“C. Q.” or, In the Wireless House
yellow-red confines of the northern desert. It was a novelist’s chance of a lifetime: but these ladies did not know it, and spent their time in indignant clusters, discussing their companions and “’ow ’orid they smelled.”
At Gibraltar another swarm of belated ones had come aboard, and Billy Parish, the gambler who regularly travels from Algiers to Gibraltar and back again—“bridge only, you understand,—at sixpence a point”—had made forty pounds by pretending he had taken passage for New York, and selling out to a Wall Street stock broker “at the greatest possible inconvenience to himself”. But the really funny thing was how that Olympic-Hawke business had made all the captains so nervous—and Ponsonby, the purple captain of the Pavonia, was worst of all.
As Fitzpatrick sauntered back to his post in the wireless house, the were all filing in to dinner, and the deck stewards were darting around among the old ladies, with sloppy trays of lukewarm bouillon and soggy sea biscuit. A condensed odor, thick to the eye as a London fog, was working along the passageways, heavy with the steam of the soup caldrons, the smell
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