CHAPTER VI
HSIEN SGAM
Nightfall found the Manchester's prow bearing into a thin mist. The rain had slackened to a fine diamond-drizzle; lightning no longer wrote livid ideographs upon the sky, but flashed far away in faded flares.
Trent did not see Dana Charteris at dinner, as he expected. "Dummkopf Englischer"—thus he was catalogued by a German merchant from Celebes who sat at the same table in the dining-salon and succeeded in drawing only monosyllables from him. The gentleman from Celebes was hot, damp and irritable, and he found fuel for his ill-humor in the Englishman who sat beside him and ate mangosteens with the air of one who liked such beastly heathen food.
After the meal Trent sought the smoking-room with a volume of lyrics, much to the disgust of his German dinner-companion, who, in passing, read, "Poems of Alan Seeger" over his shoulder. But Trent could not fix his attention upon the reading matter, and he sat with the book in one hand, a lighted cheroot in the other, and his interest nowhere in particular. He was suffering the first anæsthetizing effects of a drowsy boredom.
"... You'll have to go higher than that if you want to see me!" rasped a voice close by, and there followed a click of chips, a laugh.
Clouds of grayish smoke, fanned into fantastic shapes by electric punkas, floated on dead atmosphere, personifying the languor that had suddenly quartered in Trent. A white-clad deck-steward slid through the vaporous whorls, serving frosty glasses of arrica, or whiskey and soda to those less favorably inclined toward exotic liquors.
"... But surely, my friend, you would resent it if we sent missionaries to your country," a voice not far behind him was saying; a quiet voice that separated itself from the drone of conversation, a voice with a peculiar, alien note that caused Trent to wonder, after he heard it, why it had not penetrated to him before. "Why, imagine the indignation of your—what do you call them, New Yorkers?—if Buddhist priests established a mission in that vast and bewildering city; if they so presumed as to try to press their creed upon those of another religion."
Trent was possessed of a desire to turn; he merely sat expelling smoke from his nostrils, listening without consciousness of eavesdropping.