CHAPTER IIEVEN
Theantiquated horse had taken all the time until noon to reach the summit, so the inn-keeper had rushed instantly to provide the lady and gentleman with a private dining-room. It had a trellised portico overlooking the Bay. Here they sat and gazed. They forgot, for the moment, the interrupted conversation over “names”; even the broad suggestion of “bride and groom” that beamed from the faces of the driver, the hotel porters, mine host himself in the doorway and, afar off, mine hostess. The panorama of Naples took rank above everything else.
“No wonder the poets tried so hard to tell us about this,” she spoke finally.
“But I do wonder,” he returned. “How could they be such egotists? No writing can do justice to that,” he pointed towards the deeper blue; “one might as well try to score it for kettle-drums. It can’t be translated. All landscape poetry is a failure, a failure from the start. It can’t be conveyed to others.”
“Perhaps,” she mused, “the poet was not interested in others. Perhaps he wished merely to celebrate himself.”
He turned towards her suddenly.
“You touch me hard there,” he said. “Do you know whom you’re quoting?”
“Yes. Whitman.”
“Do you know Whitman—really know him?”
“How blunt you are,” but she showed no resentment. “Yes, I really know Whitman. Also, I hereby give notice that I am much less frivolous than I look.”
“I’m a little daft on Whitman,” he apologized.
“So am I.”
“You don’t think he is immoral?” he asked incredulously.
“I think he is super-moral.”
“You do know him, then,” he admitted, half-aloud.
“Any more cross-examination?”
“How did you come to take to Whitman?” This was the first time he had seemed to suggest any interest in her personally. She noted the change in him, but gave no sign.
“The Woman’s Club,” she answered.
“Where?”
“Penn Yan.”
“What?”
“Penn Yan.”
“China?”
“No, Penn Yan, a town of 4,000 inhabitants in New York. I live there.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed mysteriously.
“Dear me! Haven’t you heard of Penn Yan?”
“No.”
“Not heard of the Walker Bin Company?”
“No.”
“Nor the Birkett Mills?”
“No.”
“Nor the ‘Benham House’?”
“No.”
“Nor Quackenbush’s chain of two drug stores?”
“No.”
“Oh, dear!” she affected delightful concern.
“Surely you have heard of Lake Keuka, and the Keuka grape vineyards?” She leaned forward with mischief in her eyes.
“No.”
“Have you ever eaten a grape, my dear Sir Knight?”
“Possibly.”
“A good, great, luscious blue grape?”
“Possibly.”
“Only possibly?”
“Well,” he hesitated, “y-es. Yes; I am sure to have eaten one. Now that I put my mind to it, I recall that it was especially large and sweet and——”
She leaned back, contented.
“Well,thatwas a Keuka Lake grape.”
He was studying her, as one would a specimen of the thing you collect.
“Is Penn—Penn Ying——”
“Penn Yan, please.”
“Is Penn Yan your summer home or——”
“It is my all-the-year home. I was born there. This is my first adventure from the family hearth.”
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm might have made that speech.
“Ah!” he remarked. “Ah! That explains much.”
“Go on,” she smiled. “Spring it. What’s the answer? What is the ‘much’ my living in Penn Yan explains?”
“You are charmingly of the village; for which I am grateful. Otherwise, we should not have been on this delightfully unconventional trip.”
“Oh, you must see Penn Yan,” she chirped, “especiallyon Saturday night. Our Main Street is paved,” she added archly, “and we have an electric line and sweetly subdued arc-lights. But of course I don’t live in the throbbing town—that would be too exciting. We live far off down the Lake, in Jerusalem township. You see, Sir—Sir——” she hesitated, plucked out her steamer-list and went on, “—Sir Richard, we are really not even villagers; we are, I fear, hopelessly rural.”
Her satiric tone was not lost on “Sir Richard.” He would have been stupid else.
“Rural? Not a doubt of it!” he admitted. “You lend me money on sight and take me for a title and no questions asked. What makes you think I am Sir Richard?”
“I don’t think so now; and I’m awfully sorry. Your enunciation is sort of English—you know—clear, broad vowels, lots of sharp ‘t’s,’ no ‘r’s’ to speak of; but you haven’t once said, ‘Quite so,’ or ‘Really!’ or ‘Silly ass!’”
“I am half English. I went to school in England.”
“Ah!” she mimicked. “That explains much—ah!—much! And was it a school in the country?”
“Yes!” he explained eagerly. “Quite in the country. It was an omnibus and two trains away from London.”
