“That sounds all right,” said Martin; “but in order to get people to
talk to you—say in the four cases you have mentioned, you must know
something about the theatre, bronchitis, love and the lard-trade.”
Said Fortinbras, touching the young man’s shoulder:
“The experienced altruist with an eye to his own advantage knows
something about everything.”
Martin, following the precepts of his Mentor, practised the arts of
fence, parrying the thrusts of personal questions on the part of his
opponent and riposting with such questions on his own.
“It is necessary,” said the sage. “What are you among these respectable
Britons of substance, but an adventurer? Put yourself at the mercy of
one of these old warriors with grey motor-veils and steel knitting
needles and she will pluck out the heart of your mystery in a jiffy and
throw it on the deck for all to feed on.”
Thus the voyage—incidentally was it not to Cythæra?—transcended all
his dreams of social amenity. It was a long protracted party in which he
lost his shyness, finding frank welcome on all sides. To the man of
thirty who had been deprived, all his man’s life, of the commonplace
general intercourse with his kind, this daily talk with a girl here, a
young married woman there, an old lady somewhere else, and all sorts and
conditions of men in the smoking room and on deck, was nothing less than
a kind of social debauch, intoxicating him, keeping him blissfully awake
of nights in his upper berth, while Fortinbras snored below. Then soon
after daybreak, to mount to the wet, sunlit deck after his cold,
sea-water bath; perhaps to meet a hardy and healthy English girl, fresh
as the Ægean morning; to tramp up and down with her for development of
appetite, talking of nothing but the glitter of the sea, the stuffiness
of cabins, the dishes they each would choose for breakfast; to descend
into the warm, comforting smell of the dining-saloon; to fall
voraciously on porridge and eggs and kidneys and marmalade; to go on
deck again knowing that in a couple of hours’ time stewards would come
to him fainting from hunger with bowls of chicken broth, that in an hour
or two afterwards there would be lunch to be selected from a menu a foot
long in close print, and so on during the golden and esurient day; to
meet Fortinbras, late and luxurious riser; to bask for an hour, like a
plum, in the sunshine of his wisdom; to continue the debauch of the day
before; to sight great sailing vessels with bellying canvas, resplendent
majesty of past centuries, or, on the other hand, the grey grim blocks
of battleships; to pass the sloping shores of historic islands—Crete,
home of the Minotaur, whose inhabitants—(Cretans are liars. Cretans are
men. Therefore all men are liars)—had furnished the stock example of
fallacy in the Syllogism; to watch the green wake cleaving the dark-blue
sea; to make his way up and down decks, through the steerage, and stand
in the bows, swept by the exhilarating air, with the pulse racking sense