“Connection? To Hades with your connections. It was an accident.”
“Still,” I said, “an accident has its backward and forward connections, which, if they could be set forth—”
Without moving he seemed to lend an attentive ear.
“Aye! Set forth. That’s perhaps what you could do. Couldn’t you now? There’s no sea life in this connection. But you can put it in out of your head—if you like.”
“Yes. I could, if necessary,” I said. “Sometimes it pays to put in a lot out of one’s head, and sometimes it doesn’t. I mean that the story isn’t worth it. Everything’s in that.”
It amused me to talk to him like this. He reflected audibly that he guessed story-writers were out after money like the rest of the world which had to live by its wits: and that it was extraordinary how far people who were out after money would go. . . Some of them.
Then he made a sally against sea life. Silly sort of life, he called it. No opportunities, no experience, no variety, nothing. Some fine men came out of it—he admitted—but no more chance in the world if put to it than fly. Kids. So Captain Harry Dunbar. Good sailor. Great name as a skipper. Big man; short side-whiskers going grey, fine face, loud voice. A good fellow, but no more up to people’s tricks than a baby.
“That’s the captain of the Sagamore you’re talking about,” I said, confidently.
After a low, scornful “Of course” he seemed now to hold on the wall with his fixed stare the vision of that city office, “at the back of Cannon Street Station,” while he growled and mouthed a fragmentary description, jerking his chin up now and then, as if angry.
It was, according to his account, a modest place of business, not shady in any sense, but out of the way, in a small street now rebuilt from end to end. “Seven doors from the Cheshire Cat public house under the railway bridge. I used to take my lunch there when my business called me to the city. Cloete would come in to have his chop and make the girl laugh. No need to talk much, either, for that. Nothing but the way he would twinkle his spectacles on you and give a twitch of his thick mouth was enough to start you off before he began one of his little tales. Funny fellow, Cloete. C-l-o-e-t-e—Cloete.”