Anthony The Absolute

Samuel Merwin

Samuel Merwin

Anthony The Absolute

At Sea – March 28th

THIS evening I told Sir Robert What’s-His-Name he was a fool.

I was quite right in this. He is.

Every evening since the ship left Vancouver he has presided over the round table in the middle of the smoking-room. There he sips his coffee and liqueur, and holds forth on every subject known to the mind of man. Each subject is his subject. He is an elderly person, with a bad face and a drooping left eyelid. He wears a monocle; and carries his handkerchief in his left sleeve.

They tell me that he is in the British Service – a judge somewhere down in Malaysia, where they drink more than is good for them. I believe it. He tosses about his obiter dicta as if he were pope of the human intellect. A garrulous pope. Surely the mind of a judge, when exposed, is a dreadful thing!

Go where I will, of an evening, there is no peace for me. In the “social hall” some ungoverned young thing is eternally at the piano – “On the Mississippi” and “The Robert E. Lee” and the other musical literature of the turkey trot. I could not possibly sit five minutes there without shrieking. Outside, on deck, it has been raw and chill for a week, with rain penetrating my clothing and misting the lenses of my spectacles and rousing my slumbering rheumatism. And you can not sit long in a stuffy cabin, with the port screwed fast; it is unpleasant enough sleeping there… So I have huddled myself each night in a corner of the smoking-room. I have played at dominoes. I have played at solitaire with cards. And I loathe games! But anything is a relief that will divert my mind, even for an instant now and then, from thoughts of that loose, throaty voice, and of the truly awful mind that animates it.

Few of the passengers ever give me more than a nod; for I am not what is called a “mixer.” Except the Port Watch. He has looked confidingly at me twice over his siphon. But I have not encouraged him, for he has an over-intense eye and the flush of drink is on his cheek. Every day, hours on end, he paces the deck; hence his nickname. He is, like myself, a lonely man; and a little wild – distinctly a little wild.

Sir Robert outdid himself this evening. No man could possibly know so much. I have made a list (not complete, of course) of the subjects on which he speaks with dogmatic authority – very positive, very technical, with a glib use of catch phrases, with emphasis always on the peculiarly significant point in the matter. The list runs:

AГ«ronautics; the American temperament as affected by immigration; archery; art; ballistics; dog-breeding; engineering (civil and military); ethnology; folk-lore of all nations; geology; horticulture; inferiority of Latin peoples (particularly the French); laces and embroideries; modern accounting; navigation (which he explained last night in detail to the Chief Officer, a silent person); psychology (all branches); Roman law; rugs (and textiles generally); Weltpolitik; wireless telegraphy; and, at all times and places, the glory of England and the superiority of English blood.

This evening he was dismissing, with a torrent of apparently precise ethnological and historical data, the recent Japanese pretension to Aryan origin – doubtless for the benefit of that little Japanese commercial agent with bad teeth who sat in the corner opposite me working out problems on a go-board. The usual group of weak-minded persons were sitting about Sir Robert’s table, listening with the usual awe.

Now, I rather like that Japanese. Only this morning he was so kind as to sing several examples of the folk-song of his country into my phonograph. Five records he gave me, so that my work is begun even before we land. Excellent specimens, two of them, of the Oriental tone sense, with observably different intervals for the ascending and descending scales.

He exhibited no sign that Sir Robert’s talk annoyed him; quietly went on placing the little black and white shells on the boar