“It is not of the physical but of the mental that I speak!” he interrupted, a bit testily. “It is an undeserved compliment to the negro and an unjust insult to the white to claim that a man having an equal amount of both strains is more black than white, but if the white strain is Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, then he is both white and black, and all of each, for they will mix no more than oil and water.”
He was silent again, and I waited, for I knew that he would presently back his theory by an illustration.
“You know Margherita?” I asked, presently, to help him get under way.
“Better than is necessary,” he replied, and was silent again. The swift tropic twilight had almost faded; the slopes of the mountains were somber with mysterious shadows; a huge cumulus cloud, still crimson about its edges, was stranded on the highest peaks, and above it a dainty crescent moon was swiftly growing brighter.
“Let us go aft,” muttered Leyden. “These cattle make too much noise!”
He was quite right, for that part of the deck was infested by our fellow-passengers; the Venezuelans were chattering like a band of apes; naked babies lived and moved and had their unclean little beings where they listed; near us a British engineer was arguing in Spanish with a German coffee planter, and behind him an Austrian Jew who had been buying pearls in Margherita was showing his wares to the wife of a Dutch officer returning to Curaçao from a visit to relatives in Surinam, and the two were chattering away in voluble French. Our captain, a fine specimen of a Hollander, was playing chess with an Italian, and the latter was winning, having no ship on the coast and his brain unfilled with plans regarding the securing of a cargo for Havre or Amsterdam. Through the crowd came a stolid Dutch quartermaster, picking his way along the deck to read the taffrail-log, which he did, and returned oblivious to all but the number in his head, as I could see from the moving of his lips as he muttered it over to himself.
Leyden led the way aft to the grating beside the hand steering-gear—the place where we usually held our sessions of swapping experiences. I drew out a fresh cigar and the German lit his big porcelain pipe, an apparatus especially adapted to the needs of the raconteur, as one could take a puff or two and then bank the fire until the next stopping-place.
“It was several years ago,” he began. “I had been sent up the Orinoco by an American university, a new one in the Middle West, to which some sausage-maker had given a fortune to build and stock a museum of natural history. The president of the university sent for me; I can never sufficiently admire the capability of this young man for his position. He took me into the museum and showed me at least a kilometer of empty shelves.
“‘This place must be chock-a-block by commencement time,’ said he. ‘I have four men at work in North America, two in South America, four in Europe——’ and so on, all over the face of the earth. ‘I wish you to take charge of South America, north of the Amazon. There is a man in the Amazon Valley chasing up the fish and reptiles, and one in Peru, out for mammals. You are to get after the birds and insects; of course, if you should happen to run across anything rare that’s not in your line just gather it in, anyway.’ He glanced at some typewritten memoranda. ‘That ought to give us an A1 stock of South American goods, and before we get through if we don’t have Putney University bluffed off the boards I’ll go to h——’”
Leyden paused, and I heard his china stove splutter as he laughed softly.