In the vast and
melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man at any
human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory interest
in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my fellow-sufferers;
but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I clung with
undiscriminating enthusiasm.
In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance I
attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown beard
who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses, imparted
to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was nothing in
the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and though the man
had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably from the shrill
inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that under different
conditions his discursive history of successful business ventures in a
Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner of a lullaby.
Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a
self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as
though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied
itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark of
my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied with
his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty) deep-sunk
in conjugal content.
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