Go where I will, of an evening, there is no peace for me. In the “social hall” some ungoverned young thing is eternally at the piano—“On the Mississippi” and “The Robert E. Lee” and the other musical literature of the turkey trot. I could not possibly sit five minutes there without shrieking. Outside, on deck, it has been raw and chill for a week, with rain penetrating my clothing and misting the lenses of my spectacles and rousing my slumbering rheumatism. And you can not sit long in a stuffy cabin, with the port screwed fast; it is unpleasant enough sleeping there.... So I have huddled myself each night in a corner of the smoking-room. I have played at dominoes. I have played at solitaire with cards. And I loathe games! But anything is a relief that will divert my mind, even for an instant now and then, from thoughts of that loose, throaty voice, and of the truly awful mind that animates it.
Few of the passengers ever give me more than a nod; for I am not what is called a “mixer.” Except the Port Watch. He has looked confidingly at me twice over his siphon. But I have not encouraged him, for he has an over-intense eye and the flush of drink is on his cheek. Every day, hours on end, he paces the deck; hence his nickname. He is, like myself, a lonely man; and a little wild—distinctly a little wild.
Sir Robert outdid himself this evening. No man could possibly know so much. I have made a list (not complete, of course) of the subjects on which he speaks with dogmatic authority—very positive, very technical, with a glib use of catch phrases, with emphasis always on the peculiarly significant point in the matter. The list runs:
Aëronautics; the American temperament as affected by immigration; archery; art; ballistics; dog-breeding; engineering (civil and military); ethnology; folk-lore of all nations; geology; horticulture; inferiority of Latin peoples (particularly the French); laces and embroideries; modern accounting; navigation (which he explained last night in detail to the Chief Officer, a silent person); psychology (all branches); Roman law; rugs (and textiles generally); Weltpolitik; wireless telegraphy; and, at all times and places, the glory of England and the superiority of English blood.
This evening he was dismissing, with a torrent of apparently precise ethnological and historical data, the recent Japanese pretension to Aryan origin—doubtless for the benefit of that little Japanese commercial agent with bad teeth who sat in the corner opposite me working out problems on a go-board. The usual group of weak-minded persons were sitting about Sir Robert's table, listening with the usual awe.
Now, I rather like that Japanese. Only this morning he was so kind as to sing several examples of the folk-song of his country into my phonograph. Five records he gave me, so that my work is begun even before we land. Excellent specimens, two of them, of the Oriental tone sense, with observably different intervals for the ascending and descending scales.
He exhibited no sign that Sir Robert's talk annoyed him; quietly went on placing the little black and white shells on the board. (It is interesting to note, at this point, that the Japanese handle small objects with the first three fingers only, without employing the thumb as we do.) But I felt myself becoming angry. My forehead grew hot and flushed, as it always does when I am stirred. I tried to calm myself by constructing a house of dominoes; but the pitching of the ship overturned it.
Still that throaty voice. “Thank God,” I thought, “in another day we shall be at Yokohama!”
I tried to read a four-weeks-old copy of the Illustrated London News. No use; the voice held me.
It occurred to me, as an exercise in self-control, to interest myself in speculating on the emotions and the characteristics back of the faces here in the smoking-room. I achieved some success at this exercise. Why, when you come to think of it, should each particular unit in this haphazard assemblage of men and women be journeying away off here to the other side of the earth? There are surely dramas in our little company. The two middle-aged ladies with the firm chins, for instance, who dress so quietly and speak so discreetly—it is whispered among the men that they are high and prosperous in a sad business on Soo-chow Road, Shanghai. And the young German adventurer with the scars across his nose, who borrowed fifteen dollars from me, to be repaid when we land at Yokohama—if he approaches me again I shall refuse him firmly. And the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati, who plays fan-tan every night with a heap of Chinese brass cash and a bowl borrowed from the ship's dining-room!