IN THE smoking-room, Macklyn's prophecy that he and Albert Jones would be treated as outcasts seemed in a fair way to fulfilment, and as a measure of self-respect they seated themselves at some distance from the chairs occupied by their fortunate friend and the glamorous French lady. Ogle had not been aware of their entrance, so deeply was he engaged with her; but after a time his glance wandered to them as he talked, and he gave them a preoccupied nod; then immediately returned his gaze to what was undeniably better worth its while. He was speaking earnestly, but in a low tone inaudible to them, for to-day it was possible to converse quietly in that room, although eight middle-aged men (all of them hoarse) were present, including the vociferous Tinker.
This afternoon the pastime of the barbarians was neither musical nor bibulous. The eight sat about a green-covered round table within a leathern seclusion of chair-backs; they concentrated their minds in successive deliberations upon compacted hands of cards, held close to their fronts; they pondered, they considered, they breathed solemnly, they smoked cigars as with a grave unconsciousness that they did so. Then, from time to time, looking up, they regarded one another with a peculiar scrutiny, profoundly insincere; but when they spoke it was only to murmur technicalities. Before the strangely quiet and thoughtful Tinker there glistened upon the green cloth a toy castle made of celluloid disks built into many little towers brilliant in clean colours; moreover, he was the only warden of such a keep. No other of the eight thoughtful men had similar defences before him. And ever and again, through the slowly dispersing layers of cigar smoke, there were cast upon Tinker's bright towers reflective glances in which there was a hint of acidity.
"I suppose it's a relief that they sang themselves voiceless yesterday," Albert Jones said to his friend. "But as a spectacle I can't say I find them much more stimulating to-day. Poker is our national card game because it suits the temperament of our sterling business men precisely; their form of relaxation, it seems, is to prove to one another that what they essentially are is wolfish. To me it's rather a painful sight."
"You aren't compelled to look at it," Macklyn suggested. "There's something else in the place."
"Thank you," Mr. Jones said gratefully. "I'm trying my best not to let her know how much too well aware I am of that fact. How old do you suppose she really is?"
"I don't suppose. A few women in every century forbid such suppositions: the Empress Elizabeth, Ninon, Diane de Poictiers"
"Eve, herself, no doubt," the painter added, "to say nothing of the wife of Menelaus. Madame Momoro looks twenty-six or a glorious thirty, as you choose, but can't easily be under thirty-eight if she's the mother of the full-grown youth travelling with her; and I should say there's no question but that he's her son—he looks it perfectly, and she called him 'Bébé.' Probably she's forty; she might be more. Without any doubt at all, she's years and years older than Ogle—as much as ten or twelve probably."
"So? Well, he doesn't know that," Macklyn observed. "He doesn't know anything except that she's listening to him. She's a woman who casts a spell, and he's spellbound; no question. I'm not an expert reader of lip movements, but I have an impression that he's quoting rhymed and metrical verses to her."
"He is," the painter whispered. "Listen."
The poker table had become deathly silent in some crisis of suspense; the noises of air and sea through which the "Duumvir" rushed were closed out by the panelled walls; and though the throbbing of the vessel's heart was always beating up from fathoms underfoot and faintly vibrant even here, the stillness of the room permitted some phrases spoken in a lowered voice to be heard by the two intent listeners. They caught but a little; for the card players completed their crisis with an outburst of exclamations all bitter except one, which was uttered in the hoarsest voice at the table: "Push, losers, push!"
"Yes; he's reached that stage already," the painter said, alluding not to the triumphant Tinker, but to Ogle. "It's verse. Something of his own, do you suppose?"
"I do indeed suppose so," Macklyn returned, thus supposing accurately out of his own experience. "And addressed to her or descriptive of her, I haven't a doubt in the world. By George, but she's giving a wonderful performance!"
"Why 'performance'?"
"Because she's had so many such things written to her—of course she has; just look at her!—she wouldn't care a rap for a million of 'em. Yet she's letting him think she does, in her impassive way, which isn't impassive, after all, you begin to observe, as you study her more closely. She has that cool surface—a statue with an almost glossy patina; but as you get used to her, you begin to feel that she's a woman almost on fire, not with her emotions, but with the incessant vibration of her thoughts. She's thinking about everything all the time; but what she's really interested in just now, over that beautiful long cigarette holder of hers, is the poker game."
"I believe you're right at that," his friend agreed, concentrating his greenish eyes behind the thick eyeglasses he wore. "She's really paying Laurence precious little attention and probably doesn't know what he's saying."
