at you Germans call economy. Penny wise, pound
foolish.' He became sentimental. The chief had given him a four-finger
nip about ten o'clock--'only one, s'elp me!'--good old chief; but as to
getting the old fraud out of his bunk--a five-ton crane couldn't do
it. Not it. Not to-night anyhow. He was sleeping sweetly like a little
child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow. From the thick
throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the
sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious
feather in a faint stir of air. He and the chief engineer had been
cronies for a good few years--serving the same jovial, crafty, old
Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into
the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail. The quay-side opinion in the
Patna's home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation
'had done together pretty well everything you can think of.' Outwardly
they were badly matched: one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy
curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the
head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an
indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes. He had been stranded out East
somewhere--in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably
did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause
of his shipwreck. He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly
out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much
worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace
of misfortune. Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men
of his craft being scarce at first, he had 'got on' after a sort. He
was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was 'an old
stager out here.' When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his
clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus
around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored
tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long,
with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy
from the hazy glimpse of a truth. He was usually anything but free with
his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his
principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what
with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff,
had become very happy, cheeky,