I arrived in Santacruz in the early evening, and as I stepped out of
the carriage with the children the majordomo came rushing out from
under the hotel portales and said: "Meesus Trench, is it? Your suite
awaits, madam. The Lieutenant Trench from the American warship has
ordered, madam."
There was a girl, not too young, sitting over at a small table, and at
the name Trench, pronounced in the round voice of the majordomo,
she--well, she was sitting by herself, smoking a cigarette, and I did
not know why she should smile and look at me--in just that way, I mean.
But I can muster some poise of manner myself when I choose--I looked at
her. And she looked me over and smiled again. And I did not like that
smile. It was as if--as Ned would say--she had something on me.
She and I were to be enemies--already I saw that. She was making smoke
rings, and she never hurried the making of a single one of them as she
looked at me; nor did I hurry a particle the ushering of the two
children and the maid into the hotel. But I did ask, after I had
greeted Nan and her mother inside: "Auntie--or you, Nan--who is the
oleander blossom smoking the cigarette out under the portales?"
It spoke volumes to me that Nan and her mother, without looking, at
once knew whom I meant. She was the Carmen Whiffle of whom nearly
every other American woman waiting to be taken home on the next
transport had been whispering--and not always whispering--for weeks in
Santacruz.
Nan, of course, had a good word for her. Is there a living creature on
earth she wouldn't? "I think she is wonderfully good-looking," said
Nan.
"No woman with a jaw like that," said Nan's mother, "can be
good-looking. And she sat at the piano there early this evening and
raved over the 'Melody in F'; but when she tried to play it, it was
with fingers of wood. What she really did play with spirit,
Nettie--when she thought there were none of us American women around to
hear her--was: 'I Want What I Want When I Want _It_.'"
Auntie went on to tell then how this creature was a divorcee who had
married an oil millionaire and within six months got her second divorce
and a half-million alimony out of him. And as a baby she was
christened--not Carmen, but Hannah! "Now, what's the psychology,
Nettie," said auntie, "of a woman who changes her name from Hannah to
Carmen? She wants what she wants when she wants it--and she'll come
pretty near getting it, Nettie. If I had a husband within a thousand
miles of her, I'd lock him up."
You may understand from the foregoing that Mrs. Wedner--Nan's
mother--is a woman of convictions; and so she is. The Lady with the
Wallop is what Ned tells me the men folks call her. But I am not
without convictions myself.
"I have a husband within a thousand miles of her," I said, "and if you
mean that for me, auntie, I won't lock him up--not even if he were the
to-be-locked-up kind. When I can't hold my man, auntie, against any
specimen of her species, I won't call in the police to help me. And I
think I'll give her another look-over before the evening is ended."
"Don't bother your head with her," said auntie. "And sit down and have
something to eat." And we did have something to eat, but up-stairs in
my suite.
The children and I were eating, and Nan and auntie were giving me all
the gossip since I'd seen them last, when the maid came in to say that
the trunk with the children's things in it hadn't been sent up with the
others. There's no use leaving such things to a maid in those
countries--I went down to see about it myself; and there it was, as I
expected, lying in the lobby where a lazy porter hadn't yet got around
to it.
I told the fat majordomo a thing or two, and the trunk was soon on its
upward way; and then--as I was down-stairs--I thought to take a glance
about to see if anybody I knew had arrived in the meantime. You must
remember that American refugees were coming in from the interior on
every train, the revolutionary general Podesta being expected to enter
the city almost any day--or hour.
I saw the back of a man's head, and I said to myself: "If that isn't
Larry Trench's head as anything on earth can be!"--the shapely,
overhanging back head and the uncrushable hair that went with it.
There was a row of palmettos in tubs, and I walked around to make
certain. It was Larry. And he was with a young woman. And the young
woman was Carmen Whiffle, and her heavy-lashed agate eyes were gazing
into the steady, deep-set, blue-green eyes of Larry. One look was all
I needed to know what that lady's intentions were in the present case.
"So!" I said to myself--"that's what you meant when you smiled at the
name Trench? Perhaps you thought Larry was my husband!"
Now, I hadn't seen a single officer or man of our ships on my way from
the station, nor while I had been down-stairs with Nan and auntie
earlier. Which was significant in itself, for a fleet of our
battleships were anchored in the harbor, my Ned's among them. I looked
around now. No, there wasn't one officer of ours in the dining-room,
nor in the plaza outside. So what was Larry, a young officer of our
marine corps, doing all by himself ashore?
And Larry was my Ned's young brother and my own little Neddo's
godfather, and long ago I had decided that Larry should marry my own
chum and cousin Nan, the very best girl that ever lived. And--well, if
ever a woman looked like the newspaper photographs of the other woman
of a dozen celebrated cases, Carmen Whiffle was that woman.
I stood there at the end of that row of palmettos, hesitating; and
while I hesitated the orchestra struck up, and I saw the lady lead
Larry out for a dance.
I did not have to see Carmen Whiffle dance to know that she could
dance. If they never learn to do anything else on earth, women of her
kind do learn to dance. All women who have men in their minds learn to
dance. She could dance. If I had never seen her lift a toe off the
floor, the lines of her figure were there to prove that she could
dance. But she lifted her toe. More than her toe. She danced--I have
to give her credit for it--with grace; and after she warmed up to it,
not only with grace but with abandon; with so much abandon that all the
other women who were trying to dance with abandon ceased their feeble
efforts and stood against the wall to watch her.
