|CAPTAIN JANSEN met us at the gangway. There were some changes in the
look of the _Violetta_'s deck since last I had seen it, a year and a
half before, in the West Indies. The awning was new. Those geranium pots
were gone, which used to stand along the scuppers, and be carried down
every night and whenever the weather threatened. The world had been too
much for them. The same doilies were on the same rocking chairs. There
was the brown mahogany parlour table. But among objects that recalled
home conventions, something that breathed eastward, a tropic touch here
and there, had been admitted. A huge Burmese tapestry swung from one
side of the awning, and the breeze bayed it in, its green embroidered
serpents writhing lazily above an honest but uninspiring sofa from Grand
Rapids. Yellow Chinese mats from Singapore were on the deck in place of
the former flowered carpet.
Mrs. Ulswater sat in her familiar rocking chair, small, thin, quiet,
and slightly precise; and on one of the mats, with her back against Mrs.
Ulswater's chair, sat a girl in a white dress, with dark hair, with very
definite eyebrows and a tilted, provocative nose. In front of her, on
another mat, sat Chepa smoking a cigarette. At some distance off, a
motionless figure in dingy white crouched in the shadow of the cabin,
whom I took to be Ram Nad engaged in abstraction. These were the
occupants of the after-deck.
“Kit!” cried Mrs. Ulswater, dropping her knitting. Susannah sprang up
and cried: “Did we beat the Mayor?”
I told them about the insurrection, Jimmie Hagan's arrest, and the
Mayor's surrender, and how I wanted Dr. Ulswater to take charge of The
Union Electric's cash.
“I'm ever so much obliged for your insurrection, Mrs. Ulswater. As to
the Mayor--well, you've been around the world yourself since I saw you,
and got acquainted with the Gentile. What do you think of him?”
“Whom do you mean by the Gentile?”
“The alien, the uncanny human who isn't like us. His 'best is like his
worst,' isn't it? in our eyes, because both his best and his worst are
different from ours.”
“I like him better than I expected to,” she answered.
“Are you going to keep on rearranging him?”
“I'm not so sure as I was what his arrangement is.”
“But the cruise of the _Violetta_ has been a success, hasn't it?”
After a moment's thought she said:
“When it began, I didn't know what I wanted, but I thought I should know
it when I saw it. And that was the way it turned out. I found out what
it was, when I found it. The doctor and Susannah are most of it.”
“It wasn't the missions, then?”
“Not exactly. It's partly finding things to do, and doing them as they
come along.” After a pause she said, as if changing the subject:
“Do you think you can get on with the Mayor here, after all this?”
“Why, that's the question. The Mayor has his virtues, but he doesn't
like insurrections or paying bills. If Providence didn't afflict him
with one or the other of those now and then, he might be a philosopher;
but now you speak of it, I shouldn't say he was a good loser. It's one
of the characteristics of the tropics, to carry grudges long and far.”
Susannah was looking at me gravely.
“Do you make poetry?” she asked.
“Not in the way of business,” I said, still thinking of my troubles.
“It's Portate that introduces poetry into business. If I propose to the
Mayor to put in five hundred new lights, he proposes a procession. If I
tell him I'm going to repaint some of the trolley cars, he announces
it that night to the populace from the balcony of magistrates, and the
populace comes and asks me for a free ride, and The Union Electric's
employés claim it's a holiday. You see, Miss Romney----”
“Why, I'm Susannah?”
“Oh! Well, Susannah--You see, Susannah, Portate furnishes all the poetry
The Union Electric Company will stand. They can't afford to let me
decorate the situation too. That's why I have some doubts about the
ultimatum and the insurrection. They were rather decorative, weren't
they?”
“I'm going to make poetry about you,” said Susannah.
She got up and walked away across the deck, in the manner of one
conducting powerful operations with the muses. She came to where the
dingy heap of eastern wisdom sat against the cabin wall.
“Ram Nad!” we heard her say, with a stamp of the foot, “you go this
minute and get your shawl!”
He rose silently, pale and venerable, and went down the companionway.
“He catches cold easily,” Mrs. Ulswater explained. “I told him not to
sit out evenings without his shawl.”
Chepa and Hagan had gone forward sometime before. Susannah paced the
deck apart with folded arms, making poetry about me. Mrs. Ulswater sat
in her rocking chair, knitting, listening, talking.
I was thinking that she would have been a dangerous woman, with all that
will and reserve, if she had not happened to be honest and kind. She
could not help but foresee and devise. I wondered if she were plotting
and planning at the moment, and for whose benefit. Likely it was for
mine. I wondered if the Mayor were plotting and planning for my distress
or destruction at the same moment. Likely he was. I didn't much care.
Mrs. Ulswater had rearranged the tropics here and there, but they
had not rearranged her. It was about eleven o'clock. Susannah was
extraordinarily pretty. As the subject of a ballad by Susannah, of a
plot by Mrs. Ulswater, and another plot by the Mayor, supposing all
these things were going on, I seemed to be in the centre of things.
At that moment the sound of oarlocks startled us. We rose and went to
the rail. A boat drew near on the dark water. On the surface of the
water the lights of the distant city made long broken reflections.
The boat drew up at the foot of the gangway, and Dr. Ulswater mounted,
followed by a large powerful man, gray-haired, with a long dangling
moustache and lean throat, carrying on his broad shoulders a large
oblong box. Behind them came up one of the boatman, carrying a trunk.
Susannah cried:
“What's in the box?”
And I said, catching sight of my initials, “Where'd you get my trunk?”
“Jansen,” said Dr. Ulswater, “get up steam. We leave as soon as you're
ready.” A moment later we were seated under the awning; Mrs. Ulswater
in her rocking chair knitting and nowise excited; Susannah, her hands
clasped about her knees, back against the rocker, eagerly absorbing all
things; the doctor, the grizzled Sadler and I, each negotiating one
of the doctor's cigars. Chepa, with his cigarette, and Hagan, with his
black clay pipe and extravagant hair, squatted together on the deck.