The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 12
OUR human nature has many humorous ways to betray us, loving to cajole our eyes from knowing what they see, and leading us (especially when we travel) to mistake what is within us for a quality of our surroundings. So it was with Mr. Laurence Ogle's disappointment in the picturesque town of Gibraltar: he believed that he saw the place; but what he saw was a discoloration of it worked by his own mood. Macklyn and Albert Jones were to depart at once for Seville; Tinker certainly would be unable to escape from his family duties; and the playwright had hoped for a beautiful day ashore with Mme. Momoro alone, or, at the worst, with the quiet and discreet young Hyacinthe as a chaperon. Moreover, she had encouraged him in this hope, giving him a deep quick look to go with the rest of the encouragement, a look of some gravity. "We could drive to Algeciras," she suggested, and asked gently: "You would be willing to take me into Spain?"
"Willing!" he said. "Ah, very, very far into Spain!" He told her he had always owned many bright castles there; that since he had met her he was engaged upon a new one much brighter than the old; and he was fortunate enough not to suspect that something of the kind might have been said to her before. She had been several times to Gibraltar.
This was the most of his good fortune, however, for while he waited with her, as the passengers were descending to the tender to be taken ashore, an elderly lady appeared upon deck, with her bandaged ear concealed by a mourning veil. Accompanying her were her sister and the young Hyacinthe in solicitous attendance; and at once, upon sight of this group, Mme. Momoro informed the crestfallen playwright that her plans to visit his Spanish castle were cancelled.
"But if those ladies intend to go ashore and look about, surely your son"
"No, no, no!" she said quickly;—she seemed to be a little shocked by the suggestion. "Mademoiselle Daurel and her sister, Mademoiselle Lucie, are our dearest friends; they are my hostesses in Algiers. We are travelling with them; we went to America with them. They are very nervous and not strong; they depend greatly upon me. I am sorry, but I must go." He had not seen her so serious, and as she hurried away from him she gave the impression of a person who has been urged to do a frivolous thing at the sacrifice of an important one. So his new castle came down about his ears, and he went ashore carrying the ruins with him.
He said a gloomy good-bye to the painter and the poet among a mildly clamorous crowd of guides, passengers, pedlars, and drivers on the pier. Albert Jones was going to Seville "for a bit of painting perhaps," he said; Macklyn would accompany him there and later across to Florence, where they would take an apartment or possibly a villa together. Ogle promised to find them if he came to Italy after his African adventure, and also to send them news of himself and of Mme. Momoro when he reached Algiers.
Then, unexpectedly rather regretful, he watched them as they drove away, rattling and rocking in an absurd little surrey with a gayly shabby fringed top, a gayer and shabbier driver, fringed himself at the elbows, and a feather-plumed, aged little horse spasmodically brisk in a gesture of departure. When they were out of sight Ogle bethought him of an omission—his friends had forgotten to leave an address where they might be reached by letter. However, he was not inconsolable; he hoped Algiers would offer him things more interesting to do than writing letters.
Alone after that, he strolled up into the town to make a dull day for himself. Everywhere and delighted with everything were the "Duumvir's" passengers; and he could go nowhere but to be annoyed by their exclamations of discovery. They discovered the shops, the tea-rooms, the strange, pleasant colours of buildings and shutters, the incomparable sleekness of the horses held in waiting for British officers outside a club, the robed Moors from Tangiers across the way, fine old sherry, lovely gardens, and the eloquent drowsy little graveyard in the sunshine below the old town gates. Here, among the epitaphs, Ogle would have lingered, for he thought the inscriptions touching, and saw that something of England's history was written there; but he fled from an invasion by the families of Mr. Wackstle and the worsted magnate.
Most of his fellow-travellers, he observed, were now upon a footing of cheerful acquaintance with one another; in fact, he was the only person of the whole ship's company who went about Gibraltar alone, hailing none of his fellows and being hailed by none. This was his own choice; yet he could almost have wished that nature had made him a little less exclusive. He had always been exclusive; he had been so in college and in the career he was making for himself now in New York; but his exclusiveness, absorbed in boyhood from his lonely and satirical father, had no ordinary snobbishness in it. The assistant professor had despised "good family" almost as much as he had despised riches; and he had taught his son that the only aristocracy was one of culture—and there were only a few members, anywhere, apparently.
