tain
Meredith felt he would like to have a talk with this person; but his
mind became preoccupied with another aspect of the case. Here, he felt,
lay the explanation of a good deal of Mr. Spokesly's recent behaviour.
Captain Meredith was fully aware of the perilous nature of an unmarried
man's life between thirty and forty. He himself had married at
thirty-four, having been frankly terrified by the spiritual difficulties
which he beheld surrounding a continued celibacy when combined with a
life of responsible command at sea. And as he sat back on the settee of
his chart-room and looked out over the top of Pamphlet Number Four at
the steel-blue waters of the Mediterranean, he became dimly aware of Mr.
Spokesly's condition. He could not have set down in ordered phrases the
conclusions at which he was arriving; a ship's captain in time of war
has not the leisure to reduce psychological phenomena to their ultimate
first principles; but he was not far wrong in muttering, inaudibly, that
"the man was rattled." It was this tendency to try and understand his
officers which lay at the back of his leniency towards Mr. Spokesly, a
leniency which Mr. Spokesly himself, in later, saner moments, found it
difficult to comprehend.

Mr. Spokesly had "pulled himself together," as he expressed it, when
they went to sea. Archy Bates tacitly retired into the background. Archy
himself was fully aware that the bosom friendliness of the days and
nights in harbour could not continue at sea, and Mr. Spokesly ceased to
share the never-ending refreshment without which Archy could no longer
support existence. Mr. Spokesly felt better at once, for alcohol had no
real hold upon his system. He toiled laboriously through the astonishing
physical exercises which the London School of Mnemonics artfully
suggested were an aid to mental improvement. He practised Concentration,
Observation, and something the pamphlets called Intensive Excogitation,
which nearly made him cross-eyed. Incidentally, he gathered incongruous
scraps of information about Alcibiades, Erasmus, Savonarola,
Nostradamus, Arminius Vambery, and Doctor Johnson. It was while he was
busy carrying out their instructions for accurate observation, that
Captain Meredith asked him, calmly enough, if he had noticed that the
binnacle of Number Two lifeboat was smashed and useless. Mr. Spokesly
assumed a mulish expression and said, No, he hadn't. Well, in future, he
was to have the boats not only made