d: "Where the
devil is the man gone to?"

"Courting!" I shouted, with such a fiendish laugh that the old chap
didn't venture to open his lips any more.

I started to the office perfectly calm. Calm with excessive rage.
Evidently they knew all about it already, and they treated me to a
show of consternation. The manager, a soft-footed, immensely obese man,
breathing short, got up to meet me, while all round the room the young
clerks, bending over the papers on their desks, cast upward glances in
my direction. The fat man, without waiting for my complaint, wheezing
heavily and in a tone as if he himself were incredulous, conveyed to
me the news that Falk--Captain Falk--had declined--had absolutely
declined--to tow my ship--to have anything to do with my ship--this day
or any other day. Never!

I did my best to preserve a cool appearance, but, all the same, I must
have shown how much taken aback I was. We were talking in the middle
of the room. Suddenly behind my back some ass blew his nose with great
force, and at the same time another quill-driver jumped up and went out
on the landing hastily. It occurred to me I was cutting a foolish figure
there. I demanded angrily to see the principal in his private room.

The skin of Mr. Siegers' head showed dead white between the iron grey
streaks of hair lying plastered cross-wise from ear to ear over the top
of his skull in the manner of a bandage. His narrow sunken face was of
an uniform and permanent terra-cotta colour, like a piece of pottery.
He was sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten. But from
that debile body there issued a bullying voice, tremendously loud, harsh
and resonant, as if produced by some powerful mechanical contrivance
in the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know what he did with it in
the private life of his home, but in the larger sphere of business it
presented the advantage of overcoming arguments without the slightest
mental effort, by the mere volume of sound. We had had several
passages of arms. It took me all I knew to guard the interests of my
owners--whom, nota bene, I had never seen--while Siegers (who had
made their acquaintance some years before, during a business tour in
Australia) pretended to the knowledge of their innermost minds, and, in
the character of "our very good friends," threw them perpetually at my
head.

He looked at me with a jaundiced eye (there was no love lost between
us), and declared at once that it was st