Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Mrs. Tinker, having already unbent to her husband, was able to include others of his sex in her forgiveness. “It’s been a lovely day,” she said to Ogle. “I suppose you’ve been enjoying it on deck, prob’ly?”

  “A part of it, yes.”

  “I guess you behaved better than my husband, then,” she continued. “I expect about everybody on board knows what a bad man he is by this time. I never did feel so disgraced in my life, and there’ve been plenty times at home when I’ve felt disgraced, too.”

  “You don’t mean by me, Hon, do you?” Tinker inquired reproachfully.

  “Don’t I though!” she exclaimed; and she turned to Ogle, a mild waggishness in her eye. “You couldn’t guess how that man’s been behaving all afternoon! He’s nothing but a robber, and I expect a good many gentlemen on this boat think so, too.

  He’s a wicked man, and if I were you I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “Look here!” her husband protested. “I don’t see what cause you got to complain.”

  “He means he’s got a bad conscience,” she explained to Ogle. “The gentlemen in our town say he has a contract with Satan whenever he plays cards; and he gets so scared it might turn out to be true he always comes and gives Libby and me his winnings, and we put ’em in a box for our Community Chest fund. What he brought us just before dinner this evening would almost pay our whole subscription for a year. Yes, sir, this bad man’s been sitting up in that stuffy smoking-room every minute of this whole afternoon from lunch till dinner-time, playing poker. I wonder they don’t put him off the ship!”

  “Now, Honey, Honey!” Tinker objected plaintively; and then, catching Ogle’s cold sidelong glance, he favoured him with a slight but detestable wink. Being fellow-men, they were comrades in the deception of women, it implied; and Ogle was implicitly trusted on that account never to reveal the goings-on with a superb French lady that had taken place during an afternoon supposedly devoted altogether to cards. Thus the creature exhibited himself as more and more abhorrent.

  The young man looked away without making any response to the wink except a slight hardening of his expression; and as he withdrew his glance he was surprised to encounter the full gaze of the girl across the table. It was the first time during the meal that she had looked up from the plate before her; and she immediately looked down again, leaving him a little disturbed, for there had been something brightly scornful in her eyes. Astonished, he was almost sure she had expressed herself injuriously; — it was as if she let him know she understood perfectly his opinion of Tinker, and added that although she herself hated her father, she despised Ogle for thinking what he did of him.

  The playwright could not at once rid himself of the feeling that in the straight encounter of their eyes, his mind had met that of this silent girl and had been held in contempt. It piqued him, and he mentally asked her a question: “Since you feel so bitterly toward him yourself, what are you reproaching me for?” He would have put that into his glance if he could when she looked up again; but she did not do so, not even when he rose to leave the table and bowed to her and her mother.

  This time, Tinker remained fearlessly with his womenkind; — most wives pardon victorious husbands, and his winnings for charity to-day had obviously atoned not only for the means by which he got them, but for his last night’s meandering from the path of virtue as well. “See you later,” he said cordially, unaware that the two slight bows of departure had definitely not included him.

  The spacious lounge filled rapidly after dinner; but Mme. Momoro was not to be seen there; nor in the “Palm Garden,” where there was dancing later; nor in the smoking-room, which was almost vacant all evening, though three young men haunted it hopefully from time to time. The youthful Hyacinthe appeared on the promenade deck alone, wrapped like an American collegian in a coat of coonskin and pacing composedly; — he was unaware of being an object of interest, or that he was kept in sight discreetly but without intermission until he retired to his cabin. Not until late in the evening did Ogle despond, and then an uncomfortable suspicion came into his mind. Still roving bleakly on deck, he glanced for the fiftieth time through a window of the lounge and came to a halt. There were only two people in the place: Mrs. Tinker busy at a writing-desk, and her daughter seated near her and looking with an air of permanent stubbornness at nothing.

