If he were a painter, he believed he would try to sketch that woman’s face as something very like his Dream Girl. He wondered who she had been—her name? The fellow’s wife probably. Strange how things stick in the back of a man’s mind at times.
A face in a star, indeed!
Happily, new scenes and clean, free horizons were taking pressure from head and brain. The world with which he had battled was drawing off in increasingly better perspective. He was humbly thankful.
He awoke one morning to find the engine’s heart-throb stopped and the vessel strangely quiet. Glancing out his stateroom porthole in the hush of dawn, he beheld a mountain sky line weirdly close. They had approached Hawaii and Honolulu during the night. Dense, tropical vapor clouded the mauve mountain summits. The city was almost hidden in foliage. A molten sun came up while he was breakfasting. About ten o’clock he went ashore.
The narrow, low-roofed streets with queer souvenir shops; the native, comic-opera policemen at intersections of traffic; picturesque brown men with hatbands and collars wreathed with flowers; quaint Japanese women with brilliant sun-shades,—among them Nathan felt like a schoolboy off on his first vacation.
II
Many features of that voyage supplied “atmosphere” which Nathan will never forget. Laughing forenoons swashing through shimmering waves; schools of flying fish winging low above the whitecaps like dragon flies, to flip from sight as one watched them; children playing on the after-deck and a kiddie-car always left for peripatetics to stumble over; soft sea breezes wafting through velvet-covered saloons; a wisp of smoke on the far horizon where another steamer passed; the sun going aslant down the sky and making a shadow ship that sailed into flaming carmine with them; nights of laughter and music; dancing under Japanese lanterns; the close, hot confines of narrow white stateroom passages faintly scented with bilge,—one grows to love a ship which has carried one in safety over thousands of watery miles.
And his father had known all this, three years before.
His first sight of Japan came about eleven o’clock the morning of the seventeenth day at sea. A hatless young missionary in white duck, China bound, came around the southern side of the promenade deck with field-glass case swinging from one shoulder.
“Japan ahead!” he cried. “Just sighted Fujiyama!” Then Nathan noted that the deck where he had been reading was deserted.