Nancy sighed. “There you go again, appealing to my sense of justice. You’re ... you’re insidious, Lee!”
A chuckle came from a chair nearby and Lisa traced it to a thin woman of about forty, whose greying dark curls had been blown into a tangle by the breeze. She wore rather too much jewellery, but her eyes were bright and brown and her mouth humorous. Nancy gave one of the stiff little smiles she reserved for importunate adults and, with sudden dignity, walked up the deck.
“Don’t sit in the sun, Nancy,” Lisa called after her.
“An intelligent child,” commented the woman, “and you handle her deftly, if I may say so. It always gives me immense pleasure to hear children reasoned with, because they invariably respond to it.”
“She can be rigid,” laughed Lisa, “but the steward was so eager in his praise of the book that I had to take it. Next time I’ll send Nancy to deal with him herself.”
“And I guarantee she’ll do the choosing! How old is she?”
“Nearly eleven, but she thinks almost like a grown-up.” Lisa leaned back upon the rail, fading the other woman. “I shall miss her frightfully.”
The two chatted for a while. Her companion, Lisa learned, was Laura Basson, the English widow of a South African business man. She had a son and a daughter at school in Cape Town and was now on her way to bring them home.
“They’re fourteen and sixteen—a nasty age to change school—but I want them near me, add I’ve no alternative to living in England. I never stayed long enough in one place to have friends in South Africa, but I have a relative or two at home. I’m not the solitary sort. I can’t get along without friends. It’s different when one has a husband.”
She was wealthy. Her several rings were encrusted with diamonds and sapphires, and the necklace she wore carelessly with a linen suit had the depth and purity of pearls straight from the ocean bed. But gems are no substitute for human relationships, and Laura Basson admitted that her days were long and her nights often sleepless. Luckily she had retained her sense of humor, but at times it had been severely strained.
Lisa found herself wondering about other passengers. There was a story behind each one of them. Queer to think that all over the world people were working out their fate, and for each its course was different. Intuitively, she knew that this woman would never regain true happiness unless she married again.
“Don’t look so grave, my dear,” said Mrs. Basson. “You’ll have troubles—we all do—but it’s unwise to allow them much importance. You have to grab at happiness wherever you come across it—particularly when you fall in love. I suppose you haven’t been in love yet?”
Lisa shook her head. “I’m not sure that I want to be.”
“You’re too sweet-looking to escape it. I hope you’ll find someone protective and ardent. It’s so easy to get hurt, and that kind of injury is difficult to live down.” At this juncture they were joined by a thickset little Dutch woman who proceeded with the aid of a steward to set up a hand loom upon which a roll of gaily-striped weave was growing.
It was really odd and marvellous, thought Lisa as she watched the blunt, fast-moving fingers, how folk of different nations and creeds become close and friendly when confined to a ship. They unfolded their life stories and helped each other, well knowing that at the end of the trip they would all go their separate ways.
Having done more than enough moralizing for one morning, Lisa went off to wash her hands and find a hat. Nancy had left a note in the cabin which read, “I’m not going to church, I’m going to Sunday School in the nursery.” Lisa worried for a minute; she herself was responsible for Nancy’s quiet self-possession, but it still gave her qualms.
She approached the lounge alone, her knees surprisingly wobbly and a queer warmth in her veins. The place had been transformed. The chairs, most of them easies, stood in row’s down the centre, and the majority of them were occupied. On one side of the lounge were the stewards and stewardesses, lined up as if for inspection, and on the other the officers and crew made a neat array. The pianist, also in uniform, sat at the grand piano, and as Lisa slipped into her seat, which was somewhere near the middle of the congregation, he began to play a hymn.
The atmosphere calmed Lisa, so that when Captain Kennard took his place behind the table draped with the Union Jack and the flag of South Africa, she knew a deep content and a sort of pride. The service he conducted was brief and simple.
There came the final, familiar hymn and soon they were dispersing. Lisa reached one of the wide exits at the same time as Mark. She took off her hat and looked up at, him. “It was a lovely service,” she said.
