Part 6

“I suppose she wasn’t very well off,” I began. “None of us were, of course. And I suppose she must have had some German philosophy in her system. Her people came from Halle. So she set about solving the problem of dress. She said no woman could begin to dress who hadn’t at least ten thousand a year to do it on. For other women, then, the only thing was a sort of uniform--like postmen, or peasants. She really would have liked the costume of Thuringian village girls, she said, but was afraid it might be too conspicuous for New York. She therefore evolved a uniform of her own--always the same thing for the same time of day.”

“Very sensible, too,” put in Nick.

“The real beauty of it, though, was its compactness. She only kept three or four things going, and they were all”--I caught my breath--“reversible.”

“Reversible! How do you mean reversible?”

“How do I mean reversible? I mean reversible. I remember a certain brown skirt in which I oftenest saw her. When Zephine went to a party, Nicholas, what did Zephine do? Zephine turned her brown skirt inside out, Nicholas, and then it suffered a sea-change to a pea-green rich and strange, Nicholas, with brown leather bindings and big silver buttons--for _Schönheit’s_ sake.”

The madness began to flicker again within me. But Nick, out of the perversity of his heart, refused me the shadow of a smile.

“What else had Zephine?” queried he.

“What else had Zephine?” echoed I, nettled at Nick’s gravity. “Let me see. Zephine had else a creation of écru silk, which in conjunction with the pea-green skirt and the leather bindings and the silver buttons completed her effect of splendour for varnishing days and studio teas. But minus the pea-green skirt it might be a morning dress, or a painting apron, or a dust cloak, or--who knows, Nicholas?--perchance a robe of night.”

Nick looked at me and I looked at Nick.

“Do I shock you, my Nicholas? Nicholas mine, be not shocked. You know the morals of Greenwich Village, how milk-mild they are, as compared to its scarlet conversation. And Zephine never made any bones about the secrets of her toilet. She had, for instance, a----No, Nick; I cannot pronounce it. You gaze at me too solemnly, and we are surrounded by too many of what you would call the best people in New York. Very likely you’re right. It is not given me to read their hearts. But it is given me to inform you that Zephine also had a shiny grey skirt of state, of super-state, which by means of unimaginable buttonings, hookings, loopings, and heaven knows what, transformed itself at will into a blouse or an opera cloak. And she had only one hat, which in summer was a sailor and in winter a sort of Turk’s turban. The other girls said she was always urging them to go and do likewise.”

I giggled to myself at the remembrance of it. But as for Nick, he obstinately continued to frown upon me like a Spanish inquisitor.

“Look here,” he pronounced at last. “I don’t know whether you’re drawing on the recollections of an extremely lurid past, or whether you’re being visited by the divine afflatus. But it strikes me that you’re more amused than anyone else. It also strikes me that this is a pretty sleazy line of stuff for one man to pull or another to listen to.”

With which Zephine dropped abruptly from our conversation.

II

Having done his duty by the arts and crafts of his country, Nick was suddenly moved, on that eve of his departure, to go miles uptown--to Washington Bridge. He has rather an eye, Nick. I had forgotten how the tall arches of High Bridge stand up against the bright water and smoking gold of a Harlem sunset. It was better than the Academy, if I do so say who am a slave of the brush. And it inspired us to pick up a dinner somewhere in the neighborhood.

I don’t know whether it was because the place was German or whether it was that the proprietor produced for Nick such a Moselle as you didn’t come across every day even in that faraway year. But as we sipped the last of it and debated how we might worthily spend our last evening on our native shore, Nick casually proposed:

“Let’s go and see Zephine.”

I am not usually the one to lag behind. But Nick had refused, with opprobrious implications, to play with me, and it seemed good to me to refuse to play with Nick.

“Come on, Herb,” he persisted. “Don’t be a spotted zebra. Let’s go find Zephine.” And he called for the bill.

“How on earth do you propose to find Zephine at this time of day--and we sailing for Norway at ten to-morrow morning?”

