“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 Kan tara 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 bl
ankly; 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.
X
AT DINNER THAT evening, though Miss Olivia Tinker’s manner had not altere’d, the rigour of her mother’s was observed to be greatly relaxed. Tinker, still smelling faintly of perfumed hair tonic, wore the air of a quietly righteous man who has proved himself sterling in the teeth of misjudgment, and that this was a hypocritical exhibition for his wife’s benefit Ogle well believed; but at least it seemed effective. She rallied her husband upon his fine appearance, accusing him of wishing to appear young enough to dance with girls o
f eighteen or nineteen in the “Palm Garden” after dinner; and the playwright perceived that although between the husband and wife there rankled some obscure difference concerned with the sullen daughter, normally Mrs. Tinker was fond of the man, perhaps sometimes even proud of him.
Ogle was not so narrow-minded as to find it impossible to understand how a provincial wife could entertain such sentiments; her consort was no doubt eminently presentable among their own kind. He was robust, but by no means shapeless; his broad face retained enough comeliness for a middle-aged woman still to think of him without much self-deception as “handsome”; his hair was yet darker than it was gray; and there emanated from him, all in’ all, an expression of power and energy, of which even his severe young critic could not be wholly insensible.
Moreover, the critic could find no fault with the creature’s excellently made evening clothes; — so far as mere appearances went, there was little reason for the most fastidious person to dread being thought a member of the Tinker party: Mrs. Tinker and her daughter were as knowingly dressed and coifed as any of the modish ladies on board, if one did not include the supremities of Mme. Momoro. Indeed, Miss Olivia Tinker, revealed by a cloth of gold evening gown, was so lovely in spite of her ever smouldering sullenness that any young man facing her across the small table might have been thought fortunate. This one was far from thinking himself so, however; for no matter how well they appeared to the eye, these people annoyed him even when they were silent, and when they opened their lips except to eat he felt himself perishing of their Midland way of speech.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 394