“Ah!” She “ah-ed” very significantly, and added, “Much! Ah, much—much.”
“We’re even,” he owned.
“Only even?” she opened her eyes very wide.
He was about to surrender completely when the host in the doorway announced luncheon.
It was a cosy, intimate dining-room; small table set for two; uniformed butler standing rigid off to the side; maid, also in uniform, moving swiftly in and out a doorand serving deftly—exactly the suggestion of a dinneren famille.
“That is the head of the table, dear,” said the lady.
The man was so startled, especially when he glanced back to the placid, innocent face of the lady, that he neglected to take any place at all.
“Can’t you see that this is a domestic scene?” she explained; “regular man-and-wife stage-set. They expect it of us.... Beautiful, expensive scenery,” she murmured, “spoiled by a wretched actor.”
Then she nodded her head towards the uniformed attendant, and began again.
“That is the head of the table, I think,dear.”
He grinned and made for the seat.
“That is the head; is it not,my dear?” she persisted.
“It is,” he agreed.
She declined to sit.
“It is—what,my dear?”
“It is the head of the table.”
“The head of the table,my——”
She cocked her head and waited to catch the completed phrase.
“Dear!” he finished, not without embarrassment.
“You miss your cues dreadfully,” she went on briskly. “Tell the gendarme to pass the rolls, Richard dear.”
“Madame will have the rolls,” “Richard” managed in Italian. “I don’t think the gendarme comprehends English, so your little domestic playette is wasted, my—uh—darling.”
“Thenk you, m’lud,” the gendarme remarked in good cockney as he deftly removed the rolls and started towards madame.
“You’re English?” m’lud ejaculated.
“Me, m’lud? Yes, thenk you, m’lud.”
“The devil!”
“Yes, thenk you, m’lud. And would m’lady prefer the toasted muffins?”
M’lady preferred nothing so much as the open enjoyment of m’lud’s discomfiture. There was a certain boldness and a certain shyness about m’lud, typical of England. At present the awkward self-consciousness was to the fore. It was consuming him, although he was intelligent enough to know exactly his trouble and its remedy. Therefore he laughed, owned up to the embarrassment and summoned his will to fight it down.
“Even Half-English is still very English,” she told him, after she had explained carefully that his face had flushed and that the tips of his ears were quite red—all more or less comforting. In the give and take of raillery that followed he almost recovered.
“The worst thing I have to contend with is this engulfing shyness of mine,” he explained finally. “And the worst symptom of shyness, perhaps you know, is anger and sullenness. It knocks the speech out of me. That makes me hot and angry. Then I’m apt to insult my neighbour, and then it’s all off.... But I’m all right now.”
“Yes,” she helped herself to a hot muffin; “you’ve gone through all the phases, except that youbeganby insulting your neighbour.”
“How, pray?”
He was quite unconscious of any guilt. She saw that, so she preferred not to give her hand away by explaining; yet, somehow, his half-joking reference to her “charming village qualities” rankled. Her forebearshad been York State farmers, then vineyard workers and finally prosperous share-holders in the industry of raising and marketing of grapes and grape products. Although the present generation of children had gone to boarding-school and to college, had travelled and were accustomed to shop in New York city, yet the fine touch of the open country had never left them. That was their abiding charm, if they only knew it; it gave them a heartiness and a frankness and an independence of bearing and speech that marked them with distinction. Occasionally, however, in some social grouping of metropolitan dwellers they had been brought to feel a lack and were on the alert to turn even gentle compliment into ironic criticism. The young man with his patronizing air should be punished.
“Never mind,” she turned away his sincere questionings. “If you aren’t aware of the insult, we’ll forget it and call it bad manners. Bad manners are nobody’s fault.” The English servant was approaching with the meat course, so she added a gracious and distinct “dearie.”
“Ugh!” he grunted. “I detest that word. I’d rather be called ‘birdie.’”
The luncheon was a ceremonious affair. “It is part of the scenery,” the lady had remarked, “so why hurry it just to gaze on other scenery?” Coffee was served in the tiny balcony, by which time the Bay had put on other and gayer apparel; so the view had to be examined afresh. All of which took time. It was three o’clock before the bills were called for.
Several times during the delicious loafing on the balcony m’lady had examined her steamer-list and had stared at the man as if to find his name written on his forehead. He noted her interest, but claimed none forhis own. “Look, my dear,” she would say, “at lazy old Vesuvius; isn’t he a villainous old giant, dirty, evil and full of cunning. I bet he is planning another blow-off.” And he would reply without any “dear” at all, not seeming to need that handle of a name to lift his comments.
