“Never mind! I don’t want to hear—”
“Oh, dear!” Olivia moaned. “Mother!”
“Nice day,” Le Seyeux ventured cheerfully. “Fine ride. This our floor here. Lovely suite for you, sir. Big rooms. Fireplaces. Splendid beds. Everything good.”
The apartment was as excellent as he promised; and Tinker was pleased to find a desk in the room set apart for himself. He congratulated the courier warmly upon the selection of these pleasant quarters; then surreptitiously shook his head at him as a sign to be gone upon his secret errand; — Le Seyeux gave him a look of complete reassurance on that point, and departed. A few minutes later Tinker went cautiously to the desk and sat down in a chair before it.
Mrs. Tinker called instantly from the bed where she reposed in the adjoining chamber. “What are you doing now? What do you have to be moving around so much in there for? Why can’t you lie down like a Christian and let people get a little rest? Are you fixing to go out somewhere by yourself?
Because if you are—” The bed rustled as with a movement of preparation.
“My goodness! I’m just sitting here, Mamma! I don’t want to lie down. I’m not doing any harm just sitting here, am I? Wouldn’t you like to have your door closed, Hon?”
“I would not!” she replied with a decisiveness beyond argument.
He sat motionless, doing nothing whatever for several minutes; and the silence was as soothing as he hoped it would be. Presently her breathing became audible — though this was something she never believed of herself — and with slow carefulness he took from an inner pocket of his coat a small, black-bound pad of bank cheques. He cautiously removed one, slid the book back into his pocket, and, bending over the desk, wrote briefly. After that, discovering a single envelope in a pigeon-hole before him, he enclosed the written slip within it, and rose to his feet.
Across the room from him was a door opening upon a corridor. Tinker looked at it fixedly; then, moving with an elaborate delicacy, he made his way craftily over the floor in that direction.
— . — . The tall lady sitting alone in the tea-room faced the doorway as he walked briskly in. A perceptible glow of additional colour came upon her cheeks, and, not speaking, she extended the hand she had ungloved for him.
Tinker shook it heartily. “You’re lookin’ fine!” he said. “Fine! How’s your family?”
“Hyacinthe? He is happy,” she answered. “As I am. Will you sit here with me?”
“About a minute,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the vacant doorway; — then, as he sat, he spoke hurriedly, but genially, “Listen! You want to get me scalped first and boiled in oil afterwards?”
“No.”
“Well, I already have been scalped,” he informed her. “All I’m lookin’ out for now, I don’t want to get boiled in oil! I told you—”
She stopped him gently. “My friend, you are angry with me because you think I have stayed in Tunis to see you. You mustn’t be afraid: I shall not compromise you. I know the customs and ideas of American ladies perfectly: it is amusing, but of course could be very painful. I am not stopping at this hotel on that account, because I was sure you would come here. I shall protect you, but —
Will you let me confess I did so very, very much wish to see you once more?”
She smiled a little sadly, and then leaning toward him, “Forgive me for wishing it,” she said, and lightly patted the heavy shoulder nearer her.
At that, Tinker again looked hastily toward the doorway; but it remained vacant, and he was reassured. “Listen,” he said confidentially, “I got something I want to—”
“Wait,” she interrupted. “I have somesing I have so wanted to say. In Biskra you wouldn’t give me time to say it. You don’t understand the gratitude of a woman who is taken out of purgatory, and how much she might wish to do for the man who did such a thing for her. You don’t know — perhaps you wouldn’t care to know — how much she might like such a man and how difficult it would be for her to think she must say good-bye to him for a last time.” She had looked at him steadily as she spoke; but suddenly her fine-lashed eyelids fluttered; she looked away from him, and bit her lower lip. “You—”
She could not continue immediately.
“Listen!” he said hurriedly. “My family’s takin’ a nap, I think; but I don’t know. I got to—”
“Please — it’s only a moment,” she said; and recovered her composure at once. “I ask you to let me hope to see you in Paris when you come there.”
