“Oh, I see!” says the skipper as if struck all of a heap. “But is he ready to join at once?”
“I had a sort of vision of my lodgings—in the North of London, too, beyond Dalston, away to the devil—and all my gear scattered about, and my empty sea-chest somewhere in an outhouse the good people I was staying with had at the end of their sooty strip of garden. I heard the Shipping Master say in the coolest sort of way:
“He’ll sleep on board to-night.”
“He had better,” says the Captain of the Ferndale very businesslike, as if the whole thing were settled. I can’t say I was dumb for joy as you may suppose. It wasn’t exactly that. I was more by way of being out of breath with the quickness of it. It didn’t seem possible that this was happening to me. But the skipper, after he had talked for a while with Mr. Powell, too low for me to hear became visibly perplexed.
“I suppose he had heard I was freshly passed and without experience as an officer, because he turned about and looked me over as if I had been exposed for sale.
“He’s young,” he mutters. “Looks smart, though . . . You’re smart and willing (this to me very sudden and loud) and all that, aren’t you?”
“I just managed to open and shut my mouth, no more, being taken unawares. But it was enough for him. He made as if I had deafened him with protestations of my smartness and willingness.
“Of course, of course. All right.” And then turning to the Shipping Master who sat there swinging his leg, he said that he certainly couldn’t go to sea without a second officer. I stood by as if all these things were happening to some other chap whom I was seeing through with it. Mr. Powell stared at me with those shining eyes of his. But that bothered skipper turns upon me again as though he wanted to snap my head off.
“You aren’t too big to be told how to do things—are you? You’ve a lot to learn yet though you mayn’t think so.”
“I had half a mind to save my dignity by telling him that if it was my seamanship he was alluding to I wanted him to understand that a fellow who had survived being turned inside out for an hour and a half by Captain R- was equal to any demand his old ship was likely to make on his competence. However he didn’t give me a chance to make that sort of fool of myself because before I could open my mouth he had gone round on another tack and was addressing himself affably to Mr. Powell who swinging his leg never took his eyes off me.