"God knows," the man had said. "Mankind grows every day more like sheep. Go to the harbour and take a ship."
"Which ship?"
"It is immaterial. Have you in English a game that — " He made descriptive gestures.
"A counting-out game? Oh, yes. Eenie, meenie, minie, moe."
"Good. Go to the harbour and do 'Eenie, meenie, minie, moe'. And when you go aboard 'moe' see that no one is looking. On ships they have a passion for papers that amounts to a madness."
"Moe" was the Barfleur, and he had not needed papers after all. He was the gift from heaven that the Barfleur's cook had been looking for for years.
Good old Barfleur; with her filthy pea-green galley smelling of over-used olive oil, and the grey seas combing up mountains high, and the continuous miracle of their harmless passing, and the cook's weekly drunk that left him acting unpaid cook, and learning to play a mouth-organ, and the odd literature in the fo'c'sle. Good old Barfleur!
He had taken a lot away with him when he left her, but most important of all he took a new name. When he had written his name for the Captain, old Bourdet had taken the final double-L to be an R, and copied the name Farrar. And he had kept it so. Farrell came out of a telephone directory; and Farrar out of a tramp skipper's mistake. It was all one.
And then what?
Tampico and the smell of tallow. And the tally-man who had said: "You Englishman? You want shore job?"