But the matter was settled for him. An elderly man with watery eyes and a white moustache came hurrying along the deck, seized his arm, and drew him some steps away for private speech; — this man’s voice, too, was hoarse. “Weatheright’s got away from his wife again, and he and Brown and Wackstle and two of the other boys have sneaked up to the smoking-room. We got to have you.”
Tinker returned to Mme. Momoro’s chair for a moment, looking serious. “I guess I’ll have to leave Mr. Ogle for a substitute, Mrs. Mummero; it seems I got an engagement. It’s not goin’ to last all afternoon, though!”
With this happy intimation he betook himself hastily and furtively from view, entering the nearest doorway that led from the deck, his questionable medical acquaintance attending him closely.
Mme. Momoro’s grave eyes seemed to deepen in gravity during his departure’ then she said amiably: “He appoints a substitute without consulting him. I think he must have perceived I am boring myself a great deal to-day.”
Ogle, still dazed, murmured, “Ah — I hope not,” and could find nothing more intelligent to say. He had begun to understand, however, that his horrified first impression of Tinker’s action was mistaken, and that some previous contact had been established between Mme. Momoro and the out-lander. Even that big barbarian of a Tinker could not merely walk up to such a woman and begin to talk to her.
“You must not stay because he appoints you,” she said. “Perhaps you, too, have friends awaiting in the smoking-room. But if you should be so kind as to wish to remain a little while—”
She looked up at him smilingly, and he found himself in the presence of the opportunity for which he had longed; but, unfortunately, when he would have been most debonair he was awkward and self-conscious. This was not one of his customary sensations; usually he felt himself to be a person of finer perceptions, finer manner, finer culture than the people about him; though his sense of his advantage over them was a quiet one and wholly self-contained, he flattered himself. Standing before the elegant Parisian, however, the young American was in doubt of his effect upon her; and uneasily he decided to adopt the Continental tone of which she and her son seemed to him so exquisite an expression.
He bowed, therefore, from the waist, quickly and slightly, as he had seen the young Hyacinthe bow in the smoking-room; for his association with the theatre had given him a ready facility in imitation. “Since Madame permits,” he said in a deeper voice than was natural to him.
Then, as he sank into the long chair beside her, his complexion, still as pink as when Tinker accompanied him through the dining salon, became pinker. “Since Madame permits” was not in the right key, he feared. It had too much the air of an effort for the eighteenth century, or, what was infinitely worse, it might be a form employed by French chauffeurs and servants. At the best it had an artificial sound even in his own ears as he heard himself saying it, and he wished he had been simpler. “Since Madame permits” might even be as bad, though in the opposite direction, as Tinker’s awful “Mrs. Mummero.”
But she appeared to find nothing objectionable in either. “You are kind to stay and help me not to bore myself,” she said. “My poor little boy, my son, who travels with me, must all day remain in his cabin, writing upon a report for our Department of Education, where he has a little position, poor child; and I have only two other compatriots upon this boat, two ladies with whom we play a little bridge; but one has got an affection of her ear, so her sister stays all day with her. I am interested in your friend, Mr. Tinker, who seems to be such a good friend of everybody. Have you known him long?”
“No, no, no! Not at all,” Ogle replied hurriedly.
“Not in the slightest. I haven’t any acquaintance with him. I’ve never even met him. He followed me out of the dining salon.”
Mme. Momoro’s expression was not always so impassive as when she played bridge, he discovered. She looked at him for a moment with a scrutinizing intensity that made him almost uncomfortable; then her gaze relaxed and she smiled faintly. “He is very amusing,” she said. “He is a type I did not see in New York or Philadelphia or Boston, which were the three cities I have visited in your country. I did not go to Washington; but I have been told I might find your typical American there — somesing like Mr. Tinker perhaps. You agree?”
“Believe me,” Ogle entreated her earnestly, “he isn’t typical.”
