Ogle, at first not too favourably impressed with the bushy-browed young man, began to like him better and to feel willing for him to go on talking. “You’re very kind,” the playwright said. “As a matter of fact, both the manager and I were nervous about putting on ‘The Pastoral Scene’ for the very reason that it did not seem possible it would find an audience. Popularity was the one thing we couldn’t imagine its possessing, and no one could have been more surprised than I was by its showing that after all there is a great sophisticated and intelligent public for an uncompromising realism. I hope you didn’t find the play quite without that searchingness you seem to admire in art, Mr. Macklyn.”
The serious young man made no response and appeared to be unaware that an inquiry had been addressed to him. Upon concluding his own remarks he had applied himself frowningly to his glass, but without looking either at it or at his companions. Under his bushy brows, in fact, his gaze quickly fixed itself upon the lady whose appearance Ogle had found so interesting. Her chair was only a few feet from the end of the divan where Macklyn sat and her attention seemed impassively upon the card table; nevertheless, there was something in the sidelong eyes of the poet, as they sought her, that made Ogle suspect this new acquaintance of having talked for her benefit, or at least in the hope that she would hear and be impressed. Macklyn had neither looked at her as he talked, nor by any emphasis of voice shown himself selfishly unconscious that people were playing bridge close by; but the playwright, accustomed to look for the significant in the small, and marking the sidelong eye, could not resist suspicion. The next moment he found himself suspecting his friend Albert Jones of the same thing.
“No wonder you had doubts of your play’s success with the crowd, Laurence,” Mr. Jones said; and Ogle, familiar with the speaker’s ordinary voice, was momentarily surprised to find it improved to sound a more suave and musical note than it did usually. “It’s always surprising to find one’s obscure ideologisms appreciated. Last year I sent a brace of my things to the Salon d’Automne — little pictures analysing a thought of Verlaine’s about windows; that was all. When I found the Parisian critics were taking them seriously, I almost fainted away!” And the glance of the painter immediately imitated the glance of the poet, darting sidelong to the lady at the card table.
The appearance of the two adults, Albert Jones and George Wilmer Macklyn, bore no resemblance to that of little children; and yet, somewhat to the irritation of the gentlemen observing them, each of them was so ingenuous as to wear precisely the air of a child who hopes he has said something important and looks quickly to Mamma to see how favourably it has affected her. Unmistakably, they were offering little exhibitions before the unknown lady; and Ogle was annoyed to think that she might perceive that they were doing so and associate him in her mind with blunderers so naïve. She looked clever enough to comprehend performances for her benefit much more subtle than these; and he decided to detach himself in her thoughts from the two performers.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and, without realizing that he might himself be performing a little, he laughed more musically than was customary with him in moments of amusement. “Ideologism is rather a broad term, after all. We were talking of that the other evening at a country-house dinner. A French officer was staying there — a colonel of engineers on a mission, the Comte du Bourg — and he and I were arguing about the difference between the new ideologism and the old. A member of the Cabinet was up from Washington for the week-end, a very practical man; and he and Du Bourg preferred the old, I the new. As a matter of fact I was rather astonished to find that a member of the American President’s Cabinet knew what the word meant. One doesn’t look to our native politicians for even the things any fourteen-year-old schoolboy is familiar with nowadays.”
With that, wondering if the lady at the bridge table might possibly know the Comte du Bourg, he could not refrain from glancing at her to see if her attention had been at all arrested. Apparently it had not. She sat in profile to him, and a comely long profile her whole person offered to view, ending in a silver-buckled black slipper, tapered from a high instep of silvered silk. But she merely played a card from her hand, and gave no sign that ideologism, old or new, or engineers of France, or statesmen of America, had place in her thoughts.
“Quite a blow we had off the old Hook,” Mr.
Jones remarked, returning a preoccupied gaze to his glass. “Wonderful how everything’s quieted down and keeps on flattening. You could hardly tell now that you aren’t on a Fall River boat coming up the Sound. That first night out the only well people on the whole boat seemed to be Macklyn here and me.
“No,” Macklyn said, also giving up his scrutiny of the card table. “There was that impossible man who kept blatting at us.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t count him,” Mr. Jones returned. “I’d hardly call him ‘people’; he’s just one of those things our glorious country seems to love to breed. Kept trying to get us to talk to him, Laurence, telling us how he’d never been on a boat before in his life, and how sick his wife and daughter were, but he never touched by a hair; and all about how good business is this year. Pretty awful! By the way, you weren’t laid by the heels, were you? Didn’t see you about, though.”
“No,” Ogle said. “I decided to keep below. I’m a little susceptible in a hurricane, and I took that precaution.”
“‘Hurricane’?” His friend stared at him. “My dear fellow, that wasn’t a hurricane. It was only a gale. You’ve never been in a hurricane at sea.”
“Why haven’t I?”
“Because, if you had, you wouldn’t call a northeast gale one. Why, the fourth time I crossed—”
He began a narrative of the sea, including a mathematical description of waves encountered and quotations from the solemn declarations of ships’ officers; but the attention he obtained was scant, and presently he discontinued his account and turned, as his companions did, to look at the bridge table.