“Sure! Sure!” he returned cordially. “I can find you in the telephone book. But right now I”
“Yes,” she said. “The apartment Hyacinthe and I will take, by that time it will be upon the list. But I would write to you—”
“Write?” he interrupted, staring at her incredulously. “Listen—”
“No, no, no! I won’t,” she said. “I won’t write to you. I see you, don’t wish it. And you are disturbed now; you are nervous. But to-morrow—”
Tinker leaned a little toward her and spoke earnestly. “Look here: I’ve thought it over, and I realized you only told me what you needed to get that boy o’ yours started in the show business, or whatever it is, and that’s all I — all I lent you. What I didn’t think of at the time, I just lent you the round sum, and you told me how close those old ladies you lived with were when it came down to cash. What I got to thinkin’: why, you might not have enough to go on for the next few months unless you broke into the round sum you have to use for this show business. For all I know, you mightn’t even have enough to pay your fare up from here to Paris, outside o’ that, so I — well, this’ll fix it up.” He pressed the envelope he had brought with him into her hand. “Here! This’ll make everything all right. You can get it cashed at the branch bank right here in Tunis to-morrow morning.”
She looked down at the envelope in her hand and shook her head slowly. “I can’t take it. It is dear of you to offer it. Of course if there were any way I could—” She paused and looked at him inquiringly.
“Why, sure,” he said. “That boy of yours’ll pay it all off after he gets goin’. You put that in your bag. Do as I tell you!”
But she still shook her head. “No, I can’t—”
“Listen!” he said. “My family isn’t any too sound a sleeper, and I got to get back upstairs or I’m liable to be in the creek where the cows can’t wade it. John Edwards told me there’s a steamer from here to Marseilles to-morrow.”
She looked at him gravely. “You wish me to take it?”
“Murder, yes!” he said; and they both rose.
“You wish—” she began tremulously, and faltered.
“Look here!” he said. “Give me that!” He took from her the envelope she held loosely in her long fingers, and from the table a little bag of meshed gold and platinum that lay beside her glove. “Here!” He opened the bag, put the envelope within it and snapped the clasp shut. Then he thrust the glove and the bag both into her hands. “There!” he said, beaming upon her. “You take that, and get your young son down to the ticket-office as quick as you can to-morrow morning. And then, for heaven’s sake, get out o’ here!”
This enthusiasm startled her; and again her remarkable eyelashes fluttered. “You want me not to see you again — at all — until you come to Paris?”
“Well, I should say I did!” he said. “I don’t want to be walked on with spiked shoes all the rest o’ my life just because it happens you’re the finest lookin’ woman in the world! That’s the trouble: if you were a little homelier, I guess I could make out to see more of you; but the way it is — why, you’re about eight-hundred per cent, too good-lookin’, Mrs. Mummero!” And with that, beaming upon her more cordially than ever, he lifted his large right hand and brought it down with a hearty and sounding slap upon her lovely velvet back, squarely between the shoulders. “You know it!” he said.
She stared at him wide-eyed, amazed. For an instant a line appeared upon her forehead; — it faded and she
seemed to be lost in an inward wondering. Then, slowly, she began to smile, and her gaze became one of the truest utter admiration and fondness. “I think I adore you,” she said. “I shall be at sea to-morrow, as you command me.” And without any farewell whatever, she turned and swept from him with her splendid gliding swiftness; — she walked straight out of the room and out of the hotel.
Alone in the big room, Tinker waited for one minute by his watch, which he took from his pocket to observe; then, with a debonair easiness of manner, he strolled back into the entrance hallway. Mrs. Tinker was just stepping out of the elevator.
Her expression was both grim and anxious; but it became merely indignant as she caught sight of her husband. She came toward him, hurried, nervous, and threatening, walking as rapidly as she could on her high heels and in her tight skirt. “That was a nice trick!” she said. “Slip out the minute I was beginning to get just a little bit of rest after nearly having my back broken in two on that horrible road we took because you didn’t know any better than send Le Seyeux ahead where he couldn’t be any use tous. Where’ve you been?”
“Now, look here, Honey!” Tinker remonstrated. “Can’t a man even go get his hair cut without your—”
“You haven’t had your hair cut.”
“Well, I didn’t say I had. Can’t you give me time enough to tell you I’m lookin’ for the barber-shop?”
“You don’t need to find it. If you want a barber, you can tell them to send one up to your room.”
