When he woke it was some twenty hours later, for the surgeon had bound up his face and put stitches into a number of lacerations in his body, and had given him cocaine to make him sleep. The sloop was anchoring down by the flour mills, and looking out through his port-hole Mr. Spokesly could see the gardens of the White Tower of Saloniki. CHAPTER VIII Mr. Spokesly sat at a little distance from the large table in the Transport Office and listened to the gentleman with four rings of gold lace on his sleeve. It was a lofty and desolate place in the yellow stucco building opposite the dock entrance. The transport officer was a naval captain; with a beard, a brisk decisive manner, and a very foul briar pipe. He was explaining that they needed a third mate for a ship going to Basra and Mr. Spokesly would just do for the job if he would waive his right to a passage home and go to Port Said instead. It was at this point that Mr. Spokesly, rather shaky still from his immersion and extensively decorated with pieces of plaster, took a hand. "No," he said and kept his gaze on the floor. "Why not?" demanded the captain, very much astonished. "No reason's far as I know. But I'm not going third mate of anything, anywhere, any more. That's that." "Well, of course, we can't _force_ you to go, you know." "I know you can't." "But we shall really have to draw the attention of the owners to the fact that you refused to go." "That's all right. But I'm not going. I'll go home if you don't mind. Or if I can get a job here I take it my articles finished with the _Tanganyika_." "No doubt, no doubt. But what could you get here?" "I don't know what I could do. But I'd shine shoes on the steps out there before I went third mate...." "There's no need to go back to the question if you refuse to volunteer." Mr. Spokesly stood up. He was in a rage. Or rather he was resuming the rage which had assailed him when the _Tanganyika_ was going down and which had been suspended while he made good his claim on life. The smug way in which this bearded stranger disposed of him was intolerable. Mr. Spokesly knew this man would never dream of sending one of his own caste to a third mate's job on a Persian Gulf coaster with the hot season coming on. He knew that he himself, being a merchant seaman, was regarded by all these brass-bound people as an inferior, a shell-back, a lob-scouser, and no dire need would ever make them accept him as one of themselves. And he had a glimpse, in his rage, of another truth, for one often sees these things in flashes of anger. He just caught sight of the fact that these people, with their closely guarded privileges and esoteric codes, were fighting much more for their class than for England, that an England democratized and ravished of her class system would be to them a worse place than an England defeated by a class-conscious enemy. But the immediate grievance was personal. He stood up.