Captain Rannie absolutely ignored this question. He was in a corner, and like some animals in similar plight, he might almost be said to have feigned death. He stood stock still looking into his medicine chest, his back to Mr. Spokesly, his high shoulders raised higher. He was in a corner, for he had been betrayed already into the demonstration of nervous fear. It was the knowledge of his horror of the slightest physical contact with others that Mr. Spiteri had been unable to resist.
"He's nearly bit my thumb through," went on Mr. Spokesly, walking over to the wash-bowl. The ship shook as the winch hurled the slings into the air. Down below a worn pump was knocking its heart out in a succession of hacking coughs.
Captain Rannie, the flask of friars' balsam in his hand, turned slowly from the cabinet and moved cautiously to the table. He set it down, went back, and drew out a roll of bandage. He was beginning to recover his normal state of mind. Everything so far had taken the form in his view of violating the privacy of the commander. Everything! Here was this man, not five minutes on the ship, actually forcing his way into the captain's room. Captain Rannie had never heard of such a thing in his life. It loomed before him with the grimness of an irrevocable disaster. He had always had that last resource in his encounters with Spiteri—he could go into his room, lock all three locks, draw the heavy blue curtain, and remain in a mysterious seclusion for as long as he liked. Now—he almost shuddered with anguish—here was this new chief officer—a perfect stranger—didn't know him from Adam—washing his wounds absolutely in the sacred wash-bowl, standing in not over clean shoes on the very piece of matting on which he himself, the master of the vessel, stood while shaving and making stern faces at himself in the glass as he rehearsed imaginary scenes with the rabble outside. In a few moments Mr. Spokesly's eyes, grown accustomed to the sombre twilight of the blue curtains of the scuttles, would be wandering round the cabin, noting things Captain Rannie showed to no one. No one. He grew fierce as he thought of his outraged privacy. He must get this man out of the room quickly. He slopped friars' balsam on some cotton wool, and fixing his pale, exasperated gaze upon Mr. Spokesly's thumb, began to bind it up. Mr. Spokesly felt an urgent need for a smoke. He reached out and drew a cigarette from a box on the table and Captain Rannie's head bent lower as he flushed with a renewed sense of outrage. Nothing sacred! Without the slightest hint of a request.
"We may have a passenger, I hear," said the oblivious Mr. Spokesly as he managed to get the cigarette alight.
"Oh, dear me, no!" retorted Captain Rannie, with a sort of despairing chuckle. "Quite impossible, quite. I shouldn't dream of allowing anything of the sort."
"Not if the boss wanted it?"
"Oh, no doubt, in that case, the master of the vessel would be the last to hear of it." He returned to the cabinet to cut some plaster. Captain Rannie had not a bedside manner. His method of affixing the plaster made his patient grunt. Gazing over the upraised arm of the captain, Mr. Spokesly suddenly fixed his eyes with attention on the pictures round the bunk. They were pictures of people who were, so to say, the antithesis of his new commander, pugilists and wrestlers and dancers, men and women of exaggerated physical development. Some of them were so stark in their emphasis on the muscles that they resembled anatomical diagrams. There were photographs, too, of sculptures—sharp, white, and beautiful against black velvet backgrounds; boys wrestling, girls dancing, a naked youth striving with a leopard. And on a hook near the door was a set of those elastic cords and pulleys whereby athletic prowess is developed. Mr. Spokesly suddenly lost his belligerent mood. He had encountered something he did not quite understand. He turned as the captain finished and his eye fell on shelves packed with books. And outside the winch groaned and squeaked, down below the pump thumped and bucketed.
"I'll go," said Mr. Spokesly. "I must find the bosun...." And he went out, eager to go at the job and get rid of this dreadful grime on the unhappy old ship. As he went the captain stood in front of the medicine chest swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and covered his eyes with his hand. He was trembling violently.
For he was a man who was at war with the world. He was so preoccupied with this tremendous conflict that the disturbance in Europe scarcely sounded in his ears. He was a man without faith and without desire of hope. In the years behind him lay the wreckage of honour, when he had gone out east to the China Coast and never gone back. Revenge, he had called it, and called it still, for unascertained and undefined injuries. Since then he had had freedom. He had hugged the thought of the woman, who had imagined herself so clever at blinding him, working in poverty to keep herself and her brat. Her brat, ha—ha! Away out there in China, a thousand miles up an immense river, in the home river-port of his country ship, he said ha—ha! and fell to improving himself. Driven to devise a mode of existence both unsocial and unintellectual, he had stumbled upon strange things in human life. He accumulated vast stocks of scandal about humanity, and delved into repositories of knowledge which most men avoid and forget. Those and the pipe, which led him into another life altogether, the life of irresponsible dreams, wherein a man's mind, released from the body yet retaining the desires of the body, ranges forth into twilights of oblivion, clutching here and there at strange seductive shapes and thrilling to voices not heard before. Captain Rannie, out there, was much happier than many men who hold their souls in leash and render their accounts exactly. He sailed up and down his great river, a mystery to the Chinamen of the crew, a joke among the Europeans. It did not become apparent to him or anybody else that anything was happening to him. Nothing was happening to him save that the lacquer and varnish and ornament of his conventional upbringing in England were nearly all gone, and underneath there was nothing save himself, a timid, sensitive, sensual, quarrelsome creature with a disposition that seemed to rational people to have gone rancid with the heat. They bore with him because he was used to the work, and he was a warm man in silver dollars, too, they said. But the country-ships began to go home. The colossal freights out of England could not be resisted. Captain Rannie was ordered to take his ship home. Home! He funked horribly but he funked losing his job still more, and he took her home as far as Port Said, with a cargo of tobacco from Sumatra. But farther he would not go. He made himself ill, an easy trick with a well-stocked medicine chest, and no one suspected a man would be striving to avoid reaching England. It was generally just the other way round. He went to the hospital until the ship was gone and then became convalescent, moping about Port Said in his yellow pongee suits and enormous panama hat, smoking innumerable cigarettes and discovering among other things a new world of gigantic phantoms.
It was not difficult, he found, to discover the dealers in drugs and he set out, as a buyer of tobacco. But although his first trip to Saloniki and back to Alexandria was successful and enormously profitable, he became aware that he was being uncomfortably shadowed, and he left again in an Italian steamer. It was here he encountered Mr. Dainopoulos, bound home from a business trip to Egypt; where he had been buying up cheap the stocks of ship-chandlers who had been caught by the sudden withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles for service in the north. Mr. Dainopoulos had bought a small ship and now needed a commander.