‘I wonder how he gets up a ship’s side-ladder,’ said the man in tweeds; and poor Jermyn, who was a mere North Sea pilot without official status or recognition of any sort, pilot only by courtesy, groaned:

‘He makes eight hundred a year.’

‘Are you a sailor?’ I asked the stranger, who had come back to his position on the rug.

‘I used to be till a couple of years ago, when I got married. I even went to sea first in that very ship we were speaking of when you came in.’

‘What ship?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘I never heard you mention a ship.’

‘I’ve just told you her name, my dear sir,’ he replied. ‘The Apse Family. Surely you’ve heard of the great firm of Apse & Sons, shipping owners. They had a pretty big fleet. There was the Lucy Apse and the Harold Apse, and Anne, John, Malcolm, Clara, Juliet, and so on—no end of Apses. Every brother, sister, aunt, cousin, wife—and grandmother, too, for all I know—of the firm had a ship named after them. Good, solid, old-fashioned lot they were, too, built to carry and to last. None of your newfangled labour-saving appliances in them, but plenty of men and plenty of good salt beef and hardtack^* put aboard—and off you go to fight your way out and home again.’

Old Jermyn made a sound of approval which sounded like a groan of pain. Those were the ships for him. He pointed out in doleful tones that you couldn’t say to labour-saving appliances, ‘Jump lively now, my hearties.’ No labour-saving appliance would go aloft on a dirty night, with the sands under your lee.^*

‘No,’ assented the stranger, with a wink at me. ‘The Apses didn’t believe in them, either, apparently. They treated their people well—as people don’t get treated nowadays—and they were awfully proud of their ships. Nothing ever happened to them. This last one, the Apse Family, was to be like the others, only she was to be still stronger, still safer, still more roomy and comfortable. I believe they meant her to last forever. They had her built composite—iron, teak-wood, and greenheart, and her scantling^* was something fabulous. If ever an order was given for a ship in a spirit of pride! Everything of the best. The commodore-captain^* of the employ was to command her, and they planned the accommodation for him like a house on shore under a big tall poop^* that went nearly to the mainmast. No wonder Mrs Colchester wouldn’t let the old man give her up. Why, it was the best home she ever had in all her married days. Ah! she had nerve, that woman.

‘The fuss that was made while the ship was building! “Let’s have this a little stronger, and that a little heavier, and hadn’t that other thing better be changed for something a little thicker?” The builders entered into the spirit of the thing, and there she was, growing into the clumsiest, heaviest ship of her size, right before all their eyes, without anybody getting aware of it, somehow. She was to be 2,000 tons register, or a little over; no less on any account. But see what happens. When they came to measure her, she turned out 1,999 tons and a fraction, and no more. General consternation! And they say old Mr Apse was so annoyed that he took to his bed and died. The old gentleman had retired from active business twenty-five years before, and was ninety-six at the time, if a day, so his death wasn’t perhaps so surprising. Still, Mr Lucian Apse was convinced that his father would have lived to a hundred. So we may put him at the head of the list. Next comes the poor devil of a shipwright that brute caught and squashed as she went off the ways. They called it the launch of a ship, but I’ve heard people say that, from the wailing and yelling and scrambling out of the way, it was more like letting a devil loose upon the river. She snapped all the checks like pack-thread, and went for her own tugs in attendance like a fury. Before anybody could see what she was up to, she sent one to the bottom, and laid up another for three months’ repairs. One of her cables parted, and then, suddenly—you couldn’t tell why—she let herself be brought up with the other as quiet as a lamb.

‘That’s how she was. You could never be sure what she would be up to next. There are ships difficult to handle, but generally you can depend on them behaving rationally. But with that ship, whatever you