But here the envious young man was mistaken. Mme. Momoro's glance undoubtedly passed over the playwright's shoulder to the green table as he talked; but she was a woman capable of doing two things excellently at the same time. "That is delightful of you," she said, as he concluded his quotation. "I am sorry you did not write more. You see what a thirsty vanity I have; I am insatiable of any flattery, no matter how unfounded it is, so I am like a poor soul in the Desert far away from any oasis and trying to drink the water of a mirage. Besides, one knows that writers must be always writing—even if they can find no more to write about than a stranger on a big ship full of people. But when you see the Desert you will not write of ladies, Mr. Ogle; you will write only of that."
"What did you mean," he asked, "when you said some people change in Africa?"
"Well, don't some people change all the time, even though a very little, everywhere? So, if you are always changing a little, then finally after many years of changing little by little, that makes an immense change, you see. There are some who change nowhere, it is very true; but that is the people who become fixed and rigid as soon as they have passed the changes of youth; they are made of plaster of Paris. But people like you, who follow one of the arts, they remain always young because they are always plastic; so they must have to change a great deal very often, because the impressions made upon them by different things are always changing. You cannot constantly make impressions upon a piece of wax without altering the essential shape of that piece of wax. Such people are very, very susceptible to their surrounding, and they are different in different places. Well, there are some places that have unearthly beauty, places of so strange an enchantment that plastic people, when they go to one of those enchanted places, they become different from themselves very quickly and they will see everything as they have not seen it before. They will believe that what they always thought black is now white. Someone you thought he was a giant he will seem a little pygmy; and perhaps some pygmy look a giant. Such places where there is a spell that will change a plastic person like you in this way, there are not many of them; but one that I know is Capri and one is Taormina and one is Constantinople, and one is almost wherever you wish to go in Africa. You see they will put a spell upon people who can be bewitched, and the others will not be touched."
"You think I am one who can be bewitched then?" he asked, and he added, a little dramatically: "You have already discovered it?"
She laughed, declining to take this as seriously as he seemed to hope she would. "You wish again to be kind to my vanity, since I have described it to you as insatiable," she said lightly. "But what you really think is that I am fantastic when I speak of the witchery of those beautiful queer places. I am earnest, though. I have known a man to come down from a high mountain altogether a different person from what he was when he climbed up. And yet, after all, such an enchantment only accomplish' what happens to us in time without it. If we live a little while in this world we find that what we once thought black is truly white—we do not need to go to Constantinople for that! We find that someone we thought always a great, kind soul is sometimes a little spider. Toward people we cannot help but change, because we all have so many faces and everybody is like a manufacturer of masks; he has a thousand, but will show only one at a time, hoping you will like it, and so how can you ever know him? Yet each mask is a real thing, and so nobody can ever know one another, don't you see? And sometimes the mask a person show', it is a mask just to make you angry, and in a little while there is another to please you, like that young girl who was rude to her mother and would not allow her to touch her arm. She showed a mask of anger—she can afford to show so ugly a mask, because she is so pretty that even her rage is pretty, too; but the next time we see her she may be wearing the mask of a gentle angel. Which one is she, herself? If you meet her at El Kantara you may think her the angel."
For a moment Ogle was puzzled. "The young girl who was rude to her mother," he repeated; then he remembered. "Oh, you mean 'Baby,' this fellow Tinker's daughter."
Mme. Momoro laughed and her glance, passing over his shoulder, became more luminous. "Is she his daughter? Poor man, does he call her 'Bébé'? How pretty! What is her real name?"
"I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea," Ogle said coldly. "I fear that it would take more than an unearthly landscape to give that young lady the appearance of an angel in my eyes," he added, "or, for that matter, to make me care to notice what appearance she bears at all."
"Take care!" Mme. Momoro warned him gaily. "You cannot tell what you may become when you get away from this ship, Mr. Ogle, for the ship is still America. You have really not left home yet, all of you Americans."
He leaned a little nearer her. "Would you care to prophesy? What do you think I will become?"
He asked this in a low and impressive tone; but her glance still crossed his shoulder, and she spoke a little absently. "What you will become? You are charming, so you must take care to change only to become more so. You must take care" Then, as she watched the card table where another crisis impended, she paused. Suddenly she clapped her hands triumphantly. "Oh, see! See!" she cried. "What a magician! He win' everything!"
The eight middle-aged men broke out in commotion. "Push, losers!" the victor croaked loudly; and there were things said that should not have been. The players began to rise from their chairs, fumbling in their pockets, tossing bank notes and gold and silver upon the table and accompanying this outpouring of cash with loud abuse. At the same time Tinker, flushed and openly hilarious, gathered the money together in handfuls which he stuffed loosely into his pockets, and in reply to all insults he maintained a continuous husky shouting: "Hair o' the dog! Hair o' the dog! Wait for the hair o' the dog!"
