“Oh, nothing out of the way, sir.”
The jolly passenger, who knew the sea and so was always loud and hearty with the quartermasters, who saw to it that everybody had an interest in the sweepstake for the day’s run, and pulled the ladies’ chairs briskly about for them, and fed the gramophone, met him in the corridor as he was going to the bathroom. The jolly man danced a little greeting in his dressing-gown. “Dirty work last night,” said the dancer, beaming. “Thought that even I might be a bit sick early this morning. Does one good, though, to feel the sea. The old thing actually rolled. Didn’t know she could.”
The breakfast bugle brought the passengers assembling about the head of the saloon companion. There were some jokes about breakfast. The ladies were greeted with mock surprise. They were asked whether they were quite sure they wanted any. It was better to go easy after a wild night. That was the jolly man’s voice, followed by his own laughter, the first to follow his own jokes.
The lady from Hongkong complained at breakfast that her steward had forgotten to close her port window last night. “I had to get up and shut it myself. Quite suddenly the wind was terrible, and do you know, my window was open. I might have got an awful chill. So careless. Now, on the P. & O.—” She had traveled widely, the lady from Hongkong, by all the principal lines, and she would never travel by this one any more, you know. Didn’t the bacon taste the least bit queer? Did he think there was any advantage to be got out of the French exchange? If so, she would leave the ship at Marseilles and stay in the Riviera. Steward, some more bacon, well done! “Somebody told me,” she went on, “that the ship lurched frightfully once last night. I always said it would, if ever it met really bad weather.”
He trusted she would take no harm from the accident of the open window, and found himself speculating, while listening politely but without attention to her complaining voice, whether there was not a more profound difference between some human creatures, say between a man like Amiel and the lady from Hongkong, than there was between himself and one of the lower animals. The passengers at the captain’s table laughed aloud at a joke secret to themselves. The captain was not with them that morning. One of the men there turned and called over to the next table: “I say, Mrs. Taft here says she was just climbing out to shut her window when the ship suddenly rolled last night, and her husband says—”
“Hadn’t you better let him say it?” asked the young botanist from Java.
“There!” exclaimed the lady beside him. “Now we shan’t hear it. It’s too bad of you.”
The sun was warm on the promenade deck. Two children, while a sad ayah watched them, were boisterous with cigarette tins in which rattled a few coins.
The convalescent naval surgeon regarded the noisy children with malignity and exclaimed: “Not because I hate them, but because I’m sure their father has put spurious coins in those boxes, I’d like to chuck ’em both overboard. It doesn’t sound like good money.”