must go to the Master Attendant. I can't possibly listen to you. Captain
Elliot is the man you want to see. This way, this way." He jumped
up, ran round that long counter, pulled, shoved: the other let him,
surprised but obedient at first, and only at the door of the private
office some sort of animal instinct made him hang back and snort like
a frightened bullock. "Look here! what's up? Let go! Look here!" Archie
flung open the door without knocking. "The master of the Patna, sir,"
he shouts. "Go in, captain." He saw the old man lift his head from some
writing so sharp that his nose-nippers fell off, banged the door to, and
fled to his desk, where he had some papers waiting for his signature:
but he says the row that burst out in there was so awful that he
couldn't collect his senses sufficiently to remember the spelling of
his own name. Archie's the most sensitive shipping-master in the two
hemispheres. He declares he felt as though he had thrown a man to a
hungry lion. No doubt the noise was great. I heard it down below, and I
have every reason to believe it was heard clear across the Esplanade as
far as the band-stand. Old father Elliot had a great stock of words and
could shout--and didn't mind who he shouted at either. He would have
shouted at the Viceroy himself. As he used to tell me: "I am as high as
I can get; my pension is safe. I've a few pounds laid by, and if they
don't like my notions of duty I would just as soon go home as not. I am
an old man, and I have always spoken my mind. All I care for now is to
see my girls married before I die." He was a little crazy on that
point. His three daughters were awfully nice, though they resembled him
amazingly, and on the mornings he woke up with a gloomy view of their
matrimonial prospects the office would read it in his eye and tremble,
because, they said, he was sure to have somebody for breakfast. However,
that morning he did not eat the renegade, but, if I may be allowed to
carry on the metaphor, chewed him up very small, so to speak, and--ah!
ejected him again.