“Yarr!” proclaimed the horrible voice outside. “Ohowgh! Yarr!”
“I understand,” said the Pressman with an effort, “that the elephant emanated from the teeming brain of Mr. Murchison. But the leopard—there is a leopard, I surmise, if hearing goes for evidence?”
The Captain’s excellent teeth showed under his gray mustache. “That noise, you mean?” he exclaimed.... “Oh, that’s one of our electric air-pumps, for forcing air into the lower-deck storage chambers, you know. She’s out of gear, and lets us know it in that way. Must have her seen to at New York. Take a drink, won’t you? Come, gentlemen, order what you please.”
“Whisky, square,” murmured the Pressman, as the long, smooth glide of the liner was checked, the engines throbbed and stopped, and the dull roar of the docks pressed upon listening ears. He drank, and as the fluid traversed the usual channel, his eye grew brighter.... “Say, Captain,” he asked, “do you know where your Second Officer was raised?”
“Murchison comes, I believe, from Yorkshire,” said the Captain. “Hey, Murchison, isn’t that the place?”
“I am not acquainted with the geology of Yorkshire,” observed the Pressman, as he passed the Second Officer on his way to the smoke-room; “but the soil grows good liars! So long!”
GEMINI
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF CHOICE
To Captain Galahad Ranking, grilling over his Musketry-Instructorship at Hounslow one arid July, came a square lilac envelope, addressed in a sprawling hand, with plenty of violet ink. The missive smelt of Rhine violets. It bore a monogram, the initials “L. K.” fantastically intertwined, and was, in fact, an invitation from his affectionate cousin Laura, dated from a pleasant country mansion situate amid green lawns and blushing rose-gardens on the Werkshire reaches of the Thames.
Laura was not Galahad’s cousin by blood, but by marriage. Laura was the still young and attractive widow of Thomson Kingdom, once a stout man on the Stock Exchange, remarkable for a head of very upright gray hair and a startling taste in printed linen. Pigs and peaches were his pet hobbies, and the apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied was induced by a weakness in “the City” caused by unprecedentedly heavy selling-orders from a nervous north-eastern European capital, about the time of the entente cordiale. So the bloom was barely off Laura’s crêpe, and the new black gloves purchased by Galahad to grace his kinsman’s obsequies had not done duty at another funeral. The scrawly postscript to her letter said: “I want to consult you very particularly, in the most absolute confidence, upon a matter affecting my whole future.”
Galahad Ranking, Junior Captain, Fourth Battalion Royal Deershire Regiment, wrinkled up his freckled little countenance into queer puckers, and rubbed his bristly cinnamon-colored hair, already getting thin on the summit of his skull, as he puzzled the brain within that receptacle as to the possible meaning of Laura’s impassioned appeal. He was a small man, whose demure and spinster-like demeanor led new acquaintances to ask him plumply how on earth he had managed to get his D.S.O.