“But why did you ask them?”
“Well, I couldn’t tell that they were going to turn out to be so wet, could I? And you said yourself there were not enough women coming. You said so yourself last night.”
“Yes, but why ask those two? Who are they? Where did you ever meet such people?”
“I met Jenny downtown. She—”
“I know: but where did you come to know her? How long have you known her?”
“I met her downtown this morning, I tell you; in Holmes’s while I was buying a bathing suit. She said she’d like to come, but the other one was waiting outside on the street for her and he put his foot down: he said she couldn’t go without him. He’s her heavy, I gather.”
Mrs. Maurier’s astonishment was sincere now. “Do you mean to tell me,” she asked in shocked unbelief, “that you never saw these people before? That you invited two people you never saw before to come on a party on my boat?”
“I just asked Jenny,” the niece explained patiently. “The other one had to come so she could come. I didn’t want him specially. How could I know her when I never saw her before? If I had known her, you can bet I wouldn’t have asked her to come. She’s a complete washout, far as I’m concerned. But I couldn’t see that this morning. I thought she was all right, then. Gabriel’s pants, look at ’em.” They both looked back at Jenny in her flimsy green dress, at Pete holding his hat on. “Well, I got ’em here: I guess I’ll have to keep ’em from getting stepped on. I think I’ll get Pete a piece of string to tie his hat down with, anyway.” She swung herself easily up the stairs: Mrs. Maurier saw with horrified surprise that she wore neither shoes nor stockings.
“Patricia!” she shrieked. The niece paused, looking over her shoulder. Her aunt pointed mutely at her bare legs.
“Haul in your sheet, Aunt Pat,” the niece replied brusquely, “you’re jibbing.”
ONE O’CLOCK
Lunch was spread on deck, on collapsible card tables set end to end. When she appeared her guests all regarded her brightly, a trifle curiously. Mrs. Maurier, oblivious, herded them toward it. “Sit anywhere, people,” she repeated in singsong. “Girls will be at a premium this voyage. To the winner belongs the fair lady, remember.” This sounded a little strange to her, so she repeated: “Sit anywhere, people; the gentlemen must make—” She looked about upon her guests and her voice died away. Her party consisted of Mrs. Wiseman, Miss Jameson, herself, Jenny and Pete clotting unhappily behind her niece, Mr. Talliaferro, and her nephew, who had already seated himself. “Where are the gentlemen?” she asked at large.
“Jumped overboard,” muttered Pete darkly, unheard, clutching his hat. The others stood, watching her brightly.
“Where are the gentlemen?” Mrs. Maurier repeated.
“If you’d stop talking a minute you wouldn’t have to ask,” her nephew told her. He had already seated himself and he now spooned into a grapefruit with preoccupied celerity.
“Theodore!” his aunt exclaimed.
From below there came an indistinguishable mixture of sound somehow vaguely convivial. “Whooping it up,” the nephew added, looking up at his aunt at her expression of reproof. “In a hurry,” he explained. “Got to get done. Can’t wait on those birds.” He remarked his sister’s guests for the first time. “Who’re your friends, Gus?” he asked without interest. Then he fell anew upon his grapefruit.
“Theodore!” his aunt exclaimed again. The indistinguishable convivial sound welled, becoming laughter. Mrs. Maurier roved her astonished eyes. “What can they be doings”
Mr. Talliaferro moved deferentially. “If you wish—?”
“Oh, Mr. Talliaferro, if you would be so kind,” Mrs. Maurier accepted with emotion.
“Let the steward go, Aunt Pat. Let’s eat,” the niece said, thrusting Jenny forward. “Come on, Pete. Gimme your hat,” she added, offering to take it. Pete refused to surrender it.
“Wait,” the nephew interjected, “I’ll get ’em up.” He picked up the thick plate and flipping his grapefruit hull overboard he turned sideways in his chair and hammered a brisk staccato on the deck with the dish.
“Theodore!” his aunt exclaimed for the third time. “Mr. Talliaferro, will you—” Mr. Talliaferro sped toward the companion-way, vanished.
“Aw, let the steward go, Aunt Pat,” the niece repeated. “Come on, let’s sit down. Let up, Josh, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, Mrs. Maurier, let’s don’t wait for them,” Mrs. Wiseman abetted, seating herself also. The others followed suit. Mrs. Maurier roved her fretted eyes. “Well,” she submitted at last. Then she remarked Pete, still clutching his hat. “I’ll take your hat,” she offered, extending her hand. Pete foiled her quickly.
“Look out,” he said, “I’ve got it.” He moved beyond Jenny and put his hat behind him in his chair. At this moment the gentlemen appeared from below, talking loudly.
“Ah, wretches,” began the hostess with flaccid coquetry, shaking her finger at them. Fairchild was in the lead, burly and jovial, a shade unsteady as to gait. Mr. Talliaferro brought up the rear: he too had now a temporarily emancipated air.
“I guess you thought we’d jumped the ship,” Fairchild suggested, happily apologetic. Mrs. Maurier sought Mr. Talliaferro’s evasive eyes. “We were helping Major Ayers find his teeth,” Fairchild added.
“Lost ’em in that little rabbit hutch where we were,” explained the florid man. “Couldn’t find ’em right off. No teeth, no tiffin, y’know. If you don’t mind?” he murmured politely, seating himself next Mrs. Wiseman. “Ah, grapefruit.” He raised his voice again. “How jolly: seen no grapefruit since we left New Orleans, eh, Julius?”
“Lost his teeth?” repeated Mrs. Maurier, dazed. The niece and her brother regarded the florid man with interest.
“They fell out of his mouth,” Fairchild elaborated, taking the seat next Miss Jameson. “He was laughing at something Julius said, and they fell out of his mouth and somebody kicked ’em under the bunk, you see. What was it you said, Julius?”
Mr. Talliaferro essayed to seat himself beside the florid man. Mrs. Maurier again sought his eye, forced him and vanquished him with bright command. He rose and went to the chair next to her, and she leaned toward him, sniffing. “Ah, Mr. Talliaferro,” she murmured with playful implacability, “naughty, naughty.”
“Just a nip—they were rather insistent,” Mr. Talliaferro apologized.
“You men, you