Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “What? Don’t you stand there and tell me any such story. Why, the whole place got strong with it the minute you came in the door. Can’t you tell it, Libby?”

  “I certainly can.” The girl’s petulant voice came from the other side of the cabin. “It makes me—”

  “Now, Baby, now! You don’t think your old daddy would—”

  “Go ‘way from me!” the girl cried. “It’s horrible. And didn’t I tell you to stop calling me ‘Baby’?”

  “Now, Ba — I mean Libby — you oughtn’t to get to feeling like this toward me. You know I only mean everything for just your own good, and!”

  “Let Libby alone,” his wife interrupted him sharply. “You know well enough how she feels toward you; and if you expect her to ever get over it, you’d better not keep trying to talk to her; I’ve told you often enough! I asked you where’ve you been all afternoon.”

  “Why, nowhere except right on this steamer, Mamma. I just been sitting around quietly enjoying myself.”

  “It smells like it!” she said grimly.

  He seemed grieved by her distrust. “Mamma, I’ve been gettin’ acquainted with some pretty big men.”

  “You have? Where’d you find ’em?”

  “Why, Mamma, this vessel is full of ’em! It’s chuck full of the biggest and finest men I almost ever saw in one body.”

  “What on earth do you mean, talking about their being in a ‘body’?”

  “Me?” His voice grew more plaintive in explanation, and at times he seemed to be distrustful of the pronunciation of a word, pausing and then enunciating with a carefulness that was almost pedantry. “Me? What do I mean by a ‘body’? I mean a matter of perfect simplicity. I mean the list of passengers. All you got to do’s to read over that passenger list, Mamma, and you’ll see.”

  “I did, and so did Libby. There wasn’t a soul on it either of us ever heard of in our lives.”

  Ogle had recognized her voice for that of a provincial the first time he heard it, and he expected nothing better of her; but her husband was both shocked and reproachful.

  “Mamma, I hate to hear you say that; it sounds like you never read a newspaper or took any interest in your own country. You mean to tell me you never heard o’ Weatheright’s Worsteds?”

  “What if I have?”

  “Well, it’s the very Weatheright that’s on this boat. I haven’t met him yet; but the gentlemen I’ve been sittin’ with are as fine a small body of men as you’d care to know, and they’re waitin’ for me now to come back and converse some more with ’em. One of ’em is Charles M. Wacks’le — I mean Wackstle. You’ve heard of Charles — I mean Charles Wackstle — haven’t you, Mamma?”

  “No. I have not.”

  “It’s because you don’t read the papers, then. Why, Charles M. Wack — Wackstle was general manager west of the Alleghenies for the Mutual Protective for fourteen years. He and the other gentleman I been with are as fine a small body of men as you can find in the whole United States from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, from the pine forests of the great State of Maine to the silver strands—”

  “Stop talking like that,” his wife commanded sharply. “That’s the way you came home talking the last time you disgraced yourself this way, three years ago, on election night.”

  “‘Election night’?” He repeated the words slowly and gently. “‘Disgraced myself’?”

  “You did! And now you haven’t got any more sense than to talk about finding a ‘fine small body of men’ in the United States, when they’re out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! It shows pretty well what you’ve been doing all afternoon, I guess.”

  “I meant that,” he said with grave gentleness. “I meant out here — out here where we are. I said exactly that thing. They’re as fine a small body of men as you could find anywhere in the middle of the Atlantic Oshum.”

  “‘Oshum’!” Mrs. Tinker echoed angrily. “You can’t even talk! Shame on you!”

  “Mamma,” he said sadly, “you’re not yourself, or you wouldn’t speak like that to me, anyway not before Baby. I said the Atlantic — the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t believe I’m doing any good here.” His daughter agreed with him. “You certainly are not.”

  Evidently the man became dignified. “The steward will attend to your whishes,” Ogle heard him say; and the cabin door closed.

  Then the older of the irritated ladies appeared to become uneasy. “If I felt able I expect I ought to dress and go see after him,” she said. “You can’t tell what kind of people are on this ship. You can’t tell who he may fall in with. I’m worried about him.”

  “I’m worried, too,” the querulous voice of the daughter responded. “But not for him.”

