“Well you looks precious bad, an’ Mr. Driss too. It’s a shame this watch an’ watch. We in the Warrant Officers’ Mess wouldn’t stand it—unless the Service had special need. The stokers wouldn’t stand it; they’d be fallin’ in before the Captain in two ranks. Only the midshipmen stand it. He wouldn’t try it on with no one else. Last night we was sayin’ at Mess we wondered the midshipmen didn’t take it before the Captain.”
“We couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t?” said the Warrant Officer, not realizing that John had meant “wouldn’t.” “Why there’s not a man or boy in this ship that hasn’t a legal right to take his complaints to the Captain. Couldn’t? How d’you mean?”
“It can’t be done in our case.”
“Well, I agree in part; I don’t hold with officers comin’ up with complaints. It’s bad for discipline.... But there is a limit to what any man can stand. This very mornin’, when I came down here at 4 a.m., I found Mr. Driss goin’ to keep the watch with me. ‘When did you come off your last watch?’ I asks. ‘I kept the First,’ says he. ‘I turned in at twenty-five minutes after midnight. I’ve been asleep for three hours and twenty-five minutes’—all spoken cold and thin, like someone sleep-walkin’. It ain’t natural, Mr. Lynwood. I don’t like to see him—or you—white as ghosts, ready to drop, stumblin’ half blind round an’ round my Engine-room. It makes me feel a brute for keepin’ you here. But if I sent you up, the first thing Aggett would say, if he came down, would be, ‘Where’s the midshipman o’ the watch?’”
He paused dramatically.
“It’s too much,” he said, “to keep eight hours below between eight in the evenin’ and eight in the mornin’. An’ you at your guns when you are off watch. The Captain wouldn’t have it, if he knew.”
Looking at John’s hollow cheeks, he thought, “There’ll be an end to it soon.”
But before the end came disaster. Two days later, John, in a corner by the evaporators, was writing in that marble-covered book. The mood in which he wrote held him captive. He was conscious neither of the engines’ beat nor of the ringing of the telegraph. He saw with intense vision, only the scene he described.