Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/220

 for the differences men have made between themselves to assert their distinction, there is that one instant of perfect understanding. Sometimes a man in a boat sailing by will hail you with this gesture from his passing craft; he is safe from long contact, he can run a risk and for that little moment yield to the adventure of picking up an acquaintance. Sometimes it is the engineer of a locomotive leaning out of his cab window, giving you perhaps a droll wink, and there are tramps who from a box car will exchange a friendly greeting. And I shall never forget the little Irish sailor up on the boat deck with whom I talked in the early darkness of an autumn evening in the middle of the Atlantic, with the appalling loneliness of the sea as night came down to meet it in mystery, and the smoke from the funnels trailed up off to the southwest on a rising and sinister wind; he told me of his mother and his uncle—"who makes his five guineas a week and doesn't know the taste of liquor"—and of his little ambitions, and so, after a bit, of the mysteries of life, with a perfect camaraderie, as we stood there leaning over the rail, and then, suddenly, when we parted, invested himself with a wholly different manner, and touched his cap in a little salute and left me to the inanities of the smoking-room.

It was something like that, those intimacies, vouchsafed for a moment in our early meetings, whether those at noon or those at night, in the suffocating little halls, or the cold tent, with the torches tossing their flames in your eyes as you spoke, and it was even that way in those curious meetings down