“That’s what. But I’ll trim their dirty hides. I’ll trim ’em. Mr. Pathurst, this voyage ain’t started yet, and this old stiff’s a long way from his last legs. I’ll give them a run for their money. Why, I’ve buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And I’ll bury some of them that think me an old stiff.”
He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.
“Mr. Pathurst, I’ve heard you’re a writing man. And when they told me at the agents’ you were going along passenger, I made a point of going to see your play. Now I’m not saying anything about that play, one way or the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you’ll get stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell’s going to pop, believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that’ll do a lot of the poppin’. Some several and plenty’s going to learn who’s an old stiff.”
CHAPTER XV.
How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is delicious—thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr. Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then there was Wada. But no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate the problem of woman. It is just such an incident among a million others that keeps the thinker’s gaze fixed on woman. They truly are the mothers and the conservers of the race.
Rail as I will at Miss West’s red-blood complacency of life, yet I must bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible, hard-headed, a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must confess I am most grateful that she is along. Had she not been on the Elsinore, by this time I should have been so overwrought from lack of sleep that I would be biting my veins and howling—as mad a hatter as any of our cargo of mad hatters. And so we come to it—the everlasting mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her. But, regarding Miss West, I do entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she is not a suffragette. That would be too much.
Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a bit fluttery this morning, in his reserved, controlled way, when he regretted the plague of vermin I had encountered in my rooms. It seems he has a keen sense of hospitality, and that he is my host on the Elsinore, and that, although he is oblivious of the existence of the crew, he is not oblivious of my comfort. By his few expressions of regret it appears that he cannot forgive himself for his careless acceptance of the erroneous diagnosis of my affliction. Yes; Captain West is a real human man. Is he not the father of the slender-faced, strapping-bodied Miss West?
“Thank goodness that’s settled,” was Miss West’s exclamation this morning, when we met on the poop and after I had told her how gloriously I had slept.
And then, that nightmare episode dismissed because, forsooth, for all practical purposes—it was settled, she next said:
“Come on and see the chickens.”