It was not Brotherhood who was at fault; it was the fact of being in harbour, where the Captain was always uncomfortable and irritable, and the other fact, more annoying, more disturbing still, that this time there would be no real relief even when they put to sea. For they were going on a cruise, which was something Captain Harmer loathed with all his heart and soul.
He should not have done so; to take the Alcestis, flagship of the line, on her annual Caribbean and South African cruise, was meant to be the plum assignment of the year, a reward for braving the bleak North Atlantic run for the other nine months. The crew, to a man and to a boy, certainly thought so; each year, they were on their best behaviour for fully four weeks beforehand. But the Captain could never see it that way. For him, it meant that he had to change from being a sailor to being a glorified maitre d'hotel; he had to drop the sextant and pick up the martini shaker; he had to forget he was commanding a ship and learn the trick of running a three months' non-stop party. And, above all, there was always a woman, sometimes several of them, who interpreted her current mission in life as the duty of bringing comfort and warmth to the lonely sex-starved hero on the bridge. That was the worst hazard of all.
Of course, the peak of sea-going, for him, had been the war, and the dedicated masculine world to which command of a destroyer had confined him. Twenty years earlier, as Commander Harmer, with an escort group to run in the wild and murderous North Atlantic, and a D.S.O. to prove that he did it well, he had been a fundamentally happy man—a seaman in a seaman's tough job. Now, as senior captain of Myth Lines, his reward for good behaviour was to triple as Santa Claus, Charles Boyer, and John Paul Jones, for the benefit of three hundred super de luxe passengers, whose idea of fun was to bombard each other with paper streamers, to get intoxicated in paper hats, and to gamble on the ship's daily run at a minimum one hundred dollars a chance.
His jaundiced eye left the skyline of New York, the towering jungle which probably housed the majority of these characters, and travelled down the length of his ship. Her, at least, he loved. ... He had been master of the Alcestis for eight years; she would be his last command, and she had certainly been the best. As he looked at her, he saw more than the newly-painted funnel with its golden Myth Lines crest; more than the long row of canopied lifeboats, centred to an inch underneath their davits; more than the clean sweep of the decks and the controlled bustle of embarkation. He saw an idea, an idea which was his own creation; the idea that one could take 16,000 tons of steel, twenty miles of wiring, and a mass of complicated machinery, and turn the whole thing into a living, assessable personality.
After eight years, Harmer knew every rivet of Alcestis, but she was more than rivets, more than steel. She worked. . . . Built on the Clyde, manned predominantly from her home port of Liverpool, she was no longer in the first flush of youth; indeed, she was fourteen years old now, a little creaky here and there, a little old-fashioned in her ways. But those who sailed in her always grew fond of her, whether they were top-flight tourists or apprentice-engineers; she had that element more valuable than any speed-record or split-second schedule; she had a name that people warmed to. Everyone nodded or smiled when they heard the name Alcestis; it was shorthand for something good, something glamorous, something of quality. She had been built as a luxury "one-class" ship and she had always kept that distinction; she lost money steadily for most of the year, unable to compete with the bigger tourist ships and even less with a 6J-hour jet service and an "economy" air-fare, between London and Montreal, of S247. But she made it up, with something to spare, on this once-yearly millionaire's cruise, when she carried half her usual complement at much more than triple her usual price. She was about to make it up now.
The phrase "millionaire's cruise" was of course never used in the advertisements, where a decent British reticence spoke only of traditional courtesy and the best service in the world. But the phrase reappeared time and again in the newspapers and in conversation, and it was implicit in an Alcestis booking. If you were on board, it was presumed firstly that you were having a wonderful time, and secondly that you were loaded. The shore-prices of everything, from curry to coconut carvings, tripled accordingly. There was even a rumour, which Captain Harmer had never been able to check, that the taxi-drivers of Johannesburg, in South Africa, made an annual 930-mile trek down to Cape Town, especially to gyp the Alcestis passengers when they came ashore. Whether true or false, it was part of the legend. But that 'traditional British service', whether it concerned swinging out a lifeboat or serving twelve different kinds of canape between 6 p.m. and 7.30, was certainly true. The Captain saw to that.
There was a step in the passageway, and when he turned, it was Brotherhood again, bearing, by way of rebuke, not one but two buckets brimming with ice.
The Captain, smiling inwardly, offered an olive-branch for his earlier irritation by asking something which he knew Brotherhood would have attended to.
"Did you get those pipe-cleaners for me?"
"Yes, sir," answered Brotherhood.
"And the Gent's Relish?"
"Yes, sir."
Not only the passengers had their particular tastes and foibles; Captain Harmer had a weakness for a certain kind of English sandwich-spread with the odd name of "Gentlemen's Relish", and, being the captain, he was entitled to have it taken care of. It could hardly be said that the passengers were stinted of such individual care, either. Earlier, he had been leafing through a list of stores which had had to be topped up in New York; it was a formidable reflection of the kind of cosseting which was Alcestis's pride. There were sides of beef from Calgary; salmon from the Gaspe, soft-shell crab from San Francisco; five hundred pheasants which a sister-ship had brought out from Scotland; thirty cases of Beluga caviar; champagne, rye whisky, and Coca-Cola; 20,000 Frankfurters, 500 lb. of hamburger meat, ice-cream by the ton; an entire truck-load of South African lobster-tails; prunes, bottled snails, canned Vichyssoise, small complimentary tubes of striped toothpaste. ... It would keep them happy for a while, Harmer reflected, and then they would grow restive, and start complaining about the food; and at that point, with luck, they could go ashore and break the monotony by gorging themselves on fly-specked West Indian village cooking. Passengers. . . .
Brotherhood, the watch-dog, hearing a movement outside, walked to the doorway and peered out. Then he turned back.
"That's Mr. Barrett now, sir."
"Ask him to come in."
Jack Barrett, the chief booking agent and usually the last man from "shore-side" to call on the Captain, was an energetic, fast-talking man with an air of tremendous self-confidence. Everything about him was at the alert: the spotted bow-tie, the wiry crew-cut, the bouncing walk. Only the protuberant belly gave the lie to the picture ol taut efficiency; and he contrived to carry even this as if he had won it at cards. The Captain sometimes wondered if Barrett actually woke up looking like this, or whether he achieved it gradually between breakfast-time and his office—firming up stage by stage, tightening he muscles with some Rotarian draw-string, steeling the jaw, glinting the eye. Harmer always found him annoying to deal with: his obvious conviction that he had done every single thing himself was sometimes hard to take; but there was no doubt that Barrett knew his job, as Alcestis's perennially full passenger-lists testified.