nt third mate...."

"There's no need to go back to the question if you refuse to volunteer."

Mr. Spokesly stood up. He was in a rage. Or rather he was resuming the
rage which had assailed him when the _Tanganyika_ was going down and
which had been suspended while he made good his claim on life. The smug
way in which this bearded stranger disposed of him was intolerable. Mr.
Spokesly knew this man would never dream of sending one of his own caste
to a third mate's job on a Persian Gulf coaster with the hot season
coming on. He knew that he himself, being a merchant seaman, was
regarded by all these brass-bound people as an inferior, a shell-back, a
lob-scouser, and no dire need would ever make them accept him as one of
themselves. And he had a glimpse, in his rage, of another truth, for one
often sees these things in flashes of anger. He just caught sight of the
fact that these people, with their closely guarded privileges and
esoteric codes, were fighting much more for their class than for
England, that an England democratized and ravished of her class system
would be to them a worse place than an England defeated by a
class-conscious enemy. But the immediate grievance was personal. He
stood up.

"Volunteer," he repeated. "Excuse me, Mister, I came home from out east
and took a second mate's job, there being nothing better about. I went
mate when the other man died. I've had a master's ticket this ten years.
Now you want me to go third mate. Where shall I end up? In the
forecastle? Volunteer! I can tell you, I'm beginning to regret I ever
left Hong Kong."

"I see. Of course we can't help that, you know. You'd better go and see
the paymaster commander. Perhaps he can put you on a ship."

Mr. Spokesly took the cap, a size too large for him, which he had got on
credit at Stein's Oriental Store, and went out. He was feeling very
bitter. No man feels he is doing himself justice in clothes that are too
large for him. Mr. Spokesly wanted to go away and hide until he could
get rid of his enormous golf-cap and the coat which hung on him, as he
himself put it, like a bosun's shirt on a capstan-bar. He went
downstairs into the street. The sun had forced its way through vast
banks of blue-black and gray-white clouds and brought out unsuspected
tones in the roadway ankle-deep in bright yellow mud, in the green
uniform of a Russian soldier who was carrying a polished copper kettle,
and in the black-green waters of the Gulf cres