Part 2

So I looked like that! It was a surprise to me. I had thought he might mention the Embassy. My sense of superior standing was so strong that I expected another man of superior standing to see it at a glance. Contenting myself with a shake of the heads I felt his eyes on me with a graver stare.

"Must have found it useful to speak French so well, especially at a time like this."

I allowed that to pass without challenge.

"If we should ever go into the war a fellow like you could make himself handy in a lot of ways."

We were therefore not in the war. I was glad to add that to my list of facts. "I should try," I assented, feeling that the words committed me to nothing.

"Wonder you weren't tempted to pitch in as it was. A lot of our young Americans did--chaps who found themselves over there."

"I wasn't one of them."

"Poor Drinkwater, now--he went over with me as my stenographer in the spring of that year; and when the thing broke out--"

"He went?"

"Yes, he went."

"And didn't get much good from it."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Depends--doesn't it?--on what we mean by good. You fellows--"

I shot him another glance, but I don't think he noticed that I objected to being classed with Drinkwater.

"You fellows--" he began again.

I never knew how he meant to continue, for a shuffling and pawing outside the door warned us that Drinkwater, having finished his breakfast, was feeling his way in.

The doctor spoke as the boy pushed the door open and stumbled across the threshold.

"Morning, Harry! Your friend here seems to have waked up in pretty good condition. Look at the breakfast he's been making away with." He rose to leave, since the cabin had not room enough for two men on foot at the same time. "See you on deck by and by," he added, with a nod to me; "then we can have a more satisfactory talk."

I waited till he was out of earshot. "Who is he, anyhow?"

In giving me a summary of Averill's history Drinkwater couldn't help weaving in a partial one of his own. It was in fact most of his own, except that it included no reference to his birth and parentage.

Drinkwater had worked his way through one of the great universities, when laboratory research threw him in contact with Boyd Averill. The latter was not a practising physician, but a student of biology. He was the more at liberty to follow one of the less lucrative lines of scientific work because of being a man of large means. Sketching the origin of this fortune, my companion informed me that from his patron's democratic ways no one would ever suppose him the only son, and except for a sister the only heir, of the biggest banker in the state of New Jersey. By one of those odd freaks of heredity which neither Sir Francis Galton nor the great Plockendorff had been able to explain, Boyd Averill had shown a distaste for banking from his cradle, and yet with an interest equally difficult to account for in bacteria.

On the subject of Averill's more personal life all my friend could tell me was that he had married Miss Lulu Winfield, once well known on the concert stage.

"And, say," he went on, enthusiastically, "she's about the prettiest. You'll see for yourself when you come up on deck. She'll speak to you. Oh yes, she will," he hastened to assure me, when I began to demur. "She won't mind. She's not a bit aristocratic, and Miss Blair says the same."

To make conversation I asked him who was Miss Blair, learning that she was the young lady whom Miss Averill had brought over to Europe to act as stenographer to her brother when Drinkwater had gone to the war.

"You see," he continued to explain, "Averill's been white with me from the start. When I left him in the lurch--after he'd paid my expenses over to Europe and all that--because the war broke out, he didn't kick any more than a straw dummy. When I told him I felt mean, but that this war couldn't be going on and me not in it, he said that at my age he'd have felt the same. One of these days I've got to pay him back that fare. I'll do that when I've got to work in New York and saved a bit of dough."

I asked him what he meant to work at.

"Oh, there'll be things. There always are. Miss Blair wants me to learn the touch system and go in for big stenography. Says she'll teach me. Say, she's some girl. I want you to know her." He reverted to the principal theme. "Big money in piano-tuning, too, though what I'm really out for is biology. But after all what's biology but the science of life?--and you can pick that up anywhere. Oh, I'm all right. I've had the darnedest good luck, when I've seen my pals--" He left this sentence unfinished, going on to say: "That was the way when I got mine at Bois Robert. Shell came down--and, gee whizz! Nothing left of a bunch of six or eight of us but me--and I only got this."

A toss of his hand was meant to indicate his eyes, after which he went on to tell how marvelously he had been taken care of, with the additional good luck of running across Boyd Averill in hospital. Best luck of all was, now that he was able to go home, the Averills were coming, too, and had been willing to have him sail by their boat and keep an eye on him. He spoke as if they were his intimate friends, while I had only to appear on deck to have them become mine.

"In the jewelry business?" he asked me, suddenly.

I stared in an amazement of which he must have recognized the tones in my voice. "What made you ask me that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Speak like it. Thought you might have been in that--or gents' furnishings."

