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The voyage of the steam yacht Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski (the novelist’s Polish surname had been added out of deference to the large number of Polish members in the Chicago branch of the Society) was uneventful. Many photographs were taken of lagoons, reefs, volcanoes, half-castes, amateur beachcombers, English novelists from Yorkshire in search of material for novels, ambergris, canoes, and fat German hotel-keepers who were often indistinguishable from the Yorkshire novelists, and many note-books filled by the caption-writers.

Hugo explored the ship from end to end and, when that pastime had been worked out, had to fall back upon the library for entertainment. It contained the complete works of the Master, of course, and also those of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Shakespeare, and the poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, and Browning. There were twenty-five copies of each volume.

Hugo made one or two attempts to engage the American officers in a conversation about the subject that was causing him so much bewilderment, Women and How to Treat Them, but it was useless. At the first hint that this was the topic to which the young castaway was working up, these lean, brown, clean-shaven men shut their strong jaws with a click, and a look of intense silence came into their clear eyes. This puzzled Hugo a good deal. He had thought that the divergent views about Women of his three clerical instructors covered the whole field. But already, in his first step into the great world, he was encountering a fourth theory, a theory of absolute silence. Poor young man! He could not be expected to appreciate, even dimly, the deep sensitiveness which so hampers, in the Courts of Love, the best and highest type of American gentleman.

The yacht steamed through the islands, and eastwards to Panama, slipped through the cuts and locks of the canal, and turned northwards on the last lap of its two years’ cruise. There was only one more halt between Panama and New York, and that was the British port of Nassau, Bahamas, where a cargo was to be loaded for the private consumption of the members of the Joseph Conrad Society of Boston with branches at Milwaukee and Chicago. For even the highest-browed of North American literary ladies like a nice drop of Scotch now and then, and even though Prohibition has been officially abandoned, it is still so much more satisfactory to buy direct from one of those sweet English baronets at Nassau than to pay an increased price to a man who is probably called Thugs Bernardone or Fugs Alighieri or Bugs Buonarotti.

Hugo went ashore while the wooden cases, each marked “New Testaments,” were being stowed away in the hold of the yacht. In spite of all his tri-nationalism, he felt a thrill as his foot touched Imperial soil and his eyes rested upon the Union Jack flying over a vast warehouse. He was home at last. His foot was on his native asphalt and his name was Smith. For an hour he wandered, entranced, along the broad, sunny streets, looking at the shop-windows, and listening to the astonishing variety of Scottish accents with which the air was laden, and gaping at the colossal motor-cars in which Pittsburg coal-owners and peroxide damsels whizzed past, until he came to a thoughtful halt outside a house on which the following notice was displayed:

UNIVERSAL NATIONALITY PROVIDERS, INC.

and underneath in smaller letters:

Been Buzzed Out? We’ll Buzz You in Again

In the window there were specimens of fifty-six varieties of passport. Here was an opportunity of saving an infinity of time and trouble.

The yacht’s captain had told him all about passports and visas and Ellis Island and Quarantine, and had warned him that the least he could expect would be a couple of months’ detention while the authorities discussed his curious, undocumented existence. Apparently a great war had been fought by the Americans in order to make the civilized world free for democracy, and one of the most important results had been that every person in that civilized world was fettered for life to a document. Without that document it was impossible to move from one country to another, and in many lands of the new free world it was impossible to work, play, buy, sell, marry, divorce, or die without that document.

“Suppose,” Hugo said to the yacht captain, “a man without such a talisman were to arrive in your city of New York, as it might be me. What would happen to him?”

“It would depend on whether he had the makings of a good citizen or not,” the captain had replied.

“And what are the makings of a good citizen?”

“There are only two. The Possession of some Money, and a signed statement denouncing Anarchism. You are in possession, if not of money, at any rate of goods that are easily convertible into money. And I am sure that even if you have anarchical inclinations, you will have sufficient tact to say nothing about them until you are admitted into the country.”

“But suppose I had no money,” persisted Hugo. “I trust I do not incommode you with my questions,” he added, with one of Monsieur Forgeron’s graceful bows.

