Command. William McFee
and eagles and napoleons had practically vanished from the pockets of the private citizen, Archy Bates had bags of them. And like his paper currency, it was of all nations. Ten-rouble Russian pieces, twenty-drachma Greek pieces, Australian sovereigns, and massive Indian medals worth twenty dollars each, chinked and jingled against the homelier coinage of France and England. "Business, my boy, business!" he would explain with a snigger when he met Mr. Spokesly's rapt gaze of amazement. Very good business, too, the latter thought, and sighed. But there was one point about Archy which distinguished him from many owners of gold. He spent it. There lay the magic of his power over Mr. Spokesly's mesmerized soul. He spent it. Mr. Spokesly saw him and helped him spend it. Those princely disbursements night after night in Alexandria postulated some source of supply. And night after night Mr. Spokesly, pleasantly jingled with highballs and feminine society, felt himself being drawn nearer and nearer the mysterious source from which gushed that cosmopolitan torrent of money. Mr. Spokesly was in the right mood for the revelation. He was serious. He was a practical man. He needed no London School of Mnemonics to teach him to cultivate a man with plenty of money. When he and Archy Bates had walked quickly away from the ship and passed the guard at Number Six Gate, they could scarcely be recognized by one who had seen them an hour before, Mr. Spokesly silently munching his dinner under the Old Man's frown, Archy in his pantry, encased in a huge white apron, bending his sharp nose over the steaming dishes, and communicating in violent pantomime with the saloon waiter.
Now they stood side by side, brothers, magnificently superior to all the world. A dingy carriage rattled up and Archy waved it away impatiently. Another, with two horses and rubber tires, was hailed and engaged. "Might as well do the thing well," said Archy, and Mr. Spokesly agreed in every fibre of his soul. And it was the same with everything else. "My motto is," said Archy, "everything of the best, eh? Can't go far wrong then. He-he!" The third engineer, vulgarian that he was, would have laughed a shrill, derisive cackle had he heard that speech. The third engineer was under the illusion that only the virtuous have ideals. He was wrong. Archy Bates's profession of faith was sincere and genuine. He had an instinct for what he called the best, which was the most expensive. What else could be the best? A love of elegance and refinement was very widespread in those days of high wages and excessive profits. Archy's wife (for he had a wife and three children in a suburb of Liverpool) was rapidly filling her instalment-purchased home with costly furniture. Only a month ago a grand piano had been put in, and she had had the dining-room suite reupholstered in real pigskin. Mr. Spokesly knew all this and it almost unmanned him to think that he was on the way to this eldorado. One night, soon after their arrival in Alexandria, Archy had hinted there was no reason why he, Mr. Spokesly, shouldn't be "in it," too. This was late in the evening, when they were seated on a balcony high above the glitter and noise of the Boulevard Ramleh, a balcony belonging to a house of fair but expensive reception, of which Archy was a munificent patron. Archy, after two bottles of whiskey, had become confidential. He had hinted that his friend Reggie should be "put next" the business which produced such amazing returns. Reggie had waited to hear more but, with amusing inconsequence, Archy had changed the subject, relapsed indeed into a tantalizing dalliance with a lady friend.
But to-night, in sober earnest, for Archy had had little besides a bottle of gin since rising in the morning, he proposed that they should join a business friend of his, and have a quiet little dinner somewhere. Mr. Spokesly was all eyes, all ears, all intelligent receptiveness. He enquired who the business friend might be, and Archy, who had his own enthusiasms, let himself go. His friend, Jack Miller, had been out there for years. With Swingles, the ship-chandlers. Occupied, Archy surmised, a very high position there. Had worked himself up. Plenty of skippers did business with Swingles simply because Jack was there. If he liked to leave, Archy hadn't any doubt he'd take a good half of Swingles' business with him. Knew all the languages, French, Greek, Arabic, and so on. Kept his own hours, went in and out as he liked. Archy only wished he had Jack Miller's job!