“Where do you think I was born--Island Pond?” inquired Nick suavely. “There’s a telephone book in front of your nose, and a directory beside it. In addition to which I might remind you that her address was in the catalogue.”

“What was it?” I asked. I knew in my reluctant soul that if Nick had made up his mind there was no use sulking.

“O, Corlear’s Hook some place,” answered Nick, charming the heart of an anxious-looking waiter--if the heart may be charmed by that which is put into the hand.

“Corlear’s Hook!” I exclaimed. “She’s moved then, though it sounds enough like Zephine. But it’s some way from Washington Bridge.”

Nick didn’t mind, however. Neither the taxi man who presently undertook to jounce us from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. And I am happy to add that we ran over no one on the way, though we did run out of gasoline. Incidentally Nick soothed my ruffled feelings by making me tell him about Zephine all over again. I fancied, though, it was really the Corlear’s Hook that caught him. He made me promise that I would say nothing to Zephine about the picture.

At Corlear’s Hook there was no Zephine. It wasn’t that she was dining out, or anything so simple as that. She had gone up to paint at Fort Lee, in a farmhouse whose whereabouts the janitor endeavored to make plain to us in the accent of Warsaw. To Fort Lee we accordingly proceeded, to the vast delight of the taxi man. Luckily it was a moonlight night, or we never would have succeeded in tracking Zephine to her farmhouse. As it was, we nearly tumbled off the Palisades a dozen times.

I have no idea what time of night it was when we finally floundered through an orchard to Zephine’s dark and silent lair. I bet Nick she wouldn’t be in it. Nick bet me she would. She was--fast asleep in bed. But we routed her out, and she parleyed with us through a window while we kicked our heels on the edge of the piazza. It was rather like the third act of “Faust”--except that Zephine was a contralto. She had a pleasant gurgle in her voice that I had forgotten. She also had the proper yellow braid over her shoulder, if not two of them. And the whole place was operatic with apple blossoms and moonlight.

Many ladies might have betrayed a certain surprise at receiving a visit at an unknown hour of the night, in a New Jersey orchard, from a New York taxicab and two men of whom they had never seen one before in their life. Not so Zephine. She accepted it as perfectly natural that I, who had not seen her for longer than either of us could remember, should feel irresistibly impelled to bid her farewell before sailing for Norway, and that Nick, whose name she had apparently never heard, should pay this somewhat unusual tribute to a lady whose work he had happened to admire.

In token of his admiration Nick invited her to join us in a little drive--at this I heard a snicker from the direction of the taxi--and help us pick up an ice on the way. Zephine judicially considered the matter, stroking one of her Marguerite’s braids, but eventually opined that she would better not. She had models coming at sunrise, and she couldn’t paint if she were sleepy.

“O!” sighed Nick in evident disappointment. “Couldn’t you put your models off? What I really hoped was that you would get a little acquainted with us, or with me, and consent to go to Norway too.”

That was what I heard Nick Marler say, in Zephine’s moonlit orchard, swinging his long legs off her rickety little piazza! And I listened for her answer with my mouth open. For I knew she was perfectly capable of taking Nick at his word. Her deep gurgle however, reassured me.

“That is awfully nice of you, Mr. Marler. If I had sold my picture in the Academy, I might. But as it is, I’m afraid Norway is not for me.”

“O, I didn’t mean that!” cried Nick, secretly giving me an infernal pinch of reminder. “I do hope you won’t think me rude, or anything like that. But Herb here is going as my guest, to give me his expert opinion on some old enamels we have an idea of hunting up, and we’d be ever so pleased if you’d be good enough to come along too and make one of the jury.”

III

She went!

