Mess gear interrupted our happy morning.  The sight of a knife fairly sickened me.

June 24th. Last week I caught a liberty—­a perfect Forty-three—­and went to spend it with some cliff dwelling friends of mine who, heaven help their wretched lot! lived on the sixth and top floor of one of those famous New York struggle-ups.  Before shoving off there was some slight misunderstanding between the inspecting officer and myself relative to the exact color of my, broadly speaking, Whites.

“Fall out, there,” he said to me.  “You can’t go out on liberty in Blues.”

“But these, sir,” I responded huskily, “are not Blues; they’re Whites.”

“Look like Blues to me,” he said skeptically.  “Fall out anyway.  You’re too dirty.”

For the first time in my life I said nothing at the right time.  I just looked at him.  There was a dumb misery in my eyes, a mute, humble appeal such as is practised with so much success by dogs.  He couldn’t resist it.  Probably he was thinking of the days when he, too, stood in line waiting impatiently for the final formalities to be run through before the world was his again.

“Turn around,” he said brokenly.  I did so.

“Fall in,” he ordered, after having made a prolonged inspection of my shrinking back.  “I guess you’ll do, but you are only getting through on a technicality—­there’s one white spot under your collar.”

Officers are people after all, although sometimes it’s hard to realize it.  This one, in imagination, I anointed with oil and rare perfumes, and costly gifts I laid at his feet, while in a glad voice I called down the blessings of John Paul Jones upon his excellent head.  Thus I departed with my kind and never did the odor of gasoline smell sweeter in my nose than did the fumes that were being emitted by the impatient flivver that waited without the gate.  And sweet, too, was the fetid atmosphere of the subway after the clean, bracing air of Pelham, sweet was the smell of garlic belonging to a mustache that sat beside me, and sweet were the buttery fingers of a small child who kept clawing at me while their owner demanded of the whole car if I was a “weal mavy sailor boy?” I didn’t look it, and I didn’t feel it, but I had forty-three hours of freedom ahead of me, so what did I care?

All went well with me until I essayed the six flight climb-up to the cave of these cliff-dwelling people, when I found that the one-storied existence I had been leading in the Pelham bungalows had completely unfitted me for mountain climbing.  As I toiled upward I wondered dimly how these people ever managed to keep so fat after having mounted to such a great distance for so long a time.  Somehow they had done it, not only maintained their already acquired fat but added greatly thereto.  There would be no refreshing cup to quaff upon arriving, only water, or at best milk.  This I knew and the knowledge added pounds to my already heavy feet.