IN THE morning a vague and stormy light coming into his cabin from the turbulent day was at intervals almost extinguished by the rushing of gray water over the ponderous glass of the two port—holes. He must have slept a little, or at least obtained the relief of stupor, for the daylight surprised him when he saw it; but his surprise, like all else that was his, offered him no pleasure. True, the virulence of his illness had in some measure spent itself; but all his powers were enfeebled; and his interior was like an empty house after a tragedy, threatening to be haunted. Outside his cabin the corridors roared with funnelled wind; bayings and whistlings from obscure sources hunted through the ship like wild hounds and mournful huntsmen; the dark water rushed upon the glass of the portholes ominously, as if determined to get in and finish him; and still he spiralled high, higher than ever, then lurched down and down weightlessly—to rise again. The steamer's fabric screeched rather than squeaked, protesting against such a racking; and everywhere there were vehement noise and violent motion, for now the "Duumvir" rode into the full strength of the storm.
All day wind and ocean struck the ship more and more heavily until late in the afternoon, when a climax seemed to be reached. Ogle clung weakly to the bars at the head of his bed and wondered if even a great liner couldn't be lost at sea. The "Duumvir" was the pride of Italy, he knew;—at least, it was the pride of the Italian mercantile marine, and although he thought of Christopher Columbus he wondered if Italians were still good mariners; for he remembered nervously that Columbus sailed the seas more than four hundred years ago, and a race can lose its cunning. Other people shared his doubts, he discovered, when the rollings and pitchings and howlings were at their worst. All day he had heard nothing from his neighbours, perhaps because other noises prevented; but now, after a protracted outrageousness of motion and commotion, something of great weight, probably a trunk, crashed sonorously against the separating door, and the voice of the mother of the rebellious girl screamed into the corridor.
"Steward!" Ogle heard her wailing. "You man, there! You! Listen! If this ship's going to the bottom oughtn't I to get dressed?"
The steward, an Italian like the rest of the ship's people, spoke no English.
"Madame?"
"Oughtn't I to get dressed?"
The voice of the daughter was heard then, calling angrily: "If he's a respectable man, he'd say you certainly ought! Don't go out there like that. Come back in here and shut that door."
The general uproar, increasing, covered and merged all other sounds, making them indistinguishable; but evidently the mother obeyed, and for the rest of that horrifying day Ogle heard no more of his hated neighbours. The dark came early, and an hour later someone fell against his outer door, opened it, and fumbled along the wall.
"Who's there?" Ogle inquired, though he felt no interest in his own question and cared little what the reply might be.
"Ecco," a mournful voice responded, and the electric light brightened the room intolerably.
"Murder," Ogle said feebly, and, opening pained eyes, beheld his sick steward leaning upon the foot of the bed and looking at him wanly. The man's untidy hair was a lustrous black, and it could be seen that ordinarily he was of a swarthy complexion; but he had no swarthiness now. On the contrary, his pallor was disquieting and so was his expression. "Mangiare?" he said almost in a whisper, and closed his eyes pathetically. "Mangiare?"
Ogle had no wish to comprehend his meaning. "You'd better go away, steward. I don't speak Italian. No Italian. Italian no."
The steward wavered, but tightened his clutch upon the foot of the bed. "Vous voulez manger quelque chose?"
Ogle understood that he was now being addressed in the French language, which he had studied for several years in school and college, but without ever acquiring any great practical facility in its usage. However, he remembered a phrase. "Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
"Voulez manger?"
"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
The man opened his mouth and with a limp forefinger pointed to the aperture.
"Eat?" Ogle said incredulously. "No!"
