CHAPTER V

MR. VAN BLARCOM.  U. S. A.

For a trip that had begun with such rich promise of the unusual, my voyage on the Re d’Italia proved a gratifying anticlimax during its first few days.  The weather was bad.  We plowed forward monotonously, flagless, running between dark-gray water and a lowering, leaden sky.  Screws throbbed, timbers creaked, and dishes crashed as the Gulf Stream took us, and great waves reared themselves round us like myriads of threatening Alps.

After that first night the girl kept discreetly to her stateroom.  I was relieved; but I thought of her a good deal.  I had little else to do.  Pacing a drunken deck and smoking, I wove unsatisfactory theories, asking myself what was her need of secrecy, what the item she wanted hidden, what the errand that had made her sail on the vessel a week after the spectacular torpedoing of a sister-ship?  Did she know this Van Blarcom or did she merely dread any notice?  And above all, who was the man and had he been watching when I tossed that wretched extra across the rail?

I saw something of him, of course, as time went on.  Naturally we four bold spirits, the ubiquitous McGuntrie, Van Blarcom, the young reservist Pietro Ricci,—­a very good sort of fellow,—­and I were herded together beyond escape.  Also, a foursome at bridge seemed divinely indicated by our number, and to avert a sheer paralysis of ennui we formed the habit of winning each other’s money at that game.

As we played I studied Van Blarcom, but without results.  It was ruffling; I should have absorbed in so much intercourse a fairly definite impression of his personality, profession, and social grade.  But he was baffling; reticent, but self-assured, authoritative even, and, in a quiet way, watchful.  He smoked a good cigar, mixed a good drink, seemed used to travel, but produced a coarse-grained effect, made grammatical errors, and on the whole was a person from whom, once ashore, I should flee.

At six o’clock on the seventh night out our voyage entered its second lap; all the electric lights were simultaneously extinguished as we entered the danger zone.  We made a sketchy toilet by means of tapers, groped like wandering ghosts down a dim corridor, and dined by the faint rays of candles thrust into bottles and placed at intervals along the festive board.  I went on deck afterward to find the ship plunging through blackness on forced draft, with port-holes shrouded and with not even a riding-light.  If not in Davy Jones’s locker by that time, we should reach Gibraltar the next evening; afterward we should head for Naples, a two days’ trip.

The following morning found our stormy weather over.  The sea through which we were speeding had a magic color, the dark, rich, Mediterranean blue.  Ascending late, I saw gulls flying round us and seaweed drifting by, and Mr. McGuntrie in a state of nerves, with a life belt about him, walking wildly to and fro.