“Now, Mamma—”
“You get in that elevator,” Mrs. Tinker said dangerously.
The bright-eyed Arab boy in charge of the elevator giggled pleasantly; and Tinker, though becoming desperate under so much discipline, felt it might be best to comply with his wife’s desire.
“Well—” he said resignedly; but at that moment, glancing round, he began to hope. The relief to which he trusted was in sight. Le Seyeux, radiant with pleasure, had just made his appearance, coming in from the street, and with him were three men of solemn presence, followed by three Arab servants in cleanest white. Two of the three solemn men were graybeards; one of these two wore silken robes striped like a barber’s pole; and the other, whose majestic white beard hung to his waist, was in black and saffron, gloriously embroidered in orange, green, and gold. The third of the jewel merchants was a warped and wrinkled yellow person in an English frock coat, pale lilac trousers, an embroidered velvet waistcoat and a fez. The three paused aloof while Le Seyeux came forward.
Tinker became urgent in his plea to his wife. “Listen! I’ll be upstairs in half an hour. I can’t go now.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Well—” He glanced toward the three merchants. “I got business with those gentlemen.”
“Business!” Mrs. Tinker said angrily. “What’s it about? A Fancy Dress Party?”
“Honest, I have, Honey,” he insisted; and he was cunning enough to add mysteriously: “You might be sorry some day! I mean you might be sorry if you kept me from a conference with those gentlemen. Mightn’t she, John?”
“I think it would be certain,” Le Seyeux said, with laughter intentionally sly. “I am sure if you talk to them everybody is going to be very happy — oh, very happy, Madame Tinker!”
Mrs. Tinker looked undecided; and perhaps she caught some inkling of what was in the wind. In spite of herself her voice became more moderate, even almost friendly. “Well, you see that he gets upstairs in time enough to dress,” she said. “I’ll trust him to you, Mr. Le Seyeux.”
She was borne aloft alone; and Tinker, with a great sigh of relief, turned to the waiting magicians who were to assist in the dispersal of his troubles. It may have been true, as his wife said, that he had but the one remedy for everything; but, on the other hand, as he himself said, it usually “worked.”
XXXII
WITH THE ONE diamond point of the first evening star set in a watery green twilight sky behind her, the steamer stood out to sea from the Tunisian shore and pushed her bow toward the bright west. She bore northward too, for she followed the old sea path of the Carthaginian fleets when they sailed for the Golden Shell or to meet the Roman galleys in the great water fighting of the Punic Wars; for this is an old, old harried roadstead, and, embedded in the sea floor, there are statues of gods, encrusted with shells; there are ancient shields and javelin heads and broken swords and dented golden helmets. There was a golden helmet upon the steamer, too, this evening; — at least, that was the interpretation offered by a young Italian returning home after a winter in the Tunisian oases. He pointed out this helmet to the friend who was his travelling companion.
“That beautiful, very long, but very graceful woman standing alone there and looking back at the shore,” he said, speaking in French. “She has been inspired to leave her hat in her cabin and step out on deck for a farewell to Africa; and we should be grateful to the inspiration. You don’t see how perfectly her head with that smooth hair is a golden helmet? Never in my life have I seen a woman who stood so well poised; and under that crest of old pale gold she is — ah, I have discovered it! She is Diana helmeted! I have these extraordinary thoughts of people, and you never appreciate them. Don’t you see she is Diana?”
But his companion was a Scandinavian of the abysmal school, and he shook his head. “I know Diana with a bow and quiver, but not with a helmet. The lady there is just a woman. Probably her husband is an officer on duty in Africa or an adviser of the Bey of Tunis and she is wondering what sort of girl he has begun to flirt with since seeing her off at the dock.”
“No. She is thoughtful, a little impassive; but she is radiant.”
“Then she is thinking of the man, not her husband, who will meet her when we disembark.”