The lady for whom the three had been all along performing now made her voice audible for the first time in their hearing, a contralto voice of great richness. “Hyacinthe,” she said, addressing the youth opposite her with a little sharpness, though nevertheless indulgently; “c’est à toi, bébé.”
“Madame Momoro!” the playwright exclaimed to himself, “Madame Momoro!” This was she whose musical name had sounded a melody to him even from the prosaic passenger list, setting him to build a new play, with her for the heroine. Delighted, he asked for no better. “C’est á toi, bébé,” she said. How charming that was, Ogle thought, and how adorable the word! Only a frenchwoman could have said it.
IV
THE YOUTH TO whom this adorable word was spoken, said, “Pardon,” absently, and played a card. He was a slender boy of eighteen or twenty, “cameo like” in profile, Ogle thought, finding the young Hyacinthe like Mme. Momoro in that as well as in hair and eyes and gracefulness. The son was the slighter, however, and not so tall; and there was a vertical line between his eyebrows, where a definite groove readily appeared from time to time as he concentrated his thoughts upon his cards. Otherwise his face was of an olive suavity and his reserved expressionlessness complete, though when his long-lashed eyelids were lifted, what seemed to be revealed was not at all the expected innocence of youth, but an intelligence surprisingly seasoned by precocious experience. For if, as Ogle thought, the mother was an ideal portrait of the complete woman of the world, then no less was the son a fine little picture of a man of the world already finished, lacquered and polished at eighteen.
The other two players were thin, elderly ladies in mourning, and gave the impression of being sisters, not only in the grief for which they had dressed themselves in black. Sisters in affluence, too, they appeared to be — not poor even if they owned nothing more than the rings upon their fingers. They were but background dimnesses, however, in the eyes of the three surreptitiously staring young Americans. The beautiful quality of Mme. Momoro’s voice when she made it audible had sett
led any possible doubt about her; for no matter how pleasing the appearance of any person may be, his quality is not to be recognized until his voice is heard; and unexpected voices bring disappointment to many dreamers like poets, painters, and playwrights. But the poet and the painter and the playwright present when Mme. Momoro spoke to her son in the quiet smoking-room of the “Duumvir,” heard something even lovelier than what would have sufficed to meet their expectations. Her voice was more than the confirmation of her appearance; and as for Ogle, after she had spoken he felt that to be in the same room with her was like being enclosed with some supreme work of art. He became so acutely conscious of her that it began to seem that he had known her a long time.
Macklyn was the first to turn his head from her. He finished his amber drink, touched his lips delicately with a blue-bordered handkerchief, and said almost in a whisper: “I’ve written a few things in French. There’s nothing else so flexible. Do you speak Arabic, Mr. Ogle?’
“Arabic? No. I’ve never had occasion to. Why?”
“I thought the item I saw about you mentioned you were going to North Africa. One can’t know the Arabs unless he speaks with them. Of course it isn’t all Arabic that they speak. By no means! There are some interesting poems in the Kabyle dialects, exquisite, wistful things. I remember one beginning, T play my shepherd’s pipe on the hillside, and my love hears it among her young goats. How her heart beats as my dulcet sounds reach her ears’ — a thing like a Sicilian Pastorale. These things are of the true art; they use no punctuation or capitals, let me tell you. They are not written at all in the original, they are transmitted by word of mouth because they are just cries from the heart. Of course they become conventional when transcribed in French. I suppose you’ll go among the Kabyles?”
“Probably,” Ogle returned, though he had never before heard of these interesting tribes. He had decided upon his excursion impulsively, only a week before sailing, when the success of “The Pastoral Scene” appeared to be secure; and most of his preparations for the journey had been concerned with a tailor, a haberdasher, and the agent through whom he manoeuvred to secure a cabin. “The Kabyles,” he said thoughtfully. “I think so. Yes, I should like to learn something of them at first hand.”
“You’ll find them wonderful,” Macklyn assured him. “A noble looking people. If you dressed them properly, for instance — though that would be a pity — they wouldn’t look out of place on this boat.”
Mr. Jones laughed compassionately. “Queer idea, that, Macklyn. Is it your thought that most of our fellow-countrymen on the ‘Duumvir’ exhibit a high degree of distinction? From what I’ve seen of them, they appear a pretty ordinary looking lot of people, I must say.”
“Yes,” Macklyn admitted, “I spoke hastily. They’re on the dead level of the commonplace, with hardly a soul among them one would care ever to see again, judging by appearances and the passenger list. Except Mr. Ogle’s and yours, Albert, there wasn’t an American name that meant anything whatever or that one had ever heard of before. I’m afraid you’re our only celebrity, Mr. Ogle.”
Ogle laughed deprecatingly. “That’s not always an enviable situation to be in Conspicuousness isn’t invariably pleasant, you know; but I’m afraid you’re right about our fellow-passengers I stopped in the lounge for a moment a little while ago; they appeared to be all there and it was rather a well-dressed but unstimulating assemblage — the men drinking tea unwillingly, I thought, but both women and men glad to listen to the obviousness of Puccini. This seems better up here. One isn’t deafened, and the room itself is rather well done — for this sort of thing, at least. I mean the panelling and the windows aren’t bad.”