Reader, whom I feel it unworthy to cajole by the use of any epithet so simple or so designing as gentle,--reader, I who went too, I who heard, who saw, and who now narrate, do not profess to have the charcoal sketch of a notion how we really embarked on our fantastic adventure. I therefore feel somewhat hopeless of communicating it to you, or of convincing you that you have not unwittingly been seduced into starting a story unfit for ladylike or gentlemanly ears. To charge it to the account of the Moselle, however, is what I refuse. I can only propound the thesis that the geography of “this goodly promontory,” the unstable planet whereon we spin, has as yet been imperfectly mapped out. I am unable, at all events, to accept the popular theory that its surface face is divided between the World and the Half World. Even you, epithetless reader, have heard of a tract lying between the two, and overlapping them both, vaguely designated as Bohemia. But my own mild explorations have convinced me that Bohemia is a name not comprehensive enough for a certain dark intervening continent of which are denizens my very good friends Nick and Zephine. And I hereby invite you, if not to comprehend their case, at least in a spirit of tolerance to consider the same.

Do not expect me, therefore, to fill up valuable space by assuring you in so many words of Zephine’s epic simplicity, or of Nick’s romantic freedom to do whatever came into his head. He told me afterward that when he saw our friend and her braids and the apple blossoms and everything, he just had to find out whether I had been lying about her; and if she hadn’t agreed to go with us he would have cancelled our passage.

As a matter of fact, he did. Not many hours after our return from Fort Lee he sent me off by myself to get Zephine. “And by the way” he added, just as I was starting, “come to the Cunard pier.”

“What pier?” demanded I in astonishment.

“The Cunard,” he repeated. “We shall get over quicker by the _Pactolia_. And it may amuse Zephine more.”

I, who am of the submerged tenth, had been dying to cross by the latest flier. But Nick, who won’t--or who wouldn’t--have a yacht because it’s duller and less comfortable, has a passion for discovering boats that nobody ever heard of, by which queer people take forever to get to out of the way ports. He had therefore engaged passage on a line that sails to Christiania--when it doesn’t hit some outlying portion of Scotland and go down with all on board. It was on the tip of my conventional tongue to object that we were too late to get anything by the Cunard or any other line than our own, three hours before the ship was to sail, in the migrating season. I have travelled with Nick before, however. He is not like me, credulous enough to believe steamer agents and hotel clerks and sleeping car men when they solemnly swear they haven’t a berth left. He always insists, on some dark theory that what they really prefer is not to sell out, that they’ve got something up their sleeve. And heaven has gifted him with the art of getting it down.

And so it was on this memorable occasion. Zephine and I arrived at the foot of Fourteenth Street at three minutes to ten, purple and panting but still on speaking terms. For I had all but abducted her. At the decisive moment I had discovered in this emancipated lady a scruple. She was calmly painting in the orchard, and before she would dismiss the sunrise models, or pack her straw suitcase, it became necessary for me to prove to her that Nick could take the entire Academy of Design to Norway every summer, if he chose, and still have enough left for enamels. However, we were hustled by that gentleman aboard the _Pactolia_ just as the gang-plank went up. Zephine and her straw suit-case were installed in an ivory-and-gold royal suite which had until the last moment been reserved for a Cattle Queen of the South-West, her retinue, and her wardrobe trunks. But the Cattle Queen had been so imprudent as to indulge in an excess of Nesselrode pudding, plus Crême d’Yvette, during the fated hours that Nick and I were taxying around New York and New Jersey. We contented ourselves with the captain’s cabin--Nick vowing they had another somewhere and would cough it up as soon as they started. Which, in fact, they did. But as Nick wouldn’t let me take it, and I couldn’t let Nick, I suppose the captain must have slept there instead of in the steamer chair with which Zephine’s sympathetic imagination endowed him.

I have been lucky enough to cross the ocean as often as most people, and oftener than some; but I never made a voyage like that. The howls with which I had greeted Zephine’s reappearance on my horizon were constantly upsetting my equilibrium. While I have enough in common with her and Nick to travel in their company even to this day, I also have too much in common with Mrs. Grundy not to be conscious how horrified she would be when it came out, through the pronunciation of names and the confidences of stewardesses, that the lady of the royal suite was not the famous Cattle Queen of the sailing list but a simple damsel of the brush, voyaging under the protection of the far from obscure Mr. Nicholas Marler. Such cases, of course, are not absolutely unknown on ocean greyhounds. The beauty of this case was its perfect difference from anything good Mrs. Grundy was capable of conceiving. And what a picture-play I could make out of it if I had the time!

