Derek Holdsworth prodded Harry along in front of him until they reached the Marmon. "Well," he said, "Mr Beeney's car, hey? There's gratitude for you. You give a fellow a first-class cabin, and all the trimmings of first-class luxury, and what does he do for you? He tries to steal more, that's what he does for you. Can't be satisfied with what he's got, oh no, not now that he's got a taste for it. And that's the trouble with working-class people today. You make them think that they deserve two day's annual holiday by the seaside, and by God, they'll go on it. You make them think that they deserve higher wages, and by God they'll demand a right to higher wages—which is all nonsense of course, because the minute you pay people more you have to charge more for the things they want to buy."
"Is this a lecture or what?" asked Harry.
"Can't get it budged, sir," said one of the seamen, referring to the trunk of Mark's car. "It looks like he's been tampering around with the lock."
"Is that true?" Derek Holdsworth asked Harry. "Were you actually trying to force this car's boot open?"
Harry nudged his spectacles back on to his nose with the back of his hand. "Do you think I'd tell you, even if I had?"
"Well, old man, you'd better come up with some kind of an explanation," said Derek Holdsworth. "Because if you haven't got a sufficiently plausible reason for being here, and trying to burglarise other people's property, then I'm afraid that I'm going to take you a to the captain, and have you locked up in your quarters until we get to New York."
"I never went near that automobile," said Harry.
"We saw you," said the fatter of the two seamen.
"If you saw me, you ought to go to work in the moving pictures," Harry retorted. "The studios are crying out for people with good imagination."
The seaman quickly glanced across at Derek Holdsworth, to make sure that he wasn't close enough to hear what they were saying, and then he murmured, "Have you got friends in the moving pictures? In Hollywood? I always wanted to work in the films. I used to act once, in rep. Dewsbury repertory company, in Yorkshire. They always used to say I was one of their best actors. Falstaff, I played. With cushions under my jumper, of course."
Harry stared at him. "Why don't you go and boil your head?" he suggested, and Derek Holdsworth heard that.
"All right, that settles it," he said. "We're going to the captain. Johnson, take Mr. Pakenow's arm, will you?"
Harry tried to pull his arm away, but the thinner seaman held it tight, and together they walked across the hold to the door.
It was at the door that Harry broke down. It came on him unexpectedly, as if someone had hit him over the head. And, in a him, they had. He had suddenly experienced a terrible revelation: a the capitalists and their way of life could never be defeated, that it was futile even to expect that they could. No matter how many bombs he let off, not matter how many luxury liners he sank, he would never make any impression on them. Their resources were beyond imagination. Their belief in the rightness of their system was unassailable. It had been one thing to imagine how rich people lived, which was all he had been able to do before he set off the bomb on Wall Street. But now he had seen it for himself at first hand. He had seen the silver cutlery and the sparkling jewels and the brocade upholstery. He had tasted the meals of prime meat and exotic fish and rare wine. He knew now that the rich would never let it go, this this way of life, and that they would never share it. It would be hopeless to delude himself that they would. You might be able to bomb a man into changing his religion, but you could never bomb him into losing his taste for oyster loaf and canvasback duck. You could never bomb him out of a preference for New & Lingwood shirts, or Huntsman suits. The very richness of the rich had overwhelmed him, and he knew that he hadn't even experienced a fraction of it. He had talked to people in Bootle who lived with a family of five in two rooms, and ate bread-and-scrape six nights out of seven, and yet here were these cabin-class passengers wondering out loud if they ought to spend the summer at their Long Island house, or in their apartments in Paris. How could you even begin to terrorise people who lived like this?
It was caviare which had stunned him most. To see one woman spread on to a fragment of toast a spoonful of greyish eggs which cost the equivalent of two families' meals for two days, and eat it without a qualm, that was more than Harry bad been able to understand.
And it was his inability to understand, and his failure to set off his bomb, and his shameful relief that he was going to survive to go back to Janice, which finally dropped him to his knees. He clutched the leg of Derek Holdsworth's uniform trousers, and wept like a small child.
Derek Holdsworth was extremely embarrassed. It was one thing to frog-march a chappie up to the captain. It was quite another thing to have the chappie clinging to your leg. He had only followed Harry down here because the Hon. Constance Pruitt had been watching the fellow, and had suddenly suggested that he might be up to something shady.
"Look here," he said, "I'm sure you weren't actually trying to break into that car, were you?"
Harry was paralysed with grief. He could do nothing but cry and pant for breath. His whole life was folding up inside him like the bellows of a cheap camera.
Derek Holdsworth said to the fatter seaman, "He didn't actually steal anything, did he? And there wasn't any damage?"
"Few scratches on the paint, sir."
"Well, that's nothing. Perhaps we've overdone it a bit. Chap is a hero, after all. You know. Saved that girl, and so forth."
He bent forward and said loudly in Harry's ear, "All right, old man. We've decided to let you go. Do you understand me? We're going to let you go. Now, all you have to do is go back to your cabin and behave yourself, and we won't say any more about it. How's that? Okey?"
Harry sat back against the cream-painted wall of the corridor. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his tie. He felt completely devastating and ashamed. The worst thing was, he was guilty of everything that Derek Holdsworth had accused him, and worse. If he had been able to break back into the trunk of Mark Beeney's car, he would have sunk the ship and Derek Holdsworth with it.
Derek Holdsworth held out his hand. "Come on, old man. Up you get."
Harry hesitated for a moment, then reached out his own hand and allowed Derek to lift him to his feet. He wound his glasses back around his ears, and then gave an unhealthy-looking grin.
"Thank you," he said hoarsely. "I don't know what for. But, thank you."
Derek Holdsworth watched him stumble off towards the companionway and wondered if he had done the right thing.
"Most extraordinary," he said to Johnson. "You can never quite tell this these chappies, can you? Hero one minute, dunce the next. Can't be too uncharitable, though. Chap probably went to a frightful school."
In his quarters at that moment, Dick Charles was splashing his face with cold water to disguise the fact that he had been crying. He patted his eyes with a towel, and then stared at himself in the small mirror on his bureau. My God, he thought, look at you. You're acting like a boy of fourteen. Jealous, stupid, and ridiculous. If you were half the grown-up man that Ralph Peel is, you would have gone to bed with Lady Diana, enjoyed yourself, and left it at that. But oh no, you have to get infatuated. You have to go along with Chardonnel et Walker chocolates, and flowers, when all the lady wanted was a hard five minutes in bed, and a hard smack across the bottom if she talked back. But when will you ever learn? You're a ship's officer. Ship's officers can have any eligible girl they want, just by snapping their fingers. Kings of the floating fuck-a-toria, that's what they are.