I asked him how he spent his time, and he said, “mostly smokin’ an’ thinkin’ about Bill, an’ them sirenes, an’ their little black an’ tan families, ’way off down there in the South Pacific.”
“THINKIN’ ABOUT BILL AN’ THEM SIRENES”
He hoped that Bill would change his mind and come back to a decent country. Perhaps Bill might find him here, and if he did the extra bunk would come in handy. He said that somehow he didn’t feel so lonesome with the other bunk above him, and, at night, he often thought that maybe Bill was in it.
His idea of what constitutes companionship may appear a little crude to some of us, but after all it is our point of view that makes us happy or unhappy in this world.
I asked him if he thought Bill would be able to find him if he ever tried to, and he replied, “never you mind—you leave that to Bill. He’s a wonder.”
I regretted that he did not tell me all about what happened to Bill after he had left him on the island. This would not have been at all impossible if he had taken up the subject with the same compositional ability that he applied to the rest of his narrative.
His conversational charms were somewhat marred by a slight impediment in his speech, which he said had been acquired in trying to pronounce the names of all the foreign parts he had visited. Now that he had got settled down the impediment was becoming much less troublesome.
His brawny arms and chest were tattooed with fantastic oriental designs—fiery-mouthed dragons, coiling snakes in blue and red, and rising suns—which he said had been “put on by a Chink” when he was ashore for three weeks in Hong Kong. The intricacy and elaborateness of the work indicated that a large part of the three weeks must have been spent with the tattoo expert, for he had absorbed much more of Chinese art in the short time he had been in contact with it than most modern scholars do in a lifetime.
In answer to a delicate allusion to his missing eye, he declared that it had been blown out in a gale somewhere off the coast of Japan. The terrible winds had prevailed for nearly two weeks, and his shipmate, Bill Saunders, had lost all of his clothes during the blow. The eye had gone to leeward and was never recovered. He said it was glass anyway, and he never thought much of it. How the original eye had been lost he did not explain. He wore what he called a “hatch” over the place where the eye ought to be, and said that “as long as there was nothin’ goin’ out,” he “didn’t want nothin’ comin’ in.”