Laurence had never been able to look upon people generally as his fellow-men. On the contrary, he saw almost all of them as caricatures of what he felt they should have been; and since he by no means looked upon himself as a caricature, he naturally could not meet many of them upon a congenial basis of equality. Sensitive and lacking a strong consciousness of mortal fellowship, he found contact with the great majority disagreeable; almost invariably they offended some delicate prejudice of his; and, as he thought of them, they had only a surface existence, never going "deeply into life," as he did. There was a somewhat fashionable phrase he used both in speaking of people and in thinking of them, a complete definition forbidding all further research; and he thought nothing of applying it to a whole shipload of human beings, or, for that matter, to all the inhabitants of broad areas in his own country. Indeed it is probable that he had called more people "quite impossible" than had all of his most fastidious and talented contemporaries put together.
He belonged to a few clubs; but was exclusive within them; he went to dinners where he was a lion among ladies, as he was, too, at tea in the afternoon sometimes; and his acquaintance was principally with people who held exclusive views of literature and the arts—the only subjects upon which views were of real importance, they felt—but even among these exclusives he was exclusive. In his work in the theatre he had made not a single warm friend among the managers and actors, and only a few among the actresses. These people were his instruments and necessarily he must work with them; but he seldom became at all intimate with them. As a matter of fact, Albert Jones was the most intimate friend he had and the two were not very closely intimate, at that. Moreover, since his father's death his nearest relatives were some cousins in Rhode Island whom he had never seen; and after he had been nearly run down by an automobile in Gibraltar, he became a little more gloomy when he thought that if he had been killed, those unknown cousins would have inherited the royalties from "The Pastoral Scene." Probably the Rhode Island cousins and the manager of his play would have been the only people much interested; though no doubt the manager would get all the "publicity" he possibly could out of wide-spread obituaries.
Thus this lonely young man had all day grown more and more disgruntled with Gibraltar, with life, and almost with himself; and he was not the less so because the automobile that spared him by a hand's breadth contained the Tinker family returning from an excursion into Spain as far as Algeciras. Tinker shouted jovially, waving in greeting a spiked stick decorated with gay ribbons and designed for the bedevilment of bulls. Also, he wore a bull-fighter's hat, purchased simultaneously at the bull-ring and so strikingly incongruous upon his Midland head, that Ogle spitefully hoped Mme. Momoro would see him in it. She did, as it happened, only a moment later and under the playwright's eye; for she came by, just then, in one of the gay, shabby little surreys, with Mlle. Daurel beside her and her son and Mlle. Lucie Daurel in another surrey behind them.
Mme. Momoro gravely and slightly inclined her head to the Tinker automobile, not as if in a personal greeting, but in the manner of a lady whose courtesy extends itself to acknowledge the presence of people recognizable as fellow-travellers. Then, to Ogle's chilled surprise, this same distant formality was visible the next moment in her return of his own salutation. Usually she greeted him with a brightening vivid recognition that seemed to say, "You, at last! How charming!" Mlle. Daurel, sitting beside her, austere, dryly pallid, and infinitely remote, had such a frigidity of look as he had never seen upon the frostiest of American women; she suggested the snow on a faraway mountain peak, never thawed and very old. And Mme. Momoro seemed to have caught from her a little of this icy remoteness and to have become again the wholly impassive statue she was upon his first sight of her in the smoking-room.
He went to brood upon this in a tea-room; then returned in a launch to the "Duumvir," where he found a sprightly show of embroidered Spanish shawls enlivening one side of the promenade deck and many passengers chaffering with the swarthy merchants in the sunset. Other swarthy merchants, rocking up and down in rowboats on the gilded sea far below, offered baskets of fruit and branches of oranges; and the small globes, brilliant among green leaves, constantly ascended from sea to deck, for they were pulled up on long strings by the purchasers. Both sets of merchants should have appreciated the magnificence of Tinker, who was still wearing his enormous Spanish hat and bought shawls and oranges, the one as readily as the other. Of the shawls he bought the four with the longest fringe, this appearing to be his standard, though they were also the most splendid in colour—"gaudiest" was Ogle's word, as he stood by, morbidly observing. Mrs. Tinker selected one of the four for herself, and the other three were for the daughter, as Tinker made known; he could be heard loudly instructing a steward to convey them to her in her cabin.
