"Oh, there'll be things. There always are. Miss Blair wants me to
learn the touch system and go in for big stenography. Says she'll teach
me. Say, she's some girl. I want you to know her." He reverted to the
principal theme. "Big money in piano-tuning, too, though what I'm
really out for is biology. But after all what's biology but the science
of life?--and you can pick that up anywhere. Oh, I'm all right. I've
had the darnedest good luck, when I've seen my pals--" He left this
sentence unfinished, going on to say: "That was the way when I got mine
at Bois Robert. Shell came down--and, gee whizz! Nothing left of a
bunch of six or eight of us but me--and I only got this."
A toss of his hand was meant to indicate his eyes, after which he went
on to tell how marvelously he had been taken care of, with the
additional good luck of running across Boyd Averill in hospital. Best
luck of all was, now that he was able to go home, the Averills were
coming, too, and had been willing to have him sail by their boat and
keep an eye on him. He spoke as if they were his intimate friends,
while I had only to appear on deck to have them become mine.
"In the jewelry business?" he asked me, suddenly.
I stared in an amazement of which he must have recognized the tones in
my voice. "What made you ask me that?"
"Oh, I don't know. Speak like it. Thought you might have been in
that--or gents' furnishings."
After he had gone on deck, and Jean-Marie had taken away the tray, I got
up and dressed. I did it slowly, with a hatred to my clothes that grew
as I put them on. How I had dressed in the previous portion of my life
I couldn't, of course, tell; but now I was something between a country
barber and a cheap Latin Quarter Bohemian. In conjunction with my
patently Anglo-Saxon face nothing could have been more grotesque.
I thought of trunks. I must have some in the hold. Ringing for
Jean-Marie, I asked if it would be possible to have one or two of them
brought up. If so, I could go back to bed again till I found something
more presentable. The steward, with comic compassion stealing into his
eye as he studied me, said that of course it was possible to have
monsieur's trunks brought up if monsieur would give him the checks or
receipts, which would doubtless be in monsieur's pockets. But a search
revealed nothing. The bags and my purse revealed nothing. My dismay at
the fact that I had come on board without other belongings than those on
the couch almost betrayed me to the little man watching me so wistfully.
I was obliged to invent a story of hurried war-time traveling in order
to get him out.
My predicament was growing more absurd. I sat down on the couch and
considered it. It would have been easy to become excited, frantic,
frenzied, with my ridiculous inability. Putting my hands to my head, I
could have torn it asunder to wrest from my atrophied brain the secret
it guarded so maliciously. "None of that!" I warned myself; and my
hands came down. Whatever I did I must do coolly. So not long after the
eight bells of noon I dragged myself to the deck.
All at once I began to find something like consolation. The wild beauty
of sky and water beat in on me like love. I must have traveled often
enough before, so that it was not new to me; but it was all the more
comforting for that. I had come back to an old, old friendship--the
friendship of wind and color and scudding clouds and glinting horizons
and the mad squadrons of the horses of Neptune shaking their foamy
manes. Amid the raging tempests of cloud there were tranquil islands of
a blue such as was never unfolded by a flower. In the long, sweeping
hollows of the waves one's eye could catch all the hues in pigeons'
necks. Before a billow broke it climbed to a tip of that sea-water
green more ineffable than any of the greens of grass, jades, or
emeralds. From every crest, and in widening lines from the ship's sides
as we plowed along, the foam trailed into shreds that seemed to have
been torn from the looms of a race more deft and exquisite than ours.
Not many men and women love beauty for its own sake. Not many see it.
To most of us it is only an adjunct to comfort or pride. It springs
from the purse, or at best from the intellect; but the hidden man of the
heart doesn't care for it. The hidden man of the heart has no capacity
to value the cloud or the bit of jewel-weed. These things meet no need
in him; they inspire no ecstasy. The cloud dissolves and the bit of
jewel-weed goes back to earth; and the chances are that no human eye has
noted the fact that each has externalized God in one of the myriad forms
of His appeal to us. Only here and there, at long intervals, is there
one to whom line and color and invisible forces like the wind are
significant and sacred, and as essential as food and drink. It came to
me now that, somewhere in my past, beauty had been the dominating
energy--that beauty was the thread of flame which, if I kept steadily
hold of it, would lead me back whence I came.
*CHAPTER IV*
From the spectacle of sea and sky I turned away at last, only because my
senses could take in no more. Then I saw beauty in another form.
