Nor Can Its Members Take Ship And Go Home When They Please.
Imagine
for a little, the contented frame of mind that is bred in a man by the
perpetual contemplation of a harbour full of steamers as a Piccadilly
cab-rank of hansoms.
The weather is hot, we will suppose; something has
gone wrong with his work that day, or his children are not looking so
well as might be. Pretty tiled bungalows, bowered in roses and wistaria,
do not console him, and the voices of the politest people on earth jar
sorely. He knows every soul in the club, has thoroughly talked out
every subject of interest, and would give half a year's - oh, five
years' - pay for one lung-filling breath of air that has life in it, one
sniff of the haying grass, or half a mile of muddy London street where
the muffin bell tinkles in the four o'clock fog. Then the big liner
moves out across the staring blue of the bay. So-and-so and such-an-one,
both friends, are going home in her, and some one else goes next week by
the French mail. He, and he alone, it seems to him, must stay on; and it
is so maddeningly easy to go - for every one save himself. The boat's
smoke dies out along the horizon, and he is left alone with the warm
wind and the white dust of the Bund. Now Japan is a good place, a place
that men swear by and live in for thirty years at a stretch.
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