"Tell her they're from her old man," he called after him; and then, going to the rail, he began to shout, "Polly voo frossy" and "Nix ferstay" at the fruit sellers, and to shower down coins among them, laughing uproariously as they scrambled to catch the money. And as the baskets soared upward to the steerage passengers for whom he bought the fruit, he directed the distribution, not moving from where he stood and bellowing over all the clamour of the recipients and of the boat pedlars. "Hay, there! That feller in the velveteen pants didn't get any! Hay! You! Don Gonzabo! You with the whiskers! Send up that basket to the feller in the velveteen pants! You sabby? Hay, there! You no speakee? Oh, you do! Three cheers for Christopher Columbus!"
Everybody was laughing at him; and Ogle turned away, ashamed that an American should be making a spectacle of himself before these foreigners. Mme. Momoro was one of them, though she did not appear to be observing the spectacle, nor indeed to be conscious of either Tinker or himself. She stood beside Mlle. Lucie Daurel, who had not the frosty remoteness of her older sister, but showed an almost childlike eagerness in testing the effect of a darkly gorgeous green and black shawl upon her friend. The effect was dashing, unquestionably;—wrapped in this shawl the long and graceful Frenchwoman became at once a Spanish portrait, superb in colour and contour against the blue mountains that loomed beyond the vessel's rail. Ogle wished to tell her so; but the distance she had put between them when she bowed to him so coldly was now emphasized by her apparently complete unconsciousness that he stood near her. He had the painful impression that she did not wish him to speak to her.
Mlle. Daurel bought the shawl, and that evening in the lounge it was draped upon the back of Mme. Momoro's chair as she sat at bridge with her son and the two sisters. But by this time the "Duumvir" was again at sea, steaming deeper into the Mediterranean under warm stars, with the lights of Spain behind her; and Ogle was becoming unhappily confirmed in his impression that the amazing lady's attitude toward him was not what it had been no longer ago than this same day's morning.
He sat near her, with coffee upon a little table before him; and as he almost faced her his eyes were upon her over his cup whenever he brought it to his lips—and at many other times, too—but never to meet her own; for she gave him not a glance, nor seemed to know that he was in the world. Her whole consciousness appeared to be engrossed with the cards and with a constant solicitude for the sisters Daurel. The elder still wore her costume of the afternoon with the mourning veil pushed back, and once, when she put her hand to her ear under the veil as if in momentary uneasiness, Mme. Momoro quickly took her other hand in both of her own and looked at her with the glowing intensity of one who takes upon herself the pain of a friend and so banishes it. At another time, when Mlle. Lucie shivered after the opening of a door to the deck, Mme. Momoro wrapped her instantly in the new shawl; and, again, when the older sister found something amiss with the score, which was painstakingly kept by Hyacinthe in all their games, his mother spoke to him in French with a severity of tone that made him blush. But never once did she glance toward the lonely young man, who all the while watched her covertly and with an ever-deepening pessimism.
His fortune was no better the next day;—when she walked the deck it was at a slow pace, suiting her fine stride to the deliberate movements of one of the sisters Daurel; if she sat in her chair it was with one of them, or both, at her side; and in the evening the four played their eternal game until midnight; then she accompanied them on their way below and did not return. The day after that, the last day of his voyage, she was no kinder: he was as effectively separated from her as if she had been upon another boat with all the depth of the Mediterranean between them; and his consequent suffering surprised him, it was so sharp. Two weeks earlier he could not have thought it possible that he would this soon be going about with something like an actual aching in his chest because a Frenchwoman, heretofore unknown in his life, preferred the society of her son and two elderly compatriots to his own.
Then when "the last night out" had come—that night so unbelievable during his early physical sufferings—and when she was again inaccessible at the bridge table, he began to feel desperate. He wrote a note consisting of the fevered inquiry, "What have I done?" and directed a steward to place it under her cabin door. After that he went out on deck and walked violently.
His pace and the vigour of it were such, indeed, that when he rounded the after corner of the ship's house and collided with a lady who was coming almost as rapidly from the opposite direction, he struck her so shrewdly that she staggered backward, and was in the act of falling when he sprang forward and caught her in his arms as the only means of keeping her upon her feet. It was Olivia Tinker.
"Let me go!" she cried instantly, even before she regained her balance.
"Certainly!" he said indignantly. "I beg your pardon." And he stood away from her. "I was only trying to keep you from falling."
"Good heavens, you don't need to explain that!" she exclaimed. "I didn't suppose you" She stopped, apparently because of embarrassment.