“You do not incommode me in the least,” the captain had replied. “If you arrived in New York without money or papers, you would be deported. That is to say, you would be sent back to the country from which you started.”

“But if I had no papers, how would I land in the country from which I started?”

“You would not land. You would be sent back to New York.”

“But in that case,” said Hugo wrinkling his brow in perplexity, “I would go backwards and forwards between the two countries for the rest of my life.”

“That is so,” replied the captain.

“But there must be cases in which that has actually happened.”

“Certainly there are.”

“And there really are people going backwards and forwards on ships like that?”

“Yes.”

“At the expense of the steamship companies.”

“That is the regrettable feature,” conceded the captain, who held a block of shares in the White Star Line.

“There doesn’t seem to be any sense in it,” said Hugo after a long pause.

“The passport system,” replied the captain austerely, “is the world’s best defence against Bolshevism.”

Long and earnestly Hugo gazed into the window of the Universal Nationality Providers, Inc., and at last he opened the door and went in. The public offices of the Corporation consisted of one large room with a counter at one end, furnished with three hard chairs, a carpet, and a signed photograph of Mr. Volstead. Behind the counter sat a girl. She was dark and tall and elegant; her hair was expensively waved; her manner quiet and assured; her dress black with neat white collar and cuffs. She looked, in fact, more like the daughter of a hundred earls than a simple stenographer.

“I beg your pardon,” began Hugo, removing his hat, clicking his heels, lowering his eyes, and bowing from the waist, thus combining the essential features of the three sets of manners which he had learned. “Can I buy a nationality here?”

“Buy an incognito you mean, don’t you, Michael?” replied the lady astonishingly. A faint smile turned for a moment the corners of her tiny mouth.

“I beg your pardon,” said Hugo again, this time blankly.

“I haven’t seen you since we danced together at Heron Castle, Michael,” went on the soft easy voice, with a curious emphasis on the word “danced.”

“I’m afraid,” stammered Hugo in confusion, “that you are mistaking me for someone else. My name isn’t Michael and I haven’t been to Heron Castle.”

The faint smile fluttered again. “And you never made Lord Gallowglass drunk on green chartreuse, I suppose?” she murmured.

“Certainly not.”

“Or made love—rather successful love,” she coughed a tiny cough, “to his daughter?”

“I didn’t even know he’d got a daughter.”

“Not even Deirdre? Oh, Michael! You used to say Deirdre so beautifully.”

“Are you the daughter of a lord?” exclaimed Hugo, with wide-open eyes, “Then why are you working in a—in a—in a——”

“Shop?”

“Well, yes.”

“Michael, my sweet,” remonstrated the elegant girl, coming round to the client’s side of the counter, hopping nimbly on to it and displaying what seemed to Hugo to be about seven yards of beautiful pale silk legs. “Surely you know that the only way that the British aristocracy can make money is by trade and by this.” She waved a white hand, tipped with five orange flames, round the whole of Nassau, Bahamas, and brought it to rest for an instant on the photograph of the hero of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

“But I assure you,” remonstrated Hugo, “that my name is not Michael.”

The girl sighed. “You were so sweet last time,” she said wistfully. “But I presume you know your own business best. You wouldn’t care to kiss me, I suppose?”

Hugo recoiled in alarm. All the teaching of the Reverend Eustace surged down upon him like a bank of fog. Here, if anywhere in the world, was an occupant of the top story of a pedestal, and on to a pedestal Hugo instantly hoisted her.

“Thank you, no,” he said, “Thank you very much, but no. I really couldn’t. I mean, I do thank you very much, but all the same I really couldn’t.”

To his surprise the girl broke into a gay laugh.

“You are a wizard, Michael,” she cried. “You’re the best of the whole lot, damn my soul if you aren’t.”

“Quite,” said Hugo. It was all he could think of to say.

The daughter of Heron Castle suddenly tucked her black satiny dress tightly round her knees, lifted her legs above the counter, pivoted smartly through an angle of 180 degrees, hopped down to the ground on the private side of the counter, and became once more the business woman.

“And what can I do for you, sir?” she asked with a genteel expression on her face.

