Free Doctor at Sea by Richard Gordon

before was now outshone by the peril that faced the two opponents. They had composed a story during breakfast, which was begun by Kelly in the tone of bitter repentance that had occasionally swayed sympathetic members of a magistrate’s bench.
    ‘Well, sir, it was like this’ ere, sir. Me and me mate was’ avin’a cupper tea.,.’
    ‘You bloody liar!’ Captain Hogg shouted.’ You were rotten drunk, both of you bastards! Oh, yes, you were! Don’t answer me back or I’ll kick you round the deck. You were drunk in the foc’s’le and you started fighting like the pair of goddam cut-throats you are. My God, you’re a crowd of loafers up forrard! You oughtn’t to be at sea, you ought to be in jail, the lot of you! Stand up straight when I’m talking to you, blast you!’ He thrust a finger under Kelly’s nose.’ You turn my ship into a Liverpool rough-house and you come up here with some cock-and-bull story you think I’m going to swallow. What do you take me for, eh? I was at sea when you were playing marbles in the filth of a Liverpool gutter. Mr Hornbeam!’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘You found these men fighting?’
    Hornbeam nodded.
    ‘Doctor!’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘Did you or did you not find these men were drunk?‘
    ‘Well, sir, the scientific tests...’
    ‘There you are! The Doctor agrees with me! You were soused, the pair of you!’ He banged the desk with his fist, making the pen leap out of the ink-pot.’ Do you know what I’d like to do to you?’ he demanded.’ I’d like to give you every holystone on board and make you scrub the boatdeck till the plates showed through. Then I’d put you in irons in the chain-locker and keep you on bread and water till we got back to Liverpool. That’s the sort of treatment scum like you need! I’d like to put you in an open boat here and now, and get rid of the pair of you for good. Do you understand, you couple of lazy sons of bitches?’
    But fortunately the Captain’s justice was obligatorily tempered with mercy.’ Fined five shillings,’He muttered.’ Good morning.’
    It was fortunate that Captain Hogg was, through reason of his being a captain, confined most of the day to his own quarters. He passed his time sitting in an armchair reading magazines similar to the one hiding his face on the first occasion I met him. In the corner of his cabin was a pile three feet high of these periodicals, from all parts of the English-speaking world. He consumed them earnestly and steadily, like a man with plenty of time looking up a train in Bradshaw.’ There’s one thing I do like,’ he announced at dinner one day, a forkful of beef and vegetables at his mouth,’ and that’s a good book.’
    For the rest of the voyage I bowed to his opinions like a Victorian schoolboy and took the greatest pains possible to avoid him.
    The Leader of the Opposition in the Lotus was the Chief Engineer, McDougall. He alone of the engineers had unresented entry into the saloon and our company: the mates looked upon them instinctively as intruders, a relic of the days when thin funnels first poked their way through the proud canvas. The engineers lived away from the rest of us in tiny hot cabins clustered amidships, and ate in a pokey messroom ventilated by the oily breath of the engines. We saw them only when they leant over the rail in their black and sweaty boiler suits, or lay on their backs dissembling one of the pieces of ugly machinery that sprung from the Lotus’s deck.
    McDougall had a noisy cabin by the engine-room hatchway, in which he received visitors with a halftumbler of neat whisky (he maintained that gin was a drink fit only for harlots). His surroundings were as untidy as a nursery. Scraps of steel and paint-pots littered the deck, the bunk sagged under pieces of dismantled machinery, and the bulkheads supported charts, graphs, a row of sombre engineering books, and an incongruous nude leaving her bath on a boilermakers’ calendar. Scattered everywhere, like thistledown