Schomberg, exasperated
at our secrecy, went out of the room slamming the door with a crash
that positively lifted us in our chairs. This, or else what I had said,
huffed my Hermann, He supposed, with a contemptuous toss of his head
towards the door which trembled yet, that I had got hold of some of
that man's silly tales. It looked, indeed, as though his mind had been
thoroughly poisoned against Schomberg. "His tales were--they were," he
repeated, seeking for the word--"trash." They were trash, he reiterated,
and moreover I was young yet...

This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer exposed to that sort of
insult) made me huffy too. I felt ready in my own mind to back up every
assertion of Schomberg's and on any subject. In a moment, devil only
knows why, Hermann and I were looking at each other most inimically.
He caught up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the pleasure of
calling after him:

"Take my advice and make Falk pay for breaking up your ship. You aren't
likely to get anything else out of him."

When I got on board my ship later on, the old mate, who was very full of
the events of the morning, remarked:

"I saw the tug coming back from the outer Roads just before two P.M."
(He never by any chance used the words morning or afternoon. Always P.M.
or A.M., log-book style.) "Smart work that. Man's always in a state of
hurry. He's a regular chucker-out, ain't he, sir? There's a few pubs I
know of in the East-end of London that would be all the better for
one of his sort around the bar." He chuckled at his joke. "A regular
chucker-out. Now he has fired out that Dutchman head over heels, I
suppose our turn's coming to-morrow morning."

We were all on deck at break of day (even the sick--poor devils--had
crawled out) ready to cast off in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing
came. Falk did not come. At last, when I began to think that probably
something had gone wrong in his engine-room, we perceived the tug going
by, full pelt, down the river, as if we hadn't existed. For a moment I
entertained the wild notion that he was going to turn round in the next
reach. Afterwards I watched his smoke appear above the plain, now here,
now there, according to the windings of the river. It disappeared. Then
without a word I went down to breakfast. I just simply went down to
breakfast.

Not one of us uttered a sound till the mate, after imbibing--by means
of suction out of a saucer--his second cup of tea, exclaime