But it was no one’s business but my own. I comforted myself with that reflection amid much that I found disturbing.
What I chiefly found disturbing was my general environment. I couldn’t understand this narrow cabin, these provincial foreign clothes. While I was sorry for Drinkwater’s blindness, I disliked the closeness of contact with one I regarded as my inferior. I am not saying that I took this situation seriously. I knew I could extricate myself from it on arriving in New York. The element in it that troubled me was my inability to account for it. What had I been doing that I should find myself in conditions so distasteful? Why should I have wanted to obliterate my traces? It was obvious that I had done it, and that I had done it with deliberation. Being Somebody in the world, I had made myself Nobody, and for that I must have had a motive. Was it a motive that would confront me as soon as I had become Somebody again? That I should have lost the sense of my identity was bad enough in itself; but that I should reappear in a rôle that was not my own, and with a name I was sure I had never borne, was at once terrifying and grotesque.
It occurred to me that I could escape some of my embarrassment by asking Drinkwater to stop his friend the doctor from looking in on me; but before I had time to formulate this plan, and while I was sitting up crosslegged in my berth, eating from the tray which Jean-Marie had laid on my knees, there was a sharp rap on the door. As I could do nothing but say, "Come in," the doctor was before me.
"Good!" he said, quietly, without greeting or self-introduction. "Best thing you could be doing."
The lack of formality nettled me. I objected to his assumption of a right to force himself in uninvited.
I said, frigidly: "I shall be out on deck presently. If you want to see me, perhaps it would be easier there."
"Oh, this is all right." He made himself comfortable in a corner of the couch, propping his body against the rolling of the ship with a fortification of bags. "Glad you’re able to get up and dress. I’m Doctor Averill."
To give him to understand that I was not communicative I took this information in silence. My coldness apparently did not impress him, and, sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to mine, he watched me eat.