Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before we have done with blue water.  Most of the nations of the earth are at issue under a stretch of white awning above a crowded deck.  The cause of the dispute, a deep copper bowl foil of rice and fried onions, is upset in the foreground.  Malays, Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans—­the whole gamut of racetints, from saffron to tar-black—­are twisting and writhing round it, while their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald turbans and head-cloths are lying underfoot.  Pressed against the yellow ochre of the iron bulwarks to left and right are frightened women and children in turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes.  They are half protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw mats, red lacquer boxes, and plaited bamboo trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper hukas, silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and properties enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild.  In the centre of the crowd of furious half-naked men, the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue devils, holds the eye first.  It is a wicked back.  Beyond it is the flicker of a Malay kris.  A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror.  Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down from their ripening-places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters.  One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a muzzled bear.  His owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, kneels over the animal, his body-cloth thrown clear of a hard brown arm, his fingers ready to loose the muzzle-strap.  The ship’s cook, in blood-stained white, watches from the butcher’s shop, and a black Zanzibari stoker grins through the bars of the engine-room-hatch, one ray of sun shining straight into his pink mouth.  The officer of the watch, a red-whiskered man, is kneeling down on the bridge to peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, thin black revolver from his left hand to his right.  The faithful sunlight that puts everything into place, gives his whiskers and the hair on the back of his tanned wrist just the colour of the copper pot, the bear’s fur and the trampled pines.  For the rest, there is the blue sea beyond the awnings.

Three years’ hard work, beside the special knowledge of a lifetime, would be needed to copy—­even to copy—­this picture.  Mr. So-and-so, R.A., could undoubtedly draw the bird; Mr. Such-another (equally R.A.) the bear; and scores of gentlemen the still life; but who would be the man to pull the whole thing together and make it the riotous, tossing cataract of colour and life that it is?  And when it was done, some middle-aged person from the provinces, who had never seen a pineapple out of a plate, or a kris out of the South Kensington, would say that it did not remind him of something that it ought to remind him of, and therefore that it was bad.  If the gallery could be bequeathed to the nation, something might, perhaps, be gained, but the nation would complain of the draughts and the absence of chairs.  But no matter.  In another world we shall see certain gentlemen set to tickle the backs of Circe’s swine through all eternity.  Also, they will have to tickle with their bare hands.