After he had gone on deck, and Jean-Marie had taken away the tray, I got up and dressed. I did it slowly, with a hatred to my clothes that grew as I put them on. How I had dressed in the previous portion of my life I couldn't, of course, tell; but now I was something between a country barber and a cheap Latin Quarter Bohemian. In conjunction with my patently Anglo-Saxon face nothing could have been more grotesque.

I thought of trunks. I must have some in the hold. Ringing for Jean-Marie, I asked if it would be possible to have one or two of them brought up. If so, I could go back to bed again till I found something more presentable. The steward, with comic compassion stealing into his eye as he studied me, said that of course it was possible to have monsieur's trunks brought up if monsieur would give him the checks or receipts, which would doubtless be in monsieur's pockets. But a search revealed nothing. The bags and my purse revealed nothing. My dismay at the fact that I had come on board without other belongings than those on the couch almost betrayed me to the little man watching me so wistfully. I was obliged to invent a story of hurried war-time traveling in order to get him out.

My predicament was growing more absurd. I sat down on the couch and considered it. It would have been easy to become excited, frantic, frenzied, with my ridiculous inability. Putting my hands to my head, I could have torn it asunder to wrest from my atrophied brain the secret it guarded so maliciously. "None of that!" I warned myself; and my hands came down. Whatever I did I must do coolly. So not long after the eight bells of noon I dragged myself to the deck.

All at once I began to find something like consolation. The wild beauty of sky and water beat in on me like love. I must have traveled often enough before, so that it was not new to me; but it was all the more comforting for that. I had come back to an old, old friendship--the friendship of wind and color and scudding clouds and glinting horizons and the mad squadrons of the horses of Neptune shaking their foamy manes. Amid the raging tempests of cloud there were tranquil islands of a blue such as was never unfolded by a flower. In the long, sweeping hollows of the waves one's eye could catch all the hues in pigeons' necks. Before a billow broke it climbed to a tip of that sea-water green more ineffable than any of the greens of grass, jades, or emeralds. From every crest, and in widening lines from the ship's sides as we plowed along, the foam trailed into shreds that seemed to have been torn from the looms of a race more deft and exquisite than ours.

Not many men and women love beauty for its own sake. Not many see it. To most of us it is only an adjunct to comfort or pride. It springs from the purse, or at best from the intellect; but the hidden man of the heart doesn't care for it. The hidden man of the heart has no capacity to value the cloud or the bit of jewel-weed. These things meet no need in him; they inspire no ecstasy. The cloud dissolves and the bit of jewel-weed goes back to earth; and the chances are that no human eye has noted the fact that each has externalized God in one of the myriad forms of His appeal to us. Only here and there, at long intervals, is there one to whom line and color and invisible forces like the wind are significant and sacred, and as essential as food and drink. It came to me now that, somewhere in my past, beauty had been the dominating energy--that beauty was the thread of flame which, if I kept steadily hold of it, would lead me back whence I came.

*CHAPTER IV*

From the spectacle of sea and sky I turned away at last, only because my senses could take in no more. Then I saw beauty in another form.

A girl was advancing down the deck who embodied the evanescence of the cloud and the grace of the bit of jewel-weed in a way I could never convey to you. You must see me as standing near the stern of the boat, and the long, clean line of the deck, with an irregular fringe of people in deck-chairs, as empty except for this slender, solitary figure. The rise and fall of the ship were a little like those of a bough in the wind, while she was the bird on it. She advanced serenely, sedately, her hands jauntily in the pockets of an ulster, which was gray, with cuffs and collar of sage-green. A sage-green tam-o'-shanter was fastened to a mass of the living fair hair which, for want of a better term, we call golden. Her awareness of herself almost amounted to inference; and as she passed under the row of onlookers' eyes she seemed to fling out a challenge which was not defiant, but good-natured, defiant but good-natured was the gaze she fixed on me, a gaze as lacking in self-consciousness as it was in hesitation. A child might have looked at you in this way, or a dog, or any other being not afraid of you. Of a blue which could only be compared to that in the rifts in the cloud overhead, her eyes never wavered in their long, calm regard till they were turned on me obliquely as she passed by. She did not, however, look back; and reaching the end of the promenade, she rounded the corner and went up the other way.

Thinking of her merely as a vision seen by chance, I was the more surprised when she entered the dining-saloon, helping my friend Drinkwater. I had purposely got to my place before any one else, so as to avoid the awkwardness of arriving unknown among people who already have made one another's acquaintance. Moreover, the table being near to one of the main entrances, my corner allowed me to take notes on all who came in. Not that I was interested in my fellow-passengers otherwise than as part of my self-defense. Self-defense, the keeping any one from suspecting the mischance that had befallen me, seemed to me, for the moment, even more important than finding out who I was.

