Captain Rannie was not to be seen, however. Mr. Spokesly went upon the bridge charged with belligerence. But Captain Rannie was an old hand. He had had an extraordinarily varied experience of exasperated subordinates and Mr. Spokesly's conscientious tantrums worried him not at all. Especially did he fail to appreciate the significance of his chief officer's anxiety at this moment since from his own point of view this smash in the fog, supposing they did not meet any inquisitive craft for an hour or two, and this was not at all likely—this smash was a piece of singular good fortune. The cruiser would report ramming a small vessel in the fog, and the people in Saloniki, knowing the position of the Kalkis, would conclude she was lost with all hands, when she failed to appear at Phyros. It was so perfectly in accordance with his desires that he decided to run down and get one of his own special cigarettes. Now that he was actually in the middle of carrying out the plans of the owner of the Kalkis, Captain Rannie suffered from none of the timidity and truculent nervousness which had assailed him the day before. He had more courage than Mr. Spokesly would ever admit because that gentleman was not aware that his captain was a bad navigator. To the bad navigator every voyage is a miracle.
So he came up jauntily, behind Mr. Spokesly, smoking a special cigarette, and ignoring his chief officer completely until the latter chose to speak. This was another trick he had learned in the course of his career of oblique enthusiasms and carefully cultivated antagonisms. He had once been savagely "attacked," as he called it, by a sailor simply because he waited for the man to speak before saying a word! He had found that men might growl at being treated "like dogs" but to rowel the human soul it was far better to act as though they did not exist at all. There was a blind primeval ferocity to be engendered by adumbrating, even for a few moments, their non-existence. And now, with everything in his favour, for he had heard the engineer's remarks on the condition of the bilges forward, he was resolved to "maintain his authority," as he phrased it, by "a perfectly justifiable silence."
But it was no use trying to convince Mr. Spokesly that he did not exist. That gentleman, in the course of the last few minutes, since the collision in fact, had experienced a great accession of vitality. He felt as though not only his own existence but the integrity of the ship as a living whole, her frame, her life, her freight, and the souls clinging to her in the blind white void of the fog, was concentrated in himself. He looked over the side and tried to see if the engineer had succeeded in getting the pump on that bilge. She was down by the head—no doubt of that. And yet there couldn't be any real fracture of that bulkhead, or the fore-hold would have filled by now. Lucky all the caps were well lashed on the ventilators. He looked over the side again. The fog seemed clearing a little. And the ship was moving faster. The beat of the engines was certainly more rapid. He stared at the ostentatiously turned back of his commander with a sort of exasperated admiration. He was evidently a much more accomplished scoundrel than Mr. Spokesly had imagined. Here he had extra speed up his sleeve. Why, it might be anything up to thirteen knots. Not that the Kalkis had boilers for that speed. Wow! He was a card!
"I suppose you know the bosun was carried overboard when that ship hit us," Mr. Spokesly remarked in a conversational tone as the captain approached in his stroll.
"And I've no doubt," said Captain Rannie with extreme bitterness to the surrounding air, "that you blame me for not stopping and picking him up."
"You might have stopped, certainly," said his chief officer; "but the point is, if you'd been on your right course you wouldn't have hit anything."
"Oh, indeed! Oh, indeed!" said the captain.
"Yes, oh, indeed. You won't maintain you were on the right course, I suppose."
"I maintain nothing," snapped the captain. "I'll merely trouble you to ask the man at the wheel what course he was making when we were run into by one of those infernal, careless naval officers who think they know everything, like you. And after that I'll merely invite you to mind your own business."
"Mind my own business!" repeated Mr. Spokesly in a daze.