The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 32
WITH the one diamond point of the first evening star set in a watery green twilight sky behind her, the steamer stood out to sea from the Tunisian shore and pushed her bow toward the bright west. She bore northward too, for she followed the old sea path of the Carthaginian fleets when they sailed for the Golden Shell or to meet the Roman galleys in the great water fighting of the Punic Wars; for this is an old, old harried roadstead, and, embedded in the sea floor, there are statues of gods, encrusted with shells; there are ancient shields and javelin heads and broken swords and dented golden helmets. There was a golden helmet upon the steamer, too, this evening;—at least, that was the interpretation offered by a young Italian returning home after a winter in the Tunisian oases. He pointed out this helmet to the friend who was his travelling companion.
"That beautiful, very long, but very graceful woman standing alone there and looking back at the shore," he said, speaking in French. "She has been inspired to leave her hat in her cabin and step out on deck for a farewell to Africa; and we should be grateful to the inspiration. You don't see how perfectly her head with that smooth hair is a golden helmet? Never in my life have I seen a woman who stood so well poised; and under that crest of old pale gold she is—ah, I have discovered it! She is Diana helmeted! I have these extraordinary thoughts of people, and you never appreciate them. Don't you see she is Diana?"
But his companion was a Scandinavian of the abysmal school, and he shook his head. "I know Diana with a bow and quiver, but not with a helmet. The lady there is just a woman. Probably her husband is an officer on duty in Africa or an adviser of the Bey of Tunis and she is wondering what sort of girl he has begun to flirt with since seeing her off at the dock."
"No. She is thoughtful, a little impassive; but she is radiant."
"Then she is thinking of the man, not her husband, who will meet her when we disembark."
"Not at all," the Italian insisted. "She is not thinking of any man. She is Diana. This is a tremendous thought I am about to have now, Gustav. Listen attentively. Yonder shines the light on that hill of enchantment, Sidi Bousaid, and, below it, there is Carthage. Diana is passing by Moloch. Moloch's fires are out; the god is in the hideous barren dust over yonder that will hardly support a weed. They ground Moloch up as fine as that. But classic beauty survives the barbarian. Classic beauty survives forever, and here is Diana, beautiful and alive, passing over this old sea into which some of Moloch's dust has been blown. Moloch's dust was blown here, and so were some of the bacteria breathed out by Saint Louis dying of the plague close by the ruins of Moloch. Eternal Diana is now being wafted over both the bigot hero saint and the monster. How do you like that for a thought, my friend?"
"Very little. Nothing survives forever except motion; and the most intelligent people are in doubt about even that. European classicism is now as dead stuff as Chinese classicism, and only a few dried-up old men worry about it. There isn't any Diana. Whatever isn't in motion is dead."
The Italian laughed. "Africa hasn't brightened your outlook. As for me, it is a great experience to sail in the same boat with a woman like that one yonder. She isn't in motion, yet she seems more alive than all other people. How still she is! No. She has moved, though only at the lips. She has begun to smile as she looks at the shore. Now tell me the truth, Gustav. Look at that happy, triumphant lady, that gold-helmeted Diana smiling, and dare to tell me the universe is not all bright and glorious!"
"No," said the steadfast Scandinavian. "Everything is dark. It would need more than a tall Parisian lady smiling her good-bye to the coast of Africa to make me believe in a meaning to the universe or in the existence of happiness."
Here the gloomy young gentleman was in a striking coincidental conjunction with a second gloomy young gentleman just then a few leagues inland from the deep blue Carthaginian coast line. What is more, a view of the farewell smile of that same tall lady would have lightened the melancholy of this second dour traveller even less than it lightened that of the first, who was actually looking at her. For, as Aurélie Momoro stood on the high deck, a statue vaguely gilded in the afterglow, Laurence Ogle's landaulet bumped him over the bad roads of the outskirts of Tunis.
She passed down the coast and was borne evenly out to sea, still standing where she was and still smiling as she swept on westward. He, with his anxious face to the Orient, drove miserably into Tunis, carrying his entire fortune, now equal to twenty-eight American dollars, in his pocket.
Of this, he must give Etienne a pourboire, well understood, amounting to not less than twenty dollars; which would leave nothing inspirational for a courageous confrontation of the staff of a fashionable hotel. And the nearer the landaulet drew him to the absolutely necessary interview with Tinker the more was his soul filled with a grovelling anguish.
Etienne stopped the car at a street corner, descended, and opened the door.
"Hôtel, Monsieur?"
"Uh—" Ogle coughed, swallowed, coughed again, and said: "Vous savez—vous savez est-ce-que M. Le Seyeux, le courier de M. Tangkaire, a dit à vous à quel hôtel M. Cayzac avait engagé des appartements pour M. Tangkaire?"
