"Dispatches for Rudolph Hackh?" he inquired, twisting up his blond
moustache, and trying to look insolent and peremptory, like an
employer of men.

"There are none, sir," answered an amiable clerk, not at all impressed.

Abashed once more in the polyglot street, still daunted by his first
plunge into the foreign and the strange, he retraced his path, threading
shyly toward the Quai François Joseph. He slipped through the barrier
gate, signaled clumsily to a boatman, crawled under the drunken little
awning of the dinghy, and steered a landsman's course along the shining
Canal toward the black wall of a German mail-boat. Cramping the Arab's
oar along the iron side, he bumped the landing-stage. Safe on deck, he
became in a moment stiff and haughty, greeting a fellow passenger here
and there with a half-military salute. All afternoon he sat or walked
alone, unapproachable, eyeing with a fierce and gloomy stare the
squalid front of wooden houses on the African side, the gray desert
glare of Asia, the pale blue ribbon of the great Canal stretching
southward into the unknown.

He composed melancholy German verses in a note-book. He recalled famous
exiles--Camoens, Napoleon, Byron--and essayed to copy something of all
three in his attitude. He cherished the thought that he, clerk at
twenty-one, was now agent at twenty-two, and traveling toward a house
with servants, off there beyond the turn of the Canal, beyond the curve
of the globe. But for all this, Rudolph Hackh felt young, homesick,
timid of the future, and already oppressed with the distance, the age,
the manifold, placid mystery of China.

Toward that mystery, meanwhile, the ship began to creep. Behind her,