“No, I suppose not. You have so many, many people; but there could not be a great number of this kind. I should speak of him as typical only of your ruling class, perhaps.”
“Our ‘ruling class’?”
“I get my ideas from my son,” she confessed. “He is a student of peoples. But I agree with him that all nations are governed now by the gentlemen of commerce. I am afraid you must submit to being ruled by your Mr. Tinkers even in your land of liberty, because all the world must submit to the same thing. Hyacinthe instructs me that owning riches means the control of wealth, and so it is power. Mr. Tinker gives me that impression. He is a man with power, and all that he really respects is the other men with power who rule your country with him.”
To the incredulous playwright it seemed that she spoke with a kind of admiration. “Frankly, Madame Momoro, he conveys a very different impression to me. In fact, I’m afraid that what I see in him is not so much power as noisiness.”
“Yes?” she said; and she laughed. “He is much, much less noisy to-day than he was last night! Oh, very much!”
“Did you hear him?” Ogle asked, a little surprised. “When I went down to my cabin rather late, you were playing cards in the lounge with your friends, and I wonder—”
“Yes?” she said, as he paused. “You came through the lounge rather late? You noticed that I was there?”
He looked briefly into her eyes, which were somewhat metallic and inscrutable for the moment.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “I ‘noticed’ that you were there, Madame Momoro.”
She gave him a grave little nod of acknowledgment. “That is flattering. What do you wonder?”
“Nothing — except that it was quiet in the lounge and I wonder how you heard the noisiness of the smoking-room.”
“I think,” she returned, gazing before her out to sea, “you are really wondering how I met Mr. Tinker.”
This was so shrewdly the truth that Ogle blushed again and became a little confused. “I didn’t mean to ask such a thing,” he said. “I didn’t intend—”
But her quiet laughter interrupted him. “It was droll!” she said. “When we had played our last rubber, Hyacinthe asked me to go to the smoking-room to have a liqueur and a cigarette. Never did you hear so much noise as there was in that place when we sat down — never! Some thought themselves to be singing; you could not understand how they could have such a belief. Then all at once Mr. Tinker shouted louder than all of them together: ‘There is a lady present,’ he told them, and, ‘Maybe she don’t care so much about music as we do.’ And he came over to where I sat and asked me if I wish to make them ‘shut up,’ because if I do, he will, whether they wish it or not. So I said no, they must sing all they like; and he said — he said—” Here Mme. Momoro was suddenly overcome with mirth. Shepressed her two long hands upon her cheeks, laughing between them. “He said he had already perceived I was ‘a girl like that’! He pronounce’ me a ‘regular’ somesing — I cannot say what. So he told us his name and the Ill — Illi — Illinois Company; ‘he is the president. And he seized upon my hand to shake it up and down in your American way, and he shook Hyacinthe’s hand; and then he asked our name and brought the gentlemen — most of them — to where we sat. ‘This is the Mr. Somesing of Booffalo who makes all the worsted,’ he told us; and this is Mr. Somesing from Tchicago who is president of some letters in the alphabet; and this is Mr. Somesing from somewhere else who has such a big, big Trust Company — Laughter threatened her composure again; but she was able to continue: “Even though he was a little — well, we must say he was a little exhilarated, if th
at is a proper word — you could see he admires those gentlemen because they have power, like himself. It was very interesting.”
“‘Interesting’?” Ogle echoed. “I must say I think you take a gracious view of his impudence, Madame Momoro.”
“Impudence? No, no!” She became serious again. “It was like a passage in Homer, or in some Gothic poem perhaps, where the great chieftains are introduced, one after the other, and the poet tells how mighty each one is and where his home-land is and how many followers he has. You don’t see how precisely like that it is?”
He shook his head. “I fear you have learned to love satirizing Americans.”
“But no! I am not satirizing. I truly think what I say.”