“Why do you wish to go to America?” she asked, this being the nearest she ever came to breaking into the mystery of their personal lives.
“It is my home,” he answered in some surprise.
“I thought you were English?”
“Oh!” he remembered. “I am an American, even if I am half English. My mother was English, but father was so colossally American that it swamped the English strain.”
“That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?” she inquired. “It is more often that American women marry Englishmen.”
“Not at all; they’re more heavily advertised, that’s all. English women are very often attracted by men of the type of my father. There are many marriages of that sort. And the English father is mighty happy over it, I can tell you, for he gets off without the hint of a dowry. No decent American would listen to the suggestion of a dot, you know.”
There the subject dropped, and for a time all subjects. In lazy silence they looked on the view and thought their own thoughts.
Once he remarked, “I’m curious to know what that English butler is doing in an Italian inn. He can’t be happy outside of the West End. I wager he is hiding from the police. He looks it.”
And she replied, “Have you no curiosity about me?”
“Much,” he smiled. The word “much” had come to have local significance.
“You don’t ask whether I am a baroness or a saleslady, or Miss or Mrs.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Growing shy again?”
“Eh?”
“Or is it just urban rudeness?”
“Oh!” he laughed as he comprehended. “No. No. Not at all. I don’t want to know until I have to. I prefer the mystery, that is all. If you wish I’ll tell you who I am, but I hope you won’t wish, at least just at present. We’ll be together two weeks on that boat. They say ten days, but I know them. It’ll be a fortnight. It’ll all come out there. Let’s enjoy this thoroughly unusual companionship. It really is ideal——” he went on enthusiastically.
“Thank you,” she interrupted, though he hardly noticed.
“—The sort of thing that ought to happen on this earth every day. Human beings are utter strangers to one another. It takes a shipwreck or a national calamity to force them to acknowledge the existence of the neighbour they prate so much about loving. Let’s continue our primitive relationship. Call me Richard if you wish. It’s a good name. And I’ll call you,” he picked up the steamer-list and read a name, as he thought at random, but a light underscoring had unconsciously caught his eye.
The owner of that name had done what everyone naturally does with a steamer-list or a programme or a column of “those present,” glanced quickly at her own name to discover if it had been printed correctly. It is most annoying to have a “Mrs.” where a “Miss”should be. Then her nervous finger-nail had underscored aimlessly, until the name fairly popped out of the list.
“‘Miss Geraldine Wells,’” he read. “There! I’ll call you ‘Jerry.’ Is it a go?”
Miss Geraldine Wells almost leaped in astonishment. But his innocent face assured her. She looked aloft critically, as if to judge if the name were worthy. The butler arrived with a tray of change.
“Is it a go?” he asked again.
“Yes, dear.”
“Please! Please!” he shook his head firmly. “Please don’t do that.”
The butler was handed his tip and was waved away.
“Your ear-tips are beginning again,” she told him in the tone she might have used to announce a spoon in his coffee cup.
Meanwhile the butler was bowing and muttering half-coherent “Thenk-you-m’lud’s.” His eye had taken on a fine frenzy.
“That funny remark has cost you——” Richard calculated aloud, “twenty lire is $3.86, and your share is $1.93. It cost you just $1.93 in American money. You got my mind so upset that I gave that idiot a 20-lira gold-piece too much. He’ll probably murder us now for our money, or what is worse, scream the news to the neighbourhood. We’ll have to pay high to get out of this. By rights you ought to take the whole cost.”
He rang the bell. The butler appeared.
“I made a mistake just now in giving you that 20-lira coin. Oh, it’s all right! I’m not going to take it back. I’ll be a good sport and pay for my blunder; but I was careless, that’s all. The point is——”
The English serving man was rigid with fright. Fees of any sort had been rare that season, and his wages were negligible.
“The point is,” the half-Englishman spoke confidentially, “I don’t want the whole establishment to think I am a millionaire and stand in line to blackmail me when I go out. Do you understand?”
The butler began to show signs of life.
“Puffectly, m’lud. I will take you hout myself, by the rear terraces, m’lud, and nobuddy shall presume, m’lud.”
And by the rear terraces they escaped, where the old coachman and the “dinky” carriage were duly waiting. A gold coin had done the work for him, too. He had considered himself hired by the day. Rich brides and grooms rarely came into his power.
