I
I first became aware that Cressida Garnet was on board when I saw young
men with cameras going up to the boat deck. In that exposed spot she was
good-naturedly posing for them--amid fluttering lavender scarfs--wearing
a most unseaworthy hat, her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. She
was too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertising
was good. If it was good for breakfast foods, it was good for prime
donna,--especially for a prima donna who would never be any younger and
who had just announced her intention of marrying a fourth time.
Only a few days before, when I was lunching with some friends at
Sherry's, I had seen Jerome Brown come in with several younger men,
looking so pleased and prosperous that I exclaimed upon it.
"His affairs," some one explained, "are looking up. He's going to marry
Cressida Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since she confirms it
he's getting all sorts of credit. That woman's a diamond mine."
If there was ever a man who needed a diamond mine at hand, immediately
convenient, it was Jerome Brown. But as an old friend of Cressida Garnet,
I was sorry to hear that mining operations were to be begun again.
I had been away from New York and had not seen Cressida for a year; now I
paused on the gangplank to note how very like herself she still was, and
with what undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling things
that pertained to her profession. From that distance I could recognize
her "carrying" smile, and even what, in Columbus, we used to call "the
Garnet look."
At the foot of the stairway leading up to the boat deck stood two of the
factors in Cressida's destiny. One of them was her sister, Miss Julia; a
woman of fifty with a relaxed, mournful face, an ageing skin that browned
slowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew a
Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while he
ran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth
in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on the
leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not
the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft
oval cheeks and the blooming complexion of twenty-two. There was the
beginning of a silky shadow on his upper lip. He seemed like a ripe fruit
grown out of a rich soil; "oriental," his mother called his peculiar
lusciousness. His aunt's restless and aggrieved glance kept flecking him
from the side, but the two were as motionless as the _bouledogue_,
standing there on his bench legs and surveying his travelling basket with
loathing. They were waiting, in constrained immobility, for Cressida to
descend and reanimate them,--will them to do or to be something. Forward,
by the rail, I saw the stooped, eager back for which I was unconsciously
looking: Miletus Poppas, the Greek Jew, Cressida's accompanist and
shadow. We were all there, I thought with a smile, except Jerome Brown.
The first member of Cressida's party with whom I had speech was Mr.
Poppas. When we were two hours out I came upon him in the act of dropping
overboard a steamer cushion made of American flags. Cressida never
sailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reach
her at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left his
hand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, his
fingers contemptuously sprung back. "Lest we forget!" he said with a
shrug. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your
company for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English--he
despised the American rendering of the language--but there was an
indescribably foreign quality in his voice,--a something muted; and
though he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness,
there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in a
short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his
greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black
ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a
conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind
Cressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold,
supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,--very close
together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something
like defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it out
with you, or with the world, at last.