I
"Good-bye, Miss Tucker!"
"Good luck, Miss Tommy!"
"Bye, bye, Tomsie!"
"Don't stay away too long!"
These sentiments were being called from the Hoboken dock to the deck
of an ocean steamer, while a young lady, buried in bouquets and
bonbons, leaned over the rail, sparkling, inciting, compelling,
responding.
"Take care of yourself, Tommy!"
"I don't see but that I must! Nobody else to do it!" she responded
saucily.
"You wouldn't let 'em if they tried!" This from a rosy-cheeked
youngster who was as close to the water's edge as safety permitted.
"Say, did you guess what my floral offering was to be when you trimmed
your hat? I _am_ flattered!"
"Sorry! The hat was trimmed weeks ago, and I'm wearing your bouquet
because it matches."
"Thanks, awfully," replied the crestfallen youth. "Plans for reduction
of head-size constantly on file in Miss Tucker's office."
"Just Carl's luck to hit on a match."
"Don't see any particular luck in being accessory to a hat trimming,"
grumbled Carl.
"Write now and then, Miss Tommy, won't you?" said a fellow with
eyeglasses and an air of fashion.
"Won't promise! I'll wait till I'm rich enough to cable!"
"Shilling a word's expensive, but you can send 'em to me collect. My
word is 'Hopeful,'"--at which the little party laughed.
"Register another, and make it 'Uncertain,'" called the girl
roguishly, seeing that no one was paying any attention to her friends
and their nonsense.
"London first, is it?" asked the rosy youth. "Decided on your hotel?"
"Hotel? It's going to be my share of a modest Bloomsbury lodging," she
answered. "Got to sing my way from a third-floor-back in a side street
to a gorgeous suite at the Ritz!"
"We'll watch you!" cried three in chorus.
"But we'd rather hear you, darling," said a nice, tailor-made girl,
whose puffy eyelids looked as if she had been crying.
"Blessed lamb! I hope I'll be better worth hearing! Oh, do go home,
all of you; especially you, Jessie! My courage is oozing out at the
heels of my shoes. Disappear! I've been farewelling actively for an
hour and casually for a week. If they don't take off the gangplank in
a minute or two I shan't have pluck enough to stick to the ship."
"You can't expect us to brace you up, Tommy," said the rosy youth.
"We're losing too much by it. Come along back! What's the matter with
America?"
"Don't talk to her that way, Carl,"--and the tailor-made girl looked
at him reproachfully. "You know she's got nobody and nothing to come
back to. She's given up her room. She's quarreled with her beastly
uncle at last; all her belongings are in the hold of the steamer, and
she's made up her mind."
"All ashore that's going ashore!" The clarion tones of the steward
rang through the air for the third time, and the loud beating of the
ship's gong showed that the last moment had come. The gangplank was
removed and the great liner pushed off and slowly wended her way
down-river, some of the more faithful ones in the crowd waving
handkerchiefs until she was a blur in the distance.
"Well, there's no truer way of showing loyalty than by going to
Hoboken to see a friend off," said the eyeglassed chap as he walked
beside Jessie Macleod to the ferry. "I wouldn't do it for anybody but
Tommy."
"Nor I!" exclaimed the rosy youth. "Good old Tommy! I wonder whether
she'll sing and have a career, or fall in love over there?"
"She might do both, I should think; at least it has been done, though
not, perhaps, with conspicuous success," was Carl's reply.
"Whatever she does, we've lost her," sighed the girl; "and our little
set will be so dull without Tommy!"
* * * * *
Fergus Appleton had leaned over the deck rail for a few moments before
the ship started on her voyage; leaned there idly and indifferently,
as he did most things, smoking his cigarette with an air of complete
detachment from the world. He was going to no one, and leaving no one
behind. He had money enough to live on, but life had always been
something of a bore to him and he could not have endured it without
regular occupation. His occasional essays on subjects connected with
architecture, his critical articles in similar fields, his travels in
search of wider information, the book on which he was working at the
moment,--these kept him busy and gave him a sense of being tolerably
useful in his generation. The particular group of juveniles shouting
more or less intimate remarks to a girl passenger on board the steamer
attracted his attention for a moment.
"They are very young," he thought, "or they would realize that they
are all revealing themselves with considerable frankness, although
nobody seems to be listening but me!"
He would not have listened, as a matter of fact, had it not been for
the voice of the girl they called Tommy. It was not loud, but it had
the quality of a golden bell, and Fergus was susceptible to a
beautiful voice. One other thing--the slightest possible
thing--enlisted his notice. She wore a great bunch of mignonette stuck
in the waistband of her green cloth dress, and her small hat had a
flat wreath of the same flower. Mignonette was, perhaps, the only
growing thing of which Fergus Appleton ever took note, and its perfume
was the only one that particularly appealed to his rather dull sense
of smell; the reason being that in the old garden of the house in
which he was born there was always a huge straggling patch of
mignonette. His mother used to sit there on summer mornings and read
to him, and when he lay on his back in the sunshine he used to watch
the butterflies and humming-birds and trees, and sniff the fragrance
that filled the air. When his mother died, he wandered into the
garden, sought the familiar corner, and flung himself on the bed of
mignonette to cry his heart out--the lonely heart of an eight-year-old
boy. That was five and twenty years ago, but he never passed a
florist's open door in summer-time without remembering that despairing
hour and the fragrance of the flowers, bruised with his weight and
moist with his tears.
