"Sit down," said Mr. Carville, shutting the door. "You'll excuse me for a minute?"
I sat down on a red plush settee while my host settled into a wicker easy chair by a small desk. The room by our computation would be small, yet I perceived that Mr. Carville had within reach of his hand almost every convenience of civilization. At his elbow were a telephone and a speaking tube; just above him an electric fan. Electric lights were placed all over the room. His bed lay below the port-holes and a wash-basin of polished mahogany was folded up beside the bed. On the table were cigars and whisky. And between the bed and the wardrobe, on four shelves, were ranged some two hundred volumes; even for a landsman a respectable library.
He sat for some moments reading his letters with patient attention, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger. My estimate of him had undergone several changes since leaving the Battery; since leaving deck, even. I felt somehow that this quiet, sedate person was no longer apologetic in his attitude towards me. Here he was master, and a subtle alteration of his demeanour indicated this to me. He sat there, as I watched him, solid and secure by inalienable right of succession, a son of that stern, imaginative adventurer, his father; a son, moreover, of that sea which he served from year to year. I looked up at the photograph of his wife which he had mentioned, a photograph set in silver. The soft shadows of the platinotype suited Mrs. Carville. Evidently this had been taken about the time of her marriage; the fine modelling of her face and the poise of her head were instinct with youth. In her eyes I fancied something of the mild expression with which she accompanied her remark, "He is a good man." On either side of the silver frame were small pictures of the boys.
Mr. Carville put the two letters in a wire clip and offered me a cigar.
"Now you can see for yourself," said he, "where I live." He laughed. "I'm one of the few people who haven't got a bad word to say of the Standard Oil Co. They give me more cubic feet of private space, bigger cabin space, and better food than any shipowner across the water. They give me any mortal thing for my engines except time to overhaul them. The newspapers tell me they're a blood-sucking trust battening on the body-politic, and so on. Personally ..." and Mr. Carville drew the stopper from a square bottle, "personally, I find them very decent people to work for."
I sat looking at him for some time as he busied himself with a drawer which contained, he assured me, an apollinaris. It struck me that though he had gained in certain external trappings of the mind since entering his room, he had ceased to appear to me as a heroic figure. Even the perception which had appreciated the grandeur of New York, the wit which had connected St. George with San Giorgio Maggiore, seemed to me incongruous with the present phase of his character. Quite possibly I had been so drilled in hatred of Standard Oil that I unconsciously revolted from the notion that any good could come out of that protean enterprise! And yet, when I reflected, I could not but wonder whether, after all, he, in his quiet efficiency, his sober sense, and his deliberate renunciation of the glory of romance, was not as logical a product of our modern age as the corporation he served.
"You serve both God and Mammon," I remarked as the soda-water splashed into the glass. He nodded, smiling.
"Yes," he said, "or rather let us call it rendering unto Cæsar. After all, something must bend if you are going to make ends meet. Cæsar," he added, lifting up his glass, "isn't such a bad proposition when you have a family to provide for."
I agreed that this was so and scanned the books on the shelves. They at least were a noble company, their gold and green and blue broken by the plain yellow paper backs of Italian books. Shakespeare was there and St. Francis of Assisi; Fors Clavigera in a cabinet edition; Symonds' Renaissance and Pater in wide-margined dignity. Tucked in corners, too, were books in that quaint pocket edition of the Bibliothèque Nationale: Rabelais, in five volumes, Beaumarchais' Memoirs, Rousseau, Scarron's Travesty of Virgil and that extraordinary work of genius, The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. As I turned them over I saw on their pages the purple rubber-stamps of some bookseller in Tunis, Bizerta, Tangier, and other places even more obscure. I had a vision of the man making his way, in some perspiration, through the press of Arabs and Moors to the little shop under the arches. I saw him scanning the shelves, the Derby hat pushed back, the vest open, the thumb and finger pinching the lower lip.... I turned to him with a worn copy of Heine in my hand.
"I think," I said, "I must fit out an expedition, to go and dredge the Java Sea for that manuscript you threw overboard."