Previous - next
his chief clerk. Some of you might have known him--an obliging little
Portuguese half-caste with a miserably skinny neck, and always on the
hop to get something from the shipmasters in the way of eatables--a
piece of salt pork, a bag of biscuits, a few potatoes, or what not. One
voyage, I recollect, I tipped him a live sheep out of the remnant of my
sea-stock: not that I wanted him to do anything for me--he couldn't,
you know--but because his childlike belief in the sacred right to
perquisites quite touched my heart. It was so strong as to be almost
beautiful. The race--the two races rather--and the climate . . .
However, never mind. I know where I have a friend for life.
'Well, Ruthvel says he was giving him a severe lecture--on official
morality, I suppose--when he heard a kind of subdued commotion at his
back, and turning his head he saw, in his own words, something round and
enormous, resembling a sixteen-hundred-weight sugar-hogshead wrapped in
striped flannelette, up-ended in the middle of the large floor space
in the office. He declares he was so taken aback that for quite an
appreciable time he did not realise the thing was alive, and sat still
wondering for what purpose and by what means that object had been
transported in front of his desk. The archway from the ante-room was
crowded with punkah-pullers, sweepers, police peons, the coxswain and
crew of the harbour steam-launch, all craning their necks and almost
climbing on each other's backs. Quite a riot. By that time the fellow
had managed to tug and jerk his hat clear of his head, and advanced with
slight bows at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that
for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition
wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid, and
little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a development of
the Patna case. He says that as soon as he understood who it was before
him he felt quite unwell--Archie is so sympathetic and easily upset--but
pulled himself together and shouted "Stop! I can't listen to you. You
must go to the Master Attendant. I can't possibly listen to you. Captain
Elliot is the man you want to see. This way, this way." He jumped
up, ran round that long counter, pulled, shoved: the other let him,
surprised but obedient at first, and only at the door of the private
office some sort of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like
a frightened bullock. "Look here! what's up? Let go! Look here!" Archie
flung open the door without knocking. "The master of the Patna, sir,"
he shouts. "Go in, captain." He saw the old man lift his head from some
writing so sharp that his nose-nippers fell off, banged the door to, and
fled to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for his signature:
but he says the row that burst out in there was so awful that he
couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to remember the spelling of
his own name. Archie's the most sensitive shipping-master in the two
Previous - next
