"And--er--previous employment? Well, I suppose we had better leave that blank as usual. They never really expect it to be filled in, or they wouldn't offer such wretchedly small pay and commission. You've got your master's ticket to show, and that's about all they want."
"There's my wife's address, sir. I'd like my half-pay sent to her."
"She shall have it direct from Brussels, skipper, so long as you are alive--I mean, so long as you remain in the Congo Service."
Captain Kettle sighed again. "Shall I have to wait long before this appointment is confirmed?"
"Why, no," said the agent. "There's a boat sailing for the Coast to-morrow, and I can give you an order for a passage by her. Of course my recommendation has to go to Brussels to be ratified, but that's only a matter of form. They never refuse anybody that offers. They call the Government 'Leopold and Co.' down there on the Congo. You'll understand more about it when you're on the spot.
"I'm sorry for ye, Capt'n, but after what you told me, I'm afraid it's the only berth I can shove you into. However, don't let me frighten ye. Take care of yourself, don't do too much work, and you may pull through all right. Here's the order for the passage down Coast by the Liverpool boat. And now I must ask you to excuse me. I've another client waiting."
In this manner, then, Captain Owen Kettle found himself, after many years of weary knocking about the seas, enlisted into a regular Government service; and although this Government, for various reasons, happened to be one of the most unsatisfactory in all the wide, wide world, he thrust this item resolutely behind him, and swore to himself that if diligence and crew-driving could bring it about, he would rise in that service till he became one of the most notable men in Africa.
"What I want is a competence for the missus and kids," he kept on repeating to himself, "and the way to finger that competence is to get power." He never owned to himself that this thirst for power was one of the greatest curses of his life; and it did not occur to him that his lust for authority, and his ruthless use of it when it came in his way, were the main things which accounted for his want of success in life.
Captain Kettle's voyage down to the Congo on the British and African S.S. M'poso gave time for the groundwork of Coast language and Coast thought (which are like unto nothing else on this planet) to soak into his system. The steamer progressed slowly. She went up rivers protected by dangerous bars; she anchored in roadsteads, off forts, and straggling towns; she lay-to off solitary whitewashed factories, which only see a steamer twice a year, and brought off little doles of cargo in her surf-boats and put on the beaches rubbishy Manchester and Brummagem trade goods for native consumption; and the talk in her was that queer jargon with the polyglot vocabulary in which commerce is transacted all the way along the sickly West African seaboard, from the Goree to St. Paul de Loanda.