“And where will M’sieu and Madame go now? Pompeii, Vesuvius?” He named a list that would have been the death of his cadaverous animal.
“Pompeii, of course,” agreed Miss Geraldine Wells.
“Do you think we have time?”
“Plenty.” She was stepping into the lurching vehiculum. The driver was rattling forth soothing and enticing Italian, which no one heeded.
“But I don’t know anything about trains,” he persisted.
“Neither do I.”
“We don’t want to miss our steamer.”
“Don’t we?” She was comfortably seated.
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Great Scott, woman——”
“Jerry,” she corrected.
“—I was lucky to make that boat at Genoa. Hadto ride fourth class from Munich. I can’t afford to miss it now.”
“I can,” she tempted. He stared at her.
“Let’s,” she begged softly.
He appeared to be reflecting. In reality his mind was standing still. The driver was in his box looking at them with an ineffable sentimental smile. The rich honeymooners would decide. He would wait. A month’s salary in a bad season was his already.
“Get in, Richard,” she moved her skirts to make room on the diminutive seat. “Be a good boy and come along. I have money enough. We’ll take the next steamer. They sail every Wednesday, don’t they?”
He got in and the equipage swung off. On the way down the hill they debated and forgot the view.
Pompeii was so many miles off there, he made it clear. The present vehicle would get there some time, if the horse and the wagon and the driver held together, but not in time for the sailing of steamers. He would not listen to her suggestion to hang the sailings of steamers and be a good sporting Sir Richard and stay over for the next boat, but drove doggedly on to convince her that in the few hours that were left, their only resource was a drive through the streets of Naples, an hour or two at the Museo Borbonico, and an early dinner at some hotel within hail of the ship.
Upon the subject of the Museo he grew suddenly eloquent. It contained one of the most significant collections of Roman remains in the world. The best of Pompeii and Herculaneum was in reality in Naples in the Museo. He seemed to know all about it, indeed, as if he were himself a collector.
“Help! Help!” she called softly, and held his arm.She had interrupted a list of the things that made the Museo unique as an omnium gatherum of Roman curios. “You talk like a personally conducted tour. We’ll go to that Museo right off. Tell the curio up front to drive there when we get to the town. But, really, my dear Richard, your interest in things stirs me. It is the first flash of life you have displayed; and you saved that up for a museum! I’d be afraid to see you get really worked up over an Egyptian mummy or something really dead-for-keeps. We’ll just have to stay over and let you loose in that dear old Museo of yours.”
He remained silent for a jolting minute or two.
“One of my reasons for coming to Naples,” he said quite simply, “was to see the Museo Borbonico.”
For a moment she pondered in turn.
“Then why didn’t we go there this morning?”
“This is your excursion, not mine.”
“But we’re going shares on expenses, aren’t we?”
“I hope so. I warned you that I don’t always pay my debts. You wanted the hill and the view—so did I; so did I, believe me; it was glorious—but I felt under obligations to consider your wishes before my own. And—well, I did not suspect at our first meeting—forgive me!—that you would be—uh—up to doing Pompeiian mosaics and Roman bronzes. You are the sort who keep the best of their mind concealed at first. You——”
He stopped.
“Go on.”
“Do you mind if I pick you apart like this? It is an absorbing interest of mine.”
“I rather like it. It’s like having your fortune told. Go on.”
“You chatter at first, rather—well, too fluently, perhaps; and in words and phrases of a language you learned at about sixteen. Now I should say that you were at least ten years older than that——”
“Nine.”
“Exactly; nine. Well, the girlish extravagant language comes cropping out first, until you get stimulated into thinking grown-up thoughts. Then your very vocabulary changes. Your remark that Whitman is super-moral, for instance, is a summing-up of the man. No youngster could have gotten that so neatly without——”
“Stuff!” she laughed. “I cribbed that for my Woman’s Club essay. Howdoyou suppose those club essays are gotten up!”
“Of course you would affect modesty naturally; although it’s a mistake. When you’ve done a good thing you should own up. But all that’s neither here nor there. If you hadn’t come along I’d made up my mind to slip off the boat after luncheon—I couldn’t afford to risk buying a meal; I’m so extravagant—and do the Museo in time for the boat dinner at six. There! I’ve been very frank. And, really, I don’t mind if we cut the Museo out of the programme altogether. I have no very deep desires for anything in this world. I’m a terrific loafer.”
“Tell Louis Napoleon up there on the box to drive to that Museo; I’m keen for it,” she commanded.
