The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 8
THE fervour of his exclamation made her thoughtful again, and for a time neither of them spoke. They looked out to sea, but not into infinitudes of space, for the sea was visibly finite, and the immense globe of water, curving its long horizontal arc against the encircling sky, was like a great round crystal within a luminous blue shell. Stillness seemed to abide there at the crystal's edge in a frozen serenity; but that this far edge must be in movement, too, was proved by the motion near the travellers' eyes;—the rim of the deck, slowly dipping and rising, alternately disclosed and concealed the westward-running little sparkling seas as they were swept into foam and green whirlpool by the majestic passage of the "Duumvir." This activity in the foreground of what they saw and the delusion of fixity in the distance brought to the mind of Mme. Momoro a comparison that pleased her companion doubly; once for itself and again because it seemed to show that Tinker, as an episode of their conversation, was definitely disposed of and forgotten.
"How still the ocean seems to be, far, far away out there," she said. "Stiller than glass, stiller than ice—oh, still as death! Less alive than death, because it looks as if never, never at all, had any life been there and never, never could be any. One must think that only where our ship is can there be any life, or anything have power to stir. So always when I am on a ship that is solitary on the ocean, I think it is very much like our planet. The world is a great busy thing whirling and rushing on through emptiness; but so lonely because it seem to be the only thing alive in a space of death that has got no end. From the earth at night you look out on the sky and the stars, as we look out now from this ship. The sky and the stars are so quiet, so still—oh, so very still!—so you say, 'The earth is all alone on its journey through all this stillness, this terrible stillness of the sky!' But I think that must be wrong: I think it must be like what we see now. The waves near the ship are all dancing; so they must be dancing yonder where they look so still. There are great fish in the water over there and millions and millions of little water animals you would need the microscope to see. So it must be in the stars and sky when we think our world-ship is the only thing with life and everything else is death. We are wrong, I think. Everything is life and nothing at all is death." She turned to him suddenly. "Do you think so?"
"I do," he answered earnestly, leaning toward her a little. "I do—since you show me how to think so."
She smiled, but glanced away from him. "I am afraid you may mean you think the sea is making me sentimental, Mr. Ogle. Our little world of the ship is coming very much to life since all the people have had their lunch." She added this commonplace to her reverie; but her gaze went back to the sea.
Passengers had come out from the dining salon and the lounge in increasing numbers; and many of them now read in their chairs or wrote letters upon books and magazines supported by their knees. Some of them leaned upon the rail, chatting or scanning the sea in hope of whales or porpoises; others covered themselves with rugs in the long chairs and lapsed into drowsy apathy; but most of them became cheerful itinerants, making the everlasting round of the deck and seeming to take a lively pride in their pedestrianism.
Among these, though they were not equipped with such a pride or any of the common cheerfulness, Ogle took note of two ladies whom he recognized painfully, in his own mind, as Honey and Baby, his table companions. They passed recurrently, making the round again and again, arm-in-arm, with no visible pleasure in their performance. Mrs. Tinker's expression remained no less aggrieved and disapproving than it had been at the lunch table; and the profile of her daughter, as it moved across the playwright's range of vision, between him and the sunny azure of the afternoon sky, showed even an increase of resentfulness, he thought, though the silhouette was undeniably a lovely one, and, except for its sullenness, might have been a very model of piquancy.
But this pretty Miss Libby Tinker was more than sullen; she was highly irritable, as she made evident in passing Ogle and Mme. Momoro for the fourth or fifth time. She switched away to a little distance from her mother, though without interrupting their forward progress—the movement was to rid herself of the fond maternal arm. "For heaven's sake, don't hang onto me!"
Mme. Momoro detached her thoughtful gaze from the sea to look after them. "Your American young ladies are the most independent in the world," she said. "They are always showing us that."
"Some of them," he returned quickly. "But please don't take an ill-mannered provincial for a sample of our American ladies."
"No? It is very puzzling."
"What is?"
