“Going to storm, the captain tells me.”
“Yes,” rumbled Kennedy. “Be a mighty tough one over there.” He poked a thumb toward the west. “Over there where the Arion is travelling.”
The other man started. “That’s our ship.”
“She didn’t change her course. Kept straight on. Good ship, though. May weather it all right.”
“Do you mean to say,” the rich man squirmed uneasily in his chair, “that it will be as bad as that?”
“Might be—over there.” Again Kennedy’s thumb jerked.
The topic of a man’s conversation is very frequently determined by his surroundings and by the events that are transpiring about him. Was it thought of the storm and what it might mean to him that directed this rich man’s conversation, or was it a casual remark thrown out by the strange old man who sat beside him?
“See those two bits of seaweed out yonder, tossing on the waves?” Kennedy drawled. “Well, supposing one was you and the other me, and there wasn’t any ship. Supposing I had houses and banks and bonds and you were a plain ordinary seaman with nothing but a chest full of old clothes. Do you suppose I’d have any better chance with the sea than you? Sort of strange, isn’t it, when you think about it? Makes you feel unimportant and, and futile, you might say.”
For a long time the man who owned buildings and banks, bonds and many ships upon the sea did not answer. When he did speak the thoughts he gave utterance to might not seem to have been an answer, and then again they might have.
“Our times,” he said in a tone he had not used before, low, well modulated, modest and slow, “are very strange. Men, many men, most men perhaps, have come to think of capital as a great monster that always crushes the weak.