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 Vámbéry, 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 ready, but _kept_ ready, quite ready, all the time. Mr. Spokesly, looking still more mulish, said he'd attend to it.
With the gimcrack little sheet copper binnacle in his hand, Mr. Spokesly made his way to the chief engineer's room. He felt rather bitter. Here he'd been going along nicely for two whole days and now this happens! Spoken to like a dog over a little petty thing like this. As if it was _his_ fault the blamed thing had got smashed. Did he notice it! As if the chief officer of a ship had no more to do than moon round the deck, looking at things....
If Captain Meredith had told Mr. Spokesly that he himself had achieved a rung in the ladder by the simple process of paying very strict attention to his boats, it would have been the bare truth, but Mr. Spokesly would not have seen the point. He found the chief engineer standing before his desk in some deshabille, filling a black briar. His broad, hairy torso was almost naked, for the scanty singlet was torn under the arms and ripped across the bosom. His high-coloured features and reddish moustache were smeared with black oil, and he was breathing in heaves as though he had been running. When Mr. Spokesly presented his broken binnacle the chief glanced at it with a scarcely perceptible flicker of his bushy eyebrows and continued to fill his pipe from a canister on the desk.