He went down on the deck near the ladies’ saloon, where the second-class passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip.  The passengers were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the music without smiling.  One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and another began to do the rheumatic uncle’s breakdown.  Mavering said to himself:  “I can’t stand that.  Oh, what a fool I am!  Alice, I love you.  O merciful heavens!  O infernal jackass!  Ow!  Gaw!”

At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to the States after some job in the Provinces.  They smoked their pipes and whined their Neapolitan dialect together.  It made Mavering think of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass.  The inscription on the gate of hell ran through his mind.  He thought he would make his life—­his desolate, broken life—­a perpetual exile, like Dante’s.  At the same time he ground his teeth, and muttered:  “Oh, what a fool I am!  Oh, idiot! beast!  Oh! oh!” The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took out his cigarette case.  The Italians looked at him; he gave all the cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself.  He determined to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and bestowing alms.

He groaned aloud, so that the Italians noticed it, and doubtless spoke of it among themselves.  He could not understand their dialect, but he feigned them saying respectfully compassionate things.  Then he gnashed his teeth again, and cursed his folly.  When the bell rang for supper he found himself very hungry, and ate heavily.  After that he went out in front of the cabin, and walked up and down, thinking, and trying not to think.  The turmoil in his mind tired him like a prodigious physical exertion.

Toward ten o’clock the night grew rougher.  The sea was so phosphorescent that it broke in sheets and flakes of pale bluish flame from the bows and wheel-houses, and out in the dark the waves revealed themselves in flashes and long gleams of fire.  One of the officers of the boat came and hung with Mavering over the guard.  The weird light from the water was reflected on their faces, and showed them to each other.

“Well, I never saw anything like this before.  Looks like hell; don’t it?” said the officer.

“Yes,” said Mavering.  “Is it uncommon?”

“Well, I should say so.  I guess we’re going to have a picnic.”

Mavering thought of blueberries, but he did not say anything.

“I guess it’s going to be a regular circus.”

Mavering did not care.  He asked incuriously, “How do you find your course in such weather?”

“Well, we guess where we are, and then give her so many turns of the wheel.”  The officer laughed, and Mavering laughed too.  He was struck by the hollow note in his laugh; it seemed to him pathetic; he wondered if he should now always laugh so, and if people would remark it.  He tried another laugh; it sounded mechanical.