Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  “Rats,” Noel corrected her calmly. “Rats, not cats.” He disengaged his arm and continued aft. Peter Noel was completely free from the superstitious beliefs which even in this enlightened day hold sway over the minds of those who go down to the sea in ships.

  Still smiling a little at the stewardess, he came to the end of the passage, which opened directly into the small social hall of the cabin-class ship. Ahead and to the left hung a worn brown curtain bearing the legend “Smoking Room.” Behind that curtain had gathered a few passengers, for he could hear their impatient voices.

  Directly on his left was a narrow door bearing an imposing red seal stamped with the eagle of the U.S. Customs. Peter Noel leisurely broke the seal and stepped into his pantry. He did not hurry himself, although the American Diplomat had dropped her pilot and was now officially on the high seas.

  Only a single rolltop partition above the counter separated him from the people in the smoking room. Noel sat casually down on his stool, drinking in the stale odors of the windowless pantry perfumed with orange peel and drops of spilled cordial and the rich aroma which rises from a loosely corked bottle of Bacardi. Noel liked the heaviness—he was seaman enough to distrust fresh air in any form.

  He helped himself to a fat corona from the showcase and lit it. Then he puffed contentedly, polishing his finger nails on his palm. Here he was king—until he opened the barrier and became a flunkey again. The tall black bottles in the rack behind him jingled with the roll of the ship, as if readying themselves for action, but Peter Noel still took his time.

  Someone was tapping impatiently upon the outside of the partition, and he heard a loud tenor voice intoning: “…those who stood before the Tavern shouted, ‘Open then the door…!’”

  “Bloody fool!” said Peter Noel. But all the same he moved to unhook the partition and raised it. He knew as soon as he looked across the counter that this was going to be a dull trip. There was a sailing list of fifty-odd, not bad for the beginning of the winter season. Yet only seven of them were thirsty enough to hurry through their dinners and join in the sacred rite of opening the bar!

  “Well!” said the young man who had been tapping. “After all these years! Make mine a double rye.” He was a wide and high young man, with brown curly hair, a big mouth and jaw, and a red necktie. There was a twinkle in his eye. “What’ll you have, everybody? The first round’s on me.”

  “No rye,” Noel told him.

  The tenor was busily urging the various little groups to come forward and join him in Rotarian jollity. The easiest persuaded were a young couple who—Noel instantly decided—were New Yorkers by their dress, and married by their attitude. They looked smart and a bit tired and feverish and anxious to be amused. “Well, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond?”

  The girl’s blue eyes were older than her young, smooth face. “Cointreau,” she said pleasantly. Tom Hammond took a brown pipe from the wide mouth beneath his little mustache and said he could do with a cognac.

  In the farthest corner two girls were giggling and striking matches for each other’s cigarettes. “What’s yours, Miss Fraser? And what’ll your friend have?” The young man with the tenor voice was one of those passengers who spend their first few hours on board learning the names of everyone else, and the last few hours writing down addresses.

  “Thank you so much,” drawled Rosemary Fraser in a too cultured voice. “Nothing for either of us.”

  Everyone stared. Tom Hammond nudged his wife. “Loulu, they’re smoking cigars!”

  Loulu Hammond shook her head. “They’re showing off,” she informed him. “Puerto Rican brown-paper cigarettes.” She turned her casual glance back toward the bar again, but not before she had noticed every detail worth noticing about Rosemary Fraser.

  She had seen a girl of twenty or thereabouts, dark-haired and pale, wearing a softly lovely coat of squirrel that reached to her slim ankles. Around her throat was a scarf of midnight blue. The face was oval, with big gray eyes and a high-bridged nose, and escaped beauty only because of the babyish, overripe mouth.

  “Not a beauty,” Loulu decided, “though Tom will think so. But she’s got something…”

  The other girl was just that—another girl. Her face was tanned almost as dark as her brown-paper cigarette, and she was perhaps five years older than her companion, whom she resembled in a colorless way. She wore a dark blue worsted suit and looked dependable. Like Rosemary, she seemed to have a secret amusement of her own.

