Description
A List to Starboard (in Short Story Collection Vol. 040 )
I
A short, square chunk of a man walked into a shipping office on the East
Side, and inquired for the Manager of the Line. He had kindly blue eyes,
a stub nose, and a mouth that shut to like a rat-trap, and stayed
shut. Under his chin hung a pair of half-moon whiskers which framed his
weather-beaten face as a spike collar frames a dog’s.
“You don’t want to send this vessel to sea again,” blurted out the
chunk. “She ought to go to the dry-dock. Her boats haven’t had a
brushful of paint for a year; her boilers are caked clear to her
top flues, and her pumps won’t take care of her bilge water. Charter
something else and lay her up.”
The Manager turned in his revolving chair and faced him. He was the
opposite of the Captain in weight, length, and thickness–a slim,
well-groomed, puffy-cheeked man of sixty with a pair of uncertain, badly
aimed eyes and a voice like the purr of a cat.
“Oh, my dear Captain, you surely don’t mean what you say. She is
perfectly seaworthy and sound. Just look at her inspection–” and he
passed him the certificate.
“No–I don’t want to see it! I know ’em by heart: it’s a lie, whatever
it says. Give an inspector twenty dollars and he’s stone blind.”
The Manager laughed softly. He had handled too many rebellious captains
in his time; they all had a protest of some kind–it was either the
crew, or the grub, or the coal, or the way she was stowed. Then he added
softly, more as a joke than anything else:
“Not afraid, are you, Captain?”
A crack started from the left-hand corner of the Captain’s mouth,
crossed a fissure in his face, stopped within half an inch of his stub
nose, and died out in a sm
Product ID: 9781776802159
Sku: 9781776802159
