"That was the first slap in the face. I sat there in that great gloomy vault of an office in Fenchurch Street, looking at the half-models of ships and a map of the docks at Monte Video on the walls, and wondering what I should do. I was not hesitating, you understand, because of pride. No, that was gone. My brother, when he saw Gladys home, had done for that. It was more like a fear gripping at me. I was scared at letting go of my professional easy-going life. I'd never been on a ship since I'd been born on one. I knew nothing about marine engineering. I hesitated because I was afraid.
"'When shall I start?' I asked after a while.
"'The Corydon's in the river now,' said my uncle. 'They want a Fourth: can you get down to-night?'
"'To-night!' I said. 'I've not given notice yet!'
"'Phone from here,' he says.
"'But I've nothing packed,' I whimpered. And he laughed.
"I know now why he laughed. Partly because a landsman is always rather a comic figure to a sailor, partly because he knew how I had been brought up. He had never agreed with the theory of gentility which had taken such a hold of my mother. He was as out of place in his Surbiton home as a bear in a back-yard. His daughters, my cousins, couldn't make him see the importance, in England, of gentility. When he and my father and all the rest of them had been boys on that New England farm, they had had to clear stones off the land. No stones, no dinner. And now he had a house in Surbiton, and was laughing at me, who had never lifted a stone in my life. Even in the works where I was a pupil we had always had a little private lavatory to wash and change in. He laughed at me. He believed one trip would be enough for me. He didn't believe for a minute that I would stick to it.
"But I was making up my mind. Somehow or other, in spite of my twenty-five years in cotton-wool, I had imagination enough to see in my uncle's weather-beaten old face something that was not in the city faces I saw every day. He had come into London out of an alien world. Then, I argued, there are other worlds beside this one! I had not realized it before! All the time I was snug in my little job in Victoria Street men were out on the sea, out in the heat and cold and wet, living in a totally different world to mine. You may think it a foolish and common enough idea, but to me it was dazzling, blinding. It took hold of me. I could think of nothing else. I said, 'I'll go, but I can't go to-night, I've nothing to wear.' So my uncle told me to go to Cardiff and meet the Corydon at Barry Dock.
"'What's she like?' I said, standing up. He took me into another office, and showed me a beautiful model of a steamer.
"'There she is,' he says. 'That's the old Corydon. I commanded her for three years.' I can tell you I was pleased to think I was going to sea in such a fine ship. Humph!