"Oui, oui, Monsieur. Je sais bien que"
"Allons là!" Ogle said desperately. "Allons donc là, Etienne!"
Then, as Etienne returned to his seat and they moved forward again, the imagination of the flushed passenger became active. If his calculations were correct he was only twenty-four hours behind the man he sought; but Mrs. Tinker might not have liked Tunis. Her husband was now in a state of cringing subjugation to that nervous and irritated lady, and she might have insisted upon continuing their journey—with what destination it was useless to guess. For Ogle had no means to follow any farther; and if they had departed he would be left pleasantly installed in what must undoubtedly prove to be the most expensive and cold-hearted hotel in the city. He wondered if the American consul in Tunis ever made personal visits to the jail on behalf of unfortunate compatriots.
But his arrival reassured him immediately upon the one point: Tinker had not left Tunis. Before the great doorway of the hotel, Le Seyeux was making a passionate oration to a magnificent group of men who stood in stately patience to hear him. They were dressed in silken robes, striped like sticks of peppermint candy; in robes striped in green and lemon and lilac and purple; in robes of white cloth and tunics of embroidered saffron; their finger nails were stained with henna and their feet thrust loosely into embroidered slippers; their turbans, nodding together, were like a bed of immense flowers. With them there were two or three dapper men in European clothes and fezzes, and two or three others, hawk-nosed and olive-skinned, in enormous green trousers and embroidered short green jackets—immaculate, scented men whose eyelids were blackened with kohl.
They wished Tinker to buy sapphires and diamonds and emeralds and rubies and ivory and fine rugs and embroideries and brocades and carved amber and carved jade and carved crystal and old silver inlaid with gold, and old copper inlaid with silver, and glass and perfumes and curious bird-cages and ostrich feathers and curved daggers and tasselled spears and round steel shields and cigarette-holders, a foot long, and burnouses and beaten brass and ebony stools inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He had already bought some quantity of all of these things during the day; but the merchants had called, hoping that he would buy more, and the courier was trying to make them understand that at the moment he couldn't, as he was now in the bath; and that after he came out of it he would go to his dinner. He couldn't buy anything while bathing or eating; and in fact he wouldn't do any more buying until early to-morrow morning.
The relief Ogle felt when he saw Le Seyeux was so great that he missed a perception he should have had. In his writing he was fashionably fond of the ironical, and surely he should have seen a fine sample of irony in that very relief of his. All the way from the Sahara to this corner on the Mediterranean he had been pursuing the man from whom he had so often complained in his soul that it was impossible to escape; and now that he had found him he was confident of salvation. Mentally he was not himself, or he must have set his teeth on edge with this engaging paradox. Physically, however, he was himself enough to be quick at blushing, and, as he made his way through the courier's gorgeous audience, the colour of his cheeks was almost that of a red burnous against which he brushed in his passage. Not only merchants waited there, in high hopes of Tinker: mendicants hovered upon the fringes and it was with them he felt that he should have taken his own place.
Probably few sensitive people have shrivelled within themselves more wretchedly than this prospective supplicant did when he thought of the interview before him. He knew that he ought to get it over quickly; but when he considered the direct course of sending a note to Tinker's apartment asking him for a few minutes as soon as possible, his gorge rose and he knew that he couldn't force himself to write such a note. Since he couldn't, he fell back upon opportunism and gave himself a respite until the morrow;—groaning aloud, he postponed the interview until then.
An hour later, as he sat at a small table against the wall in the hotel dining-room, he postponed it permanently. With no other help visible in heaven or earth, he definitely abandoned that appeal to Tinker which was the purpose of his journey, and abandoned himself with it. Common sense was all against such an abandonment; nevertheless, his reasons were creditable.
The many tables in the room were chattered over by embellished cosmopolites piquant in variety;—every racial shade of swarthiness, of ruddiness, of pallor seemed to be displayed as if in some decorous competition for a prize. Richly dressed and handsome golden-skinned ladies dined with covertly wild-eyed sleek brown gentlemen; flamboyant ladies, enamelled dead white and wearing tall ivory combs in polished jet-black hair, dined with sallow little dandies who were smoothed with brilliantine and touched with scent; there were flaxen Danish families, pink frosted English families, dark Latin families, olive and ivory Jewish families, pallid American families, restless with curiosity; and there were two tables of flawless Japanese gentlemen on a mission. Just outside the open glass doors, in the dance-room beyond, an excellent orchestra discoursed the customary subjects from Carmen, La Bohême, Tosca, and Pagliacci; but suddenly, in the midst of "Mi Chiamano Mimi," there was a disconcerting breakdown of that touching melody: strings, brasses, woods, and piano performed gymnastics upon the astonished air for some seconds, then gloriously united themselves again into a vehement jubilation. "Yes, We Have No Bananas" had reached Tunisia at last and was there conceived to be the preferred national anthem of the land from which it sprang. This orchestra played it with supreme dash, yet grandly; everybody looked round; and the maître d'hôtel raced to the wide doorway; but his two chief assistants were already there, bowing ceremoniously. Then the Tinker family came in and were escorted to a table covered with flowers, where all the waiters in that part of the room instantly gathered.
