“May I present Mr. Achleitner?  Mr. Achleitner is an architect from Vienna.”

The man with the piercing eyes smiled with an air of interest, holding fast to the brass balustrade to keep from being hurled against the wall.

The door of a rather gloomy saloon opened on the first landing.  It bore the misleading sign “smoking-room,” misleading because the smokers never used it, far preferring the cosey little saloon on deck.  A brown upholstered bench ran around the brown, wainscoted walls.  Kneeling on the bench one could look out through three or four port-holes upon the seething and boiling of the waves.  The entire floor space between the benches was taken up by a table finished in a dark stain.

“This room is a horrid hole,” said Hahlstroem.  “It positively makes me creepy.”

A loud, trumpet-like, laughing voice called out from inside the room: 

“I say, Hahlstroem, if this sort of weather holds out, neither your daughter nor I will keep the first day of our engagement with Webster and Forster.  We’re not even making eight knots.  Perhaps I’ll be able to manage.  A big dose of salt water doesn’t hurt me.  To-day is the twenty-fifth.  If we reach Hoboken at eight o’clock the evening of the first of February, I can appear for my act in perfect serenity at nine o’clock; but that frail blossom of yours can’t.  She will certainly need a few days to recover from the hardships of this trip.”

The three men entered the smoking-room.  Frederick had already recognised the voice as belonging to the man without arms, who, he learned later, from Hahlstroem, was a world-renowned celebrity.  For more than ten years the bill-boards of every great city in the world had been displaying simply his name, Arthur Stoss, which alone sufficed to draw throngs to the theatres.  His special art consisted in doing with his feet whatever other people do with their hands.

The first sight of him, of course, was repellent; but in the smoking-room on deck Frederick had got over his first repulsion and had become interested in his personality.  Yet the situation in which he now beheld him was so novel, so remarkable, almost to the point of improbability, that he had difficulty in concealing his amazement.  Arthur Stoss was eating lunch.  Since this room was so little used and since a man forced to handle his knife and fork with his feet could not be permitted to eat in the public dining-room, they served Arthur Stoss with his meals here.  To the three onlookers it had the value of an artistic performance to see how the actor managed to manipulate his instruments with his clean, bare toes—­and that despite the pitching of the vessel—­meanwhile, in the best of humour, uttering the wittiest remarks as bite after bite disappeared down his throat.  He began to banter Hahlstroem and Achleitner, sometimes in rather caustic fashion, while exchanging glances with Frederick, as if he thought vastly more of him than of the other two men, who soon withdrew from his attacks to go on deck.