Command. William McFee
index of character which, like many such indexes, was misleading. Mr. Tolleshunt was not ill-tempered, but he had a morbid passion for efficiency. He was an idealist, with a practical working ideal. He was not prepared to accept anything in the world as an adequate substitute for achievement. He had seen through Mr. Spokesly at once, for your idealist is often a clairvoyant of character. And as he passed along to his bath, his black eyes smouldered upon the chief officer, who remembered the many insults he had swallowed from this dirty engineer, and hated him. Suddenly Mr. Tolleshunt paused, with his hand on the bathroom door, and looked back. His dead-white face, the firm modelling of cheek and chin curiously exaggerated by the black smears of grease, broke into a grim smile as he spoke.
"Say, d'you know who I am, Mister?" he asked, and added, "I'll tell ye. I'm the Thorn in the Flesh," and he disappeared into the bathroom, whence came the rumble of water being boiled up by steam. Mr. Spokesly's eyes returned to the burly gentleman who was regarding him with amusement. Mr. Spokesly threw up his hands.
"Well," he said, looking stonily at nothing, "there it is. I was told to get it fixed, an'——"
"Fix it then," said the chief quietly. Mr. Spokesly almost bridled.
"Not my work," he muttered.
"Oh, I see; it's mine, you mean!" surmised the other in a tone, of assumed enlightenment.
"It's engineer's work," said Mr. Spokesly irritably. The chief made no reply for a moment, merely studying Mr. Spokesly intently.
"See here, Mister," he began, and reached out a huge hand to close the door. "See here, Mister, you're under a misapprehension. Now I'll tell you the whole trouble. You heard Mr. Tolleshunt just now. D'ye know what he meant when he said he was the Thorn in the Flesh? It's a joke of ours in the mess room. He meant your flesh. And the reason for that is that you men up on the bridge are in a false position. Ye have executive power without knowledge. Ye command a ship and what do ye know about a ship? To whom do ye come for help, whether it is steering or driving or discharging or salving or anything? You want the same consideration and power that you have on a sailing-ship, where you know all about the gear and make out yourselves. Here, you just have to stand by while we do it. And on top o' that, you come down here with your silly damn breakages and expect us to be tinkers as well. You think Mr. Tolleshunt is sadly deficient in respect, I dare say. But what of his side o' the question? He's been up all night and all morning on a breakdown. So's the second, who's still at it. So have I, for that matter. We've all three of us got just as good tickets as you. Ye never heard about it? Of course not. What could ye do for us? When ye've pulled that handle on the bridge and heard the gong answer, you're finished! Ye're in charge of a box of mechanism of which ye know nothing. Ye walk about in uniform and talk big about yer work, and what does it all amount to? Ye're a young man, and I'm, well, not so young, and I tell ye friendly, Mister, ye're a joke. Ye're what the newspapers call an anachronism or an anomaly, I forget which. Ye'll never get men like young Tolleshunt, men who know their work from A to Z, to treat ye seriously unless ye take hold and study a ship for what she is, a mass o' machinery. Ye'll have to get shut o' the notion that as soon as ye become officers, ye must lose the use o' your hands. Now there's just as much engineerin' about that binnacle as there is in a kettle or a rabbit hutch. Put one o' your young apprentices to it, and if he can't, make him learn. I've been with old-time skippers who could do anything, from wire-splicing to welding an anchor shackle. They learned in the yard before they went to sea. Your young fellers can do nothing except slather a hose round the decks and ask for higher wages. Now don't be sore because I'm telling ye the truth. We're busy and we're tired. We've all sorts o' trouble you can't understand, vital matters that mean speed and safety. Suppose, after a spell on the bridge in fog, ye were to come down to yer room and find me there with some ash-bags to sew up, eh? Imagine it! Just imagine it!"
