Strictly speaking, he was right.But I've never had much taste for investigation, for showing people up and all that no doubt ethically meri-torious kind of work.And my view of the episode was purely ethical.If any one had to be the death of the Steward I didn't see why it shouldn't be Captain Giles himself, a man of age and standing, and a permanent resident.Whereas, I in com-parison, felt myself a mere bird of passage in that port.In fact, it might have been said that I had already broken off my connection.I muttered that I didn't think--it was nothing to me....
"Nothing!" repeated Captain Giles, giving some signs of quiet, deliberate indignation."Kent warned me you were a peculiar young fellow.You will tell me next that a command is nothing to you --and after all the trouble I've taken, too!""The trouble!" I murmured, uncomprehending.
What trouble? All I could remember was being mystified and bored by his conversation for a solid hour after tiffin.And he called that taking a lot of trouble.
He was looking at me with a self-complacency which would have been odious in any other man.
All at once, as if a page of a book had been turned over disclosing a word which made plain all that had gone before, I perceived that this matter had also another than an ethical aspect.
And still I did not move.Captain Giles lost his patience a little.With an angry puff at his pipe he turned his back on my hesitation.
But it was not hesitation on my part.I had been, if I may express myself so, put out of gear mentally.But as soon as I had convinced my-self that this stale, unprofitable world of my dis-content contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomo-tion.
It's a good step from the Officers' Home to the Harbour Office; but with the magic word "Com-mand" in my head I found myself suddenly on the quay as if transported there in the twinkling of an eye, before a portal of dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white steps.
All this seemed to glide toward me swiftly.The whole great roadstead to the right was just a mere flicker of blue, and the dim cool hall swallowed me up out of the heat and glare of which I had not been aware till the very moment I passed in from it.
The broad inner staircase insinuated itself under my feet somehow.Command is a strong magic.
The first human beings I perceived distinctly since I had parted with the indignant back of Captain Giles were the crew of the harbour steam-launch lounging on the spacious landing about the cur-tained archway of the shipping office.
It was there that my buoyancy abandoned me.
The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.I passed heavily under the curtain which the Malay coxswain of the harbour launch raised for me.There was nobody in the office except the clerks, writing in two industrious rows.
But the head Shipping-Master hopped down from his elevation and hurried along on the thick mats to meet me in the broad central passage.
He had a Scottish name, but his complexion was of a rich olive hue, his short beard was jet black, and his eyes, also black, had a languishing ex-pression.He asked confidentially:
"You want to see Him?"
All lightness of spirit and body having departed from me at the touch of officialdom, I looked at the scribe without animation and asked in my turn wearily:
"What do you think? Is it any use?"
"My goodness! He has asked for you twice to-day."
This emphatic He was the supreme authority, the Marine Superintendent, the Harbour-Master --a very great person in the eyes of every single quill-driver in the room.But that was nothing to the opinion he had of his own greatness.
Captain Ellis looked upon himself as a sort of divine (pagan) emanation, the deputy-Neptune for the circumambient seas.If he did not actually rule the waves, he pretended to rule the fate of the mortals whose lives were cast upon the waters.
This uplifting illusion made him inquisitorial and peremptory.And as his temperament was choleric there were fellows who were actually afraid of him.He was redoubtable, not in virtue of his office, but because of his unwarrantable assump-tions.I had never had anything to do with him before.