"What you have just told me. Because wherever I have gone in America I have been told I must not take any of the people I have noticed as samples. It is very hard to discover America." Then she smiled. "If Mr. Tinker should be going to Africa I do not know what he would get from it, but I would like to see him there."
"You would?" Ogle had thought they were rid of the unpleasant subject, and he was a little nettled by her tendency to revert to it and even dwell upon it. "Why on earth should you?"
"But why should I not?"
He frowned. "Well, frankly, it seems a little grotesque."
"Grotesque?" she said inquiringly; but the word seemed to please her, even to amuse her pleasantly, and she repeated it. "Grotesque. Yes, I think it might be. One might think of him in that way—upon a camel at Touggourt or out in the Desert, for instance. I am sure he would ride upon one and perhaps have his portrait painted as he sat upon one."
"He would!" Ogle said grimly. "That is, he would if he thought he could use it for an advertisement."
"All the same it would be interesting," said Mme. Momoro. "I have a little weakness for the grotesque."
"Have you?" He turned to her earnestly, and found her eyes benevolent. "I didn't mean the man would be anything so distinguished as grotesque. It seems to me he would be only annoying. I meant that something else struck me as grotesque."
"Somesing else besides Mr. Tinker in Africa? What?"
"Well—well, frankly" He hesitated, a little embarrassed, and then decided to be bold enough to go on with his thought. "Frankly, it is rather curious to me that a lady of your type—though I don't mean you belong to a type, Madame Momoro—it is a little strange to find you apparently without the—the prejudices, perhaps I should say, that an American of your class would feel. I hope you'll forgive me for seeming personal; it is only in appearance that I do seem so. I'm not really personal in my meaning. I"
"I understand," she said gravely. "Say what you are thinking."
"Then since you do permit me—well, frankly, I'm puzzled that you're so charitable as to be amused by such people. They belong to an objectionable bourgeoisie with which we ourselves avoid contact. We are never conscious of them unless we travel and then we are but too unhappily made aware of their existence. They swarm in politics and in business; they thrive upon a horrible ceremonial known as the Great American Banquet; they read mystery stories, buy maroon velours furniture, call their advertisements 'literature,' and speak of a tragic drama as a 'show.' They are blissful when a brass band plays 'In the Gloaming.' If it plays 'Suwanee River' they cry. Their religion is to pay for their wives' pews in expensive stone churches full of 'art glass,' and their patriotism is to bellow at a cultivated Chinaman that they are one-hundred-per-cent. Americans. We think they're rather terrible, Madame Momoro."
"You say—'we'?" she said inquiringly.
"I mean simply, Americans of good breeding and some experience of the world," he explained. "What distresses us is to see foreigners getting their idea of America from the Tinkers; and what I meant by 'grotesque'—well, frankly, since you do permit me to say so, it seemed grotesque that you could be so gracious as to find the man amusing instead of awful."
"Why?"
"Why?" he repeated. "Why, because anyone can see at the first glance that you are at the most extreme opposite pole from such a creature. Because you are so preëminently everything that he is not, and he is so vulgarly everything that you are not."
"Ah, but he did not seem to me vulgar," she said. "I cannot understand. Why should you think I am so different?"
"What! Why, I've never seen anyone like you before in my life," he informed her earnestly. "When I came into that room yesterday afternoon and saw you sitting there"
He paused, and she looked at him inquiringly. "Yes? I was sitting—where? You mean when I played bridge in the afternoon perhaps? I think you came in a doorway facing me."
"You remember that I did?" he asked, his earnestness so increasing that his voice became a little husky. "I thought then that you were a woman who saw everything while looking as though you saw nothing."
But she did not take this as a tribute. Her eyes opened wide; and her lips parted, too, in sudden laughter. "I seem so vacant?" she cried. "That is how I look?"
"You look" he began ardently, and then checked himself. "Ah, Madame Momoro, you might not let me tell you how I think you look! You might say I do not know you well enough."