"No!" the steward echoed, agreeing; then, balancing, staggering and plunging, made his way out of the room. Ogle wished that he had not come, and that he had not made that gesture of opening his mouth and pointing to it: ocean travel was difficult enough without these pantomimes, the unhappy passenger thought. However, the second night was not so bad as the first, although the storm showed no abatement during the earlier nocturnal hours, and Ogle, himself, did not perceive his condition to be materially improved. His impression was that he lay awake all night, suffering incessantly, everlastingly spiralling, inside and out, and listening to the heavy swish of water upon the glass of the two portholes. Nevertheless, he slept briefly at intervals without knowing it, and toward morning his slumbers grew deeper and longer. When he woke after the longest, two ovals of sunshine were dancing over his floor; the room was bright, the glass of the portholes dry and glittering; and presently, though still a little dizzy, he dared to think that the motion of the ship had grown rhythmic and sweeter.
There was creaking still and some complaint in the vessel's fabric; but the great noises were gone, and in this comparative quiet he heard the opening and closing of the outer door of the next cabin.
"Well, well, folkses!" the loud voice of the hearty Midlander exclaimed. "It's after ten o'clock. Aren't you ever goin' to get up? Upstairs everything's fine—lots o' people out, and it's pretty nearly like Springtime on deck. Honey, how's Baby feelin' this morning?"
Ogle sat up in his bed, with his hands over his ears. "'Honey, how's Baby?'" he murmured. "I've got to get out of this!" And with that he felt sufficient life and health returned into him to set foot upon his slowly rising floor.
The hearty voice continued its encouragement in the next room; but Ogle heard it indistinctly, and, as he turned on the salt water in his bathtub, not at all. If he had to listen to any more talk of Honey and Baby he would be prostrated again, he was certain; and to save himself he roused all his powers. So, an hour later, he was enabled to make a somewhat pallid appearance upon deck.
The long promenade, lined with muffled passengers in their chairs, slowly and regularly heaved up forward and sank aft, then heaved up aft and sank by the ship's bows, like a "board walk" at a summer resort made into a gigantic teeter-totter; for the sparkling green sea, laced with white, was still high and lively, showing a horizon like a deep-toothed saw. Many of the shrouded passengers looked preoccupied with introspective doubts; others were serious over troubles too severe and too recent to be so soon forgotten; and, in spite of the sunshine and the inspiriting air, a few lay haggard in their chairs, their anxieties not concealed by closed eyes. Nevertheless, a dozen or more were already briskly promenading; and, as Ogle emerged, a group of chattering young people rushed by him as merrily as if there never had been such a thing as a northeaster off our coast.
He was not yet able to understand their levity; but, having been conducted to his deck chair and neatly enfolded to the waist in a rug, by an attentive steward, he found his cares lighter, and after half an hour or so of what was almost a comfortable relaxation, he accepted a cup of broth from the steward's tray, and drank it with something like pleasure. Life might be worth living after all, he began to perceive, and even the "luxury of ocean travel" not altogether a trap for the gullible. Becoming more and more inclined toward cheerfulness, he first endured, then feebly welcomed, the thought of food, ending by lunching cautiously—yet undeniably taking nourishment—from a tray in his lap. He even went so far as to think of a cigarette, but decided that the time had not yet come for so great a hazard.
Instead of smoking, he found in a pocket of his overcoat a little pamphlet with a printed list of the "Duumvir's" passengers, and entertained himself with it for a time, first looking to see if his own name had been properly spelled. He found it, "Mr. Laurence Ogle," correct, and he repeated it inaudibly several times, wondering how many of his fellow voyagers were interested, or perhaps even a little excited, to find that name upon the list. Probably some of the more intelligent of them were already trying to identify him among the passengers, and although he smiled at his own vanity, the picture pleased him, as well it might. For, although he did not realize it, this thought was a decisive symptom of recovery; he was almost himself again.
What somewhat modified his pleasure was the fact that his name appeared at the bottom of a page. The list was in alphabetical order and he understood that no slight had been intended; but from "Abbott" to "Yountze" he was unable to discover any prestige of celebrity comparable to his own, and although he was sensible enough to understand that of course it was unimportant where a name appeared upon a page, whether at the top, the bottom, or in the middle, still it did seem to him that a little thought might have arranged matters better. Most of the other names were a mere wilderness of the commonplace in which the eye wandered without interest.
