The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 17
IN A corner of the public room of the inn at Michelet there was a small fireplace, and here, after dinner, Laurence Ogle sat alone, huddling within the limited area of heat given forth by two chunks of root hissing mildly among ashes. He was still chilled, and had declined to accompany Mme. Momoro and Hyacinthe upon a walk outdoors to obtain a moonlight view of snowy peaks, although she assured him that it would be magnificent and that the Jungfrau itself could do no better for him. He was cold, morose, and surprised at the strange fluctuation in his feeling for her;—the thought of the morrow's descent filled him with horror. By moonlight, or by any other light, he wished to see no more of mountains than was involved in getting down from these he was now unluckily upon through no fault of his own. He preferred to stay as close as possible to the fire, where he had what there was of it to himself; and, shivering upon the tepid hearth, he satirically addressed to the universe the remark that this was Africa, the land of torrid heat.
At a little after nine o'clock he heard Mme. Momoro return, her rich voice sounding cheerfully from the hallway in conversation with several unmistakably English voices. Evidently, other tourists had been forth for the moonlit view, and she had made acquaintances. One of the English voices, a man's, he had somewhere heard before, he thought, though for the moment he could not identify it. It was a tenor voice of a tinny quality, and easily ran into falsetto. "Most remarkable!" it exclaimed. "Most indeed! Quite an experience for my wife and my secret'ry, Miss Crewe, as well as myself. Quite indeed—Teen-Kah."
At least that was what Ogle understood the English voice to say; and he supposed "Teen-Kah" to be the name of one of the moonlit Djurdjurra snowpeaks the party had just been observing. "Teen-Kah" was probably what the Kabyles called the highest and most outrageous of their mountains. "Teen-Kah sounds like what such people would call a mountain!" he thought sourly; and toward them and all their mountains and Teen-Kah in particular—since it was probably for the view of Teen-Kah that he had been dragged here—he felt the most virulent antipathy. Kabyles! He remembered Macklyn's telling him on the steamer that he ought to see something of the Kabyles; and he wished that he had the poet's address in order to telegraph him that he had indeed seen something of the Kabyles—and enough, too, in one afternoon, thank you!
"Quite, indeed—Teen-Kah," Sir William Broadfeather repeated, as he opened the door for Mme. Momoro to enter the room.
Lovely in dark furs, her cheeks glowing, she came in laughing; but when she saw Ogle's attitude of depressed intimacy with the slowly charring roots, she uttered a little cry of commiseration and crossed the room to him so swiftly that she was beside him before he could rise. She put her hand affectionately upon his shoulder. "My poor dear child!" she exclaimed. "Don't move; you are still frozen. I shall have the porter make a better fire for you." Then, as she went back to the door, she said to Sir William: "One moment, and my son and I will be delightedly at your service."
Sir William, removing a long tweed cape of elderly appearance and disclosing himself in a fuzzy short coat and knickerbockers, stared after her appreciatively. "A charming woman!" he said with warmth. "She tells me you had a bright day of it all the way up. We had a bit of a brush of snow, ourselves, the day we came up. Still, it's quite a jolly little motor climb. Pretty hills."
"Hills?" Ogle said. "Hills?"
"Yes," Sir William returned. "Pretty ones." Then he seemed to feel that decorum permitted him to revert to the more important subject. "A charming woman!" he said again. "A delightful woman, your mother!"
"What!" The playwright gazed at him, open-mouthed. "I beg your pardon. What did you say?"
Sir William smiled upon him almost fondly. "Charming. A most charming woman, your mother."
"Dear me!" Ogle said. "Madame Momoro isn't my mother."
"No? Ah—I understood"
"No, no!" the young man insisted. "Not at all, not at all!"
