WE WERE SITTING at a table inside: Monckton and the bosun and Carl and George and me and the women, the three women of that abject glittering kind that seamen know or that know seamen. We were talking English and they were not talking at all. By that means they could speak constantly to us above and below the sound of our voices in a tongue older than recorded speech and time too. Older than the thirty-four days of sea time which we had but completed, anyway. Now and then they spoke to one another in Italian. The women in Italian, the men in English, as if language might be the sex difference, the functioning of the vocal cords the inner biding until the dark pairing time.
The men in English, the women in Italian: a decorum as of two parallel streams separated by a levee for a little while.
We were talking about Carl, to George.
"Why did you bring him here, then?" the bosun said.
"Yes," Monckton said. "I sure wouldn't bring my wife to a place like this."
George cursed Monckton: not with a word or even a sentence; a paragraph. He was a Greek, big and black, a full head taller than Carl; his eyebrows looked like two crows in overlapping flight. He cursed us all with immediate thoroughness and in well-nigh faultless classic Anglo-Saxon, who at other times functioned in the vocabulary of an eight-year-old by-blow of a vaudeville comedian and a horse, say.
"Yes, sir," the bosun said. He was smoking an Italian cigar and drinking ginger beer; the same tumbler of which, incidentally, he had been engaged with for about two hours and which now must have been about the temperature of a ship's showerbath. "I sure wouldn't bring my girl to a dive like this, even if he did wear pants."
Carl meanwhile had not stirred. He sat serene among us, with his round yellow head and his round eyes, looking like a sophisticated baby against the noise and the glitter, with his glass of thin Italian beer and the women murmuring to one another and watching us and then Carl with that biding and inscrutable foreknowledge which they do not appear to know that they possess. "E innocente" one said; again they murmured, contemplating Carl with musing, secret looks.
"He may have fooled you already," the bosun said. "He may have slipped through a porthole on you any time these three years."
George glared at the bosun, his mouth open for cursing.
But he didn't curse. Instead he looked at Carl, his mouth still open. His mouth closed slowly. We all looked at Carl.
Beneath our eyes he raised his glass and drank with contained deliberation.
"Are you still pure?" George said. "I mean, sho enough."
Beneath our fourteen eyes Carl emptied the glass of thin, bitter, three per cent beer. "I been to sea three years," he said. "All over Europe."
George glared at him, his face baffled and outraged. He had just shaved; his close blue jowls lay flat and hard as a prizefighter's or a pirate's, up to the black explosion of his hair. He was our second cook. "You damn lying little bastard," he said.
The bosun raised his glass of ginger beer with an exact replica of Carl's drinking. Steadily and deliberately, his body thrown a little back and his head tilted, he poured the ginger beer over his right shoulder at the exact speed of swallowing, still with that air of Carl's, that grave and cosmopolitan swagger. He set the glass down, and rose. "Come on," he said to Monckton and me, "let's go. Might as well be board ship if we're going to spend the evening in one place.'
Monckton and I rose. He was smoking a short pipe. One of the women was his, another the bosun's. The third one had a lot of gold teeth. She could have been thirty, but maybe she wasn't. We left her with George and Carl. When I looked back from the door, the waiter was just fetching them some more beer.