Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Mme. Momoro gravely and slightly inclined her head to the Tinker automobile, not as if in a personal greeting, but in the manner of a lady whose courtesy extends itself to acknowledge the presence of people recognizable as fellow-travellers. Then, to Ogle’s chilled surprise, this same distant formality was visible the next moment in her return of his own salutation. Usually she greeted him with a brightening vivid recognition that seemed to say, “You, at last! How charming!” Mlle. Daurel, sitting beside her, austere, dryly pallid, and infinitely remote, had such a frigidity of look as he had never seen upon the frostiest of American women; she suggested the snow on a faraway mountain peak, never thawed and very old. And Mme. Momoro seemed to have caught from her a little of this icy remoteness and to have become again the wholly impassive statue she was upon his first sight of her in the smoking-room.

  He went to brood upon this in a tea-room; then returned in a launch to the “Duumvir,” where he found a sprightly show of embroidered Spanish shawls enlivening one side of the promenade deck and many passengers chaffering with the swarthy merchants in the sunset. Other swarthy merchants, rocking up and down in rowboats on the gilded sea far below, offered baskets of fruit and branches of oranges; and the small globes, brilliant among green leaves, constantly ascended from sea to deck, for they were pulled up on long strings by the purchasers. Both sets of merchants should have appreciated the magnificence of Tinker, who was still wearing his enormous Spanish hat and bought shawls and oranges, the one as readily as the other. Of the shawls he bought the four with the longest fringe, this appearing to be his standard, though they were also the most splendid in colour— “gaudiest” was Ogle’s word, as he stood by, morbidly observing. Mrs. Tinker selected one of the four for herself, and the other three were for the daughter, as Tinker made known; he could be heard loudly instructing a steward to convey them to her in her cabin.

  “Tell her they’re from her old man,” he called after him; and then, going to the rail, he began to shout, “Polly voo frossy” and “Nix ferstay” at the fruit sellers, and to shower down coins among them, laughing uproariously as they scrambled to catch the money. And as the baskets soared upward to the steerage passengers for whom he bought the fruit, he directed the distribution, not moving from where he stood and bellowing over all the clamour of the recipients and of the boat pedlars. “Hay, there! That feller in the velveteen pants didn’t get any! Hay! You! Don Gonzabo! You with the whiskers! Send up that basket to the feller in the velveteen pants! You sabby? Hay, there! You no speakee? Oh, you do! Three cheers for Christopher Columbus!”

  Everybody was laughing at him; and Ogle turned away, ashamed that an American should be making a spectacle of himself before these foreigners. Mme. Momoro was one of them, though she did not appear to be observing the spectacle, nor indeed to be conscious of either Tinker or himself. She stood beside Mile. Lucie Daurel, who had not the frosty remoteness of her older sister, but showed an almost child-like eagerness in testing the effect of a darkly gorgeous green and black shawl upon her friend. The effect was dashing, unquestionably; — wrapped in this shawl the long and graceful Frenchwoman became at once a Spanish portrait, superb in colour and contour against the blue mountains that loomed beyond the vessel’s rail. Ogle wished to tell her so; but the distance she had put between them when she bowed to him so coldly was now emphasized by her apparently complete unconsciousness that he stood near her. He had the painful impression that she did not wish him to speak to her.

  Mlle. Daurel bought the shawl, and that evening in the lounge it was draped upon the back of Mme. Momoro’s chair as she sat at bridge with her son and the two sisters. But by this time the “Duumvir” was again at sea, steaming deeper into the Mediterranean under warm stars, with the lights of Spain behind her; and Ogle was becoming unhappily confirmed in his impression that the amazing lady’s attitude toward him was not what it had been no longer ago than this same day’s morning.

