"You see," he half-apologized, "my first glance was disinterested, I was merely seeking to identify ownership. But from just a few lines, read in that fashion, I saw that it was--" his voice became serious, almost awed--"well that it was rather wonderful. Some girl has been putting her heart into words here--" he tapped the blank-book--"and she's written a genuine human document." Again he paused, drumming on the rail with the fingers of one hand.
"From a half-dozen bits of Chimbote pottery," he reflected, "I can read a great deal of the habits and life of the Incas. I can restore an extinct mammal from some fragments of skeleton, but I find it jolly difficult to understand anything about a woman. If a fellow means to marry he ought to try to understand. That's why I'd like to have a dip into this. Do you think I might?"
"Do you think," I countered, smiling, "that you would have the right to read somebody's unsigned love-letters?" A certain magazine editor had once witheringly opined that I would never succeed in literature until I acquired some insight into the feminine riddle. But he had not pointed me to diaries. He had bluntly advised me to fall in love with a few variant types.
Until a man had found blond or dark hairs on his coat shoulder, said the editor, he could not hope to write about heartbeats. If he had found various kinds, and that often, he could write better.
Young Mansfield was giving my question a graver and more literal consideration than it merited.
"I rather think," he said seriously, "that one might read such letters. Unless the offense is against some definite person there is no offense at all."
"Perhaps you are right," I admitted, with a listless avoidance of argument, and in a moment more he had opened the book at random and was reading aloud.
Mansfield was right. The pages of this diary struck the essentially human note of frank self-avowal. They were as fragrant as May orchards, their sweetness of personality made one think of brave young dreams among dewy blossoms. But I confessed to him the feeling that we were trespassers into these secrets, and after that he either laid the book by altogether or read it only when alone.
The _Wastrel_ was cruising at her cripple's pace southeast by east, through those hot waters which lie directly above the equator. After some days we sloped across the line, but still clung to the hideous swelter of the next meridian. Our course lay among groups of lush islands which simmered in steam and fever, and the merciless, overhead sun beat upon us, as if focused through a burning glass until the pitch oozed from the deck cracks, and the sweat from our pores, and the self-control from our curdled tempers. Faces that had been sullen at Sandakan grew malevolent and menacing at 150 degrees, east, where, if I remember rightly, we crossed the equator.