“Shouldn’t dream of risking it, old dear,” replied John Fanshawe pleasantly, “not on your venerable coffee-grinder anyhow—­not until she gets a navigator.”  He kissed his nicotined fingers to the exploding Hollander and strolled off down the wharf, whistling “Nun trink ich Schnapps.”

Arrived in the European quarter he smoothed what creases he could out of his sole suit of drills, whitened his soggy topee and frayed canvas shoes with a piece of chalk purloined from a billiard saloon, bluffed a drink out of an inebriated ship’s engineer and snatched a free lunch on the strength of it.  Thus fortified he visited the British Consul, and by means of somewhat soiled letters proved that he really was a Dawnay-Devenish of the Dorset Dawnay-Devenishes (who should be in no way confused with the Devenish-Dawnays of Chipping-Banbury or the Devenishe d’Awnay-Dawnays of Upper Tooting; the Dorset branch alone possessing the privilege, granted by letters patent of ETHELRED the Unready, of drinking the King’s bathwater every Maunday Tuesday of Leap Year).

Awed by the name—­was there not a Dawnay-Devenish occupying a plump armchair in the Colonial Office at the time?—­the Consul parted with five hundred dollars (Mex.).  Next time the yield was not so satisfactory, not by two hundred and fifty dollars.  At the end of a month, the Consul having proved a broken reed only good for five-dollar touches at considerable intervals, it behoved our hero to seek some fresh source of income.  He cast up-river in search of it and disappeared from civilised ken for seven merciful years.

In June, 1914, he beat back into port in a fancifully decorated junk, minus one ear and two fingers, but plus a cargo of jingling genuine money.  He hired the bridal suite in the leading hotel, got hold of a fleet of motor cars and a host of boon companions, lived on a diet of champagne cocktails and splashed himself about with the carefree abandon of a dancing dervish.

By the middle of July he was “on the beach” again and once more began to haunt the Consular office babbling of his influential relations and his “temporary embarrassment.”

When war broke out he had thrown up the sponge altogether and “gone yellow”; was living from hand to mouth among the Chinese.  At the end of August a ship touched at that Far Eastern port, picking up volunteers for the Western Front.  The port contributed a goodly number, but there remained one berth vacant.  The long-suffering Consul had a stroke of inspiration.  Here was a means of at once swelling the man-power of his country and ridding himself of a pestilent ne’er-do-well.  His boys, searching far and wide, discovered John Fanshawe in the back premises of a Malay go-down, oblivious to all things, and bore him inanimate aboard ship.

In this manner did our hero answer The Call.