‘Who’s there?’
‘Open the door!’
‘Who’s there?’
An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered it around the edge. Wessel opened it a scarce three inches, and held the candle high. His was to play the timorous, the super-respectable citizen, disgracefully disturbed.
‘One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from every brawler and –’
‘Quiet gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?’
The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely. Gentlemen, they were, hastily but richly dressed – one of them wounded severely in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving aside Wessel’s ready miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the room and with their swords went through the business of poking carefully into all suspected dark spots in the room, further extending their search to Wessel’s bedchamber.
‘Is he hid here?’ demanded the wounded man fiercely.
‘Is who here?’
‘Any man but you.’
‘Only two others that I know of.’
For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the gallants made as though to prick him through.
‘I heard a man on the stairs,’ he said hastily, ‘full five minutes ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up.’
He went on to explain his absorption in ‘The Faerie Queene’ but, for the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were anaesthetic to culture.
‘What’s been done?’ inquired Wessel.
‘Violence!’ said the man with the wounded hand. Wessel noticed that his eyes were quite wild. ‘My own sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give us this man!’
Wessel winced.
‘Who is the man?’
‘God’s word! We know not even that. What’s that trap door up there!’ he added suddenly.
‘It’s nailed down. It’s not been used for years.’ He thought of the pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled their astuteness.
‘It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler,’ said the wounded man listlessly.
His companion broke into hysterical laughter.
‘A tumbler. Oh a tumbler. Oh –’
Wessel stared at them in wonder.
‘That appeals to my most tragic humour,’ cried the man, ‘that no one – oh, no one – could get up there but a tumbler.’
The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his good fingers impatiently.
‘We must go next door – and then on –’
Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark and storm-swept sky.
Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment by it, frowning in pity.
A low-breathed ‘Ha!’ made him look up. Soft Shoes had already raised the trap and was looking down into the room. His rather elfish face squeezed into a grimace, half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.
‘They take off their heads with their helmets,’ he remarked in a whisper, ‘but as for you and me, Wessel, we are two cunning men.’
‘Now you be cursed,’ cried Wessel vehemently. ‘I knew you for a dog, but when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such a dirty cur that I am minded to club your skull.’
Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.
‘At all events,’ he replied finally, ‘I find dignity impossible in this position.’
With this he let his body through the trap, hung for an instant, and dropped the seven feet to the floor.
‘There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a gourmet,’ he continued, dusting his hands on his breeches. ‘I told him in the rat’s peculiar idiom that I was deadly poison, so he took himself off.’
‘Let’s hear of this night’s lechery!’ insisted Wessel angrily.
Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled the fingers derisively at Wessel.
‘Street gamin!’ muttered Wessel.
‘Have you any paper?’ demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly, and then rudely added, ‘or can you write?’
‘Why should I give you paper?’
‘You wanted to hear of the night’s entertainment. So you shall, an you give me pen, ink, a sheaf of paper, and a room to myself.’
Wessel hesitated.
‘Get out!’ he said finally.
‘As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing story.’
Wessel wavered – he was soft as taffy, that man – gave in. Soft Shoes went into the adjoining room with the begrudged writing materials and precisely closed the door. Wessel grunted and returned to ‘The Faerie Queene’; so silence came once more upon the house.
III
Three o’clock went into four. The room paled, the dark outside was shot through with damp and chill, and Wessel, cupping his brain in his hands, bent low over his table, tracing through the pattern of knights and fairies and the harrowing distresses of many girls. There were dragons chortling along the narrow street outside; when the sleepy armorer’s boy began his work at half-past five the heavy clink and chank of plate and linked mail swelled to the echo of a marching cavalcade.
A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room was grayish yellow at six when Wessel tiptoed to his cupboard bedchamber and pulled open the door. His guest turned on him a face pale as parchment in which two distraught eyes burned like great red letters. He had drawn a chair close to Wessel’s prie-dieu which he was using as a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of closely written pages. With a long sigh Wessel withdrew and returned to his siren, calling himself fool for not claiming his bed here at dawn.
The clump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames from attic to attic, the dull murmur of morning, unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his chair, his brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand touched his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a scream to find the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray ghost of misty stuff, beside him with a pile of paper in his hand.
‘It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though it requires some going over. May I ask you to lock it away, and in God’s name let me sleep?’
He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel, and literally poured himself like stuff from a suddenly inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner; slept, with his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious and somewhat uncanny manner.
Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled, uncertain first page, he began reading aloud very softly:
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host –
The Offshore Pirate
I
This story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colourful as blue silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden discs at the sea – if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.
About halfway between the shore and the golden collar a white steam yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor, and under a blue and white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France. She was about eighteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick grey eyes full of a radiant curiosity.
Suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps, and an elderly man, topped with orderly grey hair and cl
ad in a white flannel suit, appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then, seeing the girl under the awning, he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
‘Ardita!’ said the grey-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
‘Ardita!’ he repeated.
‘What?’
‘Will you listen to me – or shall I get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?’
‘Oh, can’t you leave me alone for a second?’
‘Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore –’
‘Telephone?’ She showed for the first time a faint interest.
‘Yes. Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all this way to meet you and he’s invited several other young people. For the last time, will you –’
‘No,’ said Ardita shortly. ‘I won’t. I came along on this cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any old colonel or any young Toby or any old young people or to set foot in any other old town in this country. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else go away.’