“No,” Mr. Jones agreed. “They’re rather good; not bad at all — though of course, as you say, for this sort of thing. And the quiet is really pleasant.”
“Quiet?” Macklyn repeated inquiringly, and he set down his glass upon a tabouret before him. “Dear me! I’m afraid it isn’t going to be. Listen.”
At the lower end of the room an open door offered a view of the after deck and of the vessel’s turbulent wake, a white foaming canal dividing the blue ocean almost to the horizon. Macklyn made a gesture in this direction; but nothing upon the sea itself caused him to do so, nor for some moments did anything unusual appear beyond the open doorway. Sounds made a heralding entry there, however; sounds intended to be musical, but unsuccessful in carrying out their intention. Voices rough and loud were approaching, deluded into the belief that harmonies of tenors and bassos were produced. Four men, no longer young but still leather-lunged, were singing — or thought they were:
“Old Aunt Mariar,
A-sitting by the fire,
She wants a drink o’ gin
Though she knows it is a sin,
Aunt Mariar!
And for fear she’ll make a row
Let’s go take one for her now,
Mariar!
Mariar!
Dirty old Auntie Mariar!”
Ogle shuddered, the slight convulsive movement of his shoulders being visible to his two companions who sympathized with his distaste acutely. For the rowdy outburst came with a disagreeable shock upon the quiet room where stained glass swung jewelled lights upon the dark walls, and where Mme. Momoro, taller and more serene than other women, was like some tinted statue of a seated goddess in a still temple. So, at least, she appeared to the three sensitive young artists. If she had not been there, they would have felt the uncouth sounds annoying enough, in all conscience, destroying the feeling they had themselves produced in the place by their low-toned conversation about art; but that these liquorish bellowings of “Aunt Mariar” should intrude upon such a presence as hers was an atrocity in manners but too characteristic, they thought indignantly, of some of their travelling fellow-countrymen.
Meanwhile these outlanders were coming nearer, marching evidently, and shouting their indecorous chorus in imitation of a drum-beat:
“Mariar!
Mariar!
Bay rum in a bottle we’ll buy ’er!
Mariar!
Mariar!
Dirty old Auntie Mariar!”
And, with that, chanting vociferously, regardless equally of their own appearances and of other people’s prejudices, four red-faced middle-aged men marched in lock-step into the room, and, still uproarious, lined themselves against the little bar.
Their leader, a large man with a broad, smooth-shaven face, the ruddiest of all, outshouted the others. “Forget it! Let your Aunt Mariar alone for long enough to tell George, can’t you? What’s it goin’ to be, gentlemen?”
This voice was familiar to Ogle; he recognized it. “Dear me!” he murmured. “It’s ‘Honey-how’s-Baby’ again!”
Albert Jones caught the phrase. “What? What do you mean: ‘Honey-how’s-Baby’?”
“There’s a seasick mother and her daughter in the cabin next to mine,” Ogle explained. “A person comes in there to see them, and says, ‘Honey, how’s Baby?’ It’s that man there.”
“That one?” Macklyn inquired. “That’s the same fellow who tried to break in with Jones and me the first night out. He told us he didn’t know a soul on the ship except his wife and daughter, but he’s evidently picked up some congenial bandarlogs. Look at ’em! It’s our most terrible native type, and they all belong to it.”
The four noisy men, busy at the bar and unconscious of the unfavourable regard bent upon them, abated little of their uproar until filled glasses stood before them. Two, with their heads close together, began to sing, “Yes, Sir, She’s My Baby,” while the other two, one of whom was the person recognized by the three artists as the most objectionable of all, loudly praised the Freedom of the Seas. He delivered himself of a short oration upon this subject.
“Yes, sir; it’s just as you say, the folks at home don’t realize that all they got to do, if they don’t like Prohibition, is to step on a boat. My case, for instance; why, it’s been so long since I had what you might call a regular honest-to-
goodness drink I’d about forgot there was such a thing! The law is all right on land — I voted for it myself — but it’s a grand thing the ocean belongs to everybody. I’d ‘a’ taken a trip to Europe long ago if I’d ‘a’ realized how much freedom there was in it. And look how Prohibition habits get into a man, though; — it’s wonderful! After I introduced myself to ole Doc Taylor yonder, this afternoon, and met you two other gentlemen, what’s the first thing we do? Why, Doc says he’s got some stuff in his cabin, and just out o’ habit, what’d we do? Why, sneaked down there with him just the way we would at home, and sat pourin’ it out kind of guilty-like until we happened to remember we weren’t doin’ anything against the law at all and there was an open bar up here where a man had a right to do as he’s a mind to, with nobody on earth to tell him he can’t, except his wife; and mine’s sick, poor woman, thank heaven!” He stopped the duet, putting a hand upon a shoulder of each of the singers. “Gentlemen, I got a toast to propose. Here’s to the Atlantic Ocean, the sweet Land of Liberty!”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 388