War? He didn’t know what it meant, of course. It made good poetry and interesting fiction; it rendered history amusing; made dry facts succulent.
Preparations for war in Europe, which had been going on for fifty years, were most valuable, too, in contributing the brilliant hues of uniforms to an otherwise sombre civilian world, and investing commonplace and sober cities with the omnipresent looming mystery of fortifications.
To a painter, war seemed to be a dramatic and gorgeous affair; to a young man it appealed as all excitement appeals. The sportsman in him desired to witness a scrap; his artist’s imagination was aroused; the gambler in him speculated as to the outcome of such a war. And the seething, surging drop of Irish fizzed and purred and coaxed for a chance to edge sideways into any fight which God in His mercy might provide for a decent gossoon who had never yet had the pleasure of a broken head.
“Not,” thought Neeland to himself, “that I’ll go trailing my coat tails. I’ll go about my own business, of course—but somebody may hit me a crack at that!”
He thought of Ilse Dumont and of the man with the golden beard, realising that he had had a wonderful time, after all; sorry in his heart that it was all over 225 and that the Volhynia was due to let go her mudhooks in the Mersey about three o’clock the next morning.
As he leaned on the deck rail in the soft July darkness, he could see the lights of the destroyers to port and starboard, see strings of jewel-like signals flash, twinkle, fade, and flash again.
All around him along the deck passengers were promenading, girls in evening gowns or in summer white; men in evening dress or reefed in blue as nautically as possible; old ladies toddling, swathed in veils, old gentlemen in dinner coats and sporting headgear—every weird or conventional combination infested the decks of the Volhynia.
Now, for the first time during the voyage, Neeland felt free to lounge about where he listed, saunter wherever the whim of the moment directed his casual steps. The safety of the olive-wood box was no longer on his mind, the handle no longer in his physical clutch. He was at liberty to stroll as carelessly as any boulevard flâneur; and he did so, scanning the passing throng for a glimpse of Ilse Dumont or of the golden-bearded one, but not seeing either of them.
In fact, he had not laid eyes on them since he had supped not wisely but too well on the soup that Scheherazade had flavoured for him.
The stateroom door of the golden-bearded man had remained closed. His own little cockney steward, who also looked out for Golden Beard, reported that gentleman as requiring five meals a day, with beer in proportion, and the porcelain pipe steaming like Ætna all day long.