  In his wanderings about the ship the playwright had not seen Tinker. Could that imply a possible coincidence? With a most distasteful impression that it could, he decided impulsively to show the lonely and unhappy girl before him a slight conventional attention: music from the “Palm Garden” was still audible. He went into the lounge at once, presented himself before her and asked her to dance.

  She gave him another queer look, as brief as the one he had caught from her at dinner and as eloquent, but not less hostile. “What do you mean by this?” it seemed to say, and to add: “Intruder!” Then, with instantly downcast eyes, she seemed to consider his invitation unfavourably, for she frowned; but abruptly she rose and without any other sign of consent and without speaking at all, went with him, and they began to dance.

  Nothing could be asked of this provincial Olivia’s dancing, her partner was forced to admit to himself: she gave him no more trouble than if she had been a floating roseleaf in flight on the air, here or there or wherever he would, at his wish. But she did not look up again, and he had a fine view of dark eyelashes against new ivory; she did not look up even when he spoke to her. “I haven’t happened to see your father anywhere about the boat since dinner,” he said, as with a casual commonplace of humour. “I don’t suppose he got off at a way-station, do you?”

  “He said he was going to bed,” she replied, and added nothing whatever to the information.

  Then, as the information itself was all her partner really wished of her, and as she seemed to wish nothing at all of him, neither of them thought it necessary to say anything more until the dance ended. When it did, she turned at once to the door and without seeming to notice that he was accompanying her, went straight back to the chair in the lounge near her mother.

  “Thank you,” she said, when she reached it. “Good-night.”

  Her brusque abruptness, something to which young ladies had never sought to accustom him, he found a little startling. However, it gave him his release, and he accepted it with a bow as cavalier as seemed appropriate, and went away to see if by any last chance Mme. Momoro had made her appearance in the smoking-room during his absence. But again he was disappointed; Macklyn and Jones had gone to bed and the place was now wholly deserted except for the watery-eyed, ancient man Taylor in apathetic conversation with the barkeeper. Ogle retired quickly, disheartened by the sight. It was not until late the next afternoon that he saw her again.

  He had passed her empty deck chair many times; but at last it was occupied, and his heart quickened at sight of her as he came nearer. He had other symptoms, also, of what had begun to be the matter with him: his self-consciousness increased uncomfortably and he was disturbed by the mortifying alacrity with which his colour heightened, as he was himself too well aware. For with all his sophistication, he had never overcome a girlish misfortune of blushing whenever he was most anxious to appear austerely self-contained.

  That was how he wished to appear now, especially as the chair upon Mme. Momoro’s right was occupied by Albert Jones, and that upon her left by Macklyn. In his thought he reproached her for this; it seemed to him that she must have connived; and since he had not seen her for more than twenty-four hours she might well have provided a kinder opportunity. So, as he came near, he merely lifted his cap from his pink brow, and to emphasize his reproach, would have walked coldly by; but they hailed him.

  He joined them; accepted the foot-rest section of Albert’s chair, and was gently reproached for having so long made himself invisible. Mme. Momoro accused him of evading her; but in this he feared to trust her sincerity; and then, in view of what she lightly made known a few minutes late
r, he began to suspect that her accusation had contained an element of humour.

  “Tell me,” she said: “Is it true that everywhere in the United States the ladies are the tyrants and the husbands like slaves of the harem who are allowed to go out to work, but only under supervision? Is it true that those poor husbands must always say to the wives, ‘At such and such a time I was at such and such a place for such and such a purpose’? That extraordinary man told me this, last evening, up yonder in the corner of the boat-deck where he says he is ‘safe.’ He insists to me that those are the conditions of marriage for all American husbands: they must account to the wives for every moment, and if a husband speaks at all to any woman not in his family, he must tell every word the woman has said to him and every word he has said to her. I could not believe it, and I asked him some questions about it again to-day. He said it was true, and that no husband could go alone to call upon a woman unless his wife first instructed him to do it. Otherwise the wife would murder the husband; and when I said I think he does not speak the truth — for I am a feminist, you see — he said it was better for the husband to be murdered than to have the wife say the things she would say in such a case, because to listen would take all the rest of the husband’s life.”

