The Man on Horseback/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
THE MEETING
"Mister Graves!"
The voice was a woman's, low, musical, and irate; and Tom turned quickly.
It was the afternoon of the first day out. For the first time in his life Tom was away from his native, Northwestern heath and confronted by a scene that was not framed by lanky pine and frayed, ribbed rock, by rolling sage land and green-thundering waterfall, studded with little towns set flat, like jewels, into the surrounding plains and straddling in an arrogant, devil-may-care manner in all the cardinal points of the compass, as if to advertise to newcomers fresh from the East that, if they would but wait a year or two, the town would fill up and grow to the next range, and even beyond.
For the first time in his life Tom felt the lap and surge of salt water beneath his feet and so he had been leaning over the top deck rail looking over the great Atlantic that chopped towards the crooked, peaked sky line with an immense roll; and, the ship giving a ruffianly lurch at the same moment, he nearly lost his balance and fell on the plank deck when he recognized the speaker's face.
"Well! Bertha! I'll be eternally razzle-dazzled!"
He held out a big, honest hand to Miss Wedekind, who stood there, dressed in short plaid skirt, low-heeled brown shoes, tweed hat, and a silk blazer of gold and black stripes.
She waved the proffered hand aside. Her violet eyes eddied up with a slow flame of anger.
"I don't want to shake hands with you!" she said.
"Eh?" Tom Graves did not believe his ears. "Aren't you glad to see a face from home? Why, say, I am plumb tickled to see you. I …"
The girl stamped her foot.
"I am—oh—angry!" she cried. "Frightfully angry! What do you mean by persecuting me, by following me when you know you are not wanted?"
"Me—persecute—you?" stammered Tom. "Me—follow—you?"
"Exactly! Don't play the stupid! I took the first train for New York, the first steamship out of New York, as soon as Uncle Heinrich cabled that his mother, my grandmother, was sick, near death, and wanted to see me once more. And here you … Have you no shame, no decency?"
"Say, Bertha," stammered Tom. "Honest to God, I don't know anything of what you're saying. I guess I left Spokane a few days before you did. Why, I spent half a week in New York, just fretting and fuming to get away. Didn't your father tell you?"
"He did not! And I don't believe you! No, I do not! You are insufferable. Can't you take no for an answer? Do you think, do you imagine for a moment, that you can win me by such silly, ill-bred, rude persecution? Do you think you can bully me into marrying you? Haven't you got any more manhood than that?"
"Look here, Bertha …"
"You heard what I said, Tom Graves. And if you dare say a word to me on board this ship, if you as much as smile at me, I am going to complain to the captain. There!" and she swept off while he looked after her, cap in hand, scratching his red hair, amazement and grief and hurt pride in his honest features, finally relieving his injured feelings by a tremendous:
"Well, I'll be …"
"I say! Don't speak out your thoughts so freely, my dear sir!" Another voice came to his ear, a man's voice this time and frankly, aggressively British. "Never say you'll be damned or anything as rash as that before you've tried some of that ripping medicine against it they sell down across the saloon bar, what?"
Tom looked up.
The speaker was a young man about his own age, his own height, though a little broader. His hair (he wore his cap in his hand) was honey-colored and neatly parted down the center; his sack suit was tightly tailored and of an extravagant, hairy, green Harris tweed; his heavy brogues were topped by brown cloth spats; and his face, round, rosy, blue-eyed, open, was ornamented by a tiny mustache and an immense, gold-rimmed monocle.
The final seal to this typical specimen of traveling Briton was given by a short briar pipe clamped be tween his teeth; and when Tom Graves looked at him, dazed, rather overcome, the Englishman continued:
"My name's Vyvyan, if you want to stand upon ceremonies," giving him his card.
Tom took it and read thereon:
"Lord Herbert Vyvyan
Bury St-Edmonds."
"Mr.—Bury St-Edmonds?" stammered Tom.
"Gad, no! That's my address, home in England. Vyvyan—that's my name!"
"Oh—mine's Graves—Tom Graves!"
Now, for the excuse of the young Westerner, be it said that all his life, though he had met plenty of Englishmen, in the Inland Empire, he had been familiar only with the two types who abound there: the English worker, and the English wastrel.