But the others were noisily preparing to go on deck or return to their families. "You're nothing but a murderer," Mr. Wackstle informed him harshly. "'Hair o' the dog'? No, thanks! We'll get even with you after lunch to-morrow, and I've had enough hair o' the dog already."
Tinker did not stop shouting, and two stewards were already on their way bearing trays of wide-topped glasses brimmed with amber sparklings. "Everybody!" the uproarious victor commanded. He waved a steward toward the repellently staring Macklyn and Jones. "Those boys, too. Everybody, now! Just one hair o' the dog that bit you."
Mme. Momoro was mystified. "One hair of the dog," she repeated, turning wide-eyed to the playwright. "What can that mean—one hair of the dog that bits you?"
"This," he explained as one of the stewards presented a tray before them. "No! Certainly not!" he said to the man indignantly. "Take it away."
"No, no!" she cried quickly. "It would hurt his feelings, and he is so kind." She took one of the glasses from the tray, lifted it near her lips, and bowed smilingly to Tinker. "To the magician!"
He immediately left his companions who were departing after a brief and discourteous acceptance of his hospitality. "Magician?" he said loudly for their benefit as he came over to her. "Who? Me? No! I was just showin' those poor childish old men a few o' the rudiments; but naturally I had to charge 'em a little something for the lesson. They're all mad anyhow because their wives won't speak to 'em to-day; but glory! they haven't got anything on me in that line: the big trouble with me is, mine does!" Then his glance, roving jovially about the room, fell upon the poet and the painter, sitting coldly aloof. "Here, waiter!" he called to one of the stewards. "Didn't you hear me tell you to fix those two boys up like the rest of us?" With that he pushed a chair innocently between Mme. Momoro's and Ogle's, seated himself in it, and addressed Macklyn and Jones directly: "There's only the five of us left, it seems like. Whyn't you boys come over and join us? Five people's just enough for a nice cosy little party."
The two friends looked at each other hastily, then at Mme. Momoro, and came to a quick decision. Simultaneously they accepted filled glasses from the steward and the invitation from the barbarian, who received them with cordiality. "Sit down, boys, sit down," he said, and as they bowed in a manner a little suggesting that of the young Hyacinthe, he presented them informally. "Mrs. Mummero, it's a couple of Eastern gentlemen I been talkin' to a little, off and on. Easterners are likely to be kind of frozen-face until you get to know 'em, Mrs. Mummero; their climate makes 'em suspicious; but after they find out you aren't goin' to steal their shirts off of 'em they're just the same kind of human beings as anybody else. You been over in God's country quite some little time, Mrs. Mummero?"
"You mean" she began, somewhat blankly; then she understood, and laughed. "Oh, in America? Only three months."
"Just for pleasure, I expect," he remarked, nodding. "Well, I wish I could speak French as well as you do English; I don't hardly speak it at all—just 'polly voo frossy' and 'nix ferstay'; that's about all I know. How 'n the world you ever pick up so much of the language in that little time?"
"Oh, no," she protested. "I have been often in England to stay a long while there, and when I was a little girl I had an English governess. Yet even still I make mistakes in my English sometimes, I am sure."
"At that," Tinker returned affably, "I bet you wouldn't make as many as I would in French, if I ever tried to talk it much. I expect if I'd had to wait to learn French I'd never 'a' started for Europe at all, and I expect it was about the same with these boys here, too." Thus he generously shared his linguistic defects with the three young men, who were sitting somewhat rigidly in their chairs and showed no enthusiasm for his reference to them—though one of them was relieved to hear Europe and not Africa mentioned as the Midlander's destination. Ogle had feared that the Tinkers might intend to land at Algiers instead of continuing with the ship to the Italian ports whither most of the passengers were bound; and, although he understood that the French possessions in North Africa were extensive, his prejudice had now become such that he began to feel the need of a spaciousness more than Continental to contain him and the Tinker family at the same time, with any pleasure to himself.
Now that a prospect of eventual relief was before him, however, he relaxed enough to say: "I should hesitate, myself, to speak French in Madame Momoro's presence—and even English!"
She gave him a little bow, and explained to Tinker: "I have told Mr. Ogle that I am very susceptible to flattery. I provide myself with it wherever I can, and I am so childlike I relish it—even from the untruthful."
"I bet you hear a plenty!" Tinker exclaimed. Then, over his amber glass, he looked at her with a beaming admiration and said in a tone of amiable inquiry: "Widow, I expect?"
