For a moment the clear vision of Archy obsequiously waiting on the captain, getting him some hot water perhaps, or laying out a fresh suit of underwear, troubled the darkness of Mr. Spokesly's ruminations. A clear vision, such as even the mediocre have at times. And close to it, as though another miniature in another oval frame, a sharp, clear-cut memory of Ada Rivers looking up at him with gray adoring eyes, the proud tremble of her passionate mouth, the curve of her white throat....
Mr. Spokesly rose to his feet and he caught sight of the naked girl sitting on Archy's knee, and of the bourgeois little face looking out from behind it. Archy's wife! A long dizzy wave of revulsion made Mr. Spokesly feel momentarily faint and he clutched the edge of the bunk board. For a moment he stood, slack-mouthed and moody-eyed, gazing at the photographs. Then he turned away and crept softly along the corridor.
Archy was surprised, on his return, to find him gone.
CHAPTER III
Much of the diversity and nearly all the bitterness of our lives are due to the fact that only rarely do we encounter our exact contemporaries. In any sphere where all start at a prescribed age, as in great universities and public services, there is a tendency to become standardized, to be only one example of a prevalent type. Ambition is coördinated, jealousy is neutralized; and the hot lava-flow of individualist passion cools and hardens to an admirable solidity and composure. One's exact contemporaries are around in throngs. One has no misgivings, no heartburn, no exasperation with fate. The fortunate being whose destiny lies this way takes on the gravity, the immobility, and the polish of an antique statue. The common people pass him as they pass the Elgin marbles—without emotion; but they are aware subconsciously of the cold pure beauty of outline, the absolute fidelity to type, which is the melancholy justification of his existence.
But the common people themselves are not like that. They quit their exact contemporaries at school and thence-forth are out upon the sea of life with men of all ages and breedings and nationalities around them and pressing them hard. They act and are reacted upon. Most of them nurse a secret grievance. Very few of them have any code of honour beyond law and decency. They are very largely needy adventurers, living by their wits, and are ready to pay money to those who profess to show them how they can increase their incomes, or obtain a pension, or "better their positions," or cure themselves of the innumerable physical disabilities which their fatuous ignorance and indolence have brought upon them. They love to decipher word competitions, football competitions, racing competitions. They have the high-binder's passion for getting something for nothing, his dislike to real work. And this lack of contemporary associates, this rough-and-tumble aspect of the world, induces them to regard their vices as virtues and themselves as oppressed helots struggling under the iron heels of those whom mere luck and cunning have placed in authority over them. The London School of Mnemonics was making a hundred thousand pounds a year net profit out of these people in England alone. Even the grim witticism of the company promoter, that there is "a sucker born every minute," seems inadequate to account for so monstrous a simplicity of soul. The fact is, the very boldness of the trick rendered it easy. You paid your guinea, and in due course, in due secrecy, and under duly sworn promises to divulge no hint of their contents to a living soul, you received a number of refined-looking pamphlets containing a couple of thousand words each. You thrilled as you joined in the game. Even Captain Meredith, sitting in his chart room and looking through Number Four, which Mr. Spokesly had inadvertently left on the table, was tickled by the subtle atmosphere of the style. This, he divined, was the newly discovered rapid-transit route to the Fortunate Isles, and his expression hardened to rigid attention as his eye fell on the testimony of "a ship's officer." This gentleman had risen from the humble position of fourth officer to the command "of one of our largest liners" in the miraculously brief period of eighteen months, and ascribed this success entirely to the lessons of the London School of Mnemonics. Captain Meredith felt he would like to have a talk with this person; but his mind became preoccupied with another aspect of the case. Here, he felt, lay the explanation of a good deal of Mr. Spokesly's recent behaviour. Captain Meredith was fully aware of the perilous nature of an unmarried man's life between thirty and forty. He himself had married at thirty-four, having been frankly terrified by the spiritual difficulties which he beheld surrounding a continued celibacy when combined with a life of responsible command at sea. And as he sat back on the settee of his chart-room and looked out over the top of Pamphlet Number Four at the steel-blue waters of the Mediterranean, he became dimly aware of Mr. Spokesly's condition. He could not have set down in ordered phrases the conclusions at which he was arriving; a ship's captain in time of war has not the leisure to reduce psychological phenomena to their ultimate first principles; but he was not far wrong in muttering, inaudibly, that "the man was rattled." It was this tendency to try and understand his officers which lay at the back of his leniency towards Mr. Spokesly, a leniency which Mr. Spokesly himself, in later, saner moments, found it difficult to comprehend.
Mr. Spokesly had "pulled himself together," as he expressed it, when they went to sea. Archy Bates tacitly retired into the background. Archy himself was fully aware that the bosom friendliness of the days and nights in harbour could not continue at sea, and Mr. Spokesly ceased to share the never-ending refreshment without which Archy could no longer support existence. Mr. Spokesly felt better at once, for alcohol had no real hold upon his system. He toiled laboriously through the astonishing physical exercises which the London School of Mnemonics artfully suggested were an aid to mental improvement. He practised Concentration, Observation, and something the pamphlets called Intensive Excogitation, which nearly made him cross-eyed. Incidentally, he gathered incongruous scraps of information about Alcibiades, Erasmus, Savonarola, Nostradamus, Arminius Vámbéry, and Doctor Johnson. It was while he was busy carrying out their instructions for accurate observation, that Captain Meredith asked him, calmly enough, if he had noticed that the binnacle of Number Two lifeboat was smashed and useless. Mr. Spokesly assumed a mulish expression and said, No, he hadn't. Well, in future, he was to have the boats not only made ready, but kept ready, quite ready, all the time. Mr. Spokesly, looking still more mulish, said he'd attend to it.
With the gimcrack little sheet copper binnacle in his hand, Mr. Spokesly made his way to the chief engineer's room. He felt rather bitter. Here he'd been going along nicely for two whole days and now this happens! Spoken to like a dog over a little petty thing like this. As if it was his fault the blamed thing had got smashed. Did he notice it! As if the chief officer of a ship had no more to do than moon round the deck, looking at things....
If Captain Meredith had told Mr. Spokesly that he himself had achieved a rung in the ladder by the simple process of paying very strict attention to his boats, it would have been the bare truth, but Mr. Spokesly would not have seen the point. He found the chief engineer standing before his desk in some deshabille, filling a black briar. His broad, hairy torso was almost naked, for the scanty singlet was torn under the arms and ripped across the bosom. His high-coloured features and reddish moustache were smeared with black oil, and he was breathing in heaves as though he had been running. When Mr. Spokesly presented his broken binnacle the chief glanced at it with a scarcely perceptible flicker of his bushy eyebrows and continued to fill his pipe from a canister on the desk.