The former are the men, men of all classes, who come either direct to the Northwest or via Canada and who, in spite of the fact that they are less ready to take out their citizenship papers than the Continental Europeans, mix with the native life, business and social, as oil mixes with oil, thus accounting for the fact, never yet sufficiently dwelt upon, that though in the United States there are German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and what-not, there is no organized, or unorganized, English-American party, or vote, or even consciousness. The English man, he of the worker type, blends with the civic and national life, and his son is altogether an American.
Tom had also met and drunk with and ridden with his share of the second type of English, the wastrels, mostly remittance men who had left their country for their country's good and who received a quarterly stipend from home as long as they remained abroad. There was a vague rumor that some of them were the sons of noblemen, earls and viscounts and so forth, all called "dooks" for short by the gentry of the range, and they were not bad fellows. At least they were plucky.
But this man, Vyvyan, was decidedly not an English worker, and just as decidedly not an English wastrel—and: he was a lord; and Tom, out of the ingenuousness of his heart, blurted out a great, loud, tactless:
"Say, for the love of Mike, are you really a lord—honest to God?"
"Right-oh!" came the cheerful reply.
"One of those guys who wear silly little crowns and a whole lot of purple velvet and white fur?" pursued Tom, remembering what he had learned in the movie theaters of Spokane.
"Right-oh again!" Then, seeing that Tom was studying him intensely: "I say, what's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing!" Tom scratched his head. "But I always thought—have always been given to understand that all lords are … Oh …"
"Silly, damned jackasses? Right-oh, the third time! I am one. You have no idea what a silly ass I am—and wait till you meet my first brother, the Duke! Gad! And now, s'pose we go down and see what the maritime Ganymede has to offer in the line of mixed drinks."
Half an hour later, sampling the third of a series of cocktails, "there are three things I admired most tremendously in America," Vyvyan confided: "Your way of preparing oysters, your way of mixing drinks, and the way your women clothe their jolly little tootsies." Tom Graves had already formed a sincere liking for the young Englishman, and it was evident that the latter returned the feeling.
For, with frank and talkative naïvete, he had told the American all about himself.
"I'm in disgrace," he said; "that's why I am tryin' to perk up a bit alcoholically."
"In disgrace?"
"Right. You see, I am a diplomatist."
"You—a diplomatist?" Tom laughed at the thought.
"Can't blame you for laughing," sighed Vyvyan. "I am rather rotten at the game. Was 'steenth secretary at the Washington Embassy and just got the jolly old boot for most frightful incompetency."
"What are you going to do next?"
"Go home and devil my brother's soul. He's the Duke, y'know, and has lots of what you Americans call pull. I s'pose he'll get me some secretaryship in one of those interesting and unwashed Balkan principalities, but he'll have to wait a while until this Washington mess blows over. He won't like it a bit. You see, I'm not over-flush with the ready; rather stony, in fact, and my brother is as stingy as anything. Never mind, old dear, have one more of the liquid?"
"No, thanks. I've had a nose full."
"Right. Let's go down and eat. Ship's filled with Germans and Austrians and all that sort, eatin' peas with steel knives and inhalin' soup through their jolly old ears, so we two might as well sit together and show 'em a solid Anglo-Saxon front, what? Let's go feed!"
That day and the following saw Tom Graves and Lord Vyvyan continuously together. Occasionally the former saw Bertha Wedekind, usually accompanied by a couple of tall, lean Germans who, the Englishman said, belonged to the German Embassy in Washington. Tom was jealous, but he had to grin and bear it. He knew how stubborn the girl was and that she would doubtless live up to her threat and complain to the captain if he tried to address her.
He spoke to but few of the other passengers. He was garrulous and sociable by nature. Too, he had always liked the Germans whom he had known in the Northwest, chiefly Martin Wedekind, though, when thinking of the latter, he never thought of him as anything but a straight American. But he found it impossible to get on with those aboard the Augsburg.
They were mostly German-Americans from New York, Missouri, and the Middle West, bound on a visit to the Fatherland, and while the majority of them wore tiny American flags in their buttonholes and several had broken into hectic dithyrambs as the ship passed the Statue of Liberty, they became less American and more German with every league the steamer throbbed across the Atlantic.
