.. and
it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a
Shakespearean scholar....
"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities
about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life
... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a
soldier and citizen."
Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as,
to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move,
he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the
book.
His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his
own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about
how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad
Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....
Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me
hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line
or miss a single word ... which he did not....
Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the
water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down
for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If
I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him
forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for
his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.
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