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By Root 14251 0

low con-fidential tone. “Now the thing about Toby that characterized him was a superb effrontery, the fruit of perfect breeding! I told you his father was an M.P.? No? Funny, I thought I mentioned it in passing. Yes, he was very highly placed, you might say. But Toby never boasted of it. In fact, and this shows you, he actually asked me to treat the matter with discretion and not mention it to his ship-mates. He didn’t want any favours, he said. He didn’t want people sucking up to him neither, just because his father was an M.P. He wanted to go through life incognito, he said, and make his own career by hard work. Mind you, he was almost continuously in trouble with the upper deck. It was his religious convictions more than anything, I think. He had a remorseless taste for the cloth did old Toby. He was vivid. The only career he wanted was to be a sky-pilot. But somehow he couldn’t get himself ordained. They said he drank too much. But he said it was because his vocation was so strong that it pushed him to excesses. If only they’d ordain him, he said, everything would be all right. He’d come right off the drink. He told me this many a time when he was on the Yok ohama run. When he was drunk he was always trying to hold services in Number One hold. Naturally people complained and at Goa the captain made a bishop come aboard to reason with him. It was no go. ‘Scurvy’ he used to say to me, ‘Scurvy, I shall die a martyr to my vocation, that’s what.’ But there’s nothing in life like determination. Toby had plenty of it. And I wasn’t at all sur-prised one day, after many years, to see him come ashore ordained.

Just how he’d squeezed into the Church he would never tell. But one of his mates said that he got a slightly tainted Chinese Catholic bishop to ordain him on the sly in Hong Kong. Once the articles were all signed, sealed and wrapped up there was nothing anyone could do, so the Church had to put a good face on it, taint and all. After that he became a holy terror, holding services everywhere and distributing cigarette cards of the saints. The ship he was serving on got fed up and paid him off. They framed him up; said he had been seen going ashore carrying a lady’s handbag!

Toby denied it and said it was something religious, a chasuble or something that they mistook for a handbag. Anyway he turned up on a passenger-ship next carrying pilgrims. He said that at last he had fulfilled himself. Services all day long in ‘A’ Lounge, and no one to hinder the word of the Lord. But I noticed with alarm that he was drinking more heavily than before and he had a funny cracked sort of laugh. It wasn’t the old Toby. I wasn’t surprised to hear he had been in trouble again. Apparently he had been suspected of being drunk on duty and of having made an un-flattering reference to a bishop’s posterior. Now this shows his superb cleverness, for when he came up for court martial he had the perfect answer ready. I don’t quite know how they do court martials in the Church, but I suppose this pilgrim boat was full of bishops or something and they did it drum-head fashion in ‘A’

Lounge. But Toby was too fast for them with his effrontery. There’s nothing like breeding to make you quick at answering. His defence was that if anyone had heard him breathing heavily at Mass it was his asthma; and secondly he hadn’t never mentioned any-one’s posterior. He had talked about a bishop’s fox terrier! Isn’t it dazzling? It was the smartest thing he ever did, old Toby, though I’ve never known him at a loss for a clever answer. Well, the bishops were so staggered that they let him off with a caution and a thousand Ave Marias as a penance. This was pretty easy for Toby; in fact it was no trouble at all because he’d bought a little Chinese prayer-wheel which Budgie had fixed up to say Ave Marias for him. It was a simple little device, brilliantly adapted to the times as you might say. One revolution was an Ave Maria or fifty beads. It simplified prayer, he said; in fact one could go on praying without thinking. Later someone told on him and it was confiscated