Page:ManInBrownSuit-Christie.pdf/91

82 Sarcasm is dangerous with a man like Pagett. He brightened up at once.

"Well, if I could get rid of the typewriter and the stationery trunk"

The stationery trunk weighs several solid tons. It causes endless unpleasantness with the porters, and it is the aim of Pagett's life to foist it on me. It is a perpetual struggle between us. He seems to regard it as my special personal property. I, on the other hand, regard the charge of it as the only thing where a secretary is really useful.

"We'll get an extra cabin," I said hastily.

The thing seemed simple enough, but Pagett is a person who loves to make mysteries. He came to me the next day with a face like a Renaissance conspirator.

"You know you told me to get Cabin 17 for an office?"

"Well, what of it? Has the stationery trunk jammed in the doorway?"

"The doorways are the same size in all the cabins," replied Pagett seriously. "But I tell you, Sir Eustace, there's something very queer about that cabin."

Memories of reading The Upper Berth floated through my mind.

"If you mean that it's haunted," I said, "we're not going to sleep there, so I don't see that it matters. Ghosts don't affect typewriters."

Pagett said that it wasn't a ghost, and that, after all, he hadn't got Cabin 17. He told me a long, garbled story. Apparently he, and a Mr. Chichester, and a girl called Beddingfeld, had almost come to blows over the cabin. Needless to say, the girl had won, and Pagett was apparently feeling sore over the matter.

"Both 13 and 28 are better cabins," he reiterated. "But they wouldn't look at them."