“I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and I had had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory.
[Illustration: The Quarantine Station, North Head, Sydney.]
For nearly a month we had been living on food that a Kaffir in the Kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on board the _St. Louis_ we had eaten dirt of many French descriptions. Everything was dirty. Not even the insides of the loaves were clean. The galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of a starving man. The cook was to match. The steward who waited on us was willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself and his crockery. The chief steward on French ships is called _maître d’hôtel_, and by this title we addressed him. On shore we should have said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the _St. Louis_ he was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was open to judicious bribery.
We had worried through our last dirty _déjeûner_ on board, and preparations were being made for getting the anchors up. The captain and the mate had each put on a clean collar, and the chief engineer was wringing his hands and dancing about the forecastle because the donkey-engine had gone wrong and only fizzed feebly when it should have been getting the cable in.
“Well, thank God,” I said to my diver friend, “we shall have a decent dinner to-night! You are going to dine with me at the Australia. We’ll have a real cocktail at the bar, only one, for it won’t do to spoil a precious appetite, then we’ll eat our way through the menu and drink champagne. Looks like heaven, doesn’t it?”
This is of course only an expurgated version of what I really said. His reply consisted of a finely embroidered comparison between the Australia Hotel and the _St. Louis_, calculated to start every rivet in her hull.