“Thanks. Perhaps you were in the mood, for it. Did you come alone?”
“Nancy, for some reason, decided on Sunday School.”
“I was the reason,” he said, the ghost of a smile playing about his chiselled mouth. “I came upon her reading, and we had a brief chat. I noticed she had had to be bandaged again.”
Crimson petals flowered in her cheeks. She was vexed with herself, not knowing that there is nothing more attractive than a flush upon clear pale skin.
“It was a large dressing hiding a very small graze. Most of the children have had tumbles.”
“Some of the adults, too,” he, said enigmatically. He bowed. “I have work to do, so perhaps you’ll pardon me, Miss Maxwell.”
Lisa found Nancy making guarded conversation with a girl a year or two older than herself, and deemed it wise to leave her there. She wandered on to where two seamen were inspecting the faucets which filled the swimming pool. The sun on her back as she leant on the safety rail and watched the first trickles of water over the white tiling was warm and teasing. She had examined the marked map on the wall near the purser’s office and discovered that the ship was heading for the channel between Madeira and the Canaries. Early tomorrow, someone had said, they would pass Madeira. Lisa wished they were stopping there. She wanted to prolong the voyage into eternity, because she had a groundless yet inescapable feeling that it was the biggest thing which would ever happen to her in the whole of her life.
Jeremy did not appear for lunch. Nor did Astra. Puzzled, but not put out, Lisa ate alone, and afterwards she went to the cabin for a quiet read. The sunshine slanted through the port-hole, the curtain lifted and bellied, the faint creaking of the bulkheads and the muffled, distant throbbing of the ship’s heart were a benign accompaniment to the Sabbath quietude.
It lasted till four-thirty, when Jeremy, quite pale for him, his wheat-colored hair untidy, knocked and walked in. “Oh,” he said, momentarily stunned, as though Nancy’s presence were totally unexpected. With a visible lift of his shoulders, as if he were performing the bewildering task known as pulling oneself together, he added, “I must talk to you, Lee. We’ll have to go to the lounge, unless...”
Nancy, recumbent on the rug with a book—not the one about ponies—yielded nothing. To use her own expression, Jeremy could go fishing. She didn’t like him, and she didn’t want to like him.
Lisa said, “We might as well have tea up there. I’ve had a gloriously lazy afternoon.” She turned to Nancy. “Are you staying in here, darling?”
“Yes, please.”
“All right. I’ll send you orange squash and biscuits. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve had tea.”
Jeremy, it seemed, was worn and almost distraught. As they walked the corridor and mounted the wide, flower-decked staircase, he held on to her arm like a man clinging to a spar in erratic seas. He chose a corner of the lounge which was screened from the few other tea drinkers, saw Lisa seated and then sank down into his own chair, facing her across the table and letting out a sigh of both excitement and disaster.
“Gosh,” he breathed, “What a day! They say the turning points in a man’s existence steal upon him unawares. This one has come to me with a blare of trumpets.”
“Have some tea,” Lisa advised him soothingly, pushing across the neat blue and white cup. “They’ve brought your favorite marble cake, too.”
> But Jeremy’s digestion was temporarily paralyzed. He ignored the cake, dropped several lumps of sugar into the tea and stirred so abstractedly that the liquid poured over into the saucer.
But he managed a slightly winning smile. “First I must apologize for more or less lying to you this morning. I longed to tell you at breakfast that I’d promised Astra Carmichael to spend an hour or two on a test in her cabin, but ... well, I didn’t.”
“A test for what?”
A faint access of color made his sherry-brown eyes look like polished topaz. On a comic note of despair he said, “She thinks I have it in me to be an actor.”
Lisa absorbed this for a long moment. “Seriously?” she asked at last.
“She’s serious enough,” he returned almost grimly. “How that woman can work!”
“So you had the test?”
