“Though if anybody ever got the best of me, it is you. I don’t mind saying this. I’ve said it—there! What more can you want? Isn’t that enough for your pride, Captain Whalley. You got over me from the first. It’s all of a piece, when I look back at it. You allowed me to insert that clause about intemperance without saying anything, only looking very sick when I made a point of it going in black on white. How could I tell what was wrong about you. There’s generally something wrong somewhere. And, lo and behold! when you come on board it turns out that you’ve been in the habit of drinking nothing but water for years and years.”
His dogmatic reproachful whine stopped. He brooded profoundly, after the manner of crafty and unintelligent men. It seemed inconceivable that Captain Whalley should not laugh at the expression of disgust that overspread the heavy, yellow countenance. But Captain Whalley never raised his eyes—sitting in his arm-chair, outraged, dignified, and motionless.
“Much good it was to me,” Massy remonstrated monotonously, “to insert a clause for dismissal for intemperance against a man who drinks nothing but water. And you looked so upset, too, when I read my draft in the lawyer’s office that morning, Captain Whalley,—you looked so crestfallen, that I made sure I had gone home on your weak spot. A shipowner can’t be too careful as to the sort of skipper he gets. You must have been laughing at me in your sleeve all the blessed time. . . . Eh? What are you going to say?”
Captain Whalley had only shuffled his feet slightly. A dull animosity became apparent in Massy’s sideways stare.
“But recollect that there are other grounds of dismissal. There’s habitual carelessness, amounting to incompetence—there’s gross and persistent neglect of duty. I am not quite as big a fool as you try to make me out to be. You have been careless of late—leaving everything to that Serang. Why! I’ve seen you letting that old fool of a Malay take bearings for you, as if you were too big to attend to your work yourself. And what do you call that silly touch-and-go manner in which you took the ship over the bar just now? You expect me to put up with that?”
Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the bridge, Sterne, the mate, tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room companion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about with indifference to the right and left at the river banks slipping astern of the Sofala steadily.
Massy turned full at the chair. The character of his whine became again threatening.
“Take care. I may yet dismiss you and freeze to your money for a year. I may . . .”
But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man whose money had come in the nick of time to save him from utter ruin, his voice died out in his throat.
“Not that I want you to go,” he resumed after a silence, and in an absurdly insinuating tone. “I want nothing better than to be friends and renew the agreement, if you will consent to find another couple of hundred to help with the new boilers, Captain Whalley. I’ve told you before. She must have new boilers; you know it as well as I do. Have you thought this over?”