  He sat near her, with coffee upon a little table before him; and as he almost faced her his eyes were upon her over his cup whenever he brought it to his lips — and at many other times, too — but never to meet her own; for she gave him not a glance, nor seemed to know that he was in the world. Her whole consciousness appeared to be engrossed with the cards and with a constant solicitude for the sisters Daurel. The elder still wore her costume of the afternoon with the mourning veil pushed back, and once, when she put her hand to her ear under the veil as if in momentary uneasiness, Mme. Momoro quickly took her other hand in both of her own and looked at her with the glowing intensity of one who takes upon herself the pain of a friend and so banishes it. At another time, when Mlle. Lucie shivered after the opening of a door to the deck, Mme. Momoro wrapped her instantly in the new shawl; and, again, when the older sister found something amiss with the score, which was painstakingly kept by Hyacinthe in all their games, his mother spoke to him in French with a severity of tone that made him blush. But never once did she glance toward the lonely young man, who all the while watched her covertly and with an ever-deepening pessimism.

  His fortune was no better the next day; — when she walked the deck it was at a slow pace, suiting her fine stride to the deliberate movements of one of the sisters Daurel; if she sat in her chair it was with one of them, or both, at her side; and in the evening the four played their eternal game until midnight; then she accompanied them on their way below and did not return. The day after that, the last day of his voyage, she was no kinder: he was as effectively separated from her as if she had been upon another boat with all the depth of the Mediterranean between them; and his consequent suffering surprised him, it was so sharp. Two weeks earlier he could not have thought it possible that he would this soon be going about with something like an actual aching in his chest because a Frenchwoman, heretofore unknown in his life, preferred the society of her son and two elderly compatriots to his own.

  Then when “the last night out” had come — that night so unbelievable during his early physical sufferings — and when she was again inaccessible at the bridge table, he began to feel desperate. He wrote a note consisting of the fevered inquiry, “What have I done?” and directed a steward to place it under her cabin door. After that he went out on deck and walked violently.

  His pace and the vigour of it were such, indeed, that when he rounded the after corner of the ship’s house and collided with a lady who was coming almost as rapidly from the opposite direction, he struck her so shrewdly that she staggered backward, and was in the act of falling when he sprang forward and caught her in his arms as the only means of keeping her upon her feet. It was Olivia Tinker.

  “Let me go!” she cried instantly, even before she regained her balance.

  “Certainly!” he said indignantly. “I beg your pardon.” And he stood away from her. “I was only trying to keep you from falling.”

  “Good heavens, you don’t need to explain that!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t suppose you—” She stopped, apparently because of embarrassment.

  He was embarrassed, too, and not pleased that he should be so on account of little Miss Tinker. She was of his own height; but he thought of her as “little Miss Tinker” and thus she had sometimes been mentioned in his talks with Albert Jones and Macklyn. It angered him with himself that his savoir faire could be impaired by little Miss Tinker’s first implying that he had caught her in his arms because he wished to, and then reproaching him for explaining that his motive was utilitarian.

  “Good-night,” he said stiffly; then lifted his cap and went on; but he had not gone far when he began to fear he had been rude to her; and the thought of her lovely, unhappy young face touched him. He knew her opinion of him, for he had heard her express it to her mother; but to-night, in his own unhappiness, he discovered that he forgave her for it.

  Something in this unhappiness of his — for he perceived that his feeling now amounted to unhappiness — made him think that another unhappy person would be congenial to him; and, as he came round the forwa
rd promenade deck and met her again, he stopped her.

  “Miss Tinker, would you care to go in and dance?” She looked at him for a moment, and then brusquely asked him a strange question: “What for?”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, bowed, and would have gone on; but she detained him.

  “I meant I didn’t care for anybody to be polite to me,” she explained, her voice still ungracious. “If you’d like me to dance with you because you want to dance and don’t know anybody else to ask, I will.”

  “I think I could know other people to ask, if I wished to,” he said. “I asked you because!”

