"How do you mean?"
"Why," said the old fellow in a whisper, "we had a lot of ships in dock last week or so, so many that the anchors got fouled. One ship would drop her anchor across another's cable, you see. Well, one captain sent in a report he could not get his anchors up and in consequence he'd be delayed getting out. What I wanted to do, what I was going to do, was to move the other ships and give him room. If necessary, some of them could go out and round the breakwater, you understand. But my young lordship, this sub-lieutenant, says, 'Can't he slip his anchors?' in that tone of voice that they use trying to make you feel as though you were an errand boy. Just fancy that! 'Can't he slip his anchors?' 'I dare say he can slip them all right,' I said, 'but wouldn't he find them useful in Genoa?' Which was where he was going. You read a lot in the papers about what wonderful chaps they are, but ... I don't know."
They sat there, those two, getting themselves pleasantly communicative on gin and bitters, swapping stories of the incompetence of others and their own obscure virtues, until Mr. Spokesly realized he would have to see the paymaster and discover what was to happen to him.
"Well," he said, "I must go. I suppose I'll see you again."
"I'm at the Olympos. I'll show you where to go. You'd better get a room there, too, if you can. I think I'll get along now and see what my young lordship is up to. Slipping some more anchors, I expect. See you later."
And he moved off, in his slovenly fitting uniform and large broad-toed shoes. Mr. Spokesly watched him. There, he thought, went a man who'd had a command for years. And treated like a dog! He would be like that himself in twelve or fifteen years' time. These official people only thought of themselves. The only thing to do was to take a leaf out of their book and look after Number One. He went into the hotel.
He came out again in about a quarter of an hour. "So that's the way we're treated," he muttered, walking away. "Anybody would think I'd committed a crime, not going down with everybody else." This was rather hard on a harassed paymaster who could do nothing for Mr. Spokesly save advance him two hundred francs, as per regulations regarding distressed ships' officers, and promise him a compassionate passage home at some future date, unless Mr. Spokesly's owners authorized something more generous. With the two hundred francs in his pocket he walked away with the general idea of getting a suit of clothes. And then—perhaps it was the backward glance he took as he stood at the upper end of the noisy, dirty little Place de la Liberté and saw the sunlight dancing on the green-black water and on the polished brass funnels of the launches; perhaps it was the glimpse he caught of the far peaks of Thessaly that gave him an uplifting of the heart. His mood changed. He saw the thing suddenly not as a grievance but as an adventure, in which he would have to decide for himself. These naval people were only cogs in wheels. If they wanted him they could come for him. He recalled again the important fact that with the loss of the Tanganyika he became exactly what he had so greatly desired—a free agent, so long as he did not press his claim for passage home. There was nothing in his way now except this life-long habit of going to somebody for orders. Men had made great fortunes, he had heard, by being cast adrift in a foreign port in some such fashion. And others, he reflected cynically, had come down in the world to be weak-kneed bummers and drink-cadgers. There it was again. It rested with the man himself. What was it the little green books of the London School of Mnemonics had said? Mr. Spokesly laughed shortly as he thought of them lying at the bottom of the sea. A good place for them. Lot of rubbish, if the truth were known. Fat lot of use they were now, for instance. That chap Dainopoulos was worth a ton of scientific flub-dub about training one's memory. Why not go and see Dainopoulos now? See if his talk about a job would amount to anything. And Mrs. Dainopoulos. And Evanthia Solaris. He drew a deep breath and looked out across the dancing sea. A battalion began to march along the quay, drums and fifes thudding and squeaking behind them, a long line of khaki figures with overcoats curled in a thick band across their bodies, hung all over with an extraordinary assortment of utensils. Going up to the front, he reflected, to be shot or dismembered or racked with dysentery. They got the glory, too. They were "the boys at the front," and they filled the public eye. They and the navy. They had pensions provided and so on. Mr. Spokesly was not a trustworthy authority on the business and emoluments of soldiering. He held always the civilian's point of view. He had been brought up among a class of people who kept silent on the subject if a member of their family enlisted. Even the war, which abolished the necessity for shame, did not eradicate the fundamental animosity of these middle-class folk towards the military. Mr. Spokesly himself had an old aunt, who lived on her husband's insurance money at Hendon, who still alluded to "the red-coats," though scarlet had been abolished. It was, like their terror of dear bread, in their blood. They were individualists, these bourgeois from whom Mr. Spokesly came. They were the folk whose relatives were established in distant colonies where they had raised families of tall sons who had come back into the fight so changed in character that the people of England did not know them. They were the folk who "went out" to the East and into Africa as traders and factors, and who carried Haverstock Hill with them up the Nile and the Hoang Ho. Unimaginative and devoid of conscious art, they furnished, without knowing or caring much about the matter, the raw material of romance. They did outrageously romantic things under the pretence of providing for their families or getting orders for their firm. And it was this generic inherited character, working to the surface during the reaction from his recent exertions and emotional stress, that meant more to Mr. Spokesly than either the war or the London School of Mnemonics. The basis of romantic adventure is character, and a man's real character is sometimes overlaid with curious artificial ornaments. Mr. Spokesly had been very much in error both as to his own character and his destiny. He had no more need of memory training than Mr. Dainopoulos. In the future his care would be to forget rather than remember. His recent experiences had taught him much. What was to come would teach him still more.
He found Mr. Dainopoulos in his extremely diminutive office in a cross-street near the Post Office. Mr. Dainopoulos was ostensibly a money-changer. In front of his premises was a glass case with an assortment of currency. A few sovereigns in a saucer caught the eye, and might have inspired the casual passenger with polite wonder how they had found their way there when honest men in England had forgotten how they looked. And at the back of his premises Mr. Dainopoulos had a safe nearly as large as the office. Between these two emblems of financial affairs were a table and two chairs. On the walls were musty insurance calendars and obsolete steamship sailing lists, for Mr. Dainopoulos had done a brisk agency in the past with emigrants, stimulating the cupidity of Balkan peasants with lively handbills describing the streets of New York and Chicago as being paved with gold. At the present moment, when Mr. Spokesly came in, the other chair was occupied by a long thin person folded loosely together and smoking a cigarette in a holder nearly a foot long. He had one of those physiognomies that baffle analysis by the simple expedient of never under any circumstances meeting one's eye. The pinched cranium, the cold, pale blue eyes, the hooked nose coming down over a toothless mouth to meet an up-turning pointed chin, might lead one to think him old, yet he was no more than forty-five in fact. His long sallow hands were hairless and garnished with several seal-rings, and on one skinny wrist hung a slave bangle. He had his chair tipped back against the wall, one leg dangling, the other hooked by the heel into the cross-bar, while over the raised sharp knee-joint he had draped his fore-arm. He was talking with great animation, his jaws moving rapidly like the jaws of a ventriloquist's dummy, which he altogether resembled, and his toothless gums gave out a hissing lisp. Mr. Dainopoulos jumped up.
"My dear friend!" he exclaimed, with that faint Latin crow on the upper register which is so disconcerting to the northerner. He took in the situation rapidly. It was unusual for him to be ignorant of anything for long. He very often knew of disasters before the Intelligence Department, having means that they lacked for gathering news from obscure sources. He needed no schools of mnemonics to teach him the inevitable deductions from Mr. Spokesly's queer cap and baggy coat, while the long strips of plaster made him utter inarticulate sounds of sympathy.
"Let me introduce you. This is Captain Rannie. He's skipper of my little ship the Kalkis. Captain, I want you to know this gentleman. His ship's just been sunk."