The first day out, a short, gray-haired, dyspeptic butcher from Cincinnati said with a sigh of satisfaction:
"Na, Gott sei Dank, noch 'ne Woche und dann sind wir, wo es nicht jeder Lausekerl für seine Pflicht und Schuldigkeit hält seinen Nachbarn ordentlich zu bemogeln!"—a nasty reflection on American business morals, which was passed over with a smile as an exuberance of homesickness, an exuberance, too, of Teutonic humor.
Gradually, one by one, the American flags disappeared from buttonholes to be replaced in isolated cases by the black-and-white of Prussia and the black-white-red of the German Empire.
Three days out, a stodgy, immense, keen-eyed St. Louis brewer, with diamonds in his cuff links, his shirt, and his necktie (diamonds, as Tom said to himself, earned and paid for in America) complained to the third officer that the library in the reading-room contained "noddings but Yankee drash. Vy don't you haf some goot Cherman liderachoor instead of all dat Yankee blödsinn? Somedings like de Gartenlaube, or de Jugend, or Simplicissimus? You oughta haf been ashamed mit yourself calling dis one Cherman shib, nicht wahr?"
Thus it grew. Thus they showed with what solemnity they regarded the oath they had sworn at the time when they had taken out final citizenship papers; and on the fourth day out matters came to a head—"a jolly bloody head"—as Lord Vyvyan commented.
For Tom Graves got into an argument with a pale, pimply-faced New York bank clerk by the name of Franz Neumann.
The latter addressed Tom in German. Tom grinned, and said that he had only bought himself a German grammar two days before the Augsburg had left port, that he was working hard, but had not as yet mastered more than about fifteen words. Whereupon the clerk replied, talking raspingly through his nose, that "Bei Gott! it was an infernal arrogance! What did he mean by sailing on a German ship and expecting the Germans to talk English to him? He was a damned so-and-so, also thus-and-thus American this-and-that…"
An argument wound up by Tom's fist descending in a cruel and thumping curve on Herr Neumann's nose; by a running together of stewards and passengers; a raising of voices and avenging Teutonic fists; a blowzy Milwaukee ex-cook crying: "Ach! Dieser brutale Amerikaner! Schmeisst den Kerl ins Wasser!" and, finally, Lord Vyvyan coming to the rescue, leveling a few telling blows at the St. Louis brewer who had made a rear-guard attack against the Westerner, and leading the latter away with soothing words and gestures:
"I say, have a drink, old top. Now … No, you won't," as Tom, hearing the jeers of clerk and ex-cook and brewer, turned, eyes puckered, jaw set, fists going like flails, "don't get excited. Odds are against you. Can't lick 'em all together. Lick 'em one by one, presently. Meanwhile, have a drink. Have two drinks. Wow … Steady she goes!"
Tom fell, panting, into a chair in the smoking saloon.
"Hell!" he said. "I'm sorry that I ever gave that fool promise to that German Baron!"
"What German Baron?"
"Von Götz-Wrede!"
"What promise?" the Englishman inquired after a while, rather casually, looking into the amber depths of his whisky-and-soda; and Tom told him.
Carried away, he told him everything that had happened since his partner, Truex, had sent him the telegram with the cheering news that he had struck it rich in the Yankee Doodle Glory. He mentioned the unknown metal, the offer by cable of Johannes Hirschfeld & Co., in Berlin, the Baron's arrival in Spokane, the second offer raised to a million cash, Martin Wedekind's warning, and his promise to visit Berlin.
"I s'pose you are on your way there now?" asked Lord Vyvyan.
"Yes. I'm going to get through with it. I want to get back home just as soon as I can …"
"You'd better," said the Englishman, in a low voice, half to himself; and Tom looked up sharply.
The Englishman was staring straight ahead. His eyes, usually so round and innocent and ingenuous, were keen, with a hard, curling glitter, like sun rays on forged steel. His lips were compressed into a thin line. The whole man seemed different, changed.
The next moment, noticing that Tom was looking at him, he was his old self again. He screwed in his monocle. Something like a mask of silliness descended upon his face.
"I say, old dear," he drawled, "let's have another snifter, what?"