‘Very well. In your infatuation for this man – a man who is notorious for his excesses, a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name – you have reflected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on –’
‘I know,’ interrupted Ardita ironically, ‘from now on you go your way and I go mine. I’ve heard that story before. You know I’d like nothing better.’
‘From now on,’ he announced grandiloquently, ‘you are no niece of mine. I –’
‘O-o-o-oh!’ The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul.
‘Will you stop boring me? Will you go ’way? Will you jump overboard and drown? Do you want me to throw this book at you?’
‘If you dare do any –’
Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.
The grey-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her grey eyes blazing.
‘Keep off!’
‘How dare you?’ he cried.
‘Because I please!’
‘You’ve grown unbearable! Your disposition –’
‘You’ve made me like it! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it’s her family’s fault! Whatever I am, you did it.’
Muttering something under his breath, her uncle turned and, walking forward, called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the Revolt of the Angels.
‘I am going ashore,’ he said slowly. ‘I will be out again at nine o’clock tonight. When I return we will start for home, where I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life.’
He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tyre, and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.
‘Ardita,’ he said not unkindly, ‘I’m no fool. I’ve been about. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don’t reform until they’re tired – and then they’re not themselves – they’re husks of themselves.’ He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it, he continued. ‘Perhaps the man loves you – that’s possible. He’s loved many women and he’ll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril. Why on earth do you want to marry him?’
‘I’m sure I couldn’t say,’ said Ardita shortly. ‘Maybe because he’s the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it’s to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country.’
‘How about the – red-haired woman?’
‘He hasn’t seen her for six months,’ she said angrily. ‘Don’t you suppose I have enough pride to see to that?’
Too full of words to speak, Mr Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, went quickly down the ladder.
II
Five o’clock rolled down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea. The golden collar widened into a glittering island; and a faint breeze that had been playing with the edges of the awning became suddenly freighted with song. Ardita lifted her head and listened.
With an exclamation she tossed her book to the deck, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song with an orchestra leader’s baton.
The leader’s eyes suddenly rested on Ardita, who was leaning over the rail spellbound with curiosity. He made a quick movement with his baton and the singing instantly ceased.
‘Narcissus ahoy!’ he called politely.
‘What’s the idea of all the discord?’ demanded Ardita cheerfully.
By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a boatman turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the ladder and stood breathless before her on the deck.
‘The women and children will be spared!’ he said briskly. ‘All crying babies will be immediately drowned and all males put in irons!’
Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress, Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment.
He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly – the hair of a Grecian statue gone brunette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed and graceful as an agile quarterback.
‘Well, I never!’ she said dazedly.
They eyed each other coolly.
‘Do you surrender the ship?’
‘Is this an outburst of wit?’ demanded Ardita. ‘Are you an idiot – or just being initiated to some fraternity?’
‘I asked you if you surrendered the ship.’
‘You’d better get off this yacht!’ said Ardita.
‘What?’ The young man’s voice expressed incredulity.
‘Get off the yacht! Do you hear me?’
He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.
‘No,’ said his scornful mouth slowly; ‘no, I won’t get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish.’
Going to the rail he gave a curt command and immediately the crew of the rowboat scrambled up the ladder and ranged themselves in line before him. Over the shoulder of each was slung a small, heavy-looking white sack, and under their arms they carried large black cases apparently containing musical instruments.
‘Ten-shun!’ commanded the young man, snapping his own heels together crisply. ‘Right driss! Front! Come here, Babe!’
The smallest man took a quick step forward and saluted.
‘Take command, go down below, catch the crew and tie ’em up – all except the engineer. Bring him up to me. Oh, and pile those bags by the rail there.’
‘Yes, sir!’
He saluted again, and wheeling about, motioned for the five others to gather about him. Then after a short whispered consultation they all filed noiselessly down the companion-way.
‘Now,’ said the young man cheerfully to Ardita, who had witnessed this last scene in withering silence, ‘if you will swear on your honour as a flapper �
�� which probably isn’t worth much – that you’ll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.’
‘Otherwise what?’
‘Otherwise you’re going to sea in a ship.’
With a little sigh as for a crisis well passed the young man sank into the settee Ardita had lately vacated, and stretched his arms lazily. The corners of his mouth relaxed appreciatively as he looked round at the rich striped awning, the polished brass and the luxurious fittings of the deck.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked presently.
‘Farnam.’
‘Farnam what?’
‘Ardita Farnam.’
‘Well, Ardita, no use standing up there and chewing out the insides of your mouth. You ought to break those nervous habits while you’re young. Come over here and sit down.’
Ardita took a carved jade case from her pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a conscious coolness, though she knew her hand was trembling a little; then she crossed over with her supple, swinging walk, and sitting down in the other settee, blew a mouthful of smoke at the awning.
‘You can’t get me off this yacht,’ she said steadily; ‘and you haven’t got very much sense if you think you’ll get far with it. My uncle’ll have wirelesses zigzagging all over this ocean by half-past six.’
He laughed scornfully.
‘If that’s advice, you needn’t bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn’t been this one it’d have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Ardita suddenly. ‘And what are you?’
‘You’ve decided not to go ashore?’
‘I never even faintly considered it.’
‘We’re generally known,’ he said, ‘all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Sailormen, late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic.’
‘You’re singers?’
‘We were until today. At present, due to those white bags you see there, we’re fugitives from justice.’
The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald Page 5