  “Then who—”

  “I’m worrying for the people he may fall in with,” the girl said bitterly. And Ogle, just leaving his cabin to ascend to the dining salon, felt that there might be some points of sympathy between him and this unhappy provincial young lady. A mind so bravely unhampered by the customary filial prejudices seemed to be at least tinged with that modernism of which his own work for the stage strove to be an expression.

  He dined alone, the three other seats at his table remaining vacant; and after dinner he found the poet and the painter in the lounge, which was crowded with the same people whom he had seen drinking tea there in the afternoon. A more festal air prevailed, however; there was more movement and friendly chatter; and the evening gowns of the ladies gave the place a gayer colour, though neither Mr. Jones nor Mr. Macklyn appeared to be aware of any improvement. They were in a corner near a passageway entrance, with coffee and cordials between them upon a tabouret, and, leaning back in easy chairs, each displaying a cigarette in a long holder held with somewhat obvious fastidiousness in white fingers, looked coldly upon the neighbouring bourgeoisie. They had saved a chair for Ogle.

  “It’s the last one in the place,” Albert Jones said.

  “That orchestra’ll be here presently to murder us with some more Puccini and Leoncavallo and Mascagni — even Verdi, if not worse — and of course this type of Americans all adore it. We’d have avoided the place; but we’re driven out of the smoking-room for the evening. That gang’s still up there and they’ve got about a dozen more with ’em now, all of the same kind. They didn’t go to dinner, and they’re singing louder than ever.”

  “Nowhere in the world nowadays,” Macklyn said gloomily, “can one be sheltered from our home-bred boor who carries his native manners with him all over the world. The travellers of every other nation accommodate themselves to the places they’re in, and show plasticity — perception of the manners and customs of other people. That fellow this afternoon hadn’t the slightest idea how he’d been scorched and put in his place merely by a lady’s superb unconsciousness of him. I didn’t see her at dinner.”

  “She has a table on the balcony of the dining salon,” Mr. Jones informed him. “It’s by the railing; — I caught a glint of that wonderful metallic-looking hair of hers — you couldn’t mistake it. She was with the boy she called Hyacinthe; she’s his mother and their name’s Momoro. I asked the chief steward.”

  “Momoro,” the poet repeated. “Momoro. Yes; it ought to be that. She hasn’t come in here. You’d see her instantly, if she were here, crowded as the ‘place is. Over the dead level of these people you’d see her as you see the Nike of Samothrace.”

  “That’s too robust a comparison,” his friend objected, “too robust and too active. Madame Momoro suggests power with less amplitude, less motion. She’s painted almost as a still-life. Wouldn’t you agree there’s more of that about her than of the Nike, Laurence?”

  “Probably,” Ogle answered, a little embarrassed because he knew the statue only through small reproductions in plaster. “Less robustness, as you say, Albert. More reserve and yet a vibration. A vibrating reserve.”

  Macklyn deepened his habitual frown. “I didn’t say she was like the Victory,” he explained. “I said you couldn’t help seeing her if s
he were here any more than you could help seeing that figure when you go into the Louvre. She must be a glorious sight in a ball gown. To me she seems carved out of an Hellenic stillness.” Here, as he spoke, his frown was relaxed as if by some pleasing discovery, and he repeated the phrase slowly: “An Hellenic stillness.

  Carved from a tall, tall block of Jt.” They, his pleasure increasing, he repeated the words again, letting his voice linger upon them with some fondness. “To me, she seems carved out of an Hellenic stillness.”

  Laurence Ogle leaned toward him warningly. “Sh!” And Macklyn, turning his head, beheld the Hellenic lady and the young Hyacinthe just, emerged from the passageway near by. She paused within a few feet of the hushed young men, who, gazing up at her covertly, felt that the poet’s phrase for her was justified and Hellenic stillness realized before their eyes. Her lengthiness had no stoop in it at the smoothly carved still shoulders, which were strapped with jet and silver; her head was poised as a tall king’s should be, and the long figure of black and silver was a masterpiece of assured motionlessness.

