DOCTOR AT SEA полностью

Whimble was the most introverted and anxious member of the Lotus's company; and he had a strict rule on board-he never drank. When he came to my cabin early in the voyage and I recalled that the social formula of my new life demanded I offered him a peg, he grasped his abdomen with a sigh of horror.

'Not a drop, Doctor!' he declared. 'Never touch a dram of it!'

'What, not at all?' Finding a teetotaller in the Lotus was like running into a sober Scot on Burns night.

'Not for twenty years! It's my liver, Doctor.' He warily indicated the region of his umbilicus. 'I had a real bad turn in Cardiff. Five operations and left to die three times. I need say no more to you, need I, Doctor?'

'No, no more at all.'

'So I said to myself, "Walter," I said, "be a man! Not another drink you're going to have till your dying day!" And not a drop's soiled my lips since. Will-power, Doctor, that's what it is. I used to do Pelmanism a bit when I was younger.'

When I passed this information to Hornbeam, illuminated with admiration, he pushed his cap back on his head and roared with laughter.

'He's right in a way, Doc,' he said. 'You'll never see him with a glass in his hand. He keep it in his locker, mostly. Or his hot-water can, or under the bunk. He gets a bottle a day easy-buckshee, of course. Pinches it from the bond-room and fiddles the bar accounts so it's poor beggars like you and me that have to pay for it in the end.'

'He cooks the books, does he?' I said in surprise. 'I'd have thought he was too timid to be dishonest.'

'Don't you believe it. There isn't a chief steward afloat who wouldn't flog the funnel if he thought he could get away with it.'

I observed Whimble fairly closely after that. Once Hornbeam had given me the diagnosis it was simple to pick out the symptoms. In the early morning, when he did his round of the galley and the stores, he was a pale and nervous man who flattened himself against the bulkhead when he glimpsed Captain Hogg's threatening silhouette at the other end of the alleyway. At nine he paid his daily visit to the little bond-room below the water-line, and came up with the ship's supply of liquor. After that he went to his cabin to clean his teeth. He reappeared slightly flushed, and took his place in the inspection procession with confidence. Then he cleaned his teeth again. He found it necessary to clean his teeth before dinner, at teatime, and on several occasions during the evening. By ten at night, when he prepared the Captain's sandwiches in the pantry, his spectacles were awry and he sang snatches of bawdy songs as he slapped on the mustard with a flourish. The end of his day was marked shortly afterwards by the flash of a bottle sailing out of his porthole, and the light splash as it hit the water and joined the others that marked, at neatly regular intervals, the progress of the Chief Steward round the world.

To restore this and other profitable discrepancies, Whimble was forced to spend several hours a day sitting in his tiny office with the store-books and a ready-reckoner, biting his pen and working out worried sums on a scrap of paper.

'Father's very hard, very hard!' he explained to me one day. 'Always chasing me up over the catering. And the Company looks at every grain of rice they give you. What d'you think they'd do if I was a pound of butter out at the end of the voyage?' He indicated the sea with his thumb. 'It would be "Out, Walter, me boy," and no mistake. I don't know how I make ends meet sometimes, really I don't.'

His problem was not so much making ends meet but arranging them to do so with a worthwhile overlap. The drawers under his bunk were filled with tins of ham, peaches, lard, tongue, and pineapple, which were ready to be slipped over the side to a furtive rowing-boat our first night in port. Tins of cigarettes were stacked behind his books in the office, and two or three bottles of whisky were locked in the glass locker with the ostentatious label FOR ENTERTAINMENT OF CUSTOMS. 'If you're wanting any medical stores on the coast, Doc,' he confided in me when I dressed a cut on his hand one evening, 'let me have the list and we'll split the comish fifty-fifty.'

'Very kind of you, I'm sure.'

'Of course, there won't be much in it. There isn't much of anything in this hooker. In a big passenger job that's different. The Purser gets his comish on everything down to the bell-boy's tips. Why, the barman in one of those makes more than the Old Man.' He looked gratefully at his fresh bandage. 'If you want a few bottles of Scotch to flog the other end it might be arranged,' he added generously. 'I can get it ashore for you. Trust Walter. Never touch a drop of it myself, mind you.'