THE BOOK OF THE HOMELESS
noon, from anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea and its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, very solid and motionless against an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the emptiness of the decks favouring my reminiscent mood. It might have been a day of five-and-thirty years ago, when there was on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea, I could have given myself up to the illusion bringing the past close to the future, if it had not been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat-deck with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like two small disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He was bringing them home from their school in England for their holiday. What could have induced him to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal country, I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot, while his breast (and to some extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later, I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, the first that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian Army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine, active boys are orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a
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