He nodded, and got out his handkerchief to wipe a brow still damp from exertion. “She gave me a part to read—explained it all first and told me to forget my own identity and assume his. After a couple of false starts I got going, with her taking the other two parts. She’s magnificent, Lee. So beautiful and sensual, and yet acting the whole timer. Try to imagine her lying there in a chair...”
“It doesn’t need much imagination,” she interposed dryly.
“She didn’t bother to move even a hand; it was all done by inflection. When it was over I voted we call it a day. But not she! We tried another part, and then another. For lunch we had Scotch and soda and dry biscuits, and it was then that she told me she could train me to work with her in Johannesburg. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
For a while Lisa had no comment to offer. Had Jeremy been less serious she would have laughed, sharing his joke. But he was so obviously in earnest that a jest now might prove fatal. No, her attitude at the moment had to be as casual as she could make it. “Johannesburg is a big city, isn’t it? I suppose the prospect is rather glittering, but she may be wrong. It would be ghastly if you failed to go over with the audience.”
“Astra says I won’t. The plays she’s chosen for the season have the orthodox sort of hero. She herself is the star of them.”
“Naturally.”
He bent forward, determined to convince. “Don’t you see, it’s best for me that my first parts should be on one pattern. That way I shall have a chance to learn stagecraft and improve my technique before tackling anything really big.”
Lisa hated hurting people, but she was anxious that Jeremy should avoid deeper wounds later. She drank some tea before making her next observation, and smiled to soften its impact.
“Do you honestly believe you’ll ever be good enough to tackle something really big?”
‘ His mouth compressed, and he did not hide the fact that he was stung. “You might encourage a chap! This opportunity has dropped straight out of the blue, and I refuse to pass it up. If Astra Carmichael considers I have the talent to make a living on the stage, I don’t see that you have any cause to question it.” He broke off, and tacked on quickly, lightly, “I’m sorry. If I hadn’t muddled the telling of it you’d have understood. I want to do this thing, Lee. It may sound crazy, but I think it’s my line.”
“But your mother is so proud of you now. She’d feel terribly let down if all the sacrifices she’s made turned out to be superfluous. Think about it awfully hard,”' she pleaded. “You actually have your technical degree, but you’d be starting at the bottom with Astra. I know she promises you fairly important parts, but only for six months. After that you’d probably have to go on alone, without her influence. And I can’t help thinking it’s all too sudden and overwhelming.”
“My dear girl, that’s how the best things come about!”
“Some of them,” she said slowly, “but not those which map one’s whole career.” Her forehead puckered with an earnestness which matched his. “Before this, you’ve never had the smallest urge to act, have you?”
“No,” he acknowledged flatly, “I haven’t. But I was raised in a country where few actors reach more than amateur status.”
“You’ve been in England since then.”
He breathed , a long sigh of exasperation and chagrin. “All right, I’m not a born actor. I know, it. But Astra Carmichael, who you’ll admit has some experience of the theatre, is certain I’d make a popular leading man in her plays. Leading man, mind you, not just an extra.”
Lisa had not the heart to voice the suspicion in her mind: that Astra, secure in her own reputation and determined not to be outshone, had picked on Jeremy Carne chiefly for his good looks and the pleasure of playing with a younger man who would do as he was told. She would teach him enough to ensure that her own effect was by no whit diminished, and would generously allow him his modicum of applause, but once her season was over he could slide back into the bushveld for all she would care.
Lisa could see that he was anything but gay about his good fortune. The knowledge that his mother and father would suffer shook him more than he cared to admit, yet the vision of himself in the most glamorous of professions was one he could not relinquish.
And who was she, thought Lisa, to judge his capabilities when she had not even seen him display them? If at the first trial he could put on a show which appealed to the expert Astra, he would probably turn out to be a satisfactory stage lover. Stranger things had occurred. He was as conscious of all the drawbacks as she; she had no right at all to dissuade him.
Yet she felt compelled to point out: “The way I see it, leaving aside any consideration for your parents, is that you have to choose between a solid career for which you’re , already fitted, and a fickle one. You have a post awaiting you in Durban which you’ve admitted is far better than you’d hoped for, and you’ve the guarantee of six month work with Astra. It’s clear-cut, Jeremy.”