He laughed, incredulous. “You won’t judge the rest of us by such people, I hope; though foreigners are apt to get the impression we are all like that. One trouble with our country is that each generation produces a new brand of parvenu for the rest of us to live down. The foreigner sometimes mistakes the latest type of parvenu for our ‘best people’ and for typical; and so he draws the conclusion that we have no culture, no art, no literature. I admit that so far, in the European sense, we have nothing that may be called literature or architecture or music or painting or sculpture; but we are working toward them, and in one or two branches of art I think we may be thought pretty completely arisen.”
“Indeed, yes,” she responded generously. “In New York there is some interesting architecture quite native and not borrowed from us, and I saw some fine collections of paintings. I am sure you will have an American art some day.”
“I think we already have,” he said. “That is, I think we have in one or two branches. Ah — the stage—”
“Yes. Yes, trufy!” she agreed with a gracious show of enthusiasm. “I saw some of your actors, some of the best, I was told, though I do not remember their names. They were excellent. Some of them might be thought of highly if they would come to France and act there, I am sure. It was a pleasure.”
He frowned, seeming to concentrate upon the expression of his thought. “I meant not only the acting, but the whole art of the theatre. I really think we have arrived in that. Just in these last few years we seem to have made a really tremendous advance. Until even that recently our American theatre was frankly — well, lamentable.”
“You are fond of the theatre?”
His frown deepened. “Fond? I don’t know. There are times when I think I hate it — because I tire of it, I suppose.”
For a moment neither of them spoke; and during the silence she cast a thoughtful sidelong glance or two at him as he sat frowning at the horizon of blue water. Then she said:— “Mr. Tinker spoke of you as a lawyer.”
“I am not. Of course the man knows nothing about me whatever.”
“May I be so intrusive as to guess your profession? You are a dramatist?”
“Yes,” he said. “Probably you didn’t understand my name when he mentioned it — and perhaps it may not mean anything to you, unless you saw most of the New York plays. I am Laurence Ogle.”
She repeated the name slowly. “Mr. Laurence Ogle. No. I am sorry.”
So was he, for he had hoped that she might have been taken to see “The Pastoral Scene.” As she had not, and might possibly remember Tinker’s horrible smoking-room interpretation of this masterpiece in the new manner, the author decided not to mention the title. Instead, he offered a generalization.
“Outside of New York there is no feeling for art in America at all. Our plays find almost no audience beyond that centre. You can judge for yourself what such people as those you saw last night would make of anything with any depth or of anything really poignant or searching. I have just said that such people are not typical; but I admit that they are fairly characteristic of the newly prosperous vulgar so numerous among us. Suppose you put a play before them in which you expressed a sense of the tragedy and mystery of life; of the chaotic war always just beneath the surface of life; of the monstrous formlessness beneath the struggle that goes on near the surface — you may imagine what they would make of it! To please them you must offer a pretty little romance about money and marriage. If you write of humanity they think you are either prurient or insane. Fortunately, in the last four or five years we have either discovered or educated — I do not know which — an audience in New York that cares for an art somewhat more sophisticated than would delight these morons.”
“Morons?” She repeated the word thoughtfully. “Morons. I do not know it. It means?”
“Defectives,” he explained. “People whose mental development has been arrested since childhood.”
“Ah, yes.” She was silent for a moment or two, appearing to be occupied in adding “moron” to her vocabulary. Then she asked:— “You are going to Italy, perhaps?”
“Later, I may,” he said. “I came away for a winter’s rest. I’d been working pretty hard, and I don’t care for Florida or California. I may go over into Italy before I sail for home; but I thought I’d just run over to Algiers for a month or so.”
“You have been there, Mr. Ogle?”
“Algiers?” he said unwillingly. “No. That’s one reason I wanted to go there, because I hadn’t been; — it’s pleasant to go to a place where one hasn’t been; and Algiers seems a little off the beaten track for tourists. Of course I hope to avoid tourists as much as possible.”
“So?” she said, and seemed faintly surprised. “That is difficult nowadays, I am afraid, no matter where you go. Why do you object to them?”