There were exceptions, however;—he found one of them not far above "Mr. Laurence Ogle"; and this particular exception arrested hig attention as if with a faint strain of music Plifed upon foreign and unfamiliar instruments. "Momoro" was the name; "Mme. Momoro," and ynderneath it, "Mr. Hyacinthe Momoro." Ogle murmured "Momoro" over to himself several times, "Momoro—Madame Momoro—Madame Momoro, Hyacinthe Momoro—Momoro." Momoro was the most romantic name he had ever encountered, he thought; a name operatic in flavour and suggestive of high performances in history or even antique legend. Moreover, it might be a name of practical value to him; for he should ever make use of French "characters" in a play he could call one of them "Momoro." Indeed, Momoro so fascinated him that, letting the list drop in his lap, he began dreamily to construct some cobwebbings of plot about a charming central figure, "Madame Momoro—Madame la Marquise de Momoro," he would call her, perhaps. One of his reasons for being aboard the "Duumvir" was his belief that he would do well to get away from plays and the theatre for a while; but the dramatist's habit of mind prevailed: "Momoro" began to wind him up as if he had been clockwork. He lay back in his chair, languidly watching the rhythmic ascent and descent of the rail against green sea and blue sky; and before long he was selecting a cast for "Momoro" which he decided would be an excellent title. Elsie Grennell, that beautiful brunette, would play "Madame de Momoro;"—of course a heroine of that name should be dark.
As the afternoon wore on, the ship's motion became steadily less emphatic; the January sharpness of the air grew gentler over the softer sea, yet remained bracing; more passengers gained confidence enough to forget their introspections, trusted themselves upon their feet and set forth upon a brisker and brisker promenading; the stricken, no longer limp, began to sit up and look about them; laughter was heard along the decks. Then, since everywhere this blither spirit seemed to breathe, Ogle felt it and forgot his play building. "By George!" he said to himself. "I believe I knew what I was about, after all." And with that he began to feel sorry for his friends in wintry New York, unfortunate people bound down to desks or to nightly work in the theatre, going about through snow in jolting, dirty taxicabs and drinking poisons to alleviate the natural oppression of so dull a life.
He lighted a cigarette, found it fragrant, and, observing with pleasure that of four lively girls passing his chair in a group three were comely and all prettily dressed for sea voyaging, he believed his health almost entirely restored. Earlier in the day these damsels would have had no comeliness in his eyes; he would have looked upon them with distaste; but now, all at once, he thought them charming. He tossed off his rug, and after only a moment of uncertainty as he rose, began to pace the deck like an old hand, experienced in many crossings of the sea.
At least that was his air, convincingly worn; for he had a sometimes burdensome self-consciousness and was anxious to avoid the curious ignominy that attaches to new apprenticeship or to the doing of almost anything for the first time. What he thought of as "gaucheries" were abhorrent to him; he was determined to exhibit none and to be no parvenu either at sea or in the strange land beyond. Thus, during his protracted promenading, as—he encountered and reëncountered the four lively girls, who were going round the deck in the opposite direction, he gave them an opportunity to think a little about the indifferent and easy yet sure-footed stride of an old traveller to whom sea-legs were virtually second nature. Reproductions of his photographs had been printed frequently in periodicals and "rotogravure sections" of late; and he thought it possible that the four damsels had already identified him. If they had, perhaps they had also seen the article about him that called him "the most sophisticated of all our new playwrights"; an article he was glad someone had been discriminating enough to write. Naturally, anybody familiar with it would suppose that a sophisticated playwright like Laurence Ogle had "crossed" three or four times a year during most of his life.