  She interrupted him. “All right; it doesn’t matter. Why should anybody ever bother to explain anything? Besides, I like your dancing.” They were just outside the Palm Garden door, and she dropped her wrap on a deck chair as she spoke; he opened the door for her; she went in quickly and turned with her hands outstretched to him.

  They danced through four intervals of music; and though neither of them had more to say to the other than when he had danced with her before, her eyes were not so continuously downcast as they had been on that previous occasion; she looked at him several times with a clear, deliberate gaze in which her sullenness always smouldered; and although he knew this smouldering had nothing to do with him, her eyes disturbed him, as they always had disturbed him when he encountered their full revelation. She had no right, he felt, to look as though she understood him — and understood him Contemptuously at that — when manifestly she could not, and knew nothing whatever about him. She did not even know that he was a playwright and in his own way — so far from her little way — a celebrity. Nevertheless, he would have gone on dancing much longer with her when she stopped; for he had never danced with anyone who made him feel so much inclined to dance forever.

  “No,” she said, when he asked her to wait for the music to begin again. “That’s all.”

  Then, not looking to see if he followed, she went out to where she had left her wrap. He reached it first; put it about her shoulders; she said “Thank you,” and without turning her head walked a few steps away from him as if to leave him definitely. But she stopped suddenly, and came back to him.

  “I think I’ll say something to you,” she said. “I’ll never see you again, because this is the last night; and I’d like to have it off my mind. It’s about my manners on this trip. You know what I mean because you’ve had a sample of them at the table twice a day, and what I want you to understand is that they’re my own responsibility and not my mother’s and father’s. They brought me up to be decent to everybody, and it’s been the fault of nothing but my own beastly state of mind that I’ve behaved as I have on this voyage. It’s my fault, not theirs; I want you to understand. I’m telling you this because I’ll be able to feel afterwards that at least I made some explanation of my own rotten table manners and have that advantage over you, because though yours have been as bad as mine, you haven’t dreamed of making any such explanation and never would. And I oughtn’t to go without telling you that it’s only I who’ve realized that your manners are as bad as mine. My mother and father haven’t understood; they just thought you didn’t know anything.”

  With that, she looked him full in the eyes once more. “Good-bye,” she said, not ungently; and left him.

  Angry and a little dazed, he stared after her, regretting that his sympathetic quest for solace in another unhappy person’s society had been so ill-advised. Yet there was something curiously piquant in the most insulting thing she had said: “They just thought you didn’t know anything.” The girl herself, then, thought he did know something; but she evidently believed that it was better to know nothing than to have manners as bad as her own. “Silly!” he said; but was not quite sure that this settled anything.

  He descended frowning to his cabin, there to discover something that immediately banished both his irritation and the erratic Miss Olivia Tinker from his mind. Upon his desk there lay a thin blue envelope addressed to him, and on the single sheet of paper inside it he found written in a delicate hand:

  You will understand? Ah, you will be kind! Write to me at Villa Colline des Roses, Algiers.

  ADRELIE DE ST. D. M.

  He understood nothing except that an enchantment seemed to be just before him; and his lightened heart would not let him sleep until near dawn.

  XIII

  HE SLEPT LATE into the morning, undisturbed by a great to-do and the moving of heavy trunks in the corridor near his cabin; and he finally awoke into a curious, unfamiliar stillness. There was no throbbing from the ship’s vitals, and for a few moments the silence was like the noon pause in a village. Drowsily he became conscious of a faraway tooting of little horns; and then, close by, he heard a creaking of wheels and voices shouting vehemently in French just below the open portholes of his cabin. These sounds must be illusion, he thought, for they came from where he had grown used to the liquid rushing and flinging of the sea; it was difficult to understand what Frenchmen and creaking wheels were doing in the water. Suddenly and startlingly there came the loud sonorous braying of a donkey; and at that he sat up, wide awake, in his bed and looked out through the portholes.

