Crime de Luxe by Elizabeth Gill

Author:Elizabeth Gill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2020-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD DAY

CHAPTER XIII

WHY—?

“GOOD MORNING,” said Benvenuto. “Isn’t this grand?”

Ann, leaning over the ship’s rail, looked up from the dancing water and smiled at him.

“It’s so grand,” she said, “that it seems almost superfluous to see any more fine mornings for the rest of one’s life.”

“Which remark simply goes to show,” said Benvenuto, “that you’re completely under the spell of the Atalanta.”

“I don’t see what the Atalanta’s got to do with it.”

“That’s part of the spell,” said Benvenuto darkly. “Let me explain.”

They turned and walked along the empty deck; they were the first passengers to leave their cabins on the morning of the third day.

“Haven’t you ever noticed,” he went on, “that whenever you spend a few days on board ship, your ordinary conception of Time goes all to pieces? To begin with, the days of the week lose their personalities; Monday ceases to be real and earnest, a day without a sense of humour as it is on land; Thursday sheds its especial languorous grace; even Sunday morning loses its potency. And having once got rid of this convention by which we’ve agreed to divide life up—the rest is easy. Take board-ship friendships—even among the English who regard Time with almost religious respect, they’re proverbial—they spring up and blossom on a short ocean passage between people who normally, upon dry land, would take weeks, months, even years to arrive at the same stage of intimacy.”

“But do they achieve friendship?” said Ann. “I’m not at all sure that board-ship acquaintance lasts further than the landing-stage.”

“And why? Merely because Time has resumed his sway, and your ocean companion, as soon as he sets foot on land, becomes self-conscious and distrustful of the indecent haste with which he has confessed his favourite colour and his views on the immortality of the soul. And of course up to a point he’s right. Having invented an intricate convention of time which has been carried to such an extent that a cocktail or a marriage service is legal at one hour and illegal the next, naturally we have become unfitted to live without it. We have to spread the process of making friends over a long period of time before we can feel sure about them. Personally I think that’s a—a pity. (I almost said a waste of time.) Sympathy and hatred, cold, excitement, depression, happiness and hunger, seem to me to divide up time much better than a clock or a calendar. And talking of hunger—shall we—?”

“Come and have breakfast with me,” said Ann, turning down the companion-way.

“I think I always live by board-ship time,” she went on later, looking at him across the silver and china of the breakfast table. “It’s never interested me very much to wonder how long I shall live, but merely how much, if you see what I mean. Most of the things that are any good happen in a flash—or at least our consciousness of them does. I grew up in the war when things weren’t measured by permanence.

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