Transatlantic travel having already become difficult, those who entered were few in number; and as people are always at their worst at sea, they struck me as mere bundles of humanity. Among the first to pass my table was Boyd Averill, who gave me a friendly nod. After him came a girl of perhaps twenty-five, grave, sensible, and so indifferent to appearances that I put her down as his sister. Last of all was she whom Drinkwater had summed up as "one of the prettiest." She was; yet not in the way in which the vision on the deck had been the same. The vision on the deck had had no more self-consciousness than the bit of jewel-weed. This richly colored beauty, with eyes so long and almond-shaped that they were almost Mongolian, was self-conscious in the grain--luxurious, expensive, and languorous.

My table companions began to gather, turning my attention chiefly on myself. I had traveled enough to know the chief steward as a discriminating judge of human nature. Those who came asking for seats at table he sized up in a flash, associating like with like, and rarely making a mistake. On journeys of which no record remained with me I had often admired this classifying instinct, doubtless because any discrimination it may have contained was complimentary to myself. To-day I had occasion to find it otherwise.

On coming on board I must have followed the routine of other voyages. Before turning into my bunk for my long sleep I had apparently asked to be assigned a seat at table, and given the name of Jasper Soames. Guided by his intuitive social _flair_, the chief steward had adjudicated me to a side table in a corner, where to-day my first companion was a lady's maid. The second was a young man whom I had no difficulty in diagnosing as a chauffeur, after whom Drinkwater and the vision of the deck came gaily along together. She probably informed him that I was already in my place, for as he passed me to reach his chair at the head of the table, he clapped me on the shoulder with a glad salute.

"So, old scout, you've got ahead of us! Bully for you! Knew you'd eat a whale when once you got started. Say, what we'd all like to sit down to now is a good old-fashioned dinner of corned beef and cabbage instead of all this French stuff." He had not, however, forgotten the courtesies of the occasion. "Miss Blair, let me make you acquainted with Mr. Soames. Mr. Soames, Miss Mulberry; Mr. Finnegan, Mr. Soames."

For the ladies I half rose, with a bow; for Mr. Finnegan I made a nod suffice. Mr. Finnegan seemed scarcely to think I merited a nod in return. Miss Mulberry acknowledged me coldly. As for Miss Blair, she inclined her head with the grace of the _lilium canadense_ or the nodding trinity-flower. In the act there was that shade of negligence which tells the worldly wise that friendliness is not refused, but postponed.

We three formed a group at one end of the table--Drinkwater having Miss Blair on his right and myself on his left--while Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry forgathered at the other. The table being set for eight, there was a vacant seat between Miss Mulberry and Miss Blair, and two between myself and Mr. Finnegan. This breaking into sets was due, therefore, to the chief steward, and not to any sense of affinity or rejection among ourselves.

After a few polite generalities as to the run and other sea-going topics the conversation broke into dialogues--Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry, Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair. This seeming to be the established procedure, it remained for me to take it as a relief.

For again it gave me time to ask why I was graded as I found myself. A man who knows he is a general and wakes up to see himself a private, with every one taking it for granted that he is a private and no more, would experience the same bewilderment. What had I done that such a situation could have come about? What had I been? How long was my knowledge of myself to depend on a group of shattered brain cells?

I had not followed the conversation of Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair, even though I might have overheard it; but suddenly the lady glanced up with a clear, straightforward look from her myosotis eyes.

"Mr. Soames, have you ever lived in Boston?"

The husky, veiled voice was of that bantering quality for which the French word _gouailleur_ is the only descriptive term. In Paris it would have been called _une voix de Montmartre_, and as an expression of New York it might best be ascribed to Third Avenue. It was jolly, free-and-easy, common, and sympathetic, all at once.

My instinct for self-defense urged me to say, "No," and I said it promptly.

"Or Denver?"

I said, "No," again, and for the same reason. I couldn't be pinned down to details. If I said, "Yes," I should be asked when and where and how, and be driven to invention.

"Were you ever in Salt Lake City?"

A memory of a big gray building, with the Angel Moroni on the top of it, of broad, straight streets, of distant mountains, of a desert twisted and suffering, of a lake that at sunset glowed with the colors old artists burned into enamels--a memory of all this came to me, and I said, "Yes," I said it falteringly, wondering if it would commit me to anything. It committed me to nothing, so far as I could see, but a glance of Miss Blair's heaven-colored eyes toward her friend, as though I had corroborated something she had said. She had forgotten for the moment that Drinkwater was blind, so that of this significant look I alone got the benefit. What it meant I, of course, didn't know; I could only see it meant something.