  What he saw was a white-and-gray town rising upon a crescent of hills in terrace on terrace of thick walls and flat roofs, strangely massive and venerable to an American eye. Old-looking domes bulged up from the flat roofs here and there; the general white and gray was spotted with hazy blues and pinks; and he had distant glimpses of the great leaves of palm trees fluttering in the breeze. Everywhere shapes and colours were strange to him; the “Duumvir” was at a dock in Algiers.

  When he came forth into the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine, and had been waved onward by a man in a French uniform at the head of the pier, he realized that this was the last of the “Duumvir” for him. He was not yet free of some physical reminiscences of the sea, however; his eyes retained the ship’s habit of motion, and the solid way before him seemed slowly to rise and fall in the rhythm of the rising and falling deck; the ground felt strange to walk upon. This sensation was much more acute than it had been at Gibraltar, where it resembled a slight occasional vertigo; — here he was like a skater, walking with strangely weightless feet difficult to direct after a long day on the ice. They seemed unable to carry him forward with any proper speed, baffling him as if he were trying to hurry in a dream, and what he saw was dreamlike, too.

  Before him, beyond the dock, there was an open space of ground thick with dust, and there came from it to whine at him, and to pluck at him with old apes’ hands, five or six figures almost indistinguishable from dust. They wore ragged headgear of cloth, and about their bodies were torn swathings the colour of a coffee sack, not the colour of a new coffee sack, but of one that has lain years upon a trash heap, a colour soon to become familiar to him. Other figures like these stood to stare at him in an inhuman, strange-dog manner of staring; and they and the beggars were brown people, so strickenly old, so strickenly nondescript, that, except for a gray beard or two among them, he could not tell which was man and which was woman.

  Close by him a shabby gypsy played a guitar, and, in dusty velvet and flying ribbons, there danced a fandango in the dust to this tinkling a fantastic yellow midget woman two feet high, jerkily galvanized like a mechanical doll upon a music-box. The gypsy confidently offered his hat to Ogle for a contribution; the beggars whined importunately at his elbow and plucked at his coat; an unpleasantly dapper guide with a waxed moustache and a breath all garlic joined him officiously; — everybody seemed to feel rightfully entitled to a little of his money. gars, repulsed the guide, and discovered among some waiting automobiles the omnibus and porter of the hotel in which he had engaged rooms by cable. The porter, a handsome person with brass buttons upon his bright blue coat and gilt braid round his cap, made everything simple for the traveller, relieved him of all care for his bags and trunk, put him into the best of the automobiles, and bowed profoundly as it moved away.

  It moved r
apidly — Ogle at once perceived that he would have no complaint to make of slow driving in Algiers — and he was borne flying up and up hill through the newer French part of the town. The streets that he saw, though foreign enough to him, might have been streets in almost any city in France, except for the palm trees here and there and the veiled women and Arabs among the French pedestrians on the pavements and in the trolley-cars. The playwright’s most exotic journey until now had been to Montreal, and all he saw upon this swift drive wore for him the air of exciting novelty; he took delight in the apéritif drinkers upon the pavements before the cafés; in the strolling French cavalry officers, brilliant shapings of colour, though not so brilliant as the Spahi beneath whose scarlet cloak light flickered from spurs on boots of red Morocco leather; but, above all, Ogle was fascinated by the robed and turbaned Arabs, the robed Jews and the hurrying veiled women. He had never been among robed people before, and he decided at once that trousers, except upon ladies, had ruined the beauty of accidental life.

  The car swept him through a gateway, then through a mysterious and bosky garden beyond, and in the midst of the garden came upon the hotel. The walls were half covered with scarlet and purple blossoms of climbing vines, and before it there was a balustraded white terrace whereon a majestic black-bearded merchant, in a turban and white robes just immaculately out of the Arabian Nights, displayed embroideries for the benefit of a dozen or so English ladies and gentlemen. These were seated about painted little iron tables and enjoying coffee upon the terrace after lunch, though not making their enjoyment at all obvious.