to the general public. “This one’s mine! Where are the others? Can’t you find the others for me?” she said in a sharp, protesting voice to one of the porters, a little, brawny man with sprouting moustaches. “Hey?” she said, lifting her small hand complainingly to her ear as he answered her in a torrent of reassuring French. She turned to her companion protestingly:
“I can’t get them to do anything. They don’t pay a bit of attention to what I say! I can’t find my trunk and two of my bags. I think it’s the most dreadful thing I ever heard of. Don’t you? Hey?” again she lifted her little hand to her ear, for she was somewhat deaf: her small, rosy face was crimson with excitement and earnestness—in her tone, her manner, her indignation, there was something irresistibly comic, and suddenly her companion began to laugh.
“Oh, Esther!” she said. “Lord!” and then paused abruptly, as if there were no more to say.
Esther was fair; she was fair; she had dove’s eyes.
Now the woman’s lovely face, like a rarer, richer, and more luminous substance, was glowing among all the other faces of the travellers, which, as the tender circled and came in close below the ship, were fixed with a single intentness upon the great hull that loomed over them with its overpowering immensity.
The great ship cast over them all her mighty spell: most of these people had made many voyages, yet the great ship caught them up again in her magic glow, she possessed and thrilled them with her presence as if they had been children. The travellers stood there silent and intent as the little boat slid in beside the big one, they stood there with uplifted faces; and for a moment it was strange and sad to see them thus, with loneliness and longing in their eyes. Their faces made small, lifted whitenesses; they shone in the gathering dark with a luminous glimmer: there was something small, naked and lonely in the glimmer of those faces, around them was the immense eternity of sea and death. They heard time.
For if, as men be dying, they can pluck one moment from the darkness into which their sense is sinking, if one moment in all the dark and mysterious forest should then live, it might well be the memory of such a moment as this which, although lacking in logical meaning, burns for an instant in the dying memory as a summary and a symbol of man’s destiny on earth. The fading memory has forgotten what was said then by