“Not at all,” the Italian insisted. “She is not thinking of any man. She is Diana. This is a tremendous thought I am about to have now, Gustav. Listen attentively. Yonder shines the light on that hill of enchantment, Sidi Bousaid, and, below it, there is Carthage. Diana is passing by Moloch. Moloch’s fires are out; the god is in the hideous barren dust over yonder that will hardly support a weed. They ground Moloch up as fine as that. But classic beauty survives the barbarian. Classic beauty survives forever, and here is Diana, beautiful and alive, passing over this old sea into which some of Moloch’s dust has been blown. Moloch’s dust was blown here, and so were some of the bacteria breathed out by Saint Louis dying of the plague close by the ruins of Moloch. Eternal Diana is now being wafted over both the bigot hero saint and the monster. How do you like that for a thought, my friend?”
“Very little. Nothing survives forever except motion; and the most intelligent people are in doubt about even that. European classicism is now as dead stuff as Chinese classicism, and only a few dried-up old men worry about it. There isn’t any Diana. Whatever isn’t in motion is dead.”
The Italian laughed. “Africa hasn’t brightened your outlook. As for me, it is a great experience to sail in the same boat with a woman like that one yonder. She isn’t in motion, yet she seems more alive than all other people. How still she is! No. She has moved, though only at the lips. She has begun to smile as she looks at the shore. Now tell me the truth, Gustav. Look at that happy, triumphant lady, that gold-helmeted Diana smiling, and dare to tell me the universe is not all bright and glorious!”
“No,” said the steadfast Scandinavian. “Everything is dark. It would need more than a tall Parisian lady smiling her good-bye to the coast of Africa to make me believe in a meaning to the universe or in the existence of happiness.”
Here the gloomy young gentleman was in a striking coincidental conjunction with a second gloomy young gentleman just then a few leagues inland from the deep blue Carthaginian coast line. What is more, a view of the farewell smile of that same tall lady would have lightened the melancholy of this second dour traveller even less than it lightened that of the first, who was actually looking at her. For, as Aurélie Momoro stood on the high deck, a statue vaguely gilded in the afte
rglow, Laurence Ogle’s landaulet bumped him over the bad roads of the outskirts of Tunis.
She passed down the coast and was borne evenly out to sea, still standing where she was and still smiling as she swept on westward. He, with his anxious face to the Orient, drove miserably into Tunis, carrying his entire fortune, now equal to twenty-eight American dollars, in his pocket.
Of this, he must give Etienne a ‘pourboire, well understood, amounting to not less than twenty dollars; which would leave nothing inspirational for a courageous confrontation of the staff of a fashionable hotel. And the nearer the landaulet drew him to the absolutely necessary interview with Tinker the more was his soul filled with a grovelling anguish.
Etienne stopped the car at a street corner, descended, and opened the door.
“Hôtel, Monsieur?”
“Uh—” Ogle coughed, swallowed, coughed again, and said: “Vous savez — vous savez est-ce-que M. Le Seyeux, le courier de M. Tangkaire, a dit à vous à quel hôtel M. Cayzac avait engagé des appartements pour M. Tangkaire?”
“Oui, oui, Monsieur. Je sais bien que—”
“Allons là!” Ogle said desperately. “Allons donc là, Etienne!”
Then, as Etienne returned to his seat and they moved forward again, the imagination of the flushed passenger became active. If his calculations were correct he was only twenty-four hours behind the man he sought; but Mrs. Tinker might not have liked Tunis. Her husband was now in a state of cringing subjugation to that nervous and irritated lady, and she might have insisted upon continuing their journey — with what destination it was useless to guess. For Ogle had no means to follow any farther; and if they had departed he would be left pleasantly installed in what must undoubtedly prove to be the most expensive and cold-hearted hotel in the city. He wondered if the American consul in Tunis ever made personal visits to the jail on behalf of unfortunate compatriots.
But his arrival reassured him immediately upon the one point: Tinker had not left Tunis. Before the great doorway of the hotel, Le Seyeux was making a passionate oration to a magnificent group of men who stood in stately patience to hear him. They were dressed in silken robes, striped like sticks of peppermint candy; in robes striped in green and lemon and lilac and purple; in robes of white cloth and tunics of embroidered saffron; their finger nails were stained with henna and their feet thrust loosely into embroidered slippers; their turbans, nodding together, were like a bed of immense flowers. With them there were two or three dapper men in European clothes and fezzes, and two or three others, hawk-nosed and olive-skinned, in enormous green trousers and embroidered short green jackets — immaculate, scented men whose eyelids were blackened with kohl.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 416