"No?" Sir William was surprised; but seemed to feel that he must yield to an indubitable authority. "Then I suppose not," he said rather reluctantly. "You see my wife and Miss Crewe and I had gone out for the view, if you understand; and we saw this lady and a young gentleman with her looking at the same view that we were, you see; so we fell into talk quite naturally; but almost directly the young man returned to the inn. The lady spoke of him as her son and as I hadn't got at all a good look at him, when we came back and the lady spoke to you so solicitously, and what with the difference in your ages—though I must say she could be thought as young as yourself; a most remarkable and charming woman, too, I must indeed say!—naturally I assumed you were the youth who had been with her and were consequently her son. I see my mistake: you are of course a young friend of her son's."
"I'm travelling with them," Ogle returned; and he felt that upon his cursory view of General Broadfeather in Algiers he had thought too highly of him. "We are upon a motor journey together."
"Quite so," Sir William said benevolently. "After we had talked for a time with Madame Momoro we made bold to introduce ourselves to her, and she was so good as to mention her name and tell us something of the route she is following. We have been here four days, if you understand, and four days is something a little more than sufficient, you see; but happily for ourselves we are leaving to-morrow for Bougie, as she is. I ventured to express the hope that we might lunch together to-morrow at Yakouren, you see, and share the same table in the evening at Bougie, and indeed, in a general way, rather maintain a liaison between the two automobiles, as it were, from time to time, during the remainder of our expedition to Biskra. Ah—Madame Momoro was so charming as to appear agreeable to the project. In the meantime, as I proposed a few rubbers of bridge for this evening, she was generous enough to say that she and her son would be delighted to encounter my wife and me in that pastime."
Ogle's impression had always been that the English were a conservative people, slow to make friends, and with strangers reserved even to the point of discourtesy. Now he perceived that either this was a great mistake or that General Broadfeather was a supreme exception. Seldom in his life, the American thought, had he met a man who proposed so much intimacy upon so slight an acquaintance.
"You play?" Sir William inquired.
"Bridge? No."
"Ah! One sees that Madame Momoro must play an excellent game, though perhaps her son's youthfulness may not make him so formidable an antagonist. One sees instantly that Madame Momoro would do anything well—anything! In half an hour, if you understand, she told one more of the curious history of these extraordinary Stone Age mountaineers, the Kabyles, than one has been able to learn from all the guide-books. You have found the Kabyles doubly interesting in her company; one would know that without the asking."
Ogle was tempted to give him an honest opinion of the Kabyles, and so strong was his inclination that he might have yielded to it, at least in part, but he had no opportunity. A porter came in just then with better supplies of wood for the fire and behind him appeared Lady Broadfeather, who had replaced her outdoor wraps with a Cashmere shawl. Sir William graciously took it upon himself to present Ogle to her as "Mr. Uh, a young friend of Madame Momoro's son"; then Hyacinthe came in with his mother, bringing cards and counters.
The fire, more generously served under Mme. Momoro's direction, presently became rosy; and after a time Ogle felt warm enough to withdraw to a table against the wall and write a long and urgent letter to the manager of "The Pastoral Scene." He had finished it and was looking absently and somewhat discontentedly at the bridge players, when General Broadfeather, gazing at the cards in his hand and apparently having no thought for anything else in the world, unexpectedly said, "Ah, yes—Teen-Kah!" He seemed unaware that his remark had been pertinent an hour earlier, but not since then; for he repeated it: "Ah, yes—Teen-Kah!" Then he added: "One imagines America must be more and more extraordinary. The evening he was here Teen-Kah talked to me at least two hours about the enormous city he lives in, and the Illinois and Union Paper Company. One felt desperately ignorant never to have heard of either. Most extraordinary person—Teen-Kah!"
Ogle caught the briefest flicker in the world of Mme. Momoro's glance toward himself; and then, as first suspicions faintly sickened him, he understood that "Teen-Kah" was no Kabyle mountain, nor even a Kabyle chieftain, but only General Sir William Broadfeather's pronunciation of the name of a person more objectionable than the worst of the mountains or the wildest of the chieftains. Tinker had just been to Michelet. And after brooding upon this intelligence for only a few moments, Ogle came to the pleasant conclusion that the expedition to which he stood in the somewhat lavish relation of host was virtually a searching-party on the Djurdjurra mountain trail of the president of the Illinois and Union Paper Company.
