“And it ain’t,” said the ex-mariner, “as if I couldn’t carry on straight and proper in civil life. I wonder how many of my mates are getting what I’m getting. She ought to be proud of me, she ought. Instead of that—you heard what she said?”
Triona had heard. She had upbraided him for his ungenteel occupation, considering herself, the daughter (so Triona learned) of a small sweet-stuff monger in Dover, where they had met during his sea-going days, socially degraded by her marriage with a municipal collector of dust. She had married him, by the by, before his present appointment, while he was drawing out-of-work pay. Apparently he was possessed of some low-comedy histrionic talent, and she was convinced that he could make his fortune as a cinema star.
“You married?” he asked.
“Not now,” said Triona.
“You’ve been through it,” said the misogynist. “Women! There never was a woman who knew when she was well off! Oh, Gawd! Give me the old days on the Barracouta, where there wasn’t any thought of women. That was my last ship. I had nine months in her. There was Barracouta, Annie Sandys, Seahorse. . . .”
He ran through the names of his squadron, forgetful, in the sudden flush of reminiscence, of domestic cares.
“And what did you say you were in?”
“Vestris.”
“Of course. I remember. Torpedoed. But even that was better than this?”
Triona agreed, and the eternal talk of the sea went on, until the nostalgia for the wide, free spaces of the world gripped his vitals with the pains of hunger.