“Well, hardly, Cap.”
“Still, you don’t want to forget that I’m captain, mate.”
“And you don’t want to forget that I’m mate, Captain.”
Thus we would badger one another until one of the scullion crew arrived, when without loss of dignity on either side we could easily turn our attention to him.
And these scullions! What a dull crew! Gnarled, often non-English-speaking foreigners against or in front of whom we could jest to our hearts’ content. They could not even guess the amazing things we were ordering them to do on penalty of this, that, and the other.
Things went from better to best. We reached the place where the fact of the shop’s being a ship, and the engineer the captain, and I the mate, and the smith the bos’n, ad infinitum, came to be a matter of general knowledge, and we were admired and congratulated and laughed with until nearly all the workers of the shop, with some trifling and unimportant exceptions, the foreman for one, began to share our illusion—carpenters, cabinet-makers, joiners, all. The one exception, as I say, was the foreman, only he was a host in himself, a mean, ill-dispositioned creature, of course, who looked upon all such ideas as fol-de-rol, and in a way subversive of order and good work. He was red-headed, big-handed, big-footed, dull. He had no imagination beyond lumber and furniture, no poetry in his soul. But the crew, the hundred-headed crew, accepted it as a relief. They liked to think they were not really working, but out upon a blue and dancing sea, and came back one by one, the carpenters, the tinsmiths, the millwrights, one and all, with cheerful grins to do us honor.
“So you’re the captain, eh?” lazy old Jack, the partner of car-loading Carder, asked of the engineer, and John looked his full dignity at once.
“That I am, Jack,” he replied, “only able seamen ain’t supposed to ask too many familiar questions. Are they, mate?”
“Well, I should say not,” I replied, arriving with a basket of shavings. “Able seamen should always salute the captain before addressing him, anyhow, and never fail to say Sir. Still, our crew is new. It’s not very able and the seamen end of it is a little on the fritz, I’m thinking. But, all things considered, we can afford to overlook a few errors until we get everything well in hand. Eh, Captain?”
“Right, mate,” returned the captain genially. “You’re always right—nearly.”