Within ten minutes after Curtis Carlyle's interview with a very
frightened engineer the yacht Narcissus was under way, steaming
south through a balmy tropical twilight. The little mulatto,
Babe, who seems to have Carlyle's implicit confidence, took full
command of the situation. Mr. Farnam's valet and the chef, the
only members of the crew on board except the engineer, having
shown fight, were now reconsidering, strapped securely to their
bunks below. Trombone Mose, the biggest negro, was set busy with
a can of paint obliterating the name Narcissus from the bow, and
substituting the name Hula Hula, and the others congregated aft
and became intently involved in a game of craps.
Having given order for a meal to be prepared and served on deck
at seven-thirty, Carlyle rejoined Ardita, and, sinking back into
his settee, half closed his eyes and fell into a state of
profound abstraction.
Ardita scrutinized him carefully--and classed him immediately as
a romantic figure. He gave the effect of towering self-confidence
erected on a slight foundation--just under the surface of each
of his decisions she discerned a hesitancy that was in decided
contrast to the arrogant curl of his lips.
"He's not like me," she thought "There's a difference somewhere."
Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently thought about
herself; never having had her egotism disputed she did it
entirely naturally and with no detraction from her unquestioned
charm. Though she was nineteen she gave the effect of a
high-spirited precocious child, and in the present glow of her
youth and beauty all the men and women she had known were but
driftwood on the ripples of her temperament. She had met other
egotists--in fact she found that selfish people bored her rather
less than unselfish people--but as yet there had not been one she
had not eventually defeated and brought to her feet.
But though she recognized an egotist in the settee, she felt none
of that usual shutting of doors in her mind which meant clearing
ship for action; on the contrary her instinct told her that this
man was somehow completely pregnable and quite defenseless. When
Ardita defied convention--and of late it had been her chief
amusement--it was from an intense desire to be herself, and she
felt that this man, on the contrary, was preoccupied with his own
defiance.
She was much more interested in him than she was in her own
situation, which affected her as the prospect of a matineé might
affect a ten-year-old child. She had implicit confidence in her
ability to take care of herself under any and all circumstances.
The night deepened. A pale new moon smiled misty-eyed upon the
sea, and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown
like leaves along the far horizon a great haze of moonshine
suddenly bathed the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail
in her swift path. From time to time there was the bright flare
of a match as one of them lighted a cigarette, but except for
the low under-tone of the throbbing engines and the even wash of
the waves about the stern the yacht was quiet as a dream boat
star-bound through the heavens. Round them bowed the smell of the
night sea, bringing with it an infinite languor.
Carlyle broke the silence at last.
"Lucky girl," he sighed "I've always wanted to be rich--and buy
all this beauty."
Ardita yawned.
"I'd rather be you," she said frankly.
"You would--for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of
nerve for a flapper."
"I wish you wouldn't call me that."
"Beg your pardon."
"As to nerve," she continued slowly, "it's my one redeeming
feature. I'm not afraid of anything in heaven or earth."
"Hm, I am."
"To be afraid," said Ardita, "a person has either to be very
great and strong--or else a coward. I'm neither." She paused for
a moment, and eagerness crept into her tone. "But I want to talk
about you. What on earth have you done--and how did you do it?"
"Why?" he demanded cynically. "Going to write a movie, about
me?"
"Go on," she urged. "Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous
story."
A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the
awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while
they ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes and strawberry
jam from the plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk,
hesitatingly at first, but eagerly as he saw she was interested.
Ardita scarcely touched her food as she watched his dark young
face--handsome, ironic faintly ineffectual.
He began life as a poor kid in a Tennessee town, he said, so poor
that his people were the only white family in their street. He
never remembered any white children--but there were inevitably a
dozen pickaninnies streaming in his trail, passionate admirers
whom he kept in tow by the vividness of his imagination and the
amount of trouble he was always getting them in and out of. And
it seemed that this association diverted a rather unusual musical
gift into a strange channel.