Mr. Spokesly listened greedily. As they debouched upon the great Place Mohammed Aly, with its myriads of lights and sounds, its illuminated Arabic night signs, its cracking of whips and tinkling of bells and glasses, its gorgeous, tessellated platoons of café tables, he took a deep breath. He felt he was upon the threshold of a larger life, inhaling a more invigorating air. It seemed to him he was about to quit the dreary humdrum world of watch-keeping and monthly wages for a region where dwelt those happy beings who had no fixed hours, who made money, who had it "to burn," as they say.
And Jack Miller, whom they met that night and many nights after, was a magnificent accessory of the illusion. He was a dapper little man in fashionable clothes, a runner for a local ship-chandler, who introduced them to half-a-dozen ship-captains of a certain type, and together they went round the vast tenderloin district of the city. Mr. Spokesly was conscious of a grand exaltation during the day when he recalled his nightly association with these gentlemen. There were others, dark-skinned Greeks and Levantines in long-tasselled fezes, who joined them in their pursuit of pleasure in the great blocks of buildings behind the Boulevard Ramleh and their jaunts, in taxicabs, to San Stefano. They were, as Archy put it, over whiskey and soda in his cabin, gentlemen worth knowing, men with property and businesses. And it was one of these, one evening on the balcony of the Casino at San Stefano, who mentioned casually that he often did business with Saloniki and that if Mr. Spokesly ever had any little things to dispose of on his return, he would be glad to make him an offer, privately, of course. He often did this with Mr. Bates, he added, to their mutual satisfaction. Mr. Spokesly was charmed.
And Captain Meredith, walking the upper bridge and seeing a good deal more than either Mr. Spokesly or Mr. Bates imagined, wondered how it would all end. Indeed, Captain Meredith did a good deal of wondering in those days. He saw the wages going steadily up and up, and discipline and efficiency going, quite as steadily, down and down. Here was this young sprig Chippenham, his acting second officer, a boy of nineteen with no license and no experience, pertly demanding more money. Captain Meredith recalled his own austere apprenticeship in sail, his still more austere gruelling as junior officer in tramps, the mean accommodation, the chill penury, the struggle to keep employed, and he smiled grimly. He had his own private views of the glory of war; but apart from this, he wondered greatly what the final upshot of it all would be for the Merchant Service in general and Mr. Spokesly in particular. For he could not help regarding his chief officer as a brother of the craft. He himself had received no illumination from the exponents of modern thought. He had never been impressed by the advertisements of the London School of Mnemonics, for example. He was so old-fashioned as to imagine that to get on, a man must work hard, study hard, live hard, and stand by for the chance to come. Mr. Spokesly, he knew quite well, had been through the same mill as himself, only some ten years or so later. He regarded him, therefore, as he could never regard Mr. Chippenham, for example, who had never been in sail and who didn't know an oxter-plate from an orlop-beam. As far as the natural shyness and taciturnity of Englishmen would allow him, he was anxious for Mr. Spokesly to do well. The man was singularly fortunate, in his opinion, to be chief mate so soon. In nine or ten years, perhaps, he would have the experience to warrant the owners' giving him a command. Provided, of course, that he stuck to his business and took an interest in the fortunes of the firm. It will be seen from this that Captain Meredith was a hopeless conservative and reactionary. One of his brother-captains whom he met at dinner ashore one evening actually told him so. "Why," said this gentleman as he held a match to Captain Meredith's cigar, "why, my chief officer told me to my face the other day that there was nothing in experience nowadays. One man was as good as another, he said, so long as he had his master's ticket. Yes! A fact!" Captain Meredith was aware, too, that his ideas concerning conscientious achievement and enthusiasm for one's employers were equally archaic. The young men of to-day seemed to regard their jobs with dislike and their employers with suspicion. Their sole obsession seemed to be money. He had had pointed out to him an intoxicated youth who was causing a disturbance in a hotel bar, a youth going out East to a ship as third officer at two hundred dollars a month, they said. And the tale was received by every junior officer in the harbour with hushed awe, although it was obvious that the object of their envy would probably be laid aside with delirium tremens before he could reach his billet. Captain Meredith noticed, too, that men who were engrossed in their work were rated "queer" and as back numbers. Even among captains he sensed a reluctance to discuss a professional problem. The third engineer, a skilled mechanic with a tongue like a rasp, and the second, a patient