"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board ship."
He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the entertainment of a pretty woman.
"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.
"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying that I love the sea."
With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel, Restaurant and Café Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families enjoying the Sunday afternoon apéritif.
"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first, I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.
"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"
"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross Line—Ellershaw & Co.—trading between Havre and Mozambique."
"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.
I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."