Karl did not have much time to ingest all this, for an attendant quickly stepped up to them and asked the stoker, with a purposeful look conveying that he had no business here, what it was he wanted. Responding as softly as he had been asked, the stoker replied that he wished to speak to the chief purser. The attendant, for his part, dismissed this request with a wave of his hand but nevertheless tiptoed, giving the round table a wide berth, over to the man with the ledgers. This gentleman—as was obvious—abruptly stiffened at the attendant’s words but eventually turned to face the man who wanted to speak to him and proceeded to gesticulate furiously at the stoker to ward him off and then, as a further precaution, at the attendant too. The attendant returned to the stoker and said in a confidential manner: “Get out of this room at once!”
Upon receiving this response, the stoker looked down at Karl as if Karl were his heart to which he was silently bemoaning his sorrows. Without further thought Karl charged forward and ran straight across the room, brushing the officer’s chair on his way past; the attendant also set off running, crouching low with arms spread wide and ready to scoop, as if he were hunting some sort of vermin, but Karl was the first to reach the chief purser’s desk, which he held on to tightly in case the attendant should try to drag him away.
Naturally the whole room came immediately to life. The ship’s officer at the table sprang to his feet; the men from the harbor authority looked on calmly but attentively; the two gentlemen by the window had moved side by side; the attendant, feeling out of place now that his superiors were interested, stepped back. The stoker waited anxiously by the door for the moment when his help would be needed. The purser finally swung his armchair forcefully around to the right.
Karl, rummaging in his secret pocket, which he had no qualms about revealing to these people, pulled out his passport, which he opened and laid on the desk in lieu of further introduction. The purser seemed to consider the passport irrelevant, for he flicked it aside with two fingers, whereupon Karl, as if this formality had been concluded to his satisfaction, put it back in his pocket.
“Please allow me to say,” he then began, “that in my opinion the stoker has been done an injustice. There is a certain Schubal on board who’s on his case. The stoker has worked on many ships, all of which he can name and all of which were very satisfactorily served; he is industrious and serious about his work, and it’s difficult to comprehend why his performance would not be up to standard on this ship, where the duties are not nearly so taxing as they are, for example, on a merchant ship. Therefore it can only be slander that prevents his advancement and robs him of the reward that would otherwise assuredly be his. I have only outlined this matter in general terms, he can enumerate his specific grievances for you himself.” Karl had directed his remarks to all the gentlemen present because they were all in fact listening, and it seemed much more likely that a just man could be found among all of them than that this just man should be the purser. Karl had also been clever enough to conceal the fact that he had known the stoker only a short time. But he would have spoken more effectively if he had not been disconcerted by the red face of the man with the bamboo cane as he first viewed it from his current position.
“Every single word is true,” said the stoker before anyone asked him anything or even looked in his direction. This overzealousness would have been a gross error if the gentleman with the medals, who, it suddenly dawned on Karl, was obviously the captain, had not clearly made up his mind already to hear the stoker out. For he extended a hand and called to the stoker: “Come here!” with a voice firm enough to be hit with a hammer. Now everything hinged upon the stoker’s conduct, for Karl did not doubt the justness of his cause.