"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know. Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'
"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms, and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one. Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen. Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.
"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's ship, the Prinz Karl, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her two big yellow funnels and top-heavy passenger decks blocking the view of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, Signore Hank, was a man who had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall, spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows in his cheeks, and a sharp, thin nose jutted out over one of those heavy grey moustaches that get into the soup and make the owner look like a hungry walrus. He might have been rich, as they said he was, and he might have been clever in days gone by; but as I knew him he was a faded, soiled ghost of a man, a man preoccupied with the dirty pickings of life, just as his wife, strong character as I knew her to be, was only a drunken parody of her real self, a shrewd, calculating, good-hearted, bad-principled old failure.
"Mr. Hank sat in his cabin, talking to a young fellow in American clothes and French boots, who was, I could see, one of those shady characters who tout for ship-chandlers, whose business makes them toadies, sycophants and pandars. There is something detestable about the ship-chandlering trade, somehow. You see them lick-spittling the old man, taking him ashore if he is a stranger, bringing boxes of candy for his wife if he has her on board, sending a boat every day, for his convenience, and so on, and then, when the ship's stores are rushed on board at the last moment, and you put to sea, the stuff turns out to be bad or short. The flour is damp and won't rise, the potatoes are a scratch lot, the meat poor and the fruit rotten. And the Old Man says nothing, the steward says nothing, because they've been squared, and after all it's only the crew who really suffer, because the captain has his own private stock, which Mister steward shares, you may be sure. It is a dirty business and the sight of those sleek, cunning, pimple-faced young men, in their fancy vests and dirty cuffs, always sickens me, because I know the knavery in their hearts.
"'Come in, come in,' said Mr. Hank, as I turned away from his door.
"'No,' I said. 'I'll wait till you are through, Mr. Hank.'
"'Nonsense, come in,' said he. 'This is only Mr. Sachs, representing Babbolini's. He won't eat you,' he said.
"I came back at this, and stood at the door to let a crowd of bedroom stewards with sheets go by. 'It would take a better man than him to eat me, Mr. Hank.'
"Mr. Sachs smiled politely and made room for me on the settee, evidently having no cannibal intentions at the time, or at any rate disguising them. Offered me a cigarette, which I never smoke. Said it was a fine day.
"'It was a private matter I wanted to speak about,' I said to Hank, who looked at me with an expression of eternal anxiety in his prominent eyes.