“I want a nationality,” said Hugo, relieved by this sudden change of tactics.

“Have you any particular preference?” asked the saleswoman briskly. “I have here a very pretty line in Guatemalan citizenship at a hundred and ten dollars fifty. Or we could fix you up as a Liberian negro, with a pedigree stretching back as far as the maternal grandmother, and a failed B.A. of the Institute of Wheatology, Houston, Texas, for seventy-eight dollars and ten cents.”

“But I don’t want to be a Liberian negro,” protested Hugo.

“There is no sort of compulsion to become one,” replied Lady Deirdre equably, pulling out card after card from a small lacquered cabinet. “I can do you a very jolly Catholic priest who has been expelled from Goa for simony at twenty-seven dollars. And here is a perfectly sweet Siamese major-general with five medals and eleven grown-up daughters. Very useful if you thought of going in for the white slave trade.”

“But I want to be an Englishman,” said Hugo, horrified at the unconcerned reference to unspeakable vice which fell so smoothly from those near-coral lips.

“It’s more expensive,” said the girl. “We’ve got to be so careful to get our references right. They’re so particular in England.”

“It doesn’t matter about the expense.”

“Wouldn’t an Ulsterman do just as well? They work out much cheaper.”

Hugo hesitated. The three pastors had been unanimous in their praise of Ulster, its dockyards, its stern civic virtues, the double-decked anti-rain cape to which it has given its name, and its detestation of the Church of Rome. But the call of blood was too strong.

“No,” he said firmly, “it must be an Englishman.”

“Very well,” said the girl. “It will cost you three hundred dollars. Let me see. You’d be about twenty-one, Michael, wouldn’t you? Then you’d better have been born after 1907. That makes your birthplace Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.”

“I don’t quite understand,” said Hugo.

“Those born before 1907,” explained the beautiful saleswoman patiently, “we usually put down as born in Kingston, Jamaica. No one can check the certificates, as all the records were destroyed in the fire and earthquake of that year. Those born after 1907 are sent to New Zealand because of the earthquake of 1930.”

“What a wonderful command of detail you’ve got,” exclaimed Hugo in admiration.

“What a wonderful command of self you’ve got,” retorted the girl with a flash from her dark eyes that made Hugo jump. She went on in her professional tones, “Then if you’ll come back in an hour’s time, everything will be ready for you. By the way, if you have no special preference for names, I would suggest Howard Macaulay Jenkinson. All three are unobtrusive and all three typically English.”

“My name is Smith,” cried Hugo loudly.

The flame-tipped hand was held up as if in benediction, or in traffic-stopping.

“Oh no, no, no, no,” she cooed, “you can’t do that.”

“Smith,” replied Hugo.

“Oh, please, Michael.”

“Smith.”

“But——”

“Smith. And what’s more—Hugo Bechstein Smith.”

“Very well,” Lady Deirdre said coldly. “In an hour’s time then.” She returned to her desk without another glance at him. Hugo filled in the hour with a visit to the yacht for some of Mr. Forgeron’s gold-dust, and a visit to the bank where he changed the gold-dust into paper dollars. Owing to Pastor Schmidt’s solid grounding in financial theory, he was enabled to check the rate of exchange to a fraction of a cent.

When he returned to the office of the Universal Nationality Providers, Inc., he found that the efficient daughter of Lord Gallowglass was ready for him. A dark blue passport stamped with the great golden arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was lying on the desk. On the inside of its cover was inscribed the majestic plea on behalf of the bearer which begins with the words “We, George Nathaniel, Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Viscount Scarsdale, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, a Member of His Britannic Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire.... His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs....” and later on came to the statement that Hugo Bechstein Smith, by national status a British subject, by profession an agent, was born in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, on April 1st, 1910; that his domicile (in French domicile) was London, his height five feet ten inches, the colour of his eyes brown, his hair brown, his face oval. There was also a photograph of him. Attached to the passport was a birth-certificate signed by the rector of St. Swithin’s, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand; a marriage-certificate, dated 1906, of Howard Macaulay Jenkinson Smith, gas-fitter and plumber of Kingston, Jamaica, to Wilhelmina Caroline Nibbs, spinster, of the same city, signed by the vicar of St. Dunstan’s, Kingston. And there was also a lock of yellow hair tied with pale blue ribbon and labelled, in faded writing, “Dear wee Bechy, aged six months,” and a photograph of an exceptionally repulsive child of about four wearing a broad velvet collar, a tunic with a belt, and buckled shoes. On the back was written, “Little Bechstein,” and below was printed, “Macmahon & Sons, High Art Photographers, Hawke’s Bay.” Lady Deirdre was nothing if not thorough.

