But somehow, other things pressed more heavily.
I thought of the dress shirts several times, but I seemed to have a vague sort of an idea that dress-suits wouldn't cut much ice this trip, so I dismissed dress shirts with the idea that I had one, and the gloomy outlook was such that I must have decided that one shirt would last two days—three on a pinch—and that we were due to be sunk by that time, and if we were, a dress-suit would be of secondary importance to me—anyway I got aboard with only one dress shirt.
After clearing from Bombay for Aden, along about ten o'clock in the forenoon, the day slipped by without my realizing that I had started on a twenty-two days' voyage on a crack P. & O. liner with only one dress shirt.
The careful reader who has followed me in these travel letters will have gathered in my last that dress shirts were not weighing as heavily on my mind as some other things.
It was a doughty lot of Englishmen, with a sprinkling of Frenchmen, that made up the passenger list, about a score of men. You might say it was a picked lot—sifted, as it were—English colonials going home to England for a holiday. Judges seemed to predominate—an especially good lot of fellows—and brave.
After tea that day (by the way, I've attended twenty-two "he" tea parties on this voyage, the Englishman's tea and his dress-suit are twin brothers), shortly after tea the bell rang to dress for dinner.
I had a hazy idea that the ceremony might be waived on this voyage.
I couldn't see any occasion to put on the glad rags—a handful of men, probably sailing to their doom—to get into gala attire seemed almost sacrilegious.
But every last man ducked for his cabin to get into his dress-suit.
Under the circumstances the Frenchmen wouldn't kick, no matter how they felt about it—they all ducked too.