  The tenor was undiscouraged. He approached a couple who were sitting on the lounge, engrossed in old copies of Punch. The woman was monocled, fortyish, and very tweedy. Her companion was young, palely masculine, and he wore a pink shirt and brown plus-fours with tassels on them.

  “Don’t mind,” accepted the Honorable Emily, a bit stiffly. “I’d like—” She was about to order a whisky and soda until she remembered that all Americans are rotten with money. “A champagne cocktail,” she finished. Then she nudged the young man beside her. “Nephew!”

  “Oh—quite,” said Leslie Reverson. “MindifIdo.” He smiled a very pleasant smile. “Gin-and-it.” It was his largest contribution to the conversation that evening.

  The drinks were placed on the counter by Noel. “Where’s my double rye?” complained the tenor.

  “No rye,” said Noel clearly. “I’ve got Scotch, and I’ve got Irish, and I’ve got Bourbon. But no rye.”

  The tenor ordered a gin fizz in a tone which proclaimed that his faith was gone and wrote “Andy Todd” across the bill in staggering script. Then they all drank, in a silence broken by small talk from the Hammonds. Even that died away when the tanned girl put down her dark cigarette and approached the bar.

  “Two crême de menthes,” she ordered. She wrote “Candida Noring” on the bill, and carried the drinks carefully back to her corner.

  Peter Noel strangled a cough behind his counter. “Well!” gasped Andy Todd loudly.

  Loulu Hammond was pointing at his glass. “You’re spilling gin fizz on your trousers,” she said softly. So he was.

  Tom Hammond saved the situation by buying another drink for Todd and a fresh cognac for himself. Then he sat down and let the larger young man tell him the story of his life. Boiled down, it amounted to this—working his way through the University of Washington at Seattle, with time enough for crew and track and Phi Beta Kappa. Now he was going for a higher degree via a Rhodes scholarship. “And I’m going to have some fun out of this trip, too,” Todd was insisting. “I’ve had my nose to the grindstone long enough.”

  Rosemary Fraser, across the room, whispered something to her companion, and both girls laughed. Loulu Hammond guessed that the Fraser girl had suggested that Todd’s nose could stand a bit more grinding from an artistic point of view.

  Rosemary and Miss Noring were standing up, the former pulling the collar of her squirrel coat around her ears. “How frightfully chilly it is in here,” she said as she went out.

  “She’d be warm enough if she were wearing something underneath that coat besides a suit of lounging pajamas,” Loulu Hammond said to herself. She had caught a glimpse of crimson silk trousers beneath the squirrel coat.

  “High hat, eh?” said Andy Todd indignantly to the bar steward. But Peter Noel did not answer. He was staring after the two who had gone and straightening his tie.

  The two girls came out into the main social hall. It was a wide, low room well aft in the ship, and furnished with a bad piano, a good gramophone, ten bridge tables, and two easy chairs. Along one wall were five old ladies at five writing desks, scratching away with pens that were no doubt honorably retired from the post offices of America. Each rose from time to time to drop a fresh sheaf of stamped fat envelopes in the near-by letter box, though it would not be opened until the ship reached London.

  A few bridge tables were in use, and half a dozen children were chasing each other and screaming merrily. One fat-faced youth of seven or eight was quietly whittling at the leg of the piano, his tongue protruding in
the intensity of his labor.

  “How horribly dull,” said Rosemary Fraser. “Candy, why didn’t we wait for the Bremen?”

  Candida Noring agreed. “Not a man on the boat, my dear. That cute English boy is under age, and Hammond is married…”

  “Not too married, if I know the look in his eye,” said Rosemary. She looked back toward the smoking room. “No, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there isn’t a single solitary man on the boat worth developing…”

  “You surely don’t mean Cecil Rhodes’ gift to Oxford?”

  “Him!” said Rosemary. “Too, too sick-making.” She headed for the door. “Let’s take a turn or two of the deck and then go down and fight over who has to take the upper berth.”

  Two hours later Rosemary thumped her pillow. “He has the strangest eyes!” she decided aloud.

  Candida Noring put down her book and leaned over the edge of the top berth. “Who, in heaven’s name?”