He could not let it rest there, of course. Astra had handled him with all her considerable cleverness; persuaded him, no doubt, that a man with his features was meant to use them. One couldn’t really blame Jeremy if he found himself yearning to try his luck behind the footlights. They parted soon after that, Jeremy to take a sea water bath and relax in his cabin and Lisa, to collect Nancy and watch the first brave swimmers in the pool.
Jeremy came to dinner looking pale and interesting. Like many other men he had donned a white evening jacket as a concession to the warmer atmosphere, and the sleekness of his hair allied with the sombre shadow in his eyes made him appear older and more responsible. His compliment for Lisa’s white frock was sincere but restrained. He was acting already, she thought, and doing it rather well. His first lesson with Astra had been completely successful.
They strolled on deck, found chairs in the wind-screened deck lounge and drank coffee and liqueurs. Tonight the stars were bright, and a moon, invisible from where they sat, cast back shadows in angular patterns over the afterpart of the ship.
Jeremy said, “I’m going to sleep on it and not make any decision till it’s unavoidable.”
“Very wise,” she answered. “And while you’re thinking , it over, don’t forget that one of these days you may want to take a wife.”
“I’ve always told myself I wouldn’t marry before I’m thirty. It used to be my ambition to marry where money is.”
“Wise again, perhaps,” she said, smiling.
Lisa was watching a couple who had appeared from the lounge and halted in an angle of the rail. No mistaking the fact that Mark was doing most of the talking, but Astra gave the impression of being a willing listener. She gave a low laugh and shook his arm as she made some response. Lisa imagined the faint, autocratic grin which he was doubtless bending upon his companion, and her heart contracted, though it shouldn’t have done, so. She had no proprietary rights in that grin. But she did wish it wasn’t the custom for the Captain to be sociable with his passengers; only then she herself would never encounter him.
Jeremy turned his head and saw them. “Oh, oh,” he murmured. “Astra’s amazing, isn’t she? I expect the big sea-dog will hitch up w
ith someone like her. They’re different from us, Lee, both of them. In their set one doesn’t need the thing called love. One changes one sophisticated relationship for another, that’s all. Then they get married and share a flat on the few occasions when they happen to be in the same place together. I don’t suppose they ever get really intimate ... only physically.”
“They’ve known each other for years,” she threw at him quickly. “If they were attracted they’d have married before.”
“Don’t you believe it, my pet. Both were probably ambitious, and now each of them has reached the top. They’ve nothing left to conquer but marriage.”
Jeremy’s diagnosis was too close to Mark’s expressed sentiments. Lisa had the conviction that the young man was learning more than the art of speaking and posturing from Astra Carmichael. Or perhaps he had picked up a good deal while kicking around London without an anchor.
The couple by the rail had begun to walk back again.
Trust Mark to stay well on the right side of convention. He must have cast a glance into the open end of the deck lounge and seen the two who had it to themselves, for he spoke to Astra, and their steps veered. With Astra preceding him, he came to their corner and gave a slight, ironical bow.
“Good evening. I’ve just been hearing, Carne, that you have a spark of what it takes to carry a man to fame. How fortunate for you that you should be travelling with Miss Carmichael.”
By now Jeremy was standing. Under the cool satire of Mark’s glance, his composure began to warp.
“I think so, too,” he managed, with a show of nonchalance. “It’s been an amazing day for me.”
Astra placed slim fingers with bronze-red tips upon his wrist. “Then you’re happy about it now? I was half afraid that your Lisa would not approve, but, after all, she’s only a shipboard companion, isn’t she?”
This last was murmured in a tone calculated to make Lisa go hot. In addition, Mark was regarding her with a mocking intensity, which was confusing, to say the least. And more than anything Lisa hated to be baited. Considering that she seethed, she answered for Jeremy with admirable control as well as a show of spirit.
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