  She leaned back in her chair, laughing. “What a man! He is so amusing in what seems to be such a strange frankness, and because you cannot tell whether it is frankness or not, or if he is joking, or what it is at all. Never have I seen such a man in my life! Can it be true what he tells me?”

  She addressed the question to Ogle; but he did not seem to hear it, for he was too greatly preoccupied with the revelation of her recent whereabouts: — the theory of Mme. Momoro’s interest in specimens was plausible, yet hardly seemed to account for the number of hours she had too evidently spent in studying this single abominable one. Then, as the playwright sat staring plaintively at the smiling lady instead of replying, it was Macklyn who explained that the views of Tinker were not to be thought representative except of the Tinker walk in life. What the man said was true enough of countless Tinkerish couples; but these formed an inferior populace with which members of the caste of her present auditors had little to do. So the poet informed her, with some emphasis.

  She was only the more amused, and expressed a doubt of his authority. “I think you are a bachelor,” she laughed. “He told me he knows almost everybody in great sections of North America, and he declared that upon the whole of that continent there are absolutely no exception to what he says of husbands and wives, unless there are a few in Mexico and one or two among the frozen Esquimaux.” Then, observing that the three young men were unable to laugh with her, but remained serious and almost disapproving, she must have resolved tactfully to make them forget a subject plainly unsympathetic to their natures. She began to speak of other things, and spoke so well that she succeeded with two of them.

  Something in the aspect of the water, as the running little seas tipped themselves with bright rose-colour from the westernsun reminded her of a voyage she had made in the Indian Ocean; and she began to tell them of it in her thrilling voice: cholera had come on board her ship in this Oriental seafaring; but it was not discovered until it had made headway among a crowded steerage of Far Eastern Mohammedans returning from Mecca. Then the ship’s engines had broken down and could not be repaired for days — days of torrid heat, with molten gold from the sun, she said, poured upon their fevered heads. Two of the passengers had become insane; one, a girl whom she knew, had flung herself into the sea in the unbearable heat of noon, drowning before she could be reached; and the sea-burials over the vessel’s side were hourly, day and night. But all the while, and through all the terror, she told them, the sea was incomparably beautiful and the nights were an enchantment of big stars close overhead with such meteors flaming and hissing from among them as she had never seen before or since. It was like a strange, strange conception of Gustave Doré’s, she said; and except for the anguish about her she might have enjoyed it, because she had not been frightened, and it resembled, she thought, a great artist’s dream of hell.

  Her audience sat motionless, held as much by her voice itself, perhaps, as by what she said; for it was a voice with mellow hints of music in its every tone. They hung upon her narrative as if Paganini played it to them upon his violin; and when she concluded — with a little trill of her rich laughter and a final gesture of her shapely long hands — only the young playwright still retained a troubled thought of Tinker. She left them then, and as she went swiftly down the bright deck toward the sunset she did not seem to go to dress for the evening, though that was how she had explained her departure. She seemed to be flying home appropriately to the great, round blaze of the sun into which her tall figure appeared to vanish, as the three, with blurring eyes, stared after her.

  This was Macklyn’s expression of her manner of leaving them; and Albert Jones agreed. “Yes,” he murmured, wiping his glasses. “A woman with wings! A woman with wings!” Ogle said nothing; for the voices of the sea and the pulsation of the ship’s vitals were mocking him, and through and through his head, from ear to ear, they seemed to beat a hoarse, intolerable chanting:

  Mariar!

  Mariar!

  Bay rum in a bottle we’ll buy ’er!

  Mariar!

  Mariar —

  He turned from his enthusiastic friends and walked away without any of the usual explanatory mutterings.