“Why? Dear lady! Do you need more than the sample of their manners on this boat to answer that?”
“But on this boat we are all tourists,” she said. “I am one myself.”
“That is rather different,” he returned. “I do not mean people of the world who happen to be travelling.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Well — to put it briefly, such people as the Tinker family. But to save our nerves, don’t let us talk of them; it is enough that we have to see them and hear them. Do you know Algiers, Madame Momoro?”
“Oh, yes; it is where I am going now.”
“It is?” he said, delighted.
“Yes. I am going there with the two French ladies who are here upon the boat; they have a winter villa in Algiers. But Algiers is not Algeria, Mr. Ogle. You will’ see somesing of our great province there, I hope.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t made any definite plans. What is it like?”
She smiled; then with a slow gesture of her slender, long hand she waved his glance toward the length of the horizon line from east to west and back again. “Ask me what this ocean is like and I could answer you because I could say, ‘Well, it is all like that, except for changing weathers, from New York until we come to Gibraltar.’ But if you ask me what Algeria is like I can’t tell you so easily and perhaps I can’t tell you at all, because, for one thing, it is Africa. I think you can’t tell much about Africa, no matter how much you talk of it or how many pictures of it you show, except to someone who has been there — and him you do not need to tell because he knows. But I can tell you one thing about it, Mr. Ogle.”
She turned from the sea to look at him, and, returning her grave regard with some intensity, he asked: “What is the one thing?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “you will be glad afterwards that you went there. I think you may find somesing in Algeria, Mr. Ogle.”
“You mean local colour, types, landscape?”
She still continued to look at him, and he thought that into this fixed gaze of hers, very pleasant to him, there came a mysteriousness, something impenetrable from the depths. “Well, I mean — some-sing!” Then she laughed. “Do you know if Mr. Tinker goes there, too?”
“Heaven forbid!” he said.
VIII
THE FERVOUR OF his exclamation made her thoughtful again, and for a time neither of them spoke. They looked out to sea, but not into infinitudes of space, for the sea was visibly fi
nite, and the immense globe of water, curving its long horizontal arc against the encircling sky, was like a great round crystal within a luminous blue shell. Stillness seemed to abide there at the crystal’s edge in a frozen serenity; but that this far edge must be in movement, too, was proved by the motion near the travellers’ eyes; — the rim of the deck, slowly dipping and rising, alternately disclosed and concealed the westward-running little sparkling seas as they were swept into foam and green whirlpool by the majestic passage of the “Duumvir.” This activity in the foreground of what they saw and the delusion of fixity in the distance brought to the mind of Mme. Momoro a comparison that pleased her companion doubly; once for itself and again because it seemed to show that Tinker, as an episode of their conversation, was definitely disposed of and forgotten.
“How still the ocean seems to be, far, far away out there,” she said. “Stiller than glass, stiller than ice — oh, still as death! Less alive than death, because it looks as if never, never at all, had any life been there and never, never could be any. One must think that only where our ship is can there be any life, or anything have power to stir. So always when I am on a ship that is solitary on the ocean, I think it is very much like our planet. The world is a great busy thing whirling and rushing on through emptiness; but so lonely because it seem to be the only thing alive in a space of death that has got no end. From the earth at night you look out on the sky and the star’s, as we look out now from this ship. The sky and the stars are so quiet, so still — oh, so very still! — so you say, ‘The earth is all alone on its journey through all this stillness, this terrible stillness of the sky!’ But I think that must be wrong: I think it must be like what we see now. The waves near the ship are all dancing; so they must be dancing yonder where they look so still. There are great fish in the water over there and millions and millions of little water animals you would need the microscope to see. So it must be in the stars and sky when we think our world-ship is the only thing with life and everything else is death. We are wrong, I think. Everything is life and nothing at all is death.” She turned to him suddenly. “Do you think so?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 392
