I went inside. The sofas in the ladies’ saloon had been turned into beds. Most of the women had already put on their life preservers and were surrounded by impossible mounds of baggage. An old man was methodically deploying a pack of cards at a table. A woman, with a child on her shoulder, was staring open-eyed at the ceiling. Outside on the landing two returning sailors and a nursemaid were whispering with sudden outbursts of mirth,—Americans all, Yankee, Westerner, Scandinavian, Latin and Asiatic.
I went upstairs and into the foul thickness of the smoking room, where the shock of my entrance set the layers of gray fumes to twisting and coiling about the dim lamps. Groups had already formed at the corner tables; Hungerford and the younger men, a solemn audience about a chess match; another group near me—officers of two torpedoed freighters—were swapping yarns as they played.
“Got ours out of Genoa, just after dawn.”
“Trouble getting away?”
“Shelled us right up to the last minute.”
A little woman, wife of the speaker, broke into a light laugh.
“Kept on shellin’, too, when we got the boats clear. Dan here, he says to me, ‘Sarah, you stand right up and let ’em see there’s a woman in the boat.’ So I stood up, and crack, they let go with a shot that jumped the bonnet from my head. Polite, aren’t they?”
“Don’t tell that at home: they’ll say you ex—aggerate!” said a large, swarthy man, who was shuffling the cards. “Civilized folks don’t do such things; that’s what they’ll say!”
“Well, Sarah and I ain’t got no kick coming,” said the skipper philosophically. “We got away with six trips and landed the last cargo, too. Risky—but big money, and I guess we’re on easy street for a while.”
“Say, if this war goes on another year, boy, we’ll have all the money in the world.”
A short, stockily built young fellow, keen as a vulture, derby pushed back, removed a fat cigar and nodded to his neighbor, a type of world peddler, Armenian or Levantine, who was chewing a toothpick in a drowsy interest.
“All the money in the world! And after? Say—I’ve been over cleaning upsomecontracts, believe me; but that’s nothin’ to what’s comin’—nothin’! Say—when this little war’s over, any fellow who’s got somethin’ to sell is goin’ to cash in so fast a crooked gamblin’ wheel won’t be in it.”
“Oh, got a pretty good line, myself.”
“You have, eh? What?”
“Antiques.”
“Pretty soft bargains, eh?”
The Levantine smiled contentedly. And the two, suddenly attracted, moved into a corner, absorbed by their own bright conceptions of the future.
“Hello, there, Big Dale. Ship ahoy!”
I sauntered over curiously to where Hungerford was ensconced in the midst of congenial spirits.
“Have a hand?”
“No, thanks.”
“Have a drink?”
“Not now.”
I had sat through just such all-night sessions in the days when such feats were regarded as title to man’s estate, but to-night the mood was foreign to my own.
“Shake hands with my old friend, ‘Gyp, the Blood,’ alias Frangipani,” said Hungerford, whose good humor was proof against hunger, drowsiness, the cold gray dawn and stale tobacco. “Mr. Frangipani wasnota professor of English at Columbia.”
“How be you, friend? Seen you on the deck,” said a stocky, square fellow in ambulance uniform, who gave me a drowsy squint from around a knobby nose and put out a squatty hand which was minus a finger. “Not drinkin’?”
“Thanks, no. The atmosphere is strong enough,” I answered, wondering in what strange by-ways of civilization—tramp steamer, traveler of the underworld, or ranger of the Western prairies—the man had gone his careless journey.
“Mr. Tooker, of Tookerville, Mississippi, sah. Mr. Tooker is a close student of our great national game.”
“Very glad to know you, Mr. Littledale,” said a brisk little fellow, sober, well-groomed, soft-voiced, alert and smiling. “Heard a good deal about you.”
“Mr. Galligan, of Walla Walla. Mr. Galligan is returning from his period of rest at the front to get a littleexcitement in the Coeur d’Alene district,” said Hungerford, who was in good spirits.
A powerful, big-framed youth, with bullet head, blue eyes and thin lips, who had been making desperate attempts at keeping his eyes open, yawned, and said thickly:
“’Scuse me. Had a —— of a night in Bordeaux. Glad to know you.”
“AndProfessor Ralph Waldo William Butler Swinburne Southwick, of Harvard, and Beacon Street, and the American Ambulance.”
Southwick, in his precipitation to shake hands, dropped his glasses, which slid from his long, delving nose and dangled back and forth on their short string, overturned a pile of chips, and started to take up the discards, under a storm of protests.
“Other members of the original Inter-Allied Poker Club have succumbed to poison gas, auto-intoxication, and the need of a recumbent position,” continued Hungerford, with a wave of his hand toward two figures on the couches, who had passed beyond the stage of introductions. He paused and indicated a large, bulbous figure under a sombrero, snoring peacefully in a sitting position at his side. “The late Mr. Honus Scroff, of Tittle Valley, Arizona. Mr. Scroff is especially delighted to meet you,” he added, lifting the hat from the red, cropped hair and freckled ears.
“Honus hasn’t been to bed since we started down,” said Galligan, gathering in the cards.
“Quite right. Mr. Scroff’s like an eight-day clock; he only has to sleep every Saturday night from 12 to 8.”
“Play ball!” said Frangipani loudly, throwing in an ante.
Scroff woke, blinked, and said thickly, “My deal?”
“Not yet, old top!”
“All right.”
And he went off to sleep again.
“I’m in,” said the professor colloquially. “Shove around the pasteboards.”
She didAnd she didn’t;She wouldAnd she wouldn’t;O-o-o-o-o! BUT—!
She didAnd she didn’t;She wouldAnd she wouldn’t;O-o-o-o-o! BUT—!
She didAnd she didn’t;She wouldAnd she wouldn’t;O-o-o-o-o! BUT—!
began Frangipani, in a long, doglike wail, which drew curses from the four corners of the room. The cards were dealt and the bets began.
I stood watching them quite a while, amused at their patter. They were real, as I had learned to value men in the rough-and-tumble of life. It was Young America relaxing,—the need of a young nation to return to its play, to blow off steam after months of driven dynamic energy. Quite barbaric at bottom, perhaps,—but so understandable, to me! I liked the democracy of the group and its unconscious camaraderie. Yet, I could not help thinking how unrelated we were to one another,—to the present or to the future. And, as I stood there studying them—in my mind the menace that Magnus had voiced—I wondered how long we could stem the moving forces below that had the solidarity and the energy of determined rebels.
*****
To-night, as I recall this first conversation with Magnus, my irritation dies away. I am not sure but what he has but stated in his own antagonistic way things which have been growing over me.
Democracy was a revolt against the leadership of a class when that leadership had grown weak and was no longer natural and genuine. But, if democracy cannotproduce its own real leadership—if it can do no more than set in motion a mob—the leadership of that mob will be the leadership that surges out of the accidents of a stampede.