  “It’s as if some overwhelming great work of art had suddenly been brought into the room,” Macklyn, said in a low voice to Ogle. “Nothing else seems to have any real existence here, now she’s come. I wish I were going to Algeria, as you are. She lives there.”

  “How do you know?”

  Macklyn nodded his head toward a twinkling scarf of mesh and heavy silverwork hanging upon the young Hyacinthe’s arm. “Algerian — a very fine one. I’ve seen one like it at Sidi Okba.”

  “Sidi Okba?” Ogle murmured, a little irritated by Macklyn’s superiority as a traveller. “You have? At Sidi Okba?” Then he divined why Mme. Momoro and her son had come to a halt beside them; — they were looking over the room to discover vacant chairs. He rose impulsively. “Madame,—” he said. “Madame—” He blushed, struggling for

  French words.— “Madame — ah — chaise — chaise ici”

  “Ne vous dérangez pas, messieurs,” she said in her rich and thrilling voice; for the two other young men had jumped up, also.

  “Mais, madame, nous n’avons pas encore besoin de ces chaises,” Macklyn said, bowing. “Nous partons toute de suite. Je vous prie—”

  She inclined her head gravely. “You are very kind. Thank you,” she said, with a little sibilance, almost as if she said, “Tsank you.” Her son murmured the same words, and the little episode in gallantry closed with three solemn bows delivered almost in concert and in the foreign manner felt to be appropriate by the three knightly Americans. When they had departed, as they straightway scrupulously did, to the strains of the Hungarian rhapsody just begun by the orchestra, Mme. Momoro and her son took two of the vacated chairs and turned to watch the musicians. She sat as eloquently impassive as any carven Hellenic stillness indeed; nevertheless, there were slight quiverings and alterations in the contour of her finely outlined lips, and, although almost imperceptible, these delicate shadowings were seen and comprehended by the intelligent young Hyacinthe. He smiled faintly.

  “There are some drolleries in the world,” he said in French; and Mme. Momoro seemed to acquiesce.

  Meanwhile, the three polite young men went for a stroll on the deck, rather elated, though Ogle was disturbed by a detail. “I find I’m a little rusty in my French,” he said. “It’s quite a time since I’ve had occasion to use it, and I found myself at a loss, rather, when I began to speak to her. For a moment I actually couldn’t remember the word for ‘chair’.”

  Albert Jones laughed. “Don’t let that upset you, Laurence. She answered Macklyn in English, you noticed, as soon as he got through speaking French to her.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?!’ Macklyn retorted, with some warmth. “She knew perfectly well we were either English or Americans. She’d heard us talking in the smoking-room, hadn’t she?”

  “Yes; she’d remember that, of course,” Mr. Jones said thoughtfully. “Do you suppose the barbarians would allow us any peace up there by this time? Let’s go and see.”

  Agreeing, his friends ascended with him to the deck above; but long before they reached the smoking-room door they understood that their hopes to find there a quiet nook in which to talk of art — and Mme. Momoro — were not to be fulfilled. Song still prevailed, and a solo in a too familiar voice, hoarser now, but still from leathern lungs and brazen throat, lamented in ballad form a Kansas tragedy of the long ago. And then in all that part of the vessel and out upon the salty air through which the vessel sped, and out over the rushing black seas and the shimmering starlit foam that edged them, rolled the chorus of eighteen convivial middle-aged men, far from home and feeling few of their customary responsibilities:

  “Oh, Jesse James,

  Pore Jesse James!

  I’ll never see my Jesse any more.

  Oh, the awnry little coward

  That shot Mr. Howard

  And laid Jesse James in his grave!”

  The three young men came to a halt outside the door. “It grows more horrible,” Macklyn said. “Let’s get out of this.”

  Then, as they turned away, the too familiar voice was heard again, “Now, gentlemen, le’ss sing something a little sweeter and more homelike.

  “Old Aunt Mariar

  A-sitting by the fire—”

  The three returned to the promenade deck below; but it seemed to them that even there some snatches of the detestable song haunted the eddying wind and blew upon their ears. Ogle thought that he could hear “Aunt Mariar” intermittently as he tramped the deck alone, long after his companions had left him and descended to read in bed in the cabin they shared. The curse had come back upon him, and he could not prevent himself from marching in time to it, though w hat he thought an echo of the orgy going on above may have been not actual sound, but one of those half delusions with which our minds sometimes persecute us when we are in a state of annoyance. This one was persistent enough to follow him, however, even when he left the deserted deck and again entered the lounge on his way to bed.

