On the way cabinward from this fascinating presence, I was invited into a crap game on the salle à manger floor. The gentleman with the dice tossed a hundred-franc note into the ring and said: “Shoot it all.” And the amount was promptly oversubscribed. So I kept on going cabinward.
Samedi, 11 Août.
The man back there in the steamship office can no more truthfully say: “There has never been an accident on this line.”
I awoke at three-thirty this morning to find the cabin insufferably hot and opened the port-hole which is directly above my berth. The majority of the ocean immediately left its usual haunts and came indoors. Yale and Harvard were given a shower bath and I had a choice of putting on the driest things I could find and going on deck or drowning where I lay. The former seemed the preferable course.
Out there I found several fellow voyagers asleep in their chairs and a watchman in a red-and-white tam-o’-shanter scanning the bounding main for old Hans W. Periscope.
I wanted sympathy, but the watchman informed me that he ne comprended pas anglais, monsieur. So we stood there together and scanned, each in his own language.
My garçon de cabine promises he will have me thoroughly bailed out by bedtime to-night.
I sat at a different breakfast table, but there was no want of entertainment. At my side was a master of both anglais and français, and opposite him an American young lady who thinks French is simply just impossible to learn.
“Mademoiselle,” says he, “must find it difficult to get what she likes to eat.”
“I certainly do,” says she. “I don’t understand a word of what’s on the menu card.”