At which I usually swore.
“ Oh, you’ll be all right soon. Don’t mind my puffin’ a bit? Eh?”
He never tired of asking me to “have a hand at Nap. Good game. Makes you forget it, and that’s half the battle.”
He would sit swaying with the rolling of the ship and suck at his pipe of blond tobacco and look with an inexpressibly sage but somnolent blue eye at the captain by the hour together. “Captain’s a Card,” he would say over and over again as the outcome of these meditations. “He’d like to know what we’re up to. He’d like to know—no end.”
That did seem to be the captain’s ruling idea. But he also wanted to impress me with the notion that he was a gentleman of good family and to air a number of views adverse to the English, to English literature, to the English constitution, and the like
