Night in Bombay

Előszó

Hrs luggage was all ready to be taken ashore, his cabin in order, and now he stood on the upper deck just beneath the bridge watching the flying fish scud out of each jade green land swell of the Arabian Gulf üke swift pencils of silver and disappear again in glittering jets of spray. He was a tall, good-looking fellow with square shoulders over which his Hanover Street tailor found no need to put any padding. His clothes said 'London' in a discreet whisper, but you knew at once that he was an American. There was something in the blue eyes, the pitch of the chin, but more than anything in the generous, full curve of the lips and the tiny lines about the eyes which betrayed him. His face told you that he came of a people who were gamblers, who were sometimes reckless, and a people who knew how to laugh. He was the American who knew his way about the world, and so in many ways he was dangerous, to himself perhaps more than to others.
He didn't think of himself any longer as wild: he believed quite earnestly that he had settled down. In fact he was rather proud of himself that in his early thirties he had pulled himself together suddenly and made sense. That was the reason he had packed all his luggage carefully, even meticulously with his own hand, instead of asking the steward to do it; that was the reason he had carefully pulled out every drawer and left the door of the cupboard open to show that nothing had been left behind. He did things üke that as an exercise, as a kind of discipline - to keep himself in order and prove to himself that he was a serious fellow, organized and efíicient. It made him feel that he had developed something his father called ' character', which he knew only meant counting ten before he acted; it meant not going off the deep end the moment the Vissza