After that dance Carmen Whiffle never had another chance with me. I
almost ran up to my room. Little Anna was already asleep; but Neddo,
aged six, was wide-awake. Nan and her mother had gone to their room,
which was across the hall on the same floor.
"Neddo, dear, do you know your uncle Larry is down-stains?" I asked him.
"Oh-h, mummie!" he cried, and came leaping out of his cot bed. "I must
see him, mummie!"
"I'm going to let you go down-stairs all by yourself, Neddo, and see
him. And then be sure to bring him up here, to have a look at sister.
And then be sure to take him to the balcony at the end of the hallway
and tell him to draw the lattices and wait there. It's to be a
surprise, Neddo, tell him; but not a single word more than that."
I waited two minutes or so, and then followed Neddo. I was in time to
see Neddo throw himself at Larry, and wrap his arms around his neck and
smother him with kisses. "Uncle Larry! O Uncle Larry! Come and see
who's up-stairs! No telling, you know!"
From where I was, on the screened balcony overlooking the
lounging-room, I needed no ship's spy-glass to read the suspicion in
Carmen Whiffle's eyes when she looked at little Neddo. I do believe
she could even suspect that innocent, affectionate child with playing a
game.
The tears were in Larry's eyes. "My godson, my brother's boy," he
explained. "If you don't mind my running away for a few minutes, Miss
Whiffle, I'll hurry back. I'll explain to Neddo's mother that you are
waiting and hurry right back."
"Don't explain anything," said Miss Whiffle, just a bit tartly. "Never
mind any explaining, but come back as soon as you can. I shall be
waiting here."
Are you at all given to the habit of fancying in human beings the
resemblance to different kinds of birds and beasts? Looking down on
Carmen Whiffle just then, I could see where, if her well-cushioned
features were chiselled away, she would look startlingly like a hawk.
I may be unjust, I know, but I was thinking of more than one thing just
then. I was thinking of what I read in Carmen Whiffle's glance and
smile at me when I passed under the portales of that hotel that
evening. A devoted, slavish wife and mother was what she was thinking
I was; and possibly I am. But women of her kind are altogether too
quick to think that the devoted wife and mother hasn't any brains.
And more than all the brains in the world is the wisdom that comes of
knowing men. Carmen Whiffle may have known several men in her day; but
if she did it was to know them incompletely; and to know any number of
men incompletely is never truly to know any one, while to know one man
well is to know many. And when that one in my case was Larry's own
brother, why, I wasn't worrying over a battle with Carmen Whiffle,
superbly equipped though she doubtless thought herself.
Ned and his brother Larry were natively pretty much alike; but my Ned
was trained early in a rigid profession and early assumed the
responsibilities of marriage and a home; and--he told me so more than
once--so saved himself more than one drift to leeward. It is no gain
for us women to dodge facts in this life. To a man with a conscience,
a wife and two children are better than many windward anchors, as Ned
would say. Larry was Ned, minus the wife and two children, and plus a
little more of youth and the not yet, perhaps, disciplined Trench
temperament.
And for every child a woman bears mark her up a decade of years in
human wisdom. And twice a decade in hardening resolution. It had
already become marble in me--my resolution to save from the talons of
this hawk this brother of my Ned's--a twenty-five-year-old man of war
according to stupid bureau files, but in reality a little child playing
in the garden of life with never a thought of any bird of prey hovering
in the air above him.
I watched Larry go bounding up the wide staircase with Neddo, and then
I waited long enough for them to get well out of sight ahead; for Neddo
to lead his uncle up the second flight, to show him baby in her bed
asleep; and Larry--I could picture him--time to stoop over and kiss the
dear, warm, plump little face.
"And now you must hide--I'll show you, Uncle Larry--till mummie comes,"
said Neddo, and led him back to the hall and onto the balcony, which
looked down on the patio of the hotel. And there Neddo left him, after
closing him in behind the lattice, as I had told him.
I then went to get Nan, who had been sentenced to read her mother to
sleep with something out of Trollope. Nan's mother carried volumes of
Trollope with her as other women carry hot-water bottles. Twenty
minutes of dear old Trollope and she was good for her eight hours'
sleep, she would say, as she did now; but this time without keeping Nan
twenty minutes.
"Nettie, the way you go around commandeering people, you ought to be a
general in the army," said auntie, but with perfect good nature. "Go
along with her, Nan."
I led Nan to where Neddo was waiting in his crib. "Did you tell Cousin
Nan yet, mummie?" asked Neddo in what he thought was a whisper.
"Tell me what, Neddo?" asked Nan.
"Neddo!" I said, and raised a finger. "Sh-h, Neddo!" and Neddo sh-h-d,
and I led Nan into the hall. "I'm dying to have a talk with you," I
whispered to Nan--"out here, where Neddo won't be kept awake and the
maid won't hear us."
And so, just when Larry was, no doubt, thinking of breaking out of his
hiding-place, he heard a door in the hall open, and through the slats
of the lattice saw two women's shadowy forms tiptoeing down the hall
toward his balcony.