  “You wouldn’t have noticed,” said Rosemary comfortably, and opened her fountain pen. From beneath her pillow she took a leather-bound book, unlocked it with a tiny golden key, and pressed her cheek against the smooth creamy pages with their faint blue rule.

  At the head of the first page she wrote “Friday, September Thirteenth,” then was thoughtful for a long while and finally began: “There’s a man on board, diary, and when he looks at me…”

  At the moment when Rosemary was filling the creamy pages with her round script, back in the tiny smoking room Tom Hammond was having his fifth cognac. The others had gone, and the bar steward was leaning on his counter and talking swiftly and agreeably.

  “You said just now that you are with a manufacturing chemist,” Noel began after lighting himself a cigar. “You know, I had a bit of that thrown at me when I was with the Chilean navy—in ’27 and ’28. There was only one cruiser, with three-inch guns that were falling to pieces and full of bird’s nests besides. It was up to me and four greaser rear admirals to concoct a powder weak enough to fire salutes with and still not blow the guns to bits. We were just getting there when the government overturned and some new rear admirals took charge. I got the sack and some of the new greasers got blown sky-high…” He looked happy when Hammond asked a question.

  “Me? I was a rear admiral too. We were all rear admirals on board except for two captains and a cook. Gold epaulettes and a hundred Mex dollars a month. Great run while it lasted.”

  Hammond looked a little envious. “You’ve been around.”

  “Sure!” Noel grinned. “This is just marking time for me, this job. I’m pulling strings to get into the Chinese flying corps in Manchuria—”

  There was a knock on the pantry door. The stewardess, Mrs. Snoaks, stood outside.

  “Two more gin and bitters for the fussy couple in 44,” she ordered. “Colonel Wright says please will you use Booths instead of Gordon’s like you did last time?”

  “The Colonel will drink what I mix,” said Peter Noel viciously. He rattled with his rack of bottles. “Now, when I was with the White Russians, in their Secret Service—”

  But Tom Hammond was departing. “See you tomorrow,” he called back. The social hall was empty now. He took a turn or two of the boat deck, found the wind so high that his pipe became overheated in a moment, and he knocked it out. Then he went back below and followed the corridor to C cabin. It was the best on the ship, with a real bath, four portholes, and a genuine double bed. Two berth settees lined the wall, and on one of them was a tumble of bedclothes from which protruded a small fist, threatening even in relaxation. Tom Hammond walked softly, so as not to call down on himself the Vesuvius of trouble which was condensed in his eight-year-old son.

  Loulu Hammond, propped against pillows in the big bed, smiled at him. “If you wake Gerald you may have the joy of beating him. He did twenty dollars’ worth of damage to the ship’s piano tonight.”

  “It was your idea, bringing him,” Tom said. He slipped into a silk dressing gown. “For myself, I’d rather travel with a goat. The twenty can come out of your allowance, for you should have been watching him.”

  “I was too busy watching you with your eyes glued on the little snip in the squirrel coat,” said Loulu. “Spend a pleasant evening?”

  “She didn’t come back to the bar,” Tom said quickly. “But I saw her just now, stretched out in the gayest pair of red pajamas…”

  “What?” Loulu sat up straight in bed.

  “Through the porthole, when I took a turn around the promenade deck,” he went on. “The curtain was blowing.”

  Tom Hammond was ready for bed. Loulu put down the New Yorker she had been reading—it was her Bible whenever she was out of the city—and her husband reached for the light switch.

  Tom drew back his hand as if something had snapped at him. Gerald Hammond raised his rumpled, triumphant head from the blankets and shouted in a soprano voice that penetrated half the ship: “Daddy saw red pajamas! Daddy saw red pajamas!” He took a fresh breath. “Daddy saw—”

  Tom Hammond got his hand across the mouth of his son and heir, but not before an impatient maiden lady in the next cabin had been awakened and had rapped sharply on the wall for silence. She had just managed to doze off, after eight hours of mal de mer, and now she was unwillingly awake again, conscious of the endless and persistent rocking of the billows.

  “And this was a trip for pleasure!” moaned Hildegarde Withers. Which was hardly the exact truth. She had been left in such a nervous state as an aftermath of her participation in the unraveling of the murder mystery at Catalina Island in the late summer, that her physician had refused to allow her to go back to her desk at Jefferson School that fall. Luckily, the unexpected payment of a comfortable reward by the millionaire owner of the island permitted her to indulge a long-standing desire to see Europe.