This was a conclusion involving no little mortification of spirit for the young man who sat so quietly at the writing-table against the wall. Mme. Momoro looked at him several times as he continued to sit there; but he seemed to be engaged in examining the address he had written upon the envelope of his letter. However, after half an hour of this rather meaningless scrutiny, he got up and with a murmured good-night, left the room and went to bed.
In the morning he did not speak to her of what lay so heavily upon his mind; he suffered from it and from his horror of mountains, as they rode down slopes that stupefied him, but he suffered in silence. He had a premonition that she would herself open the subject, though he hoped she wouldn't until they had passed the grisliest part of the descent; and she fulfilled both his hope and his premonition. It was not until they had turned aside, below Fort National, from their road of yesterday, and were upon a saner highway among more amiable hills that she asked him why he was so quiet.
"If you do not talk to me I must think one of two things."
"What two things?"
"Either that you are not well or that you are angry with me."
"Not at all. I am perfectly well."
"Ah, so?" she said. "Why are you angry with me?"
"I'm not angry."
"What then?"
"Nothing!"
She looked at him, considering him thoughtfully; but he did not meet her eyes;—instead, he sat staring moodily before him. "My dear," she said, "you remember something I once told you of the great effect places may have upon people? I told you that Africa might make a change in you—and already it has."
"Not at all."
She laughed sadly. "Yes, you would say not. But you are like the man I told you of. Do you remember? He went upon a high mountain, and when he came down he was not at all the same person he had been before then. It has happened exactly to you. You are not the same person you were yesterday before we came up into the mountains. I feel the difference like a blow in the face, and I know that I am riding beside a stranger. What has happened?"
"Nothing at all. It happens I've never been among mountains before, except on a train, and I find they get on my nerves a little; that's all."
"I am so sorry," she said gently. "Indeed I am sorry. You were cold, too—shivering by that poor little fire last night. I know. I understand. You hate the mountains, you hate the Kabyles—and you hate me!"
"What nonsense!" he said impatiently. "There's nothing whatever the matter."
"My dear! Do you think I can't feel it?" She was silent for a moment, seeming to ponder upon some perplexity; then she laughed as if at an absurd idea intruding upon her. "It could not beNo, you would never be so foolish as that!"
"As what?"
"You could not be cross because these English are to lunch with us at Yakouren?" She looked out through the small window behind her. "Yes; they are following. You could not be so absurd as to object to my consenting to that, could you?"
"Not at all," he returned gloomily. "I don't care who lunches with us at Yakouren—or any other place!" Then he was a little ashamed of himself; for even in his own ears what he had just said had the ring of sulking eighteen. "I mean it isn't your fault that you overwhelmingly fascinated that pompous old General at first sight. Whatever our ages, we succumb to you immediately: we can't help it and you can't help it! So far as I can make out, he intends to attach himself—from now on."
She laughed. "You are a funny young man, and he is a funny old one. I was polite to him. How can one be otherwise? But I shouldn't have given up my evening to play bridge with them, since you don't play. I thought it would amuse Hyacinthe; he had gone to his room to work again upon that tedious report, and so I"
Ogle interrupted her petulantly. "I wish you'd understand that I haven't the slightest objection"
But she, in turn, interrupted him. "What is it that you do object to? I came with you to be really your friend, and friends should make us happier." Then she spoke as if to herself. "What is it—what can it be that I have done?" And when he would have said "Nothing!" again, she checked him, lifting her hand. "Wait! Let me think." She put the tips of her fingers to her forehead, and pressed them there, remaining silent for a moment or two. Then she made a sound of wonder and discovery. "Ah! It could be that!"
"It could be what?"
