n the ship. There is a pleasure in an unshared scandal
which many men and all women seem to overlook. It added, I may say, to
the joys of being a super in the play. And when Mr. Basil Bloom, our
effulgent chief mate, informed me one evening that I seemed to be very
chummy with Miss Macedoine, I only smiled and asked him if he had
designs on her himself. He twisted his moustache, looked scornfully at
the horizon, and was evidently perturbed. He had referred
grandiloquently, during the previous voyages, to a peerless female whom
he called 'the future Mrs. Bloom.' This lady lived at Greenwich, and we
had reason to believe that Mr. Bloom, on the strength of his genteel
manners, formidable moustache, and optimistic temperament, had been
sponging on her family for some months before he joined the _Manola_.
'I'll tell the young lady,' I said, 'and perhaps you'll get some
encouragement.' He assured me first that I needn't trouble, and then
added that he knew I was the last person in the world to think less of a
man if he changed his mind. This was so infernally unfair to the lady at
Greenwich that I laughed in his face and walked away.

"The Second Mate took a different line. He was a quiet, inoffensive
creature, and usually preoccupied with a feeble struggle which he
maintained against whiskey. He had a delicately coloured, spiritual,
refined face, with the salient points slightly sharpened, and he seemed
to have neither thoughts, hopes, nor aspirations. However, his finely
chiselled features appeared one day while we were in Alexandria with the
addition of a greenish-yellow puff below the left eye, and the mess-room
boy informed us that the Second Mate was having his meals in his room in
future. There was a laugh from the Third Engineer, and I said nothing,
for I had a notion he and the Second Mate had been ashore together. But
the mess-room boy, whose slant eyes and long nose worried into all the
scandal of the ship, added that young Mr. Siddons had blacked the Second
Mate's eye for him, over the nurse. I told him to dry up. To tell the
truth I was getting tired of the episode. I felt the whole thing was
becoming tawdry and dropping to a rather low plane. I wasn't willing to
admit this to myself, mind you, because it involved my old friend Jack.
I mean it would be the Commander's fault if we all slumped into the mire
together over this young woman. That's what commanders are for--to raise
the tone. That's what a good many of