A girl was advancing down the deck who embodied the evanescence of the
cloud and the grace of the bit of jewel-weed in a way I could never
convey to you. You must see me as standing near the stern of the boat,
and the long, clean line of the deck, with an irregular fringe of people
in deck-chairs, as empty except for this slender, solitary figure. The
rise and fall of the ship were a little like those of a bough in the
wind, while she was the bird on it. She advanced serenely, sedately,
her hands jauntily in the pockets of an ulster, which was gray, with
cuffs and collar of sage-green. A sage-green tam-o'-shanter was
fastened to a mass of the living fair hair which, for want of a better
term, we call golden. Her awareness of herself almost amounted to
inference; and as she passed under the row of onlookers' eyes she seemed
to fling out a challenge which was not defiant, but good-natured,
defiant but good-natured was the gaze she fixed on me, a gaze as lacking
in self-consciousness as it was in hesitation. A child might have
looked at you in this way, or a dog, or any other being not afraid of
you. Of a blue which could only be compared to that in the rifts in the
cloud overhead, her eyes never wavered in their long, calm regard till
they were turned on me obliquely as she passed by. She did not,
however, look back; and reaching the end of the promenade, she rounded
the corner and went up the other way.
Thinking of her merely as a vision seen by chance, I was the more
surprised when she entered the dining-saloon, helping my friend
Drinkwater. I had purposely got to my place before any one else, so as
to avoid the awkwardness of arriving unknown among people who already
have made one another's acquaintance. Moreover, the table being near to
one of the main entrances, my corner allowed me to take notes on all who
came in. Not that I was interested in my fellow-passengers otherwise
than as part of my self-defense. Self-defense, the keeping any one from
suspecting the mischance that had befallen me, seemed to me, for the
moment, even more important than finding out who I was.
Transatlantic travel having already become difficult, those who entered
were few in number; and as people are always at their worst at sea, they
struck me as mere bundles of humanity. Among the first to pass my table
was Boyd Averill, who gave me a friendly nod. After him came a girl of
perhaps twenty-five, grave, sensible, and so indifferent to appearances
that I put her down as his sister. Last of all was she whom Drinkwater
had summed up as "one of the prettiest." She was; yet not in the way in
which the vision on the deck had been the same. The vision on the deck
had had no more self-consciousness than the bit of jewel-weed. This
richly colored beauty, with eyes so long and almond-shaped that they
were almost Mongolian, was self-conscious in the grain--luxurious,
expensive, and languorous.
My table companions began to gather, turning my attention chiefly on
myself. I had traveled enough to know the chief steward as a
discriminating judge of human nature. Those who came asking for seats
at table he sized up in a flash, associating like with like, and rarely
making a mistake. On journeys of which no record remained with me I had
often admired this classifying instinct, doubtless because any
discrimination it may have contained was complimentary to myself.
To-day I had occasion to find it otherwise.
On coming on board I must have followed the routine of other voyages.
Before turning into my bunk for my long sleep I had apparently asked to
be assigned a seat at table, and given the name of Jasper Soames.
Guided by his intuitive social _flair_, the chief steward had
adjudicated me to a side table in a corner, where to-day my first
companion was a lady's maid. The second was a young man whom I had no
difficulty in diagnosing as a chauffeur, after whom Drinkwater and the
vision of the deck came gaily along together. She probably informed him
that I was already in my place, for as he passed me to reach his chair
at the head of the table, he clapped me on the shoulder with a glad
salute.
"So, old scout, you've got ahead of us! Bully for you! Knew you'd eat
a whale when once you got started. Say, what we'd all like to sit down
to now is a good old-fashioned dinner of corned beef and cabbage instead
of all this French stuff." He had not, however, forgotten the
courtesies of the occasion. "Miss Blair, let me make you acquainted
with Mr. Soames. Mr. Soames, Miss Mulberry; Mr. Finnegan, Mr. Soames."
For the ladies I half rose, with a bow; for Mr. Finnegan I made a nod
suffice. Mr. Finnegan seemed scarcely to think I merited a nod in
return. Miss Mulberry acknowledged me coldly. As for Miss Blair, she
inclined her head with the grace of the _lilium canadense_ or the
nodding trinity-flower. In the act there was that shade of negligence
which tells the worldly wise that friendliness is not refused, but
postponed.
We three formed a group at one end of the table--Drinkwater having Miss
Blair on his right and myself on his left--while Mr. Finnegan and Miss
Mulberry forgathered at the other. The table being set for eight, there
was a vacant seat between Miss Mulberry and Miss Blair, and two between
myself and Mr. Finnegan. This breaking into sets was due, therefore, to
the chief steward, and not to any sense of affinity or rejection among
ourselves.