There had been a colored woman named Belle Pope Calhoun who
played the piano at parties given for white children--nice white
children that would have passed Curtis Carlyle with a sniff. But
the ragged little "poh white" used to sit beside her piano by the
hour and try to get in an alto with one of those kazoos that
boys hum through. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a
living teasing ragtime out of a battered violin in little cafés
round Nashville. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the
country, and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. Five of
them were boys he had grown up with; the other was the little
mulatto, Babe Divine, who was a wharf nigger round New York, and
long before that a plantation hand in Bermuda, until he stuck an
eight-inch stiletto in his master's back. Almost before Carlyle
realized his good fortune he was on Broadway, with offers of
engagements on all sides, and more money than he had ever dreamed
of.
It was about then that a change began in his whole attitude, a
rather curious, embittering change. It was when he realized that
he was spending the golden years of his life gibbering round a
stage with a lot of black men. His act was good of its
kind--three trombones, three saxaphones, and Carlyle's flute--and
it was his own peculiar sense of rhythm that made all the
difference; but he began to grow strangely sensitive about it,
began to hate the thought of appearing, dreaded it from day to
day.
They were making money--each contract he signed called for
more--but when he went to managers and told them that he wanted
to separate from his sextet and go on as a regular pianist, they
laughed at him and told him he was crazy--it would be an artistic
suicide. He used to laugh afterward at the phrase "artistic
suicide." They all used it.
Half a dozen times they played at private dances at three
thousand dollars a night, and it seemed as if these crystallized
all his distaste for his mode of livlihood. They took place in
clubs and houses that he couldn't have gone into in the daytime.
After all, he was merely playing to rôle of the eternal monkey, a
sort of sublimated chorus man. He was sick of the very smell of
the theatre, of powder and rouge and the chatter of the
greenroom, and the patronizing approval of the boxes. He couldn't
put his heart into it any more. The idea of a slow approach to
the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course,
progressing toward it, but, like a child, eating his ice-cream so
slowly that he couldn't taste it at all.
He wanted to have a lot of money and time and opportunity to read
and play, and the sort of men and women round him that he could
never have--the kind who, if they thought of him at all, would
have considered him rather contemptible; in short he wanted all
those things which he was beginning to lump under the general
head of aristocracy, an aristocracy which it seemed almost any
money could buy except money made as he was making it. He was
twenty-five then, without family or education or any promise that
he would succeed in a business career. He began speculating
wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every cent he had
saved.
Then the war came. He went to Plattsburg, and even there his
profession followed him. A brigadier-general called him up to
headquarters and told him he could serve his country better as a
band leader--so he spent the war entertaining celebrities behind
the line with a headquarters band. It was not so bad--except
that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he
wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed
only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were
forever eluding him.
"It was the private dances that did it. After I came back from
the war the old routine started. We had an offer from a
syndicate of Florida hotels. It was only a question of time
then."
He broke off and Ardita looked at him expectantly, but he shook
his head.
"No," he said, "I'm going to tell you about it. I'm enjoying it
too much, and I'm afraid I'd lose a little of that enjoyment if I
shared it with anyone else. I want to hang on to those few
breathless, heroic moments when I stood out before them all and
let them know I was more than a damn bobbing, squawking clown."
From up forward came suddenly the low sound of singing. The
negroes had gathered together on the deck and their voices rose
together in a haunting melody that soared in poignant harmonics
toward the moon. And Ardita listens in enchantment.
"Oh down---
oh down,
Mammy wanna take me down milky way,
Oh down,
oh down,
Pappy say to-morra-a-a-ah
But mammy say to-day,
Yes--mammy say to-day!"
Carlyle sighed and was silent for a moment looking up at the
gathered host of stars blinking like arc-lights in the warm sky.
The negroes' song had died away to a plaintive humming and it
seemed as if minute by minute the brightness and the great
silence were increasing until he could almost hear the midnight
toilet of the mermaids as they combed their silver dripping curls
under the moon and gossiped to each other of the fine wrecks
they lived in on the green opalescent avenues below.
"You see," said Carlyle softly, "this is the beauty I want.
Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding--it's got to burst
in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl."
He turned to her, but she was silent.
"You see, don't you, Anita--I mean, Ardita?"
Again she made no answer. She had been sound asleep for some
time.