They emerged to the street at length, and the New Yorker started shyly back to the pier. The Hatmos man laughed.
“You fall for the sailing-stuff, don’t you?”
“Yes, it’s got me. Do they take passengers?”
“Sure, if you’re in no hurry. Here and there, some one like you—just for the voyage. Two or three on board from here.... One a preacher. He’d better look out. Stackhouse hates to drink alone.”
“Thanks. Good-bye.”
The Jade, far and very little among the liners, had turned south to the Narrows and was spreading her wings.... The world began to shut Bellair in, as he crossed the river again. Sunday night supper at the boarding-house was always a dismal affair; by every manner and means it was so to-night. The chorus woman of the Hippodrome was bolting ahead of the bell, to hurry away to rehearsal. Nightly she came up out of the water.... He tried three sea-books that night—“Lady Letty,” “Lord Jim” and “The Phantom,” but couldn’t get caught in their old spell. A new and personal dimension was upon him from the afternoon. He fell to dreaming again and again of the Jade—the last misty glimpse of her at the Narrows, and the huge brown hands pushing Brooklyn away.... There is pathos in the city man’s love and need for fresh air. Bellair pulled his bed to the window at last, surveying the room without regard. Long afterward he dreamed that he was out on the heaving floor of the sea, and that a man-monster came down from the deck in pajamas, and pressing his hands against the walls of the cabin, made respiration next to impossible for the inmate. There was a key to this suffocation, for the air in his room was still as a pool. A lull had fallen upon the city before a gusty storm of wind and rain.
PART TWO
LOT & COMPANY: I
1
Bellair regarded himself as an average man; and after all perhaps this was the most significant thing about him. He was not average to look at—the face of a student and profoundly kind—and yet, he had moved in binding routine for five years that they knew of at Lot & Company’s. His acquaintances were of the average type. He did not criticise them; you would not have known that he saw them with something of the same sorrow that he regarded himself.
Back of this five years was an Unknowable. Had you possessed exactly the perception you might have caught a glimpse of some extraordinary culture that comes from life in the older lands, and personal contacts with deeper evils—the culture of the great drifters, the inimitable polish of rolling stones. As a usual thing he would not have shown you any of this. At Lot & Company’s offices, men had moved and talked and lunched near and with him for years without uncovering a gleam of a certain superb equipment for life which really existed in a darkened room of his being.