Part 16

“And my husband’ll sit still drinking tea while I’m given the lie,” said Mrs. Fillson, bending an indignant look upon the mate.

“If you think I’m going to share the state-room with that woman, George, you’re mistaken,” said Mrs. Bunnett in a terrible voice. “I’d sooner sleep on a doorstep.”

“And I’d sooner sleep on the scraper,” said Mrs. Fillson, regarding her foe’s scanty proportions.

“Very well, me an’ the mate’ll sleep there,” said the skipper wearily. “You can have the mate’s bunk and Mrs. Fillson can have the locker. You don’t mind, George?”

“Oh, George don’t mind,” said Mrs. Bunnett mimickingly; “anything’ll do for George. If you’d got the spirit of a man, you wouldn’t let me be insulted like this.”

“And if you’d got the spirit of a man,” said Mrs. Fillson, turning on her husband, “you wouldn’t let them talk to me like this. You never stick up for me.”

She flounced up on deck where Mrs. Bunnett, after a vain attempt to finish her tea, shortly followed her. The two men continued their meal for some time in silence.

“We’ll have to ’ave a quarrel just to oblige them, George,” said the skipper at length, as he put down his cup. “Nothing else’ll satisfy ’em.”

“It couldn’t be done,” said the mate, reaching over and clapping him on the back.

“Just pretend, I mean,” said the other.

“It couldn’t be done proper,” said the mate; “they’d see through it. We’ve sailed together five years now, an’ never ’ad what I could call a really nasty word.”

“Well, if you can think o’ anything,” said the skipper, “say so. This sort o’ thing is worrying.”

“See how we get on at breakfast,” said the mate, as he lit his pipe. “If that’s as bad as this, we’ll have a bit of a row to please ’em.”

Breakfast next morning was, if anything, worse, each lady directly inciting her lord to acts of open hostility. In this they were unsuccessful, but in the course of the morning the husbands arranged matters to their own satisfaction, and at the next meal the storm broke with violence.

“I don’t wish to complain or hurt anybody’s feelings,” said the skipper, after a side-wink at the mate, “but if you could eat your wittles with a little less noise, George, I’d take it as a favour.”

“Would you?” said the mate, as his wife stiffened suddenly in her seat. “Oh!”

Both belligerents, eyeing each other ferociously, tried hard to think of further insults.

“Like a pig,” continued the skipper grumblingly.

The mate hesitated so long for a crushing rejoinder that his wife lost all patience and rose to her feet crimson with wrath.

“How dare you talk to my husband like that?” she demanded fiercely. “George, come up on deck this instant!”

“I don’t mind what he says,” said the mate, who had only just begun his dinner.

“You come away at once,” said his wife, pushing his plate from him.

The mate got up with a sigh, and, meeting the look of horror-stricken commiseration in his captain’s eye, returned it with one of impotent rage.

“Use a larger knife, cap’n,” he said savagely. “You’ll swallow that little ’un one of these days.”

The skipper, with the weapon in question gripped in his fist, turned round and stared at him in petrified amazement, “If I wasn’t the cap’n o’ this ship, George,” he said huskily, “an’ bound to set a good example to the men, I’d whop you for them words.”

“It’s all for your good, Captain Bunnett,” said Mrs. Fillson mincingly. “There was a poor old workhouse man I used to give a penny to sometimes, who would eat with his knife, and he choked himself with it.”

“Ay, he did that, and he hadn’t got a mouth half the size o’ yours,” said the mate warningly.

“Cap’n or no cap’n, crew or no crew,” said the skipper in a suffocating voice, “I can’t stand this. Come up on deck, George, and repeat them words.”