Ogle had expected a plaintive and anxious Tinker, a querulous and injured Mrs. Tinker. On the contrary, the expression of the big, broad-faced man was placidly dominant, the expression of a man who knows himself to be not only the master of many fates, but the head of his own family. As for Mrs. Tinker, she was radiant—and in more ways than one; for her throat, her bosom, and her wrists shot white and coloured fires with every movement she made.
No doubt she wore too many jewels for the occasion; but, as they were all new, it may have been impossible for her to choose between them. When she came thus brilliantly into the spacious room, smiling upon her consort as she walked beside him, the diners stared at her, dazzled;—she was startling even to a banker from the Argentine, who half rose from his chair for a better view of her. But when she had been seated at her table, she was visibly a true and devoted wife; anyone could see that it was her husband's admiration she wanted first of all. She moved her sparkling wrist gracefully under his eyes, pretending to pass things to him; she coquetted tenderly with him, beamed upon him, teased him sweetly. Upon his part, he received her attentions benignly, like a big kind old dog pleased with a kitten's gayeties, yet withal a little absent-minded.
But it was at Olivia that the lonely young man across the room looked most fixedly. She blushed as she came in with her father and mother, seeming to be a little troubled by the attention drawn to their entrance—perhaps dismayed, too, by the tribute of the orchestra; and she kept her eyes downcast, holding them so after she had taken her place at the table. She sat in profile to Laurence; but he could see that she was preoccupied, and when she did look up, he had a disturbing impression that he comprehended a thought of hers. Perhaps it was at first more a disconsolate bit of hope than an impression; but what brought it to him was the manner in which she glanced rather quickly over the room as if she hoped, a little breathlessly, to see someone she knew. The glance did not reach him quite, and she looked down again at her plate;—there seemed to be disappointment, a little sadness, in her preoccupation then.
She had never before looked so charming. Moreover, Laurence had never before thought of her as charming, precisely, though he had thought of her as many things both disagreeable and agreeable; and of late he realized that he had the habit of thinking of her more and more. In the inevitable rebound of his emotions she had begun to have a great effect upon him, and he knew it;—she had been a thorn-bush from which an elusive perfume hinted spring, and of late wistful little petals had blown to him. To-night it was as if the bush were all in bloom—and then drooped because he was not near. For suddenly Laurence knew positively, without knowing how he knew it, that it was indeed himself whom she had hoped to see; that it was for him this deep, eager, gentle glance had gone quickly over the room; and he knew it was because she thought he had not come that she was sorrowful. Then, when he knew this, he knew that he could never ask her father to lend him any money.
He had finished his dinner; but for a time he sat staring at the depths of his despair, which appeared to be in the finger-bowl on the table before him. He made no decision; he had no control in the matter, which had thus been decided for him; and he understood that being unable to ask Olivia's father for money did not enable a stranded bankrupt to ask for Olivia: he had now no chance for either. He was in some measure an artist, at times almost supernaturally shrewd, but not usually practical, and, in this stress, wholly lacking the resourcefulness of an ordinary man of affairs. With their situations exchanged, Tinker would have felt no distress whatever;—he would have been admirably sanguine of securing both the girl and the money; and indeed he would have had both; but Tinker's imagination was that of the builder of roads and mover of mountains.
The imagination of the playwright, finer and in its delicacy infinitely feebler, presented him with nothing whatever except a tragic view of his own helplessness; and he found nothing to do except, in his shame, to keep out of Olivia's way. If she looked for him again she might turn her head far enough in his direction to see him; and as soon as he thought of this possibility he got up and went out of the room. He was near the doorway and no one noticed him.
The triumphal struttings of the Toreador, flung out with gusto by the orchestra, accompanied him as he crossed the vacant dancing-floor of the room beyond; and he thought that he would ever afterward hate that song—if indeed there were any "afterward" for him. He could see none;—what vision of his future he had was limited to a vague, soul-shrivelling picture of himself being manhandled by hotel porters hustling him to the street; and in this passage across the shining floor on his way to the entrance hall, where he meant to take the elevator and go to his own room, he touched the bottom of his misery.
