‘Ah!’ said a little P. and O. official, wagging his head sagaciously (he had lost a thousand dollars since noon), ’it’s all right now.  They’re trying to make the best of it.  In three or four days we shall hear more about it.  I meant to draw my money just before I went down coast, but——­’ Curiously enough, it was the same story throughout the Club.  Everybody had intended to withdraw, and nearly everybody had—­not done so.  The manager of a bank which had not failed was explaining how, in his opinion, the crash had come about.  This was also very human.  It helped none.  Entered a lean American, throwing back his waterproof all dripping with the rain; his face was calm and peaceful.  ’Boy, whisky and soda,’ he said.

‘How much haf you losd?’ said a Teuton bluntly.  ‘Eight-fifty,’ replied the son of George Washington sweetly.  ’Don’t see how that prevents me having a drink.  My glass, sirr.’  He continued an interrupted whistling of ‘I owe ten dollars to O’Grady’ (which he very probably did), and his countenance departed not from its serenity.  If there is anything that one loves an American for it is the way he stands certain kinds of punishment.  An Englishman and a heavy loser was being chaffed by a Scotchman whose account at the Japan end of the line had been a trifle overdrawn.  True, he would lose in England, but the thought of the few dollars saved here cheered him.

More men entered, sat down by tables, stood in groups, or remained apart by themselves, thinking with knit brows.  One must think quickly when one’s bills are falling due.  The murmur of voices thickened, and there was no rumbling in the skittle alley to interrupt it.  Everybody knows everybody else at the Overseas Club, and everybody sympathises.  A man passed stiffly and some one of a group turned to ask lightly, ’Hit, old man?’ ‘Like hell,’ he said, and went on biting his unlit cigar.  Another man was telling, slowly and somewhat bitterly, how he had expected one of his children to join him out here, and how the passage had been paid with a draft on the O.B.C.  But now ... There, ladies and gentlemen, is where it hurts, this little suspension out here.  It destroys plans, pretty ones hoped for and prayed over, maybe for years; it knocks pleasant domestic arrangements galleywest over and above all the mere ruin that it causes.  The curious thing in the talk was that there was no abuse of the bank.  The men were in the Eastern trade themselves and they knew.  It was the Yokohama manager and the clerks thrown out of employment (connection with a broken bank, by the way, goes far to ruin a young man’s prospects) for whom they were sorry.  ‘We’re doing ourselves well this year,’ said a wit grimly.  ’One free-shooting case, one thundering libel case, and a bank smash.  Showing off pretty before the globe-trotters, aren’t we?’

’Gad, think of the chaps at sea with letters of credit.  Eh?  They’ll land and get the best rooms at the hotels and find they’re penniless,’ said another.