  XI

  GROTESQUE” HAD BEEN his word for the puzzle of her behaviour, and with “Mariar” persistent in his head he feared it was now the right word for his own condition. Never in the young playwright’s life had he been so fascinated by a woman, or so piqued and mystified by one. He had no interest in the sea, or in the unknown land upon the other side of it whither he was bound, or in the ship, or in the ship’s passengers, save only one. Day and night she was the provoking apple of his mind’s eye; he could get no rest from his thought of her, nor any satisfaction in the thought; and when he was with her he felt himself to be clumsy and brooding.

  What irked him, too, he could never be alone with her — only the accursed Tinker seemed able to accomplish that. From the moment the execrable one had introduced Albert Jones and Macklyn to her they were barnacles. If she sat in her deck chair, Jones was fast to a chair upon her right, Macklyn clung upon her left. When she went upon her sweeping promenades they kept themselves undetachable alongside. In the lounge for music or coffee, or in the smoking-room or wherever she appeared, they appeared also. In the evenings, if she watched the dancing in the “Palm Garden” — she declined to dance, herself — they watched with her. Only once again before land was sighted did Ogle contrive to be alone with her, and then not for long. It was the day before they reached Gibraltar.

  “Thank heaven this part of the journey’s almost over,” he said gloomily.

  She looked a little hurt, though perhaps more humorously so than really. “You find us very tedious?”

  “You know what I mean, I think, Madame Momoro.”

  “No. I cannot imagine at all.”

  “I think you can.” He was so serious that she laughed compassionately, whereupon he made bold to touch her arm. “Please don’t laugh,” he said. “I’m glad we’re near Gibraltar because two of my friends are landing there; and I’ll be glad when we reach Algiers because after that you won’t sit in a corner of the boat-deck with Yahoos any more.”

  She frowned as if puzzled. “Yahoos? I do not know the word. What is that?” Then comprehending, she laughed. “Oh, I see. You mean yesterday afternoon when I was talking there again with Mr. Tinker, and you passed us and looked so cross you wouldn’t speak. Why didn’t you join us?”

  “For one reason, I couldn’t quite believe I was wanted.”

  “Oh, but I should have been charmed,” she protested. “That man, he is so amusing one would love to have a companion to enjoy him with.”

  “I find I have quite enough of him at the table,” Ogle said coldly. “T
hat is about as much as a civilized being could be asked to stand of him, I think.”

  “I am not civilized?” she inquired; but she was not offended, for she laughed, and little lights danced in her clear eyes. “You do not see the real man at your lunch table or at dinner,” she added, not waiting for his reply. “I have been able to catch a glimpse of your table sometimes, looking down over the balcony railing. I can see he does not talk so much when he is with his family; you all four look very solemn. But when he is not under the eye of his tyrant women — oh, then he is entertaining to me; he is extraordinary!” And she concluded with a question in a tone of childlike naïveté: “You don’t like him?”

  Ogle stared at her. “Pardon me,” he said. “I’m not precisely in the habit of being laughed at, Madame Momoro.”

  Then she thrilled him, although she laughed; for she touched his hand lightly with the tips of her fingers, and said: “You are a dear!”

  That was all; — the indefatigable pair, Macklyn and Jones, came up just then and ruined a beautiful moment for him.’ And to increase the coldness of his sentiments toward them, this was all they accomplished; because she departed at once to visit friends, the elderly French ladies, in their cabin, where one of the sisters was still afflicted by an abscess of the ear. After that, as she explained, she must prove her devotion to Hyacinthe and allow him to read to her his report upon public education in America, which he was preparing for the French government.

  This report of the young Hyacinthe may have been a compact one, or perhaps he had only written a little of it; for certainly the reading occupied no great length of time. Prowling uneasily about the boat-deck, not quite an hour later, the playwright heard a rich, low laughter unmistakable anywhere in the world, and, following the sound, came upon a nook between two lifeboats where sat the elusive lady with Tinker.