CHAPTER XXVII
At Port Said the Rangoon was coaling. Legions of black and brown men swarmed at her from the unkempt rafts alongside. Half naked, gleaming with perspiration, chattering and laughing, they poured into her an unending stream of coal.
The passengers were escaping into the town, besieged by a motley set of rascals, masterpieces of ugliness and iniquity, with cries of “Hi, hi, Master—Tararaboomdeay—Mrs. Langtry—Hi—Charlie—Porter, sah?—Very good guide, dis fella, Master.” Nobody wanted them, nobody engaged them, but they followed yelping like a pack of curs.
Legard, walking rapidly through the streets, inquiring his way here and there, went straight to the post-office. He had received nothing at other places, but it was a formality which he continued to observe. There was nothing. He came out again, and stood in the street, biting his lips, with a sick, leaden sensation of defeat, and mechanically began to calculate the next possible place at which he might have news. He stared about him blankly. In the sprawling, ill-kept streets the hot wind, creeping unexpectedly round corners, raised little eddies of sand, and crept away again, leaving them stagnant. Jews, Greeks, Turks, infidels and heretics, lounged and loafed outside the shops, in every variety of costume; now and then, threading stolidly between them, parties of his fellow-passengers passed, their faces for the most part expressive of a continual exclamation, smothered in a continual sniff. He began to walk about, wandering idly into shops, exchanging a nod here and there with some ship acquaintance. His thoughts were bitter, and yet his attention was half distracted from them by the strange chatter and movement around him.
The sea had done him good, he no longer looked ill, only very fine-drawn. On the second day of the voyage he had given up brandy; he used to tramp about the deck by himself, or stand in the bows with Shikari, looking at the water hissing up the ship’s side.
His thoughts ran perpetually in one channel. If she wished it to be an episode, let it be; he would tear her image out of his heart, drop the past year out of his life, as if it had never been; and then—he would suddenly have a sense of degradation, a feeling as if his heart were shrinking within him, like a plant closing its leaves at the touch of something rough and foreign to it; the old pain and longing would begin again, and he would think of her as a tender, helpless child to whom he must be good, at all costs to himself—yes! to whose memory even he must be good. He sometimes wished the thing would break him up, and let him go comfortably to the dogs, and he felt exasperation because he somehow knew that it would not.
He remained gently unapproachable to people on board, but he made friends with some children, one of whom, a dark-eyed, brown-faced child, reminded him in a mysterious way of Jocelyn. She was not in the least like her, except that she had the same tiny dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. She left the ship, however, at Brindisi, and he gave her his watch, to which she had taken a fancy.
He had always loved the sea, and now she served him; her many moods gave him something outside himself to think about. The days seemed very long, but all the time, without knowing it, he got stronger and calmer. The great sea is a wonderful soother of sorrowing. For the time that she takes a man into her keeping, he is not torn, but rather rocked by sorrow, with a gentle heaving as of many waters. She brings not forgetfulness, but sympathy. So Giles found....
When he had strolled aimlessly about the streets for some time, he went into an hotel, and, sitting down, waited till it should please an unwilling providence to give him lunch. Many of his fellow-passengers were in the room, the waiters ran distractedly here and there, and nothing seemed to result. That is a peculiarity of Port Said when ships are in.
Two men sitting at a table near him, but hidden by a column, began to talk.