Captain Johns, very much startled, raised his perplexed and credulous glance, which, together with a low and horizontally wrinkled, brow, did not make a very intellectual ensemble. This impression was by no means mended by the slightly pointed form of his bald head.
Everybody laughed outright, and, thus guided, Captain Johns ended by smiling rather sourly, and attempted to defend himself. It was all very well to joke, but nowadays, when ships, to pay anything at all, had to be driven hard on the passage and in harbour, the sea was no place for elderly men. Only young men and men in their prime were equal to modern conditions of push and hurry. Look at the great firms: almost every single one of them was getting rid of men showing any signs of age. He, for one, didn’t want any oldsters on board his ship.
And, indeed, in this opinion Captain Johns was not singular.
There was at that time a lot of seamen, with nothing against them but that they were grizzled, wearing out the soles of their last pair of boots on the pavements of the City in the heart-breaking search for a berth.
Captain Johns added with a sort of ill-humoured innocence that from holding that opinion to thinking of poisoning people was a very long step.
This seemed final but Captain Ashton would not let go his joke.
‘Oh, yes. I am sure you would. You said distinctly “of no use”. What’s to be done with men who are “of no use?” You are a kind-hearted fellow, Johns. I am sure that if only you thought it over carefully you would consent to have them poisoned in some painless manner.’
Captain Sellers twitched his thin sinuous lips.
‘Make ghosts of them,’ he suggested, pointedly.
At the mention of ghosts Captain Johns became shy, in his perplexed, sly, and unlovely manner.
Captain Ashton winked.
‘Yes. And then perhaps you would get a chance to have a communication with the world of spirits. Surely the ghosts of seamen should haunt ships. Some of them would be sure to call on an old shipmate.’
Captain Sellers remarked drily:
‘Don’t raise his hopes like this. It’s cruel. He won’t see anything. You know, Johns, that nobody has ever seen a ghost. *
At this intolerable provocation Captain Johns came out of his reserve. With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of credulity giving momentary lustre to his dull little eyes, he brought up a lot of authenticated instances. There were books and books full of instances.* It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions. Cases were published every month in a special newspaper. Professor Cranks saw ghosts daily. And Professor Cranks was no small potatoes either. One of the biggest scientific men living. And there was that newspaper fellow - what’s his name? - who had a girl-ghost visitor. He printed in his paper things she said to him. And to say there were no ghosts after that!
‘Why, they have been photographed! What more proof do you want?’
Captain Johns was indignant* Captain Bell’s lips twitched, but Captain Ashton protested now.
‘For goodness’ sake, don’t keep him going with that. And by the by, Johns, who’s that hairy pirate you’ve got for your new mate? Nobody in the Dock seems to have seen him before.’
Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects, answered simply that Willy, the tobacconist at the comer of Fenchurch Street, had sent him along.
Willy, his shop, and the very house in Fenchurch Street, I believe, are gone now. In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on his pasty face, Willy served with tobacco many southern-going ships out of the Port of London. At certain times of the day the shop would be full of shipmasters. They sat on casks, they lounged against the counter.
Many a youngster found his first lift in life there; many a man got a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of birds’-eye at an auspicious moment. Even Willy’s assistant, a red-headed, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow, would hand you across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your box of cigarettes, in a whisper, lips hardly moving, thus: ‘The Bellana, South Dock. Second officer wanted. You may be in time for it if you hurry up.’
And didn’t one just fly!
‘Oh, Willy sent him,’ said Captain Ashton. ‘He’s a very striking man. If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red handkerchief round his head he would look exactly like one of them buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plank and carried women off into captivity. Look out, Johns, he don’t cut your throat for you and run off with the Sapphire. What ship has he come out of last?’
Captain Johns, after looking up credulously as usual, wrinkled his brow, and said placidly that the man had seen better days. His name was Burner.
‘He’s had command of a Liverpool ship, the Samaria, some years ago. He lost her in the Indian Ocean, and had his certificate suspended for a year. Ever since then he has not been able to get another command. He’s been knocking about in the Western Ocean trade lately.’
‘That accounts for him being a stranger to everybody about the Docks,’ Captain Ashton concluded as they rose from table.
Captain Johns walked down to the Dock after lunch. He was short of stature and slightly bandy. His appearance did not inspire the generality of mankind with esteem; but it must have been otherwise with his employers. He had the reputation of being an uncomfortable commander, meticulous in trifles, always nursing a grievance of some sort and incessantly nagging. He was not a man to kick up a row with you and be done with it, but to say nasty things in a whining voice; a man capable of making one’s life a perfect misery if he took a dislike to an officer.
That very evening I went to see Bunter on board, and sympathized with him on his prospects for the voyage. He was subdued. I suppose a man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy. And there was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great elasticity of spirits. For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and besides - but of that later.
Captain Johns had been on board that afternoon and had loitered and dodged about his chief mate in a manner which had annoyed Bunter exceedingly.
‘What could he mean?’ he asked with calm exasperation. ‘One would think he suspected I had stolen something and tried to see in what pocket I had stowed it away; or that somebody told him I had a tail and he wanted to find out how I managed to conceal it. I don’t like to be approached from behind several times in one afternoon in that creepy way and then to be looked up at suddenly in front from under my elbow. Is it a new sort of peep-boo game? It doesn’t amuse me. I am no longer a baby.’
I assured him that if anyone were to tell Captain Johns that he - Bunter - had a tail, Johns would manage to get himself to believe the story in some mysterious manner. He would. He was suspicious and credulous to an inconceivable degree. He would believe any silly tale, suspect any man of anything, and crawl about with it and ruminate the stuff, and turn it over and over in his mind in the most miserable, inwardly whining perplexity. He would taken the meanest possible view in the end, and discover the meanest possible course of action by a sort of natural genius for that sort of thing.
Bunter also told me that the mean creature had crept all over the ship on his little, bandy legs, taking him along to grumble and whine to about a lot of trifles. Crept about the decks like a wretched insect - like a cockroach, only not so lively.
Thus did the self-possessed Bunter express himself with great disgust. Then, going on with his usual stately deliberation, made sinister by the frown of his jet-black eyebrows:
‘And the fellow is mad, too. He tried to be sociable for a bit, and could find nothing else but to make big eyes at me, and ask me if I believed “in communication beyond the grave.” Communication beyond -I didn’t know what he meant at first. I didn’t know what to say. “A very solemn subject, Mr Bunter,” says he. “I’ve given a great deal of study to it.’”