Considering his corpulence the instructor picked himself up with agility and, not waiting for the boat to be brought properly alongside, made his way from thwart to thwart, gaining the foot of the accommodation-ladder by way of the bows of the gig.
At the head of the ladder he was met by the Officer of the watch. Greatly to the latter's disgust the instructor committed a most heinous offence: he spat upon the sacred precincts of the quarter-deck and coolly threw his cigarette end upon the snowy planks!
So flabbergasted was the duty-lieutenant that he said not a word, and before he could recover his composure he was anticipated by First-lieutenant Garboard.
Garboard was an officer who owed his position to influence rather than to merit. He shone in the reflected light of his parent, Sir Peter Garboard, till lately Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth.
He was one of those officers, luckily becoming rarer, who believe in cast-iron discipline amounting almost to tyranny. He would bully and brow-beat at the ship's-police when there were not enough defaulters to do the odd jobs requisitioned by the commander. When the childish punishment known as 10a (which consisted of compelling blacklist men to stand on the lee side of the quarter-deck from 8 to 10 p.m., to have their meals under the sentry's charge and to be deprived of grog and tobacco) was abolished, Garboard, then a junior lieutenant, asserted that the Service was going, to the dogs. He was never happier than when bully-ragging the men of his watch, under the plea of efficiency.
Wishing to air his French the first lieutenant remarked: "Il fait très chaud, monsieur."
The instructor whisked off his stove-pipe hat and bowed ceremoniously.
"Show?" he repeated. "Oui, ver' fine show," and looked about him as if he expected to see a floating Agricultural Hall.
"Blockhead!" muttered the discomfited Garboard as he beat a retreat, signing to a quarter-master to take the Frenchman below to the midshipmen's study.
The dozen disconsolate youngsters were already mustered, and awaited with no great zest the arrival of their instructor; but their apathy changed when the Frenchman appeared. They seemed to scent a lark.