To the three sensitive young men the very air seemed shocked by the impact of so grossly naïve a personality; but the response of the desecrated lady left them nothing to wish for, though it was as personal indeed as what elicited it. "But you, Mr. Tinker, if one is to judge by some remarks you have made, you are not in the least a widower."
"Me!" he shouted, without the remotest consciousness of having received a reproof. "A widower? I guess you wouldn't think so, if you'd heard a few things I heard this morning after I came on deck! The trouble with steamships is, no matter how big they make 'em they'll never be able to make 'em big enough for a man to get down town before his wife wakes up the morning after he's been out a little late with a few congenial friends. Widower!" He laughed in rueful jocularity, and passed to another aspect of this suggestion. "I expect you wouldn't think I'm a widower if you knew what'd happen to me if it got out that I was sittin' up here right now talkin' to as good-lookin' a woman as you are, Mrs. Mummero!"
At this she surprised and a little grieved the majority of the impromptu party by a laugh of frankest pleasure. "You are an extraordinary man, I see. When a woman says she exist' only to hear pleasant things, no matter how far from the fact, you are shrewd enough to believe she has told the simple, shameful truth. Yes, you are very extraordinary, Mr. Tinker."
"Think so?" he said, and he was modest enough to utter a deprecatory laugh. "I guess nobody'd have to be very extraordinary to say a good many of that kind of things to you!" Suddenly he sighed, but as with some physical reminiscence not to his taste; he passed a handkerchief over his forehead and set his untouched glass upon a tabouret. "Oh, dear me!" he murmured. "It don't look so good to-day. What I really need is a little fresh air."
"Why do you not go to take it?" Mme. Momoro asked him with a kindly solicitude.
He brightened, looking at her appreciatively. "I believe I would," he said, "if I could get anybody to go with me to keep me from jumping overboard;—I feel kind of despondent. I expect you and I could find a place out here on the top deck among all these boats where my family wouldn't be liable to come, and we could sit down and get a whole lot of ozone." He rose, looking at her in genial confidence. "How about it?"
Again it was time for the lightnings to destroy this man. Playwright and painter and poet, already uneasily aware that the outlander had been monopolizing the attention of the tolerant lady, now were sure that his hour was come. He had gone too far; and for the incredible audacity of his proposal, as well as for the offensive artlessness with which it had been made, he would now be beautifully and permanently annihilated. But as the three sat hopefully expectant, Mme. Momoro smiled amiably and rose.
"If you think it will be of benefit," she said. "I am always a philanthropist." And with a charming nod of farewell over her shoulder, she moved at once toward the open door.
"My glory!" Tinker said, as they stepped out upon the small after-deck beyond. "I feel any amount better already."
He was tall enough to look down upon her, and he did so gratefully. She took his arm, and they disappeared from the sight of those within the room.
Unquestionably some sense of bafflement remained behind. "Now, why on earth," Albert Jones inquired, "would such a woman do a thing like that?"
"It's simple enough to me," Macklyn said. "You wonder how she can let the creature address a syllable to her, and not freeze him so solid he'd never be able even to look at her again. I suppose that's what you're wondering, both of you, isn't it?"
"I do," Ogle admitted. "I do indeed. I thought I thought"
"Yes; one knows what you thought," Macklyn interrupted a little crisply. "But I'm afraid Madame Momoro has seen quite a number of men like you, Mr. Ogle, and like Albert and me quite as well. But this Iroquois from the prairies is a new type to her, and she's interested in specimens. We're of her own class; she intuitively knows us too well to be interested in us when there's an unknown specimen at hand. I don't think we need to feel mortified because she prefers half an hour or so of microscopic work, tête-à-tête, to a general conversation—especially as Albert and I didn't even offer her a sample of our own and never opened our heads. She had no reason to suppose we were prepared to offer her any more entertainment than that, even if she sat here all afternoon."
For himself and his friend Albert there appeared to be more consolation in this viewpoint than for Ogle, who had been two hours engaged in offering her entertainment; nevertheless, he accepted the theory of her interest in specimens and found a slight solace in it. But another thought of Macklyn's did not add to the clarity of the playwright's mind, already somewhat painfully mystified.
"There was one inconsistency I don't understand," said Macklyn. "When he delicately asked her if she was a widow, she scolded him with that retort to the effect that he had been complaining publicly, as it were, of his wife. Of course the creature himself hadn't any idea he'd been scolded; but that's beside the point. Why should she resent his asking her if she was a widow and then not be offended, even be pleased apparently, by his much grosser references to her personal appearance and his charming implications of his wife's jealousy? That's what I don't see."
Neither did the playwright nor Albert Jones; there appeared to be no solution.