He sat there, looking sideways at Mr. Spokesly, his pipe between his enormous thumb and knuckle, asking Mr. Spokesly to imagine this fearsome thing. But Mr. Spokesly's imagination was for the time being out of commission. He was scarcely conscious of the request, so intensely preoccupied was he with the ghastly cleavage between his own estimate of his position and the chief's. Back of all these frank insults to his dignity, Mr. Spokesly scented the sinister prejudice of his commander. As he strode, in severe mental disarray, back to his room, he discovered a conviction that the chief "had been pumpin' the Old Man." Not that he needed any pumping, of course. It would be only too like him to blab to an engineer about his own officers. Well, there it was! Mr. Spokesly pitched the hapless binnacle on the settee and turned to the wash-stand. Perhaps it was due to the course of the London School of Mnemonics, the course in tracing the association of ideas, that when his eye fell on the tumblers in the rack he should think of that abominable trick of the Old Man sneaking in and smelling the glass to see if he, Mr. Spokesly, had been drinking. Couldn't trust him that far! Do what he would he could give no satisfaction. He would ask to be paid off to-morrow as soon as they dropped anchor in Saloniki harbour. That would be the best way. Just pull out of it. They would realize, when he was gone, the sort of man they had lost. The flame of indignation died out again and he sat moodily pondering the difficulty of commanding an adequate appreciation. Command! The word stung him to bodily movement. If only he could once grasp the sceptre, he could defy them all. He would have the whip-hand then. And there were ways, there were ways of making money. Some he had heard of on this run were quadrupling their incomes. Archy had whispered incredible stories of skippers and stewards working together … working together. Perhaps it would be worth while to stick to the ship for a voyage or so, even if he did have to put up with this sort of thing. They would reach Saloniki in a few hours, and then they would see.
It frequently happens that moods which would logically drive men mad, moods which seem to have no natural antidote, are broken up and neutralized by some entirely fortuitous event. It is not too much to say that Mr. Spokesly's grievances were inducing one of these moods, when the wholesome activity of affairs on the forecastle-head, the keen autumn wind blowing across the bony ridges of Chalcidice, and the professional criticism evoked by the ships outward-bound, blew the foul vapours away. Captain Meredith, whose reflective and unchallenging blue eyes were visible between the weather-cloth and the laced peak of his cap, made a mental note that "the man was doing himself justice." Of course Captain Meredith did not perceive how very wide of the mark his sensible phrase led him. Mr. Spokesly always did himself justice. What he was eternally hunting for, in and out of the maze in which he spent his life, was justice from others. Captain Meredith did not realize that a middle-aged man with a grievance is like a man who has been skinned—to touch him causes the most exquisite agony. Nay, merely to exist, to permit the orderly march of every-day routine, chafes him to the verge of hysteria. It was nothing to Mr. Spokesly that he was serving his country; nothing to him that he was in imminent peril by mine and torpedo. During the voyage he had scarcely noticed the occasional formal slips that came from the wireless house informing them that an enemy submarine was operating in such and such a position, so many miles ahead or astern as the case might be. Mr. Spokesly had never seen a submarine and he didn't want to. The whole business of war in his eyes became a ghastly farce so long as he was not appreciated at his true worth. It might almost be said that at times he was indifferent to the outcome of the gigantic struggle. A horrible unrest assailed him. The world was heaving in a death grapple with the powers of darkness and he was as nothing in the balance.
But as he walked the forecastle-head and the Tanganyika passed through the bottle neck of Kara Burun into the wide waters of the gulf-head, he was restored to a normal attention to the cut-and-dried duties of his calling. There was exhilaration in the thought of foregathering once more with Archy, of going ashore in a new port. And there would be letters. He drew a deep breath. Ada would write. Unconsciously he straightened up. A warm glow suffused him as he recalled her dark-gray, adoring eyes and the deep tremble of her voice as she called him her sailor sweetheart. After all, he was that. He was understood there, he thought, and was comforted. Rung by rung he climbed up out of the dark dank well in which he had been dwelling until, when the compressors had been screwed up tight and the Tanganyika was swinging gently on her eighty fathom of cable, he was recapitulating the heartening words he had last read in his "course" in the London School of Mnemonics.
Think well of yourself and your ability, it ran. Get the habit of believing in your own ambition.