Hugo handed over his money, pocketed the documents and was about to go out, when Lady Deirdre whispered, “Michael.” Hugo stopped nervously, and the girl, with a swift glance round, went on in the same undertone: “It’s not strictly professional, but for old time’s sake I’ve made you up a couple of smaller identities in case they come in useful.” She slipped a couple of envelopes furtively across the counter and added, “One’s a Los Angeles Kidnapper and the other’s a Welfare Worker who’s come to the Bahamas to study the Factory Acts. There’s nothing to pay for them.”

“It’s very, very kind of you,” said Hugo earnestly.

“I haven’t forgotten that night at Heron Castle, even if you have, Michael,” was the soft reply. At the door Hugo was struck with a sudden idea.

“Wherever did you get that photograph of me that’s in the passport?” he asked.

The girl trilled with blackbird laughter.

“Very good, Michael,” she replied. “Very good indeed. Bon voyage and—au revoir.”

Outside in the sunlit street, Hugo stopped and pondered over the extraordinary behaviour of the girl. He had been exceedingly civil. Indeed he felt that Uncle Eustace would have warmly approved his action. But somehow—Uncle René might have been a little sad, a little disappointed at the failure of his pupil to pursue an acquaintance so suddenly, if mysteriously, begun. As for Uncle Hans, he became utterly discredited within an hour of Hugo’s arrival in civilization. Who could imagine that divinely beautiful girl in a kitchen? Why, the thing was sacrilege. Uncle Hans would have done better to have stuck to his accountancy and his costing. Hugo was struck with an idea. He would go back and invite Lady Deirdre to dine with him. At dinner he could see how the land lay, and could decide whether it was possible to combine the respectful adoration of Uncle Eustace with a trifle of the more intimate notions of Uncle René in a way that would bring discredit upon the teachings of neither.

But Hugo was naturally so inexperienced in the ways of the world, that he did not like to return to the shop without a better excuse than an invitation to dinner—little knowing that there are few better ones—and he loitered on the pavement in a state of some indecision. Happily a casual, almost unconscious, glance at his passport provided him with the required excuse, and he went boldly back into the shop.

There was a demoniac gleam in Lady Deirdre’s eye as she looked up and saw him come in, but she said nothing.

“I say,” began Hugo without ceremony. “This is all wrong. It says brown hair and brown eyes, and mine are black and pale blue.”

Lady Deirdre yawned elegantly but ostentatiously. “You can overdo the Simple Simon stuff, Micky,” she remarked.

“What do you mean?”

She exploded in righteous annoyance. “Who the hell looks at passports, you fat-head?” she demanded.

“Then what’s the good of having them?” enquired Hugo in surprise.

Lady Deirdre sighed heavily and looked at the ceiling.

“Anyway,” went on Hugo, “will you dine with me to-night?”

Lady Deirdre did not move a muscle of her indolent, bored attitude, but she sprang to attention mentally.

“Trying to seduce me again?” she asked. Hugo broke out into carnelian blushes and a strong perspiration simultaneously, and he began to stammer.

“Hit it first time, have I?” went on Lady Deirdre calmly. “Well, you’ve got a cheek and no mistake. Think you can come back after two years and pick me up where you left off? Hop it, laddie, hop it. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

In a state of burning confusion, and a fog of astonishment, Hugo backed out of the shop and bolted.

That evening Hugo transferred his belongings to an English ship returning with empties to Liverpool, said good-bye to his American friends on the yacht, and set sail for Home.

The last thing he saw as the ship steamed out of Nassau harbour was a gigantic picture of himself on a hoarding.