But, having touched bottom, there was only one direction in which he could move; and as the ancient salvation of souls at the bottom is the fact that motion is the one perpetual necessity of all things, then upward he must go, willy-nilly. In that happy direction, therefore, he was going, though he had no hope or thought of it when he walked out into the hallway with the Toreador prancing so hatefully behind him.
In truth, the gods of comedy who had ridden the storm out of the too frolicsome northeastern seas and had espied him, happy, self-content, and newly prosperous, on that noble ship, the "Duumvir", took now a surfeit of him. They had pursued him furiously, allowing him only such moments of peaceful fatuousness between their harryings as should make his anguishes the more pungent and their mirth the keener; but, having had their fill of him at last, when even they could drive his spirit no lower than its lowest, they gave him over to mercy and departed from him for this while with the same abruptness of their pounce upon him out of the heart of the northeaster. The malicious beating of their pinions should have been heard down the coast of Barbary and the long reaches of the Mediterranean, that night, as they rode the darkness back to the Herculean Pillars and onward to their home eyrie over the top of the winds. For from there, assured of their gratification, they would watch the vessels puffing merrily out of New York Harbour and select new comedians to writhe and grimace for their antic humour.
The young man in despair at the bottom was saved by an agency he despised, one that within the space of a youth's life bears greater weight in the world than is borne by stupendous philosophies developed through the centuries: this mighty force, at least touching the affairs of almost all men in one way or another, became now the complete salvation of Laurence Ogle. Lehren had been shrewd enough to guess something of the effect the "The Pastoral Scene's" withdrawal might have upon its author, for the manager had a long and sometimes severe experience of people who buoyantly conceived as perpetual the temporary theatrical incomes passed to them through his office. Therefore, while he feared that the disappointing career of "The Pastoral Scene" might bring about an extreme embarrassment upon foreign shores, he had written of the matter with great caution. Even though Lehren had a hope of reimbursing himself for his own loss and of extricating the playwright from what might be a predicament, he did not think it wise to extend this hope to Laurence. Because of his severe experience he feared that the playwright might cable him requesting an advance in cash to be repaid out of the hope; and the negotiations with the moving-picture corporation had not yet reached a conclusion.
A few days after his cautious letter, however, the matter was set down and made fast upon legal paper; money was passed, and half of it, except for a slight deduction, belonged by contract to the author of the play. Lehren's second letter had been forwarded by rail from Biskra, and one of the concierge's assistants in the hotel at Tunis handed it to a tragic-looking, dark and smallish, but handsome young gentleman with "burning eyes" indeed, as he was just stepping into the elevator.
Laurence looked at it broodingly, and, when he reached his room he tossed the missive upon his dressing-table, accompanying this action with a slight hissing noise from his lips. Then he sat down in a chair, took his head in his hands and rubbed his hair into a tumult of disorder, renewing this desperate massage at intervals during the next half hour. Finally, with the thought in his mind that the last accounting for "The Pastoral Scene" could not possibly make him more unhappy than he was—since nothing could—he opened the envelope. It contained the promised account, a letter from Lehren and a blue slip of paper—a draft readily negotiable at the office of M. Cayzac's agency in Tunis.
Laurence did not read the letter or examine the account;—he stared and stared at the draft, reading it over and over with slowly dispersing incredulity: it was for four thousand, eight hundred and twelve dollars and seventy-one cents. Then, after a tremulous glance at the letter, he understood what had happened. He had always thought and spoken with detestation of moving pictures and of their effect upon the populace and upon "art" and "literature"; they were indeed and repulsively for "the many," and his conviction of their vulgarity was a profound one.
Now he sat trembling, looking at Lehren's draft; and his eyes grew bright and watery. "Thank God for the movies!" he whispered brokenly.
A few moments later he jumped up and looked at the happy and distracted person in the mirror over his dressing-table. "You better brush your hair, you little fool!" he said, omitting the "dear" Mme. Momoro had used when she called him that.
When he came downstairs presently, a new man, the tables about the central dancing space in the large room beyond the hallway were filled with diners sipping coffee and cordials while the orchestra thrillingly crooned an Argentine tango. From the doorway he saw where Olivia sat with her dominant big father and glittering mother to watch the intermittently gliding and pausing couples; and in the daughter's look there was a pathetic blankness;—it was the look of a girl hurt by some cruel omission.
When he came near her and she saw him, there was a change in her at first pathetically eloquent, then altogether lovely; one that showed how dangerous it is for a girl to be too personal (even abusively) in her contact with a young man easily mistaken by other girls for a Spanish poet. She sank a little into her chair; she seemed stricken and about to weep; then instantly she straightened;—she was all of a rosy and glowing gayety.
"Well, I should say so!" she answered, when he asked her if she would dance with him.