"But we shall really have to draw the attention of the owners to the fact that you refused to go."
"That's all right. But I'm not going. I'll go home if you don't mind. Or if I can get a job here I take it my articles finished with the Tanganyika."
"No doubt, no doubt. But what could you get here?"
"I don't know what I could do. But I'd shine shoes on the steps out there before I went third mate...."
"There's no need to go back to the question if you refuse to volunteer."
Mr. Spokesly stood up. He was in a rage. Or rather he was resuming the rage which had assailed him when the Tanganyika was going down and which had been suspended while he made good his claim on life. The smug way in which this bearded stranger disposed of him was intolerable. Mr. Spokesly knew this man would never dream of sending one of his own caste to a third mate's job on a Persian Gulf coaster with the hot season coming on. He knew that he himself, being a merchant seaman, was regarded by all these brass-bound people as an inferior, a shell-back, a lob-scouser, and no dire need would ever make them accept him as one of themselves. And he had a glimpse, in his rage, of another truth, for one often sees these things in flashes of anger. He just caught sight of the fact that these people, with their closely guarded privileges and esoteric codes, were fighting much more for their class than for England, that an England democratized and ravished of her class system would be to them a worse place than an England defeated by a class-conscious enemy. But the immediate grievance was personal. He stood up.
"Volunteer," he repeated. "Excuse me, Mister, I came home from out east and took a second mate's job, there being nothing better about. I went mate when the other man died. I've had a master's ticket this ten years. Now you want me to go third mate. Where shall I end up? In the forecastle? Volunteer! I can tell you, I'm beginning to regret I ever left Hong Kong."
"I see. Of course we can't help that, you know. You'd better go and see the paymaster commander. Perhaps he can put you on a ship."
Mr. Spokesly took the cap, a size too large for him, which he had got on credit at Stein's Oriental Store, and went out. He was feeling very bitter. No man feels he is doing himself justice in clothes that are too large for him. Mr. Spokesly wanted to go away and hide until he could get rid of his enormous golf-cap and the coat which hung on him, as he himself put it, like a bosun's shirt on a capstan-bar. He went downstairs into the street. The sun had forced its way through vast banks of blue-black and gray-white clouds and brought out unsuspected tones in the roadway ankle-deep in bright yellow mud, in the green uniform of a Russian soldier who was carrying a polished copper kettle, and in the black-green waters of the Gulf crested with silver plumes. Without analyzing the causes of the change, Mr. Spokesly felt more cheerful. He would go to the paymaster commander, who was in the Olympos Palace Hotel, and get the price of a drink anyway. He put his hands in his pockets and whistled. His hand had closed over the ring. He thought of Archy, the shiningly successful one, the paladin of pilferers, the financial genius, down among the crawfish and awaiting those things he saw on a stall just over there, eight-armed horrors with enormous bald heads and bulging eyes and hooked beaks. And as he came to the corner of the Place de la Liberté, he encountered a gentleman in the uniform of a lieutenant of reserve. He was an elderly person, with the subdued air of those men who have somehow attained to a command without ever making any mistakes or achieving any remarkable successes. His uniform was badly cut, his trousers bagged at the knees, and a large blue anchor was tattooed on his left hand. But to Mr. Spokesly he was an angel. He was not surprised when this person made some trivial remark to open the conversation. And it soon appeared that he, too, was nursing a grievance.
"What? You off the Tanganyika? Why, you only went out yesterday. No, the day before. Dear, dear! And what are they going to do with you?"