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. "That 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 her 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.
She was anything but embarrassed. "I told you it needs two persons to enjoy this extraordinary man," she said gayly. "To believe what he tells me would need perhaps a thousand; but one more might be at least a little help. I insist that you join us."
"Sit down, sit down, young fellow," Tinker said cordially, and he waved his hand toward a folded camp-stool leaning against the white wall of the wireless operator's room near by. "I just been tellin' Mrs. Mummero some simple God's facts about a few things in my part o' the country, and she thinks I'm makin' 'em up. She don't know a thing about the United States; all she saw was just New York and Boston and Philadelphia and hardly anything to speak of, of them, nothing but a few hotel clerks and some pink teas. Well, she began to talk about how much of a place Paris is—she seems to think a good deal of Paris and some the other towns they got over in Europe;—but I told her she never in her life saw a real town yet, and she never will see one unless she comes back and gets to the other side the Allegheny Mountains. I told her to come out my way and I'd show her one!" Then in his enthusiasm he leaned toward her, beaming broad admiration upon her. "I'd certainly like to take you around my city!" he said.
"Such a proposal!" she cried. "Mr. Ogle, you must stay to save me. I might accept!"
But Ogle was already moving away, and did not look back. He made up his mind to stop thinking of her, to banish her entirely from his mind, and, feeling restored to freedom by this resolution, sat down comfortably upon a coiled hawser and wondered why he had not sooner set himself at liberty by so simple an act of will. The sun was bright and under it the whole circle of the sea lay sparkling; balmy airs encompassed him; he was once more his own man. Congratulating himself upon the ease with which he had dispersed the fascination, he began to realize that he had been almost in love with Mme. Momoro. Then his chin sank, his hands clenched, and he groaned half-aloud.
"How can she?" he whispered bitterly. "How can she treat me so!"
At dinner that evening Mrs. Tinker was in great spirits. She nodded at the placid hypocrite across from her and said to Ogle: "Do you know what this wicked man has been up to? Robbing those poor gentlemen in the smoking-room again the whole live-long afternoon. Well, Libby and I'll just have to stand it, I expect, because he stole more from 'em to-day than any time yet, and I'm going to endow a new ward in a hospital when we get back home. What's more, the first place I'm going to look for when we land from this boat, it's a jewellery store!"
There had been no card game at all in the smoking-room that afternoon, as Ogle knew; and he found a momentary satisfaction in the thought that Tinker's hypocrisy was at least expensive.
But this pleasure was fleeting; the man was probably "made of money." One day the playwright had heard the manufacturer of worsteds and the Wackstle person talking of Tinker in the lounge. The two men evidently had known something about him before they encountered him on this voyage, and it was clear that they thought well of him. In fact, the worsted magnate had spoken of his "respect": "I have a great respect for any man that can build up a really big business out of nothing the way Mr. Tinker's done these last fifteen years with that paper company. It was just about up the spout when he got hold of it, and I understand he never borrowed a penny for it but backed it with his own capital entirely. It must be a great satisfaction to a man to feel he's made such a position for himself in the world of business."
Ogle thought wonderingly of this phrase, "the world of business." He had always been aware that there was such a world and always felt about it what his father felt about it before him. His father had been a rather embittered and radical assistant professor of English; and Laurence had gone from the life of the university into what he felt was the forefront of the theatre and studio life of New York. So when he thought wonderingly of that phrase used by the worsted man, "the world of business," his wonder was that of the mountaineer who sees pedlars greedily bargaining over their packs far below him in the haze of the plain. The world of these business men, the Tinkers and Wackstles, and worsted men, was a strange gloom, as he thought of it—a smoky twilight wherein they groped ignobly for money and incessantly babbled in their own dialects about their grubbing. To them it was a real world evidently; they passed the word from one to another when one of them got money in quantity, and they had their own murky little trading celebrities, dismal bragging beings wholly unknown on the heights above. And it was with one of these that Mme. Momoro preferred to spend hours alone!
"Preferred" was the galling word in Ogle's mind. For it had become clear to him that although she was "nice" to him and to Macklyn and Albert Jones, and, when she had nothing more to her taste to do, gladly made herself their gay and sympathetic companion, what she preferred was Tinker.
All in all, the young man felt that he was getting a rather severe lesson in both the variety and the singularity of human tastes and viewpoints. Upon the matter of their singularity, moreover, he received further enlightenment as he was preparing to retire, this last evening before the "Duumvir" left the Atlantic for the Mediterranean. For days he had heard nothing through the closed door between the adjoining cabin and his own, except commonplace fragments from Mrs. Tinker concerning dress, to which Olivia responded in monosyllables; but to-night the elder lady was more discursive.
"One thing I've been sort of disappointed about, so far," she said. "I always heard you were likely to meet so many interesting people on these big liners, especially going to the Mediterranean. Of course most of these on board are well dressed, and they're all well off, no question, or else how could they be here? But I certainly don't agree with your father: he says they're the finest lot of people he ever saw—he always says that, anyhow, wherever we go, because he always likes everybody—but I never did feel that just succeeding in business and showing it in their clothes makes people interesting. What I mean is, you can look over this whole boat and you'll scarcely see a single intellectual face."
The daughter's response was characteristic of her mood. "I wouldn't want to see it, if there were."
"Well, I would," Mrs. Tinker returned. "At first, from his looks, I thought that little fellow might be going to turn out right cultivated; but he hasn't made one interesting remark the whole way over. He don't seem to know anything about anything at all."
There came a sharpness into the daughter's voice. "Oh, yes, he does. He knows he's wonderful."
"It doesn't look like it," her mother returned;—"the way he and his two funny-looking friends keep hanging around that adventuress! I do wish I knew who she is: I'll bet she's got a history behind her!"
"Perhaps in front of her," Olivia suggested, and could be heard to yawn. "She's beautiful."
"She may be," Mrs. Tinker admitted cautiously; "but she looks like a woman to me that'd always be up to something or other, you couldn't tell what. Anyway, the thing that's sort of disappointed me so far is, I thought there'd be so many cultivated-looking people on board, and except that second head-waiter in the dining-room with the eyeglasses, I haven't seen a one."
The light clicked out upon that, and the incensed young man heard no more. Inevitably and by every possible means, it seemed, these Tinkers, middle-class Middle Westerners, of whom he had never heard two weeks ago, were ruining his voyage and his temper, and actually interfering with his life;—at least, thinking of Mme. Momoro, he went so far as to put the matter in that extreme way. He could only pray for haste to Algiers and his departure from the boat and all contact with such people.
But in the morning for a time the engrossing lady made him forget his ill-humour. He stood with her upon the forward gallery of the promenade deck, and, although Macklyn and Albert Jones and other passengers stood with them and even pressed upon them, he stood nearest her, and his shoulder touched her arm. Before them the bow of the "Duumvir" flung aside a bluer sparkle of water than they had yet known, and there opened a majestic avenue between the giant headlands of two continents. Upon the left, flat-roofed Spanish villages rose from the sea and massive square white towers stood beyond upon hills of unfamiliar shapes and colours. On the right a long parapet of ominous mountains, gray and mysterious within a veil of blue haze, ranged down the Straits as far as the eye could reach. It was to this long and somehow disturbing highland barrier that Mme. Momoro directed Ogle's attention.
"Africa!" she said, in a low voice. "That is Africa! Anything could happen behind those mountains, one feels. The stranger it could be, the more one would expect it. These are the Pillars of Hercules; and just here, on this side, is Spain. It is barren, perhaps; yet it is beautiful and smiling, too. But there, that huge sculptured shadow in the high air—that is Africa!"
She said the word "Africa" in a way, as he thought, he had heard no word spoken before in all his life. She little more than breathed it; but it was as if she breathed the whole stories of Cleopatra and Carthage in the one lingering low sound.
"It is magnificent," he said, deeply moved; and added in a husky voice for her ear alone: "Your thought of it, I mean. I feel your thought of it in your voice, and I understand. And you—you are more than Africa!"
Onward sparkled the flying bow of the "Duumvir," opening headland upon headland on the leftward shore until almost abruptly, there, gigantic before them, they beheld old Britain's Rock climbing the brilliant sky of Spain.
"My golly! that's familiar," a hearty voice said from the clump of passengers behind Mme. Momoro and Ogle. "What an ad! What an ad!"
Tinker's enthusiasm was for the genius of a commercial organization in his native country; and a moment later he was heard again jovially extolling it, in reply to a remark from Mr. Wackstle.
"Yes, sir; certainly it's impressive; but if it hadn't been for that ad how many people do you expect would ever 'a' heard of it? The only thing that disappoints me, I always thought they had their sign painted right on the Rock like it is in the pictures. I'm goin' to sue 'em, when I get back, for false pretences. It ain't there!"
"Pop-puh!" Mrs. Tinker, excited by these first moments in the Old World, so new to her, scolded him amiably but with a loud shrillness. "If you don't look out, Mr. Wackstle will think you really don't know any more than you sound like you do."
"Well, I don't—not much. Was this where Napoleon landed from St. Helena or something? What ever did happen around here, anyhow?"