  The concert was over and the great place almost empty; a few people read books or drowsily lounged in easy chairs, and at a card table were seated Mme. Momoro and her three companions of the afternoon, again occupied with bridge. Ogle passed near them on his way across the room, and, as he approached the table, Mme. Momoro, who faced him, looked up from her cards and his eyes met hers directly in a full face-to-face exchange of glances.

  For an instant he had the hope that she would nod to him, recognizing him as the person who had addressed her and surrendered his chair to her. If she did thus recognize him and make that acknowledgment, he might dare to bow to her to-morrow, if he should encounter her on deck, and, having got that far, he might hope soon to have speech with her. He had flashlight imaginings of the kind that the dreaming mind of a sleeper groups almost instantaneously into long sequences within the traditioned time needed to open and close a door; and they showed him pictures of himself walking the deck with Mme. Momoro, seated beside her for coffee after dinner, even reading a play to her as she reclined, bright-eyed with sympathetic comprehension, in her steamer chair — and he saw Macklyn and Jones in attitudes of amazed envy in the distance of the long deck.

  But his fancies were too fond. Her grave eyes remained grave, and although they may have contained the cognizance that a fellow-being appeared before her, they showed not any light of a personal recognition, but returned unemotionally to the perusal of her cards.

  Ogle passed on, apparently cold and no more impelled toward romance upon the sea than was she. Nevertheless, he was strangely disappointed and a little crestfallen. Already, though he was not entirely aware of his own sudden susceptibility, he had begun to have the feeling that the success of his whole adventure to foreign lands depended upon his meeting this remarkable lady. If he failed to know her his great excursion was a disaster at its very beginning.

  VI

  WHEN HE CAME on deck the next morning at eleven, there ran by the ship a sea of turquoise
encrusted with innumerable twinklings of foam opalescent in sunshine. The air, sprung from some aromatic source in the south, was mellow yet invigorating; and Ogle began to regret that already the “Duumvir” was well into the “third day out.” But not the weather alone brought about this change in sentiment; indeed, it was not the weather principally; for his thought was less of the increasing balminess than of a fellow-passenger whose acquaintance he had not yet made, though only nine short days were left of their voyaging in company. Macklyn was no longer the only poet on board; the playwright had become his rival, and one reason for Ogle’s late appearance on deck lay upon the writing desk in his cabin — an unfinished ode beginning, “O still and stately lady in burnished gold enhelmed.” Thus there had been trouble with this poem from the beginning on account of his obstinacy about the word

  “enhelmed,” which was of all words in our language, he felt, the one most expressive of the close shapeliness of Mme. Momoro’s coifing, yet has not many twins in sound; and Ogle, as a poet, was not so advanced as Macklyn, but still clung to rhyme. “Whelmed” had been his tentative solution after an hour’s fretful experiment, and he still hoped to do better.

  No golden helm was visible along-the lines of chairs where cheerful voyagers basked and chatted, nor among those who strolled the deck and to-day made bold to show some hint of the climates to which they were escaping; for light fabrics and even white flannels appeared here and there. The four lively damsels brushed by Ogle as he began to pace the immaculate planking; they had found a boy or two and were merry, yet made evident some encouragement to the handsome lone pedestrian; two of them looking him humorously, yet rather pointedly, in the eye, so that he understood he might approach and be forgiven, if he would. These young things, so brisk and boyish, annoyed him; his mind was all upon Hellenic stillness.

  Among the strolling or reclining passengers he saw a few whom, he remembered indifferently, he had seen the day before or upon embarking; but Mme. Momoro, her son, her two elderly friends, and Macklyn and Albert Jones were all invisible. Not even the execrable Tinker nor any of his fellow rioters appeared; and the lounge and the other public rooms, when he walked through them, were almost vacant; no one at all was in the smoking-room, not even the studious bartender. The hour for lunch arrived without his having seen a familiar face.