"Look at me," she said; and when he obeyed he saw little shadowy compressions as of a repressed amusement at the corners of her mouth, and her beautiful clear eyes were brilliant with laughter unsuccessfully hidden. "I know now," she said. "It is because Mr. Tinker and his family have been at Michelet. You are absurd enough to think I wished to go there because of that. You think I hoped they would be there. Confess it."
"Does it need to be called a confession?" Ogle asked, keeping his gloomy eyes steadily upon her. "I think you missed him by about a day. I think he told you he was going there."
At this she laughed aloud, and her laughter was genuine. "How could he tell me where he was going?"
"How could he tell you!" Ogle exclaimed indignantly. "Presumably with his voice."
"He couldn't," she cried, "because he didn't know himself!"
"Do you mean to tell me he didn't know where he was going?"
"Not the least in the world!"
"You expect me to believe it?"
"He didn't," she insisted, still almost overcome by her pleasure in Tinker's unspotted ignorance. "He only knew he'd never heard the names of the places and couldn't pronounce them if he had. His wife had been to Cayzac, and Cayzac had given her a courier who would take them to see what Mr. Tinker calls 'the sights'; but what these sights were, or where, he had no more idea than a stone! So how could he tell me what he didn't know himself? You Americans are the most wonderful people!"
Ogle believed her. "Tinker wouldn't know!" he thought. But her added exclamation nettled him.
"I wish you wouldn't so often call me 'you Americans,'" he said. "There are about one hundred and twenty millions of us, I believe; and really we aren't all exactly alike. I don't think of you and the valet de chambre who brought my hot water this morning as 'you French.' It might rather be more agreeable of you not to say 'you Americans' in a classification of myself with that Tinker."
He spoke the unpleasant name with vehemence, and as he did so, Mme. Momoro, still laughing, called his attention to the roadside. "Look!" she bade him. "Look at those people there upon that rock. Quickly!"
He turned to the window and beheld a dozen Kabyles, men and boys, emerged from a cluster of stone huts and grouped upon a shouldering rock, close by, to observe the passing of the automobile. Frowning, they stared unwinkingly at it and its occupants; and the eyes of all of them had that hard exclusion Ogle was beginning to know so well. Then, as the car came opposite the rock, almost all of them lifted their right hands, palms outward, in a gesture that might have been thought one of greeting, except for the fierce stare that forbade such an interpretation. Ogle already knew the gesture; it was a forefending against the evil fortune that might be an emanation from the Christian outlanders in the automobile.
"These Kabyles are like the rest," he said. "Why did you wish me to look at them?"
"It was to remind you of their eyes," she said gravely. "Your own had the same look a moment ago when you asked me not to speak of you in the same breath with that poor Mr. Tinker."
"Indeed? That's rather odd," Ogle returned; and he smiled faintly. "Another lady told me exactly the same thing in Algiers."
"Another lady?"
"Someone I think you don't know," he said; and did not further satisfy her slight curiosity upon this point.
But, although at the moment he took the coincidence lightly, it annoyed him by remaining in his mind and recurring to him at intervals throughout the morning, so that by the time they stopped for lunch at the Arab village of Yakouren, he had begun to think of it rather poignantly. The provincial American girl and the experienced French woman-of-the-world had both made the same unpleasant personal comment upon his eyes, and while he liked it from neither of them, he bore it better from the "little American."
Then, wondering why the slurring comparison seemed less offensive coming from Olivia Tinker than from Aurélie Momoro, he did Olivia the justice to remember that she had some warrant to resent anybody's instinctively looking like an Arab whenever she herself or her mother or father was in sight. For upon this double testimony he realized that he must indeed admit having worn an Arabian expression at such times, and he found himself thinking a little more tolerantly—almost with favour—of Olivia. She was ill-tempered, rather evidently because of some grief or rebellion within herself; but she had made no pretense of liking him, and at least had not told him he looked like a Kabyle or dragged any senile British generals around after her while she was his guest upon a motor trip. "Besides," he added to himself, as a final explanation of his more severe present hurt, "I never did care for her!"
In this there appeared to be an implication that at some time in the past he had cared for Mme. Momoro.