Zephine’s clothes were naturally what interested the more inquiring of our fellow passengers. Yet the glances which followed our companion were not, I noted, of disdain. I concluded that the royal suite of the _Pactolia_ lent Zephine’s uniform a new value, or at any rate gave her a freedom to wear what she chose. For she was good enough to justify my account of her. Having marked out a sartorial course for herself, Zephine had never wasted time in reconsideration. She duly produced the brown skirt, or the pea-green, or the shiny grey, as occasion demanded. And each was a pure delight to Nick, who couldn’t get over her. But he had had the flair to know, which I hadn’t, that Zephine would not suffer by comparison with the laces and jewels of the saloon. It surprised me, in that company, to discover what an air she had. She had been through the mill of the studios, of course, and it would take a good deal to startle her. In fact she sometimes startled more delicately nurtured dames by the things she took for granted. She was not Marguerite, though. She was nearer Juno, in her large, fair, easy, Germanic way. Her braids were magnificent in the light. As for her throat and her shoulder, they were incomparable.

“Really Nick,” I burst out one night, “you are a born connoisseur. Did you know, or were you mad--just seeing her like that, in a window, for a quarter of an hour, in the moonlight?”

Nick’s rejoinder, which was no reply, edified me to the limit of edification.

“She says they wash,” he seriously observed.

My jaw dropped, for only to the wise is a word sufficient. But then I howled anew.

“Of course they wash, you cracked walnut! That’s the killing part of it, because she doesn’t save anything by her famous system--she has to keep so many of them going.”

“Why didn’t you ever marry her?” continued Nick inconsequently.

“I never thought of it, for one thing. Neither did she, for another. If she had, she scarcely would have failed to mention it. And neither of us could afford it, for a third. Want any more reasons? I can think them up as fast as you can ask them.”

“Herb, you’re an ass,” commented Nick without forms. “But it’s never too late to mend. We’ll build a Norwegian cottage in the lake orchard at Island Pond, and you can both paint apple trees and live happily ever after.”

“Thanks,” said I.

IV

It was great fun showing Norway to Zephine. They went very well together. Norway is the least conventional of countries, where you have the most room in which to swing cats. There is nothing to look at but Norway itself, and you aren’t overrun by fellow bearers of the red book. It doesn’t distress me a bit that the mountains are only half as high as the Swiss ones. They are twice as effective when they climb sheer out of still green fiords. That is the great point about Norway, of course--the water, and those fingers of the sea feeling for leagues among the mountains. And the peasants are quite the most perfect among peasants, if a shade too honest.

Zephine was entranced by everything, from our first view of the Christiania Fiord. That’s too much like Island Pond to suit me. However, disdaining trains, boats, and the outcries of the Grand Hotel, we embarked in three of those funny little carts, drawn by three of those fat friendly little ponies, and travelled post--when we could--across to the Hardanger Fiord. When we could not, we walked. We nearly froze to death, too, in the high fjelds, just as the Grand Hotel had promised with tears in its eyes. But Zephine and I made no end of sketches, and Nick got no end of ideas for cottages--with arches of rough stone, and outside stairs, and loggias of carved wood, and roofs overgrown by turf and pansies and bluebells. We also picked up, out of such cottages, some old silver that made our eyes pop out of our heads. Altogether we had the time of our lives.

We hardly saw a tourist the whole way. Consequently we were surprised enough to drive into Odde one evening, at the head of the fiord, and be told there was not a room in the hotel. We might have expected it, for the time was just when people flock to the North Cape. And there was no other hotel in the place--which then consisted of two or three cottages and a pier. Nick, however, took his usual course with the landlady. He blandly persisted in demanding three rooms, until the landlady produced them. Very good rooms they were, too--or at least mine was. It looked out through festoons of blossoming honeysuckle into a little garden, and beside it a river ran gaily into the long avenue of the fiord, whose rocky walls were still gilded by the late summer light. As I stood there, looking and listening and sniffing, an old lady stepped from a wing of the house to make a last touch of local colour with her wonderful white cap, which stood out frilled and starched around her head like an aureole.

