You would
hear him communing with himself and a Scotch and soda.
"Bah!" he would say bitterly, addressing the soda-bottle. "These
idiots who've never been anywhere talking about this being rough
weather! Rough weather, mind you! Bah! People shouldn't be allowed
to go to sea until they know something about it. Bah!"
By the fourth day out his gums were as blue as indigo, and he was
so swelled up with his own venom he looked dropsical. I judged
his bite would have caused death in from twelve to fourteen minutes,
preceded by coma and convulsive rigors. We called him old Colonel
Gila Monster or Judge Stinging Lizard, for short.
There was the spry and conversational gentleman who looked like
an Englishman, but was of the type commonly denominated in our own
land as breezy. So he could not have been an Englishman. Once
in a while there comes along an Englishman who is windy, and
frequently you meet one who is drafty; but there was never a breezy
Englishman yet.
With that interest in other people's business which the close
communion of a ship so promptly breeds in most of us, we fell to
wondering who and what he might be; but the minute the suspect
came into the salon for dinner the first night out I read his
secret at a glance. He belonged to a refined song-and-dance team
doing sketches in vaudeville. He could not have been anything
else - he had jet buttons on his evening clothes.
There was the young woman - she had elocutionary talents, it turned
out afterward, and had graduated with honors from a school of
expression - who assisted in getting up the ship's concert and then
took part in it, both of those acts being mistakes on her part,
as it proved.
And there was the official he-beauty of the ship. He was without
a wrinkle in his clothes - or his mind either; and he managed to
maneuver so that when he sat in the smoking room he always faced
a mirror. That was company enough for him. He never grew lonely
or bored then. Only one night he discovered something wrong about
one of his eyebrows. He gave a pained start; and then, oblivious
of those of us who hovered about enjoying the spectacle, he spent
a long time working with the blemish. The eyebrow was stubborn,
though, and he just couldn't make it behave; so he grew petulant
and fretful, and finally went away to bed in a huff. Had it not
been for fear of stopping his watch, I am sure he would have slapped
himself on the wrist.
