Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/243

231 The ship ought to have been overhauled before we started. But the owners wouldn’t see it. They insisted that a patch here, and a coat of paint there, would meet the case. But it didn’t. Not by a deal. As we soon found. At Aden, after all, the engines had only been tinkered. They went wrong again before we had been three days out. The weather we had would have tried the best work that ever came out of an engineer’s shop. Those nailed together pieces of rusty scrap iron worried the lives right out of us. If we had gone to the bottom they would have been to blame.

We were late at Yokohama. A lot. The agents didn’t like it, nor the consignees either. There were words. After all I’d gone through I wasn’t in a mood to take a jacketing for what wasn’t any fault of mine. So I let them see. The result was that there were all round ructions. I admit that, under severe provocation, I did go farther than I intended. And I did not mean to knock old Lawrence down. But it was only by the mercy of God I had brought the ship into port at all. And it was hard lines to meet nothing but black looks, and words, because I hadn’t performed the impossible.

Lawrence resented my knocking him down. David Lawrence was our agent; a close-fisted, cantankerous Scotchman. I own I ought to have kept my hands off him. But when he started bullyragging me on my own deck, before the crew, as if I was something lower than a cabin boy, when I had had about enough of it, which wasn’t long, I let fly, and over he went.

I was sorry directly afterwards. And when he gave me to understand that not a ha’porth of stuff should come aboard that boat while I was in command, I swallowed the bile and started to apologise. Not much good came of that. As soon as my nose was inside his office he began rubbing me the wrong way. The end of it was that I nearly knocked him