Magnus laughed.
“Your American inheritance; there it is!”
“Damned if I can listen to any more of that!”
I rose abruptly, kicking the rugs from my legs, and went down the deck. I am, I suppose, too young not to resent unwelcome arguments with a hot intolerance. Socialism had meant to me little more than a name, which I rejected on faith as something akin to anarchy. The voice of the immigrant, speaking for my America, roused in me a blind rebellion. The more so that, while he had cut across every traditional instinct, I was at a loss in the poverty of my mental experience to answer the coldly stated propositions which, despite my will, convinced me of some measure of their truth. Yet what had he done but state in his own words thoughts which had been in my own mind; yes, even those opinions which had been surging uppermost,—that, in the coming test of a changed democracy, my generation had let slip the leadership that was its by inherited responsibility. I could say this to myself, yet I could not brook it from another. Why? Perhaps Mr. Brinsmade was right, and in the conflicts of man to man there is no antagonism so deep-rooted, so unreasoning, so obedient to inherited repulsions, as that antagonism which in the field of ideas has led men to persecute, to torture and to stamp out one another with the fury of unreasoning beasts.
Of this reflection I was not then conscious. I felt only the resentment of the man of action for the man of thought. It was not the ideas, but the ideas in the mouth of Peter Magnus which aroused my fury. I remember standing a long time forward, sheltering myself behind a bulging canvas which slapped against its chains with windy explosions, trying to shake off my ill-humor, until the cold cut of the spray which hissed over the decks brought back some equanimity.
IV
I went inside. The sofas in the ladies’ saloon had been turned into beds. Most of the women had already put on their life preservers and were surrounded by impossible mounds of baggage. An old man was methodically deploying a pack of cards at a table. A woman, with a child on her shoulder, was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Outside on the landing two returning sailors and a nursemaid were whispering with sudden outbursts of mirth,—Americans all, Yankee, Westerner, Scandinavian, Latin and Asiatic.
I went upstairs and into the foul thickness of the smoking room, where the shock of my entrance set the layers of gray fumes to twisting and coiling about the dim lamps. Groups had already formed at the corner tables; Hungerford and the younger men, a solemn audience about a chess match; another group near me—officers of two torpedoed freighters—were swapping yarns as they played.
“Got ours out of Genoa, just after dawn.”