. I would have felt a passenger indeed in there! I gave it a
hostile glance and directed my steps toward the Officers' Sailors' Home.

I walked in the sunshine, disregarding it, and in the shade of the big
trees on the esplanade without enjoying it. The heat of the tropical
East descended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly-clad body,
clinging to my rebellious discontent, as if to rob it of its freedom.

The Officers' Home was a large bungalow with a wide verandah and a
curiously suburban-looking little garden of bushes and a few trees
between it and the street. That institution partook somewhat of the
character of a residential club, but with a slightly Governmental
flavour about it, because it was administered by the Harbour Office. Its
manager was officially styled Chief Steward. He was an unhappy, wizened
little man, who if put into a jockey's rig would have looked the part to
perfection. But it was obvious that at some time or other in his life,
in some capacity or other, he had been connected with the sea. Possibly
in the comprehensive capacity of a failure.

I should have thought his employment a very easy one, but he used to
affirm for some reason or other that his job would be the death of him
some day. It was rather mysterious. Perhaps everything naturally was too
much trouble for him. He certainly seemed to hate having people in the
house.

On entering it I thought he must be feeling pleased. It was as still as
a tomb. I could see no one in the living rooms; and the verandah, too,
was empty, except for a man at the far end dozing prone in a long chair.
At the noise of my footsteps he opened one horribly fish-like eye. He
was a stranger to me. I retreated from there, and crossing the dining
room--a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over the
centre table--I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: "Chief
Steward."

The answer to my knock being a vexed and doleful plaint: "Oh, dear! Oh,
dear! What is it now?" I went in at once.

It was a strange room to find in the tropics. Twilight and stuffiness
reigned in there. The fellow had hung enormously ample, dusty, cheap
lace curtains over his windows, which were shut. Piles of cardboard
boxes, such as milliners and dressmakers use in Europe, cumbered the
corners; and by some means he had procured for himself the sort of
furniture that might have come out of a respectable parlour in the East
End of London--a horsehair sofa, arm-