The obvious thing for it to mean was that Miss Blair knew more about me than I knew myself. While it was difficult to believe that, it nevertheless remained as part of the general experience of life which had not escaped me, that one rarely went among any large number of people without finding some one who knew who one was. That had happened to me many a time, especially on steamers, though I could no longer fix the occasions. I decided to cultivate Miss Blair and, if possible, get a clue from her.

*CHAPTER V*

That which, in my condition, irked me more than anything was the impossibility of being by myself. The steamer was a small one, with all the passengers of one class. Those who now crossed the Atlantic were doing it as best they could; and to be thrown pell-mell into a second-rate ship like the _Auvergne_ was better, in the opinion of most people, than not to cross at all. It was a matter of eight or ten days of physical discomfort, with home at the other end.

I knew now that the month was September, and the equinox not far away. It was mild for the time of year, and, though the weather was rough, it was not dirty. With the winds shifting quickly from west to northwest and back again, the clouds were distant and dry, lifting from time to time for bursts of stormy sunshine. For me it was a pageant. I could forget myself in its contemplation. It was the vast, and I was only the infinitesimal; it was the ever-varying eternal, and I was the sheerest offspring of time, whose affairs were of no moment.

Nevertheless, I had pressing instant needs, or needs that would become pressing as soon as we reached New York. Between now and then there were five or six days during which I might recover the knowledge that had escaped me; but if I didn't I should be in a difficult situation. I should be unable to get money; I should be unable to go home. I should be lost. Unless some one found me I should have to earn a living. To earn a living there must be something I could do, and I didn't know that I could do anything.

Of all forms of exasperation, this began to be the most maddening. I must have had a profession; and yet there was no profession I could think of from which I didn't draw back with the peculiar sick recoil I felt the minute I approached whatever was personal to myself. In this there were elements contradictory to each other. I wanted to know--and yet I shrank from knowing. If I could have had access to what money I needed I should have been content to drift into the unknown without regret.

But there was a reserve even here. It attached to the word home. On that word the door had not been so completely shut that a glimmer didn't leak through. I knew I had a home. I longed for it without knowing what I longed for. I could see myself arriving in New York, fulfilling the regular dock routine--and going somewhere. But I didn't know where. Of some ruptured brain cell enough remained to tell me that on the American continent a spot belonged to me; but it told me no more than the fact that the spot had love in it. I could feel the love and not discern the object. As to whether I had father or mother or wife or child I knew no more than I knew the same facts of the captain of the ship. Out of this darkness there came only a vision of flaming eyes which might mean anything or nothing.

I was unable to pursue this line of thought because Miss Blair came strolling by with the same nonchalant air with which she had passed me before lunch. I can hardly say she stopped; rather she commanded, and swept me along.

"Don't you want to take a walk, Mr. Soames? You'd better do it now, because we'll be rolling scuppers under by and by."

For making her acquaintance it was too good an opportunity to miss. In spite of my inability to play up to her gay cheerfulness I found myself strolling along beside her.

I may say at once that I never met a human being with whom I was more instantly on terms of confidence. The sketch of her life which she gave me without a second's hesitation came in response to my remark that from her questions to me at table I judged her to have traveled.

"I was born on the road, and I suppose I shall never get off it. My father and mother had got hitched to a theatrical troupe on tour."

A distaste acquired as a little girl on tour had kept her from trying her fortunes on the boards. She had an idea that her father was acting still, though after his divorce from her mother they had lost sight of him. Her mother had died six years previously, since which time she had looked after herself, with some ups and downs of experience. She had been a dressmaker, a milliner, and a model, with no more liking for any of these professions than she had for the theatrical. In winding up this brief narrative she astounded me with the statement:

"And now I'm going to be an adventuress."

"A what?" I stopped in the middle of the deck to stare at her.

She repeated the obnoxious noun, continuing to walk on.

"But I thought you were a stenographer."

"That's part of it. I'm deceiving poor Miss Averill. She's my dupe. I make use of people in that way--and throw them aside."

"But doing the work for Doctor Averill in the mean time."

"Oh, that's just a pretext."

"A pretext for what?"

"For being an adventuress. Goodness knows what evil I shall do in that family before I get out of it."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, well, you'll see. If you're born baleful--well, you've just got to be baleful; that's all. Did you ever hear of an adventuress who didn't wreck homes?"

I said I had not much experience with adventuresses, and didn't quite know the point of their occupation.

"Well, you stay around where I am and you'll see."

"Have you wrecked many homes up to the present?" I ventured to inquire.

"This is the first one I ever had a chance at. I only decided to be an adventuress about the time when Miss Averill came along."