He was embarrassed, too, and not pleased that he should be so on account of little Miss Tinker. She was of his own height; but he thought of her as "little Miss Tinker" and thus she had sometimes been mentioned in his talks with Albert Jones and Macklyn. It angered him with himself that his savoir faire could be impaired by little Miss Tinker's first implying that he had caught her in his arms because he wished to, and then reproaching him for explaining that his motive was utilitarian.
"Good-night," he said stiffly; then lifted his cap and went on; but he had not gone far when he began to fear he had been rude to her; and the thought of her lovely, unhappy young face touched him. He knew her opinion of him, for he had heard her express it to her mother; but to-night, in his own unhappiness, he discovered that he forgave her for it. Something in this unhappiness of his—for he perceived that his feeling now amounted to unhappiness—made him think that another unhappy person would be congenial to him; and, as he came round the forward promenade deck and met her again, he stopped her.
"Miss Tinker, would you care to go in and dance?"
She looked at him for a moment, and then brusquely asked him a strange question: "What for?"
"I beg your pardon," he said, bowed, and would have gone on; but she detained him.
"I meant I didn't care for anybody to be polite to me," she explained, her voice still ungracious. "If you'd like me to dance with you because you want to dance and don't know anybody else to ask, I will."
"I think I could know other people to ask, if I wished to," he said. "I asked you because I"
She interrupted him. "All right; it doesn't matter. Why should anybody ever bother to explain anything? Besides, I like your dancing." They were just outside the Palm Garden door, and she dropped her wrap on a deck chair as she spoke; he opened the door for her; she went in quickly and turned with her hands outstretched to him.
They danced through four intervals of music; and though neither of them had more to say to the other than when he had danced with her before, her eyes were not so continuously downcast as they had been on that previous occasion; she looked at him several times with a clear, deliberate gaze in which her sullenness always smouldered; and although he knew this smouldering had nothing to do with him, her eyes disturbed him, as they always had disturbed him when he encountered their full revelation. She had no right, he felt, to look as though she understood him—and understood him contemptuously at that—when manifestly she could not, and knew nothing whatever about him. She did not even know that he was a playwright and in his own way—so far from her little way—a celebrity. Nevertheless, he would have gone on dancing much longer with her when she stopped; for he had never danced with anyone who made him feel so much inclined to dance forever.
"No," she said, when he asked her to wait for the music to begin again. "That's all."
Then, not looking to see if he followed, she went out to where she had left her wrap. He reached it first; put it about her shoulders; she said "Thank you," and without turning her head walked a few steps away from him as if to leave him definitely. But she stopped suddenly, and came back to him.
"I think I'll say something to you," she said. "I'll never see you again, because this is the last night; and I'd like to have it off my mind. It's about my manners on this trip. You know what I mean because you've had a sample of them at the table twice a day, and what I want you to understand is that they're my own responsibility and not my mother's and father's. They brought me up to be decent to everybody, and it's been the fault of nothing but my own beastly state of mind that I've behaved as I have on this voyage. It's my fault, not theirs; I want you to understand. I'm telling you this because I'll be able to feel afterwards that at least I made some explanation of my own rotten table manners and have that advantage over you, because though yours have been as bad as mine, you haven't dreamed of making any such explanation and never would. And I oughtn't to go without telling you that it's only I who've realized that your manners are as bad as mine. My mother and father haven't understood; they just thought you didn't know anything."
With that, she looked him full in the eyes once more. "Good-bye," she said, not ungently; and left him.
Angry and a little dazed, he stared after her, regretting that his sympathetic quest for solace in another unhappy person's society had been so ill-advised. Yet there was something curiously piquant in the most insulting thing she had said: "They just thought you didn't know anything." The girl herself, then, thought he did know something; but she evidently believed that it was better to know nothing than to have manners as bad as her own. "Silly!" he said; but was not quite sure that this settled anything.
He descended frowning to his cabin, there to discover something that immediately banished both his irritation and the erratic Miss Olivia Tinker from his mind. Upon his desk there lay a thin blue envelope addressed to him, and on the single sheet of paper inside it he found written in a delicate hand:
You will understand? Ah, you will be kind! Write to me at Villa Colline des Roses, Algiers.
Aurélie de St. D. M.
He understood nothing except that an enchantment seemed to be just before him; and his lightened heart would not let him sleep until near dawn.