After a few polite generalities as to the run and other sea-going topics
the conversation broke into dialogues--Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry,
Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair. This seeming to be the established
procedure, it remained for me to take it as a relief.
For again it gave me time to ask why I was graded as I found myself. A
man who knows he is a general and wakes up to see himself a private,
with every one taking it for granted that he is a private and no more,
would experience the same bewilderment. What had I done that such a
situation could have come about? What had I been? How long was my
knowledge of myself to depend on a group of shattered brain cells?
I had not followed the conversation of Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair,
even though I might have overheard it; but suddenly the lady glanced up
with a clear, straightforward look from her myosotis eyes.
"Mr. Soames, have you ever lived in Boston?"
The husky, veiled voice was of that bantering quality for which the
French word _gouailleur_ is the only descriptive term. In Paris it
would have been called _une voix de Montmartre_, and as an expression of
New York it might best be ascribed to Third Avenue. It was jolly,
free-and-easy, common, and sympathetic, all at once.
My instinct for self-defense urged me to say, "No," and I said it
promptly.
"Or Denver?"
I said, "No," again, and for the same reason. I couldn't be pinned down
to details. If I said, "Yes," I should be asked when and where and how,
and be driven to invention.
"Were you ever in Salt Lake City?"
A memory of a big gray building, with the Angel Moroni on the top of it,
of broad, straight streets, of distant mountains, of a desert twisted
and suffering, of a lake that at sunset glowed with the colors old
artists burned into enamels--a memory of all this came to me, and I
said, "Yes," I said it falteringly, wondering if it would commit me to
anything. It committed me to nothing, so far as I could see, but a
glance of Miss Blair's heaven-colored eyes toward her friend, as though
I had corroborated something she had said. She had forgotten for the
moment that Drinkwater was blind, so that of this significant look I
alone got the benefit. What it meant I, of course, didn't know; I could
only see it meant something.
The obvious thing for it to mean was that Miss Blair knew more about me
than I knew myself. While it was difficult to believe that, it
nevertheless remained as part of the general experience of life which
had not escaped me, that one rarely went among any large number of
people without finding some one who knew who one was. That had happened
to me many a time, especially on steamers, though I could no longer fix
the occasions. I decided to cultivate Miss Blair and, if possible, get
a clue from her.
*CHAPTER V*
That which, in my condition, irked me more than anything was the
impossibility of being by myself. The steamer was a small one, with all
the passengers of one class. Those who now crossed the Atlantic were
doing it as best they could; and to be thrown pell-mell into a
second-rate ship like the _Auvergne_ was better, in the opinion of most
people, than not to cross at all. It was a matter of eight or ten days
of physical discomfort, with home at the other end.
I knew now that the month was September, and the equinox not far away.
It was mild for the time of year, and, though the weather was rough, it
was not dirty. With the winds shifting quickly from west to northwest
and back again, the clouds were distant and dry, lifting from time to
time for bursts of stormy sunshine. For me it was a pageant. I could
forget myself in its contemplation. It was the vast, and I was only the
infinitesimal; it was the ever-varying eternal, and I was the sheerest
offspring of time, whose affairs were of no moment.
Nevertheless, I had pressing instant needs, or needs that would become
pressing as soon as we reached New York. Between now and then there
were five or six days during which I might recover the knowledge that
had escaped me; but if I didn't I should be in a difficult situation. I
should be unable to get money; I should be unable to go home. I should
be lost. Unless some one found me I should have to earn a living. To
earn a living there must be something I could do, and I didn't know that
I could do anything.
Of all forms of exasperation, this began to be the most maddening. I
must have had a profession; and yet there was no profession I could
think of from which I didn't draw back with the peculiar sick recoil I
felt the minute I approached whatever was personal to myself. In this
there were elements contradictory to each other. I wanted to know--and
yet I shrank from knowing. If I could have had access to what money I
needed I should have been content to drift into the unknown without
regret.
But there was a reserve even here. It attached to the word home. On
that word the door had not been so completely shut that a glimmer didn't
leak through. I knew I had a home. I longed for it without knowing
what I longed for. I could see myself arriving in New York, fulfilling
the regular dock routine--and going somewhere. But I didn't know where.
Of some ruptured brain cell enough remained to tell me that on the
American continent a spot belonged to me; but it told me no more than
the fact that the spot had love in it. I could feel the love and not
discern the object. As to whether I had father or mother or wife or
child I knew no more than I knew the same facts of the captain of the
ship. Out of this darkness there came only a vision of flaming eyes
which might mean anything or nothing.