  She took up a worn linoleum-bound copy of Alice and tried to forget that eight more days of the unfriendly Atlantic lay between the ship and the muddy mouth of the Thames. The book opened at the Hatter’s tea party. “‘I didn’t know it was your table,’ said Alice. ‘It’s laid for a great many more than three.’”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers smiled grimly, and wondered if she would ever sit in her chair at the ship’s table this trip.

  At any rate, her place was vacant at dinner the next evening. The rest of the arbitrarily arranged group at the doctor’s table was there intact, however.

  Dr. Waite, bald and sniggering, was a good master of ceremonies, for all that. The head steward always put the “young crowd” at the doctor’s table, plus one or two steadier women for balance. This evening saw them properly arranged—on the doctor’s left was the Honorable Emily Pendavid, then her nephew Leslie, then haughty Rosemary, then Tom Hammond and Loulu—minus Gerald, who gulped his food at a wall table with the rest of the children, under the eye of the stewardess—next Andy Todd, with Miss Withers’ vacant chair on his left, and beyond that the tanned face of Candida Noring, and the doctor again.

  Dr. Waite was talking, and he could out-talk Andy Todd. “What a crowd and what a voyage that one was!” he finished. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

  Loulu Hammond said something about the pace that kills. But Andy Todd wanted to know where there was any room for dancing.

  “Pull up the rug at one end of the social hall,” advised Dr. Waite wickedly. “Turn on the Victrola and leap to it. If the bridge players object, let them go complain to the Old Man. He’s on the side of youth and beauty, and he may come down off the bridge and trip a few fantastics himself.”

  Candida Noring had been on the bridge and met Captain Everett, who stood eighteen stone. “God forbid!” she said fervently.

  There was dancing in the social hall that night, in spite of the slow, shuddering roll of the vessel. The bridge players, instead of raising objections, paired off in sedate couples and got onto the floor. From time to time they overruled Leslie Reverson, who was self-appointed selector of the records, and played a waltz or one-s
tep.

  The five old ladies at the five writing desks glared disapprovingly, but after a little while they finished their letters and went off to bed. The doctor appeared on the scene, danced with the Honorable Emily, with Loulu Hammond, and finally with Candida. He sought for Rosemary, who had watched coolly as a spectator up to this point, but found her dancing in the corridor with Tom Hammond. Their cheeks were very close together, and the bar steward had closed up his bar for lack of patronage and was watching them.

  Loulu Hammond was in the arms of Leslie Reverson, who danced beautifully and impersonally. She swung, when the music began again, into the strong and somewhat smothering arms of Andy Todd.

  Andy didn’t bother to be diplomatic. “Shall we go on deck and look at the moon?” he leered. “You needn’t mind your husband, he’s having a good time.”

  “What good taste he has,” said Loulu sweetly. But she didn’t go to look at the moon with Andy Todd. There was an easy chair beside the doctor.

  He lit her cigarette, nearly burning off her eyelashes in the process. “You know,” he observed generally, “it’s funny what people will do when they get on shipboard. They just seem to cut loose, sort of.”

  “They run hog-wild and dance until eleven or twelve, don’t they?” agreed Loulu. She was thinking of something else.

  “And romance! Say, there’s nothing like a shipboard love affair,” continued the medico.

  Andy Todd and young Reverson both approached to ask Loulu for the next one, and Leslie was vaguely surprised and pleased to find that he had won. Andy wheeled uncertainly and saw that Rosemary Fraser was approaching—alone. She looked like a princess in a wine-colored dinner dress, and carried her squirrel coat over her arm.

  “Miss Fraser!” he shrilled, in the high tenor which he could never control. “Can I have this dance?”

  “Sorry,” said Rosemary. “But I never dance.” She passed lightly out onto the deck, as if to an appointment there. Slowly a red flush rose along the neck of Andy Todd, mounting to his ears. Loulu felt so sorry for him that she was very nice to him all the rest of the evening—and regretted it whole-heartedly for the rest of her life.