The others go away, still smiling, and I shut the door. For this young chap, who has come across Europe to relieve me, is an old shipmate. We were on the Merovingian. We have been many voyages to Rio and the Plates. We were always chums. In some obscure fashion, we got on. Tommy is North Country—dry, taciturn, reticent, slow to make friends. A hot-air merchant makes him restive and he goes away. He abhors bluffers. I like him. We have never written, though, for it is a fact that some friendships do not ‘carry’ in a letter. They are like some wines—they do not travel. For all I knew, I was never to see him again. What of that? We had been chums and we understood each other. I had often thought of him since I’d been out here—a good little shipmate. And now here he was, on my settee, smiling and tickling O’Henry just where he likes to be tickled, and asking me to come ashore with him.
Will I come ashore with him? Will I not? I drag open drawers, fling out a white-drill suit, and begin to dress. I open the door and shout to the messman to go and get a boat and bring my shoes and some hot water. While I shave, Tommy relates his adventures in a sketchy way. He has no gift of tongues, but now and again he strikes out a phrase that brings the picture before me. He has been torpedoed. He was in the Malthusian when she was ‘plugged.’ He was on watch, of course,—Thirds always are on watch when anything happens. I used to tell him that he was the original of Browning’s ‘Shadowy Third,’ he is so small, with delicate hands and that charming, elusive, shadowy smile.
Oh, I remark, as I reach for the talcum powder, he was torpedoed, was he? He nods and smiles at O’Henry’s trick of falling off the settee head over heels. And the poor old Malthusian too,—what a box of tricks she was, with her prehistoric pumps and effervescent old dynamo,—gone at last, eh? Tommy says nothing about the catastrophe save that he lost his gear. Then, he observes, he joined the Polynesian as Third, having, of course, got himself fresh gear. Ah, and had I heard about the Polynesian? She’s gone too, he said, letting O’Henry down to the floor by his tail. What? Torpedoed too? It must be a sort of habit with him. Good Heavens! But no, says Tommy, she was attacked, but she got away, and—
‘It was a funny thing,’ he adds meditatively; and looks at me as though he couldn’t make it out.
‘What,’ I ask, ‘what happened?’ as I look around for my stick and cigar-case.
‘Oh, I’ll tell you when we get ashore,’ he says; and he rolls O’Henry into a ball and drops him on my bunk.
‘Come on, then.—Sam! Got that boat?’
A negro voice howls, ‘Yes, sah,’ and we go out and down the ladder.
A three-quarter moon is coming up, hangs now over Palestine, and Port Said, the ancient Pelusium, takes on a serene splendor inconceivable to those who have seen her only in the hard dusty glare of noon-day. The harsh outlines of the ships soften to vague shadows touched with silver; the profound gloom within the colonnades of the Canal building, the sheen of the moonlight on green domes and gray stucco walls make of it a fairy palace of mist and emerald. Each motor-launch speeding past leaves a broadening, heaving furrow of phosphorescence. Each dip of our oars breaks the dark water into an incredible swirl of boiling greenish-white radiance.
Tommy and I sit side by side in the stern in silence as the Arab boatman, in blue gown and round white cap, pulls us up to the Custom-House quay. We pass out at a side gate and find ourselves in Egyptian darkness. Whether this is due to military exigencies or to a shortage of fuel, nobody seems to know. The hotel buildings along the front throw their shadows right across the Sharia el Legera, down which we pass until we reach the broad dusty Rue el Nil, a boulevard running straight down to the sea. We are bound for the Eastern Exchange Hotel, familiarly known as ‘The Eastern.’ It is the grand rallying-point of mariners east and west of Suez. It is a huge gaunt structure of glass and iron, built over to the curb of the street and the arcade under it is full of green chairs and tables, green shrubs in enormous tubs, and climbing plants twined about the iron stanchions. The lights are shrouded in green petroleum cans, and one has the illusion of sitting in the glade of some artificial forest. Hotel waiters, in long white robes cut across with brilliant scarlet sashes, and surmounted by scarlet fezes, move noiselessly to and fro with trays of drinks. An orchestra, somewhere beyond, plays a plaintive air.