The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [405]
‘Actually, it was then that we began to realize that it was probably rather a boring idea after all to go prowling about in the other classes … There was really nothing much to do! And one of the men who was in the Diplomatic … He told me his name was Sinclair Sinclair (he had a stammer and he always said it twice and I never found out whether it was really that or whether he was just repeating one of his names) and had been to Harrow and was a great sport and was something like the millionth secretary in Bangkok or somewhere … he said : “I say, I don’t know what you people think b-b-but it seems to me that the other cluh-cluh-cluh … parts of the ship are just a tiny bit disappointing, if you get m’meaning,” and he did rather say what was in everyone’s mind. And someone else said: “I mean to say, it’s ever so slightly dingy, which is not to say that it’s not frightfully jolly in its way, and all that.’
And soon we were all feeling pretty glum which was awful considering how cheerful we’d been just a few minutes before. And by that time we’d come to another locked door and almost decided to go back but Carlos, alias the Stage Butler, had already bribed somebody, sort of automatically, and he was opening the door so we went through that one, too. And that was a mistake because on the other side of that door things were really pretty grim and we found ourselves trooping through a sort of dreadful dormitory with bunks which had a ghastly stuffy smell and was full of half-naked people snoring, and Sinclair Sinclair said: “I think we must be in one of the holds,” and one of the girls began to feel faint, but the man had locked the door behind us again and we couldn’t find anybody else to open it and we were afraid the girl was going to faint or have hysterics or something. So someone said that there must be a way of getting up to the deck … that there was a law of the sea or something which said even third-class passengers had to have a way of getting on to the deck, and so we decided to wait up on deck in the fresh air while we sent Carlos to bribe somebody to get us back to the first class. Incidentally, when I told Sinclair about the man I’d seen in Shanghai with strawberry jam coming out of his stomach he wasn’t at all impressed and said he’d seen lots of things like that and that Asiatics were always killing each other. It seems they don’t mind. It’s been proved scientifically, that’s what Sinclair said anyway.
‘In the end we found some stairs and got up on to the deck and thank heaven because it was ghastly down there. Someone said that now he knew why it was called the bowels of the ship but nobody laughed because it was vulgar. And even on deck there were people sleeping huddled here and there, Chinese, I think, I suppose they didn’t care for it down below either. It was quite warm and there was a lovely moon and a soft breeze. After crawling about down below it was super to be in the fresh air again and one of the men produced a bottle of champagne he’d brought with him and we all took a swig and felt quite merry again. And while we were waiting for Carlos to come back Sinclair Sinclair told us about a game he and his chums used to play in Paris when he was learning French (which they all have to in the Diplomatic) … it was called saute-clochard: evidently all the beggars in Paris sleep in rows over the hot-air vents from the Métro in winter to keep warm and the game consisted in seeing how many you could jump over at a time: it sounds a bit heartless, I must say, but anyway, Sinclair announced that he had decided to beat the world record for saute-Chinois which meant the number of Chinamen he could jump