The girl vanished the moment the steamer was out of sight of the dock,
and Fergus did not give her another thought for a day or two. He had
liked her green cloth dress and the hat that framed her young,
laughing, plucky face. He had thought her name suited her, and
wondered what dignified appellation had been edited, cut, and
metamorphosed to make "Tommy," deciding after a look at the passenger
list that it was Thomasina, and that the girl must be Miss Thomasina
Tucker, an alliterative combination which did not appeal to his
literary taste.
The voyage was a rough one, and he saw her only now and then, always
alone, and generally standing on the end of the ship, her green cape
blowing in a gale of wind and showing a scarlet lining, her mignonette
hat exchanged for a soft green thing with an upstanding scarlet quill.
She was the only companionable person on board, but he did not know
her and sat nowhere near her at table, an assemblage of facts that
seemed to settle the matter, considering the sort of man he was and
the sort of girl she was.
"She's too pretty and too young to be gallivanting about 'on her
own,'" he said to himself one morning, when Tommy stood on the upper
deck looking out to sea and, as far as he could judge, singing, though
there was such a gale blowing that he could not hear her voice. "But
all the girls are the same nowadays,"--and he puffed his pipe
disconsolately; "all the same; brisk, self-supporting, good fellows.
If I ever met a nice, unsuccessful-but-not-depressed sort of girl,
soft but not silly, mild but not tame, flexible but not docile,
spirited but not domineering, I think I should capitulate; but they're
all dead. The type has changed, and I haven't changed with it."
* * * * *
Fergus Appleton did not make acquaintances easily; no man does who has
had a lonely, neglected boyhood, his only companion a father who
seldom remembered his existence, and, when he did, apparently
regretted it. He had known girls, but he was a shy, silent, ugly boy,
and appealed as little to them as they to him. He did not live through
the twenties without discovering that a fine crop of sentiment was
growing in his heart; he also discovered that he didn't know in the
least what to do with it. George Meredith, speaking of Romance, says:
"The young who avoid that region escape the title of Fool at the cost
of a Celestial crown." Fergus Appleton wouldn't have minded being
called a fool if only he could have contrived to deserve the title,
and the glimmer of the crown celestial had been in his imagination
more than once until he turned thirty and decided it was not for his
head. Guileless school-girls did not appeal to him, and elderly sirens
certainly had no power to charm; he was even widow-proof, so he became
a thoroughfare for sisterly affection. Girls suffocated him with
friendliness, which was not the stuff of which his dreams were made.
However, he had nothing to complain of, for he got as good as he gave,
and it occurred to him that he could not expect to start a disastrous
conflagration in any maiden bosom so long as he had no brimstone, nor
any substitute for it, on his own premises.
"Anyway," he reflected (though perhaps not oftener than once a year),
"if I haven't a tie in the world, I have complete freedom to do as I
like!" And if the said freedom palled upon him occasionally, nobody
was the wiser, for Fergus Appleton did not wear his heart on his
sleeve.
As for Tommy, there had been several Thomas Tuckers in genealogical
line, and the father of Thomasina was already Thomas Tucker the third.
Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, the parents of the first Thomas, must have been
somewhat lacking in humor, and somewhat ignorant of the classics, for
although they could not, perhaps, help being Tuckers, they needn't
have saddled their offspring with a Christian name which would suggest
Mother Goose to every properly educated person. However, the first
Thomas grew into a great man, healthy, wealthy, and wise, and his
descendants could hardly do less than keep his name alive. Thomas the
third was disappointed, not to say mortified, when his only child,
born in his old age, turned out to be a girl, but he bravely did the
best he could and named her Thomasina. Mrs. Tucker did not like the
name, but she died before the baby was three days old. The baby hated
it herself when she reached years of discretion, and when she found
that she possessed a voice and had a possible career before her, she
saw plainly that something more mellifluous must be substituted if
programmes should ever be in question. Meantime she was Tommy to her
friends, and the gay little name suited her to a T. The gay little
rhyme suited her, too, for like the Tommy Tucker in Mother Goose, she
had to "sing for her supper"; for her breakfast, and her dinner, and
her tea also, for that matter, if any were to be eaten.
Her only relation, a disagreeable bachelor uncle, had given her a home
during her orphaned girlhood, and her first idea on growing up was to
get out of it. This she did promptly when she secured a place in a
Brooklyn choir. The salary was modest, but it provided a room and at
least one meal a day, not, of course, a Roman banquet, but something
to satisfy a youthful appetite. It seemed to the intrepid possessor of
a charming voice, an equally charming face, and a positive gift for
playing accompaniments, that the other two meals, and a few clothes
and sundries, might be forthcoming. As a matter of fact, they were,
although the uncle said that Tommy would starve, and he almost hoped
that she would, just to break the back of her obstinate independence.