"So soon I should be saying that to you?" she asked gaily; and to his thrilled delight she added, with a quick flash of her eye to his, "Well, there are nine days left!" Then, as she unfolded the rug that had been about her and rose easily to her fine height, she said: "Do you care enough to know me better to walk with me a little while on this eternity of cycles we call a deck?"
"Do I!" the happy young man exclaimed, though it is possible that he would have preferred to go on knowing her better, seated. She was taller than he and he had to look up to her as they walked.
He had also to lengthen his stride and make it a rapid one to keep pace with her, he discovered; for although she appeared to be moving not even briskly, she swept onward with a graceful and tranquil speed that inspired poetic improvisation in one of two astonished young men who emerged from coffee in the lounge, half an hour later.
Great Diana gliding swift—
Oh, swift as light!
Between two close-set clouds"
This was the black-browed Macklyn's spoken thought of her as he and Albert Jones, deciding instantly upon a promenade for themselves, more moderately followed the fast-moving pair. Then the poet became prosaic. "How in the name of a name d'you suppose he's ever managed to meet her?"
"I'd like to know that myself," said the envious Jones. "He's always lucky, that fellow. His new play is running like wildfire and people make a great fuss over him;—everybody tells him seriously he's a 'great artist'; and he's even lucky enough to believe it. Now he's had the prodigious luck to meet this one wonderful-looking woman on board, and he'll probably also be lucky enough to interest her and monopolize her. Anyhow, he'll try to; you'll see. She's got him on the hop to keep up with her, though, and for his sake I hope he's lucky enough not to know he looks rather like her poodle trotting beside her."
Macklyn was fairer. "Oh, no. He's a distinguished-looking person, that Ogle; handsome, too; and you can tell he's 'somebody.' Even if he is a bit shorter and nearly trots as you say, he can afford it, because he's too significant looking to be even a Diana's poodle. Where do you suppose they're heading for now?"
The question was drawn from him by a change of movement on the part of Mme. Momoro and the playwright, who were leaving the promenade deck and ascending an open companionway to regions above. Albert Jones proved himself equal to a shrewd guess.
"They're going up to the smoking-room," he said. "Women smoke anywhere nowadays, of course; but for some inexplicable reason you'd find that many of these elderly American ladies on board object to the sight of one of their sex doing it in the open air. Mme. Momoro wants a cigarette; but she's been in America and she's so completely a woman of the world that she understands this curious prejudice. Shall we go up there, too?"
"We might as well," Macklyn assented. "He'll probably treat us like a couple of outcasts; but we may as well try it out. Anyhow, he can't stop us from looking at her. I think you're an adroit person, by the way, Jones."
"Why?"
"To reason it out why such a woman wouldn't smoke on deck if she cared to. Ogle prides himself on being an analyst—you can tell he does from his play—but I doubt very much if he'd have been able to fathom a delicate bit like that from merely seeing Mme. Momoro bound for the upper deck. I'm sure he'd never have guessed it."
By coincidence, Ogle was just then guessing in a directly opposite direction, and not at all to his own pleasure, though he followed Mme. Momoro with alacrity. As a matter of fact, she had offered him precisely the explanation diagnosed by the astute Mr. Jones—she wished a cigarette, and perhaps some of the American ladies would not be pleased to see a woman smoke on the open deck, though she had herself observed young American and English girls thus freely disporting themselves. But Ogle, in spite of himself, could not avoid an uneasy suspicion that she had become curious to know what the man Tinker was doing. The execrable one seemed to have indeed a grotesque fascination for her; she had mentioned him again, several times, during their flying promenade; and the young playwright was distressed to discover this singular and almost unworthy predilection in a lady who had for him so compelling a charm.
Something more than charm she had for him, in fact; though he did not yet realize the condition into which he was lapsing. He hurried after her swift Diana gliding and his eyes were fixed upon that inscrutable head enhelmed in burnished gold;—thus, already glamoured, he followed her, if not like the leashed poodle fancied by his jealous friend, at least like an ardent servitor of the hunting goddess. And this was only "the third day out"; while nine were left, as she had reminded him.