Still more wonderful, in his way, was a man whose acquaintance we struck up at dinner. He was an Angle, though he might have been a Saxon. He was all pockets, and he travelled with everything he had in the world in them. You never saw such bunches in such unexpected places. Some of the pockets were too inaccessible for him to get at without taking off his clothes; so he had bags inside of them, detachable by means of tagged strings which hung within reach. He showed us some of the things in the bags--rocks and weeds and beasts of the field. For the man was by way of being a naturalist. And his back was so stiff and so flat that you couldn’t conceive what was the matter with him, until you learned that somewhere in it he kept a life-sized atlas!

“Nick,” I observed after a hilarious evening, as we stood in my window looking at the twilight of the gods that hung in the fiord, “a crown of righteousness shall be laid up for you on high. You have made Zephine’s fortune.”

“O?” he grunted noncommittally.

“That Englishman! I see it all. They were formed by heaven for one another. It’s a case of _coup de foudre_, as the alienists say. We shall have to go home without Zephine.”

“Herb,” remarked Nick, turning his back on the twilight of the gods and on me, “your inside is as baroque as that bird’s outside. Stop being a pickled peacock, if you can, and go to sleep.”

It was not written, however, that slumber should instantly visit our eyelids. We presently became aware of a tremendous commotion downstairs. We then became aware of the cause of the commotion. The commotion was caused, as no one in the house could help learning in the broken and squeaky English of its fount and origin, by no less a personage than His Serene Highness the Prince Ernst Paul XXIII of Waldeck-Hohenkugel, who had reserved, as it appeared, the very rooms which Nick had pulled out of the landlady’s sleeve, and who clamoured that those rooms be delivered up to him at once. The landlady, good woman, had made her bed and she lay in it. She refused at all events to turn us out of ours, arguing that no reservation held after dinner. And she liberally offered his far from serene Highness his choice of bath rooms, billiard rooms, reading rooms, drawing rooms, or dining rooms. His Highness rejected them all, very profanely, and vowed he would go on to the next post-station. But as there happened to be no road to it except by water, and as no steamer would leave till morning, he was forced to accept what hospitality the landlady proffered him. So silence descended at last upon the solitudes of Odde.

V

When I unwillingly came back to consciousness I thought His Serene Highness must be getting under way again. Then I didn’t know what to think. For who should be at my chaste bachelor bedside, shaking me vigorously and shouting something about Nick, but Zephine. It didn’t take me long, however, to make out a strong smell of smoke, a most unpleasant glare, and horrid sounds of crackling. What happened next I don’t quite remember. We only just had time to run for it. You have no idea how quickly a small wooden hotel can burn up at two or three o’clock of a cool June morning. There turned out, thank heaven, to be no casualties. But there were some pretty tight squeezes. And nobody saved much of anything.

As the flames died down and the survivors began to regard each other in the cold light of day, we presented one of the most inspiriting spectacles I ever hope to admire. It made me think of what I have heard described in rural regions as a white shower. The only completely dressed persons in the party were a few sympathetic citizens of Odde, plus my old lady in the white cap and the Englishman of the pockets. A fairly complete exhibition of the night-wear of civilisation was there, hovering for warmth in the neighbourhood of the smoking ruins or lurking for privacy in an orchard I had not noticed the evening before. There were a few blankets and counter-panes in the assembly. Some had clutched odd garments as they fled, and now retired behind apple trees to put them on. One lady had had time to rescue her hat--“only this and nothing more.” A squire of two dames had clothed one of them in his dinner-jacket and the other in the waistcoat appertaining thereto. He himself boasted a pair of pumps and a Baedeker. As for me, I discovered myself to be the happy possessor of a pair of trousers and a travelling rug. The latter in particular was highly comforting, in the air that drew down the valley from the white fjelds.