’I don’t pretend I understood him.
The views he let me have of himself were like those
glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog—bits
of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected
idea of the general aspect of a country. They
fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they
were no good for purposes of orientation. Upon
the whole he was misleading. That’s how
I summed him up to myself after he left me late in
the evening. I had been staying at the Malabar
House for a few days, and on my pressing invitation
he dined with me there.’
CHAPTER 7
’An outward-bound mail-boat had come in that
afternoon, and the big dining-room of the hotel was
more than half full of people with a-hundred-pounds-round-the-world
tickets in their pockets. There were married
couples looking domesticated and bored with each other
in the midst of their travels; there were small parties
and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly
or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing,
joking, or scowling as was their wont at home; and
just as intelligently receptive of new impressions
as their trunks upstairs. Henceforth they would
be labelled as having passed through this and that
place, and so would be their luggage. They would
cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve
the gummed tickets on their portmanteaus as documentary
evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving
enterprise. The dark-faced servants tripped without
noise over the vast and polished floor; now and then
a girl’s laugh would be heard, as innocent and
empty as her mind, or, in a sudden hush of crockery,
a few words in an affected drawl from some wit embroidering
for the benefit of a grinning tableful the last funny
story of shipboard scandal. Two nomadic old maids,
dressed up to kill, worked acrimoniously through the
bill of fare, whispering to each other with faded lips,
wooden-faced and bizarre, like two sumptuous scarecrows.
A little wine opened Jim’s heart and loosened
his tongue. His appetite was good, too, I noticed.
He seemed to have buried somewhere the opening episode
of our acquaintance. It was like a thing of which
there would be no more question in this world.
And all the time I had before me these blue, boyish
eyes looking straight into mine, this young face, these
capable shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with
a white line under the roots of clustering fair hair,
this appearance appealing at sight to all my sympathies:
this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful
seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was
one of us. He talked soberly, with a sort of
composed unreserve, and with a quiet bearing that
might have been the outcome of manly self-control,
of impudence, of callousness, of a colossal unconsciousness,
of a gigantic deception. Who can tell! From
our tone we might have been discussing a third person,
a football match, last year’s weather. My
