“Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and when I turned on the light—”... Well, immediately after the accident the captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle.
“Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same thing?” I asked the Fourth.
“Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth.
His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich, pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the company, he was to have no friendly relations.
“On a long voyage like this, where we stop every few days and I stand here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to do.”
It was also, judged by material standards, a discouraging existence. There had been occasions when for hours at a time the Fourth had been chiefly responsible for the safety of hundreds of lives and about a million dollars’ worth of property; and for his expert knowledge, his anxiety, his prolonged nervous strain he received the munificent salary of twenty-eight dollars a month—but little more than enough in the tropics, where he had to put on always one, and sometimes two suits of white a day, to pay his laundry bills.
“Nobody but the stewards get rich at sea,” he laughed when we were discussing the matter.
“Do you ever think of giving it up—of doing something else?” I asked him.
“I think of it,” he answered, “but I know I shan’t. I like to look forward to having a command, although I’ll probably be eighty when I get one and too old to take it, and, besides, what could I do? I’ve been on the bridge of a ship since I was fourteen. I don’t know how to breathe inside of a house.”
When we were in port and he could get off, we now and then dined together on shore and went to a show. By way of returning these small hospitalities he did the only thing he very well could do, which was to ask me to go to his room in the evening to have a glass of beer. This I liked infinitely better than an evening spent in the restaurant or the theater of some sultry South American town. His room was large and cool, high up and forward, with neither a sound nor a vibration. It always seemed to be detached from the world, suspended in some way between the sea and the sky, and in it the Fourth, when he got to know me better, felt at liberty to wear his second cleanest white ducks instead of his first, to sprawl on the sofa, to play with his pet monkey, to talk nonsense and to be quite frankly the kid he really was.