II

We greet each other shyly, for the chief and some of the others are

standing in the alleyway, with broad grins on their faces at my look of

flabbergasted bewilderment. An Arab porter comes along with a big canvas

bag of dunnage, which he dumps at our feet.

‘Why—what—how—when—did you get here?’ I ask weakly.

‘Train from Alexandria,’ he replies, sitting down on the settee.

My kitten, a sandy little savage known as O’Henry, jumps up and begins

to make friends. O’Henry is stroked and tickled, and Tommy looks up at

me with his old tolerant, bland, imperturbable smile.

‘You, of all people!’ I remark, looking at him inanely.

‘Aye, they sent me out,’ he affirms. ‘They told me you were here. How’s

things?’

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.

All around are uniforms naval and military, British, French, Italian,

and so forth. It is here, I say, that East and West do meet. Here the

skipper from Nagasaki finds an old shipmate just in from New Orleans.

Here a chief engineer, burned brown and worn thin by a summer at Basra,

drinks with a friend bound East from Glasgow to Rangoon. Here the gossip

of all the ports of the Seven Seas changes hands over the little tables

under the dim green-shaded lights. Outside, beyond the screen of

verdure, a carriage will go by stealthily in the dust, a cigar glowing

under the hood. Itinerant salesmen of peanuts in glass boxes, beads,

Turkish delight, postals, cigarettes, news-sheets, postage-stamps, and

all the other passenger junk, pass to and fro. A native conjuror halts

as we sit down, sadly produces a dozen lizards from an apparently empty

fez, and passes on as I look coldly upon his peripatetic legerdemain.

Here and there parties of residents sit round a table—a French family,

perhaps, or Italian, or Maltese, or Greek, or Hebrew, or Syrian—for they

are all to be found here in Pelusium, the latter making money out of

their conquerors, just as, I dare say, they did in Roman times. Papa is

smoking a cigarette; Mamma is sitting back surveying the other denizens

of the artificial forest through her lorgnon; the young ladies converse

with a couple of youthful ‘subs’ in khaki, and a bare-legged boy, in an

enormous pith hat like an inverted bath, is haggling over half a piastre

with a vender of peanuts. Tommy and I sit in the shadow of a shrub and I

order gin and lime-juice. He wants beer, but there is no beer—only some

detestable carbonated bilge-water at half a dollar (ten piastres) the

bottle.

And soldiers go by continually to and from the cafés and canteens. Many

are Colonials, and their wide-brimmed hats decorated with feathers give

them an extraordinarily dissipated air. There is something very

un-English about these enormous, loose-limbed, rolling fighting-men,

with their cheeks the color of raw beef and their truculent eyes under

their wide hats. They remind me at times of the professional soldiers of

my school-days, who dressed in scarlet and gold and were a race apart.

As they pass us, in twos and threes and singly, slouching and jingling

their spurs, and roll off into darkness again, I think of Master Angus

MacFadden and his chums, and I wonder what the future holds for us all.

Then I hear Tommy talking and I begin to listen.

No use trying to tell the story as he told it. Whoever thinks he can, is

the victim of an illusion. Tommy’s style, like his personality, is not

literary. I often wonder, when I think of the sort of life he has led,

how he comes to express himself at all. For he often startles me with

some queer semi-articulate flash of intuition. A direct challenge to

Life! As when he said, looking up at me as we leaned over the bulwarks

and watched the sun rise one morning in the Caribbean, ‘Yo’ know, I

haven’t _had_ any life.’

Well, as I said, he and I are chums on some mysteriously taciturn, North

Country principle that won’t bear talking about! And I must tell the

story in my own way, merely quoting a phrase now and then. I owe him

that much because, you see, he was there.