, the
criterion of his integrity, the inexorable condition of carrying-on in
his career. This ideal perfection of professional service resembles the
giant fruits and immaculate fauna depicted on the labels of the canned
articles--a grandiose conception of what was within. Just as nobody
really believes that apples and salmon are like that and yet would
refuse to buy a can without some such symbol, so Mr. Spokesly would have
found his services quite unmarketable if he had discarded the polite
fiction that he was, as far as was humanly possible, incapable of
improvement. It was the aura, moreover, which distinguished him and all
other officers from the riff-raff which nowadays go to sea and ape their
betters--the parsons and surgeons, the wireless operators and engineers.
They were common clay, mere ephemeral puppets, without hope of command,
minions to take orders, necessary evils in an age of mechanism and
high-speed commerce. It was an article of Mr. Spokesly's creed that "the
cloth" should stand by each other. He was revolving this assumption in
his mind as he rubbed the towel gently to and fro, and it occurred to
him in his slow way that if he were to adopt the modern ideas of the
London School of Mnemonics, if he were to devote every fibre of his
being to forging ahead, gaining promotion, proving himself a superior
article with a brain which was the efficient instrument of an
indomitable will, then the obsolete idea of professional solidarity
would have to go overboard. And just at that moment, with the
consciousness of that petty mistake casting a shadow on his soul and the
sharp rebuke of the Old Man rankling below, Mr. Spokesly was quite
prepared to jettison anything that stood in the way of what he vaguely
formulated as "his gettin' on." Mr. Spokesly's conceptions of
advancement were of course largely but not entirely circumscribed by his
profession. His allusions in conversation with Mr. Chippenham to "soft
things" were understood to refer to shore jobs connected with shipping
and transport. At one time the fairy-tale fortune of a shipmate who had
married a shipowner's daughter had turned his thoughts that way. But not
for long. Mr. Spokesly had a feeling that to marry into a job had its
drawbacks. He felt "there was a string to it." And come what might, in
his own hazy, amorphous fashion he desired to be captain of his soul.
Had he the power at that moment of calling up Destiny, he would have
made quite modest demands of her. Of course, a command, a fine large
modern steamer, twin-screw, trading for choice in the Pacific, where as
he knew very well a commander had pickings that placed him in a few
years beyond the reach of penury at any rate.... Ada could come out. She
would do justice to such a position out East. And when the war was
over they could come home and have a little place up the river at Bourne
End ... nothing very great, of course, but just right for Captain and
Mrs. Spokesly. The dream was so very fair, so possible yet so utterly
improbable, that his mouth drew down tremulously at the corners as he
stared at the bulkhead. His eyes grew tired and smarted. Ah! Money! How
often he had mouthed in jest that sorry proverb about the lack of money
being the root of all evil! And how true it was, after all. Suddenly he
stood up and became aware of someone in the alleyway outside his window.
With a sense of relief, for his reflections had become almost
inconveniently sombre and ingrowing, he saw it was someone he already
knew in a friendly way, though he still addressed him as "Stooard."
There is much in a name, much more in a mode of address. When Archy
Bates, the chief steward of the _Tanganyika_, turned round and hoisted
himself so that he could look into Mr. Spokesly's port, their friendship
was just at the point when the abrupt unveiling of some common
aspiration would change "Stooard" into "Bates" or "Mister." For a
steward on a ship is unplaced. The office is nothing, the personality
everything. He may be the confidential agent of the commander or he may
be the boon companion of the cook. To him most men are mere assimilative
organisms, stomachs to be filled or doctored. Archy Bates was, like
another Bates of greater renown, a naturalist. He studied the habits of
the animals around him. He fed them or filled them with liquor,
according to their desires, and watched the result. It might almost be
said that he acted the part of Tempter to mankind, bribing them into
friendship or possibly only a useful silence. It is a sad but solid fact
that he nearly always succeeded.
But he liked Mr. Spokesly. One of the disconcerting things about the
wicked is their extreme humanity. Archy Bates liked Mr. Spokesly's
society. Without in the least understanding how or why, he enjoyed
talking to him, appreciated his point of view, and would have been glad
to repay confidence with confidence. He was always deferential to
officers, never forgetting their potentialities as to future command. He
respected their reserve until they knew him intimately. He was always
willing to wait. His discretion was boundless. He knew his own value.
Friends of his had no reason to regret it. That third engineer, a coarse
fellow, one of the few irreconcilables, had called him a flunkey. Well,
the third engineer paid dearly for that in trouble over petty details,
soap, towels, and so forth. But with "gentlemen" Archy Bates felt
himself breathing a larger air. You could do something with a gentleman.
And Mr. Spokesly, in the chief steward's estimation, was just that kind
of man. So, in the lull of activity before lunch, he came along to see
if Mr. Spokesly felt like a little social diversion.
"Busy?" he enquired, thrusting his curiously ill-balanced features into
the port and smiling. Mr. Bates's smile was unfortunate. Without being
in any way insincere, it gave one the illusion that it was fitted on
over his real face. A long, sharp nose projecting straight out from a
receding brow nestled in a pomatumed and waxed moustache, and his eyes,
of an opaque hazel, became the glinting centres of scores of tiny
radiating lines. His chin, blue with shaving, and his gray hair
carefully parted in the middle, made up a physiognomy that might have
belonged either to a bartender or a ward politician. And there was a
good deal of both in Archy Bates.
To the enquiry Mr. Spokesly shook his head. The steward gave a sharp
look each way, and then made a complicated gesture that was a silent and
discreet invitation.
"Oh, well." Mr. Spokesly shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the
corners of his mouth. The face at the window tittered so violently that
the owner of it nearly lost his balance and put up a hand to support
himself.
"Come on, old chap. I've got half an hour to spare."
"Oh, all right, Bates. Sha'n't be a minute."
The face, like a satiric mask, suddenly vanished.
Mr. Spokesly put on his socks and slippers and, lighting a cigarette,
prepared to go along. He liked the steward, and he felt lonely. It so
happened that, quite apart from his intrinsic greatness, Mr. Spokesly
was very much alone on the _Tanganyika_. Mr. Chippenham was too young;
the chief officer, a gnarled round-shouldered ancient, was too old; the
commander too distant. There remained only the chief engineer, a robust
gentleman who conversed hospitably on all subjects in a loud voice but
invited no confidences. And it was confidences Mr. Spokesly really
wanted to give. He wanted to impress his ideals and superior views of
life upon a sympathetic and receptive mind. Most men are unconscious
artists. Only instead of working in stone or brass or pigment, instead
of composing symphonies or poems, they hold forth to their kindred
spirits and paint, in what crude words they can find, the god-like
beings they conceive themselves to be. Indeed, when we call a man a
"hot-air merchant"; when we say "he does not hate himself," what is it
save a grudging tribute to his excessive artistry? He is striving to
evolve in your skeptical mind an image which can appear only by the
light of your intelligent faith and liberal sympathy. He claims of you
only what all artists claim of the critic--understanding. He seeks to
thrill you with pleasure at the noble spectacle of himself blocked out
against a sombre background of imperfect humanity. But to get the very
best out of him you must become one in soul with him, and do the same
yourself.