It was half-past four when they drove up to the door of the museum. A clear sign announced that the institution would close at seven o’clock. And at fifteen minutes after seven o’clock, when they were finally driven from the place, they had hardly advanced beyond the first few rooms of that wonderful collection. It wasalmost eight o’clock before they found a suitable place to dine.
“Isn’t it a pity,” she said as they waited for the soup, “to leave without seeing those other rooms!”
“Horrible!”
He stared at the full dining-room without seeing anyone. “Horrible,” he repeated, but immediately plucked up a cheerful spirit. “It is something saved for next time.”
“When will that be?”
“I was seven years saving up for this trip—you see, I can’t do a thing like this on a cheap scale—I mean I haven’t the ability. Suppose we say 1919—that’s a nice-sounding year.”
“Really?”
She was very sympathetic.
“Really,” he mocked her seriousness.
“And if we stayed over we could take a week to it.”
The dinner moved slowly. They were within a five-minutes’ drive of the steamer and the faithful Louis Napoleon was outside on guard, but Richard kept his watch before him. Meanwhile the lady aimed to prove how easy it would be to miss the boat, have the ticket-money refunded, and do the proper thing by the Museo.
The idea grew in his own mind as the minutes ticked nearer to the fateful nine o’clock.
“You could stay in one of those Woman’s Leaguepensions,” he mused, “while I lived at a nearby hotel.”
She baited him with alluring arguments, exactly in keeping, he might have thought, with those village qualities which, he had observed, were part of her charm. Undoubtedly, he noted her seeming artlessness.
At eight and three-quarters he rose briskly, walked to the curb, and openly paid and dismissed the faithful coachman.
Nine rang from a dock-tower or two as he jubilantly received coffee from the large silver-service at which Miss Geraldine Wells presided.
“Jerry!” he cried joyfully. “It’s done. The Rubicon is crossed and the Atlantic is not! We’ll hunt up one of those Woman’s League places right after dinner.”
“No,” she corrected; “not immediately. My conscience is York State and peculiar. You’ll have to drive me down to the boat-landing, so that I can say truthfully that I went there, but it was too late.”
“Thatisrural!” he laughed. “My conscience is strictly urban, like a steel bridge; it’s built to stand an awful strain.”
Jollity came out upon him. He grew witty, quick of tongue, even appreciative of the woman before him. He called her “Jerry” as if he liked the name; he did not resent her occasional “my dear.” His vacation had been suddenly lengthened; he was like a child in his unaffected glee; while the lady grew demurer and demurer, to use the language of “Wonderland.”
The rural conscience of Miss Geraldine Wells was insistent. It demanded precedence over hunts for Woman’s Leaguepensions; and it would not walk, it would go in a cab. What if the distance is short and cabs cost money? Isn’t a satisfied conscience above rubies?
Not that Mr. Richard objected to the most freakish demands of Miss Geraldine’s York State conscience; on the contrary, he was most interested in it; it wasone more curious phenomenon of the most curious of all phenomena, namely Life itself. He dealt with it—on the rumbling ride along the docks—both seriously and humorously. In fact, he was in the midst of a rather good joke on the moral iniquity of consciences in general when the vehicle stopped abruptly near the front end of a familiar black hulk on which a string of striking white letters proclaimed, “S.S.Victoria.”
“Play’s over,” a laughing voice whispered in his ear. “Wake up, child, and come on home.”
But he did not wake up. He stared stupidly and tried to get his bearings.
“She sails to-morrow at six, Sir Richard,” the lady explained, again demurely; “not to-night at nine as you so foolishly believed.”
“You knew?” he inquired thoughtfully.
She laughed; a little uncomfortably, for he was trying the operation of looking through her.
“Then you had no intention of staying over?”
He asked the question very mildly. It was quite clear that he felt not a shade of anger at the elaborate jest, but anyone could see that he was mightily disappointed.
“Staying over?” she arched her brows. “Why, Sir Richard! What a question! I am notaltogetherrural!”
Then he woke up, paid the driver, and plodded with her up the steep gang-plank.
Sir Richard was himself again; that is, silent and benumbed. He stood solemnly beside her and stared at the announcement on the bulletin-board that theVictoriawould sail “to-morrow morning at six.” Then after a mere smiling nod for a good-night he wandered down the corridor to his stateroom.
Miss Jerry Wells found a lonely steamer-chair on the upper deck, tucked herself in with the help of a clumsy deck-steward and tried to feel guiltless. The lady from the country had had her revenge, but she did not feel very happy over it.