I was unable to pursue this line of thought because Miss Blair came
strolling by with the same nonchalant air with which she had passed me
before lunch. I can hardly say she stopped; rather she commanded, and
swept me along.
"Don't you want to take a walk, Mr. Soames? You'd better do it now,
because we'll be rolling scuppers under by and by."
For making her acquaintance it was too good an opportunity to miss. In
spite of my inability to play up to her gay cheerfulness I found myself
strolling along beside her.
I may say at once that I never met a human being with whom I was more
instantly on terms of confidence. The sketch of her life which she gave
me without a second's hesitation came in response to my remark that from
her questions to me at table I judged her to have traveled.
"I was born on the road, and I suppose I shall never get off it. My
father and mother had got hitched to a theatrical troupe on tour."
A distaste acquired as a little girl on tour had kept her from trying
her fortunes on the boards. She had an idea that her father was acting
still, though after his divorce from her mother they had lost sight of
him. Her mother had died six years previously, since which time she had
looked after herself, with some ups and downs of experience. She had
been a dressmaker, a milliner, and a model, with no more liking for any
of these professions than she had for the theatrical. In winding up
this brief narrative she astounded me with the statement:
"And now I'm going to be an adventuress."
"A what?" I stopped in the middle of the deck to stare at her.
She repeated the obnoxious noun, continuing to walk on.
"But I thought you were a stenographer."
"That's part of it. I'm deceiving poor Miss Averill. She's my dupe. I
make use of people in that way--and throw them aside."
"But doing the work for Doctor Averill in the mean time."
"Oh, that's just a pretext."
"A pretext for what?"
"For being an adventuress. Goodness knows what evil I shall do in that
family before I get out of it."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, well, you'll see. If you're born baleful--well, you've just got to
be baleful; that's all. Did you ever hear of an adventuress who didn't
wreck homes?"
I said I had not much experience with adventuresses, and didn't quite
know the point of their occupation.
"Well, you stay around where I am and you'll see."
"Have you wrecked many homes up to the present?" I ventured to inquire.
"This is the first one I ever had a chance at. I only decided to be an
adventuress about the time when Miss Averill came along."
That, it seemed, had been at the Settlement, to which Miss Blair had
retired after some trying situations as a model. Stenography being
taught at the Settlement, she had taken it up on hearing of several
authenticated cases of girls who had gone into offices and married
millionaires. The discouraging side presented itself later in the many
more cases of girls who had not been so successful. It was in this
interval of depression on the part of Miss Blair that Mildred Averill
had appeared at the Settlement with all sorts of anxious plans about
doing good, "If she wants to do good to any one, let her do it to me,"
Miss Blair had said to her intimates. "I'm all ready to be adopted by
any old maid that's got the wad." That, she explained to me, was not
the language she habitually used. It was mere pleasantry between girls,
and not up to the standard of a really high-class adventuress.
Moreover, Miss Averill was not an old maid, seeing she was but
twenty-five, though she got herself up like forty.
All the same, Miss Averill having come on the scene and having taken a
fancy to Miss Blair, Miss Blair had decided to use Miss Averill for her
own malignant purposes.
For by this time the seeming stenographer had chosen her career. A
sufficient course of reading had made it clear that of all the women in
the world the adventuress had the best of it. She went to the smartest
dressmakers; she stayed at the dearest hotels; her jewels and furs
rivaled those of duchesses; her life was the perpetual third act of a
play. Furthermore, Miss Blair had yet to hear of an adventuress who
didn't end in money, marriage, and respectability.
Having been so frank about herself, I could hardly be surprised when she
became equally so about me. As the wind rose she slipped into a
protected angle, where I had no choice but to follow her. She began her
attack after propping herself in the corner, her hands deep in her
pockets, and her pretty shoulders hunched.
"You're a funny man. Do you know it?"
Though inwardly aghast, I strove to conceal my agitation. "Funny in
what way?"
"Oh, every way. Any one would think--"
"What would any one think?" I insisted, nervously, when she paused.
"Oh, well! I sha'n't say."
"Because you're afraid to hurt my feelings?"
"I'm a good sort--especially among people of our own class. For the
others"--she shrugged her shoulders charmingly--"I'm an anarchist and a
socialist and all that. I don't care who I bring down, if they're up.
But when people are down already--I'm--I'm a friend."
As there was a measure of invitation in these words I nerved myself to
approach the personal.
"Are you friend enough to tell me why you thought you had seen me in
Salt Lake City?"