I had put aside the cards when he sat down, but now, thinking that for this first occasion our conversation had lasted long enough, I went on with my game.
“The three on the four,” said Mr Kelada.
There is nothing more exasperating when you are playing patience than to be told where to put the card you have turned up before you have had a chance to look for yourself.
“It’s coming out, it’s coming out,” he cried.
“The ten on the knave.”
With rage and hatred in my heart I finished.
Then he seized the pack.
“Do you like card tricks?”
“No, I hate card tricks,” I answered.
“Well, I’ll just show you this one.”
He showed me three.
Then I said I would go down to the dining-room and get my seat at table.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.
“I’ve already taken a seat for you.
I thought that as we were in the same state-room we might just as well sit at the same table.”
I did not like Mr Kelada.
I not only shared a cabin with him and ate three meals a day at the same table, but I could not walk round the deck without his joining me.
It was impossible to snub him.
It never occurred to him that he was not wanted.
He was certain that you were as glad to see him as he was to see you.
In your own house you might have kicked him downstairs and slammed the door in his face without the suspicion dawning on him that he was not a welcome visitor.
He was a good mixer, and in three days knew everyone on board.
He ran everything. He managed the sweeps, conducted the auctions, collected money for prizes at the sports, got up quoit and golf matches, organized the concert, and arranged the fancy-dress ball.
He was everywhere and always.
He was certainly the best-hated man in the ship.
We called him Mr Know-All, even to his face.
He took it as a compliment.
But it was at meal times that he was most intolerable.
For the better part of an hour then he had us at his mercy.
He was hearty, jovial, loquacious and argumentative.
He knew everything better than anybody else, and it was an affront to his overweening vanity that you should disagree with him.
He would not drop a subject, however unimportant, till he had brought you round to his way of thinking.
The possibility that he could be mistaken never occurred to him.
He was the chap who knew.
We sat at the doctor’s table.
Mr Kelada would certainly have had it all his own way, for the doctor was lazy and I was frigidly indifferent, except for a man called Ramsay who sat there also.
He was as dogmatic as Mr Kelada and resented bitterly the Levantine’s cocksureness.
The discussions they had were acrimonious and interminable.
Ramsay was in the American Consular Service, and was stationed at Kobe.
He was a great heavy fellow from the Middle West, with loose fat under a tight skin, and he bulged out of his ready-made clothes.
He was on his way back to resume his post, having been on a flying visit to New York to fetch his wife, who had been spending a year at home.
Mrs Ramsay was a very pretty little thing, with pleasant manners and a sense of humour.
The Consular Service is ill paid, and she was dressed always very simply; but she knew how to wear her clothes.
She achieved an effect of quiet distinction.
I should not have paid any particular attention to her but that she possessed a quality that may be common enough in women, but nowadays is not obvious in their demeanour.
You could not look at her without being struck by her modesty.
It shone in her like a flower on a coat.
One evening at dinner the conversation by chance drifted to the subject of pearls.
There had been in the papers a good deal of talk about the culture pearls which the cunning Japanese were making, and the doctor remarked that they must inevitably diminish the value of real ones.
They were very good already; they would soon be perfect.