pokesly mercilessly. He was, or at
any rate he looked, perfectly aware of the extreme unfitness of Mr.
Spokesly's bodily frame, for Mr. Spokesly had done no real work since he
had passed for second mate eleven years before. The chief himself was
inclined to obesity, for he verged on fifty and his frame was of the
herculean type, needing much nourishment and upholstery. But there was a
difference between the huge, red-freckled and hirsute masses upon his
bones and the soft puffiness of Mr. Spokesly's fatty degeneration. The
latter's double chin was in singular contrast with the massive and
muscular salience that gave the chief's face an expression of
indomitable vigour. He sat there, tipping himself slightly back in his
swivel chair, looking quizzically at Mr. Spokesly through the tobacco
smoke. Mr. Spokesly was annoyed. The chief had always been a decent
sort, he had imagined, and here he was jibbing at a little thing like
this. After all, it was the engineer's business to do these things. He,
an officer, couldn't be expected to attend to petty details.... A short
figure with a towel over his naked shoulders appeared abruptly out of
the engine room and passed along the alleyway. The chief called in his
stentorian tones, which issued from between twisted and broken teeth,
"Hi, Mr. Tolleshunt, here's a job for ye. Mate wants a binnacle fixed."
And Mr. Spokesly's mind became easy. A voice from behind a slammed door
said that the mate could take his binnacle and chase himself round the
deck with it, and the chief cackled. Mr. Tolleshunt came out of his room
again on his way to the bathroom. He was a young man with a thick white
neck, and black eyes set in a dirty, dead-white face which bore an
expression of smouldering rage. This, however, was merely an index of
character which, like many such indexes, was misleading. Mr. Tolleshunt
was not ill-tempered, but he had a morbid passion for efficiency. He was
an idealist, with a practical working ideal. He was not prepared to
accept anything in the world as an adequate substitute for achievement.
He had seen through Mr. Spokesly at once, for your idealist is often a
_clairvoyant_ of character. And as he passed along to his bath, his
black eyes smouldered upon the chief officer, who remembered the many
insults he had swallowed from this dirty engineer, and hated him.
Suddenly Mr. Tolleshunt paused, with his hand on the bathroom door, and
looked back. His dead-white face, the firm m