The young engineer stood up suddenly with unwonted passion. "Damn it! I'm not a blasted mendicant! I'm a competent engineer! It's no use talking rot about modesty. I know what I have done and can do again. I say I'm a competent engineer. I've been getting two hundred and fifty quid a year, and earning it, saving it for the people who paid me. And I am willing to take a quid, one blasted quid a week, and I can't get it. I'm not going to beg for my own cursed rights. In all those hundreds of jobs I've applied for, I must have been the best man on my paper form alone. If I can't live as an engineer in my own cursed country, then, by God! I'll steal." He turned on his father with blazing eyes. "I say, I'll steal, and if any blundering idiot or flabby fool tries to stop me, I'll kill him dead. The first law of life is to live. What do you say to that? You preach platitudes from the pulpit every Sunday, what have you to say to the logic of the engine room?"
The old vicar smiled, somewhat sorrowfully. "I might say that you are possessed of a devil," he said, with quiet humour. "Your engineering experience ought to tell you that it's no use ramming your head against a brick wall."
Jack sat down. "That's so," he said, "there's an obstruction somewhere; the thing to do is to find it out and remove it."
"I tell you, Hugh! the initial mistake was in not putting that boy into the Service; though there's a maxim there that promotion comes 80 per cent. by chance, 18 per cent. by influence, and 2 per cent. by merit."
"That's rot, you know, unless you mean to say that 18 per cent. of the men in the Service are snivelling cheats."
The sailor was thoughtful. "There are some cheats in the Navy, but not many; as a rule it's not the man's own fault that he is promoted by influence. At the same time you can't afford to get to loo'ard of your skipper, much depends on one man's word, but that man is usually a——"
"Sportsman," Jack interrupted.
"Well! 'an officer and a gentleman' they call him. The Service would have suited you."
"My dear uncle, I have all respect for the Service, but at the same time I should not wish to be anything but an engineer, and engineers in the Service at the present time are somewhat small beer. Anyway, as a money-making concern, the Service don't pan out anything great. Bounce told me that the seamen haven't had a rise in pay since Nelson's time."
The sailor laughed. "That's a good old A.B.'s growl," he said. "I gather, too, that engineering is not panning out so very great as a money-making concern just now."