Unmistakably the lively girls took note of him; the elaboration with which they seemed unaware of him and concerned solely with their own private gayeties proved their awareness. Indeed, they could not well lack it; for his good looks were unusual, though he was not impressive in figure, being short and slight. Probably the promenading young women overlooked this defect, if it were one; some quality of knowingness in movement and attire may have successfully atoned in their eyes for a deficiency in height, breadth, and muscular power. Moreover, his symmetrical shapings of feature and pleasant harmonies of dark hair and skin, and his notable, shadowed eyes were all made more significant by those delicate markings that blend into the expression of the attribute young maidenhood most appreciates in the male. One of these maidens mentioned it just after they had come face to face with him for the second time. "He certainly has gobs of distinction," she said. "I adore burning, reserved eyes like that; especially with one of those tiny moustaches. Bet you anything he turns out to be a young Spanish poet in English clothes!"
Other passengers were beginning to notice and estimate their fellow-voyagers, even to venture upon speech with strangers among them; for the "Duumvir" was not a hurried North Atlantic "ferry" merely hustling preoccupied crowds to and fro between commercial and fashion capitals; this was a voyage of pleasure, although its opening pleasantries had been of a humour too rough for its victims to perceive the joke. But with the increasing amenity of the sea and the recovery of something less capricious underfoot and something dependable within themselves, the pleasure-seekers began to catch their first glimpses of what they sought. They dispersed themselves over the ship, taking the air high and low upon all the decks; pulling at weights in the gymnasium; reading or talking in corners of the big salons; contemplating cards or liquor in the smoking-room; or, bending over the little French desks in the writing-room, they began their diaries, and scribbled letters, both diaries and letters opening with accounts of a hurricane at sea, written by the survivors. But at a little after four o'clock most of them were listening to the excellent Italian orchestra in the enormous lounge.
This was the greatest of the great public rooms of the steamer, a tapestried and walnut-panelled room into which a New England village church of fair size might have been squeezed with a little inconvenience to the steeple; and here, as the music began to be heard, the convalesced travellers came to seat themselves in easy chairs grouped about small tables pleasantly accoutred in napery and silver for tea. Then a prevailing characteristic became apparent in the assembly: the colour of the hair of these adventurers to Africa and Spain and Italy was predominantly gray or white; only here and there did a dark young head or a blonde one enliven the eye of youth looking the place over, hopeful of companions.
In good truth, the pleasure-seekers were elderly, most of them long coupled in marriage; though some were widows, some were spinsters, and a few were worn but hardened bachelorsand widowers, travelling in mildly jovial small groups. Their like could have been found in the hotels of California, of Florida, of Georgia and of Virginia and the Carolinas at this season, with youth there as here not much in evidence among them. For youth must be at school or in college, or earning its living, and younger middle age must be providing and storing for the future; but these were people who had provided and stored comfortably enough to grant themselves at least a winter's pleasuring, and now sallied bravely forth to enjoy their own and the earth's fruitions. They were from everywhere in the country, and most of them were wondering a little who the others might be.
From a doorway Ogle looked in upon them thoughtfully. He had a mind to drink a cup of tea and ascertain what music the orchestra might be expected to offer; but they were playing Puccini; nothing intelligently modern was to be hoped of them, he feared; and among the gray heads he saw little to cheer him. These people were well enough dressed and no doubt well enough mannered too, he thought; but their general caste was as discouragingly evident as their age. Successful bourgeoisie, merchants, bankers, brokers, manufacturers, and members of the unsophisticate professions; most of them retired, or else able to leave their businesses or offices to the care of sons and junior partners;—thus the keen young dramatist in the doorway appraised and assorted them, finding them and their wives and the few daughters and young sons who sat among them a dreary spectacle.
Indeed, they oppressed him; he would have none of them, not even though he desired tea; and so, turning away, he walked aft through a corridor and ascended to the smoking-room upon the deck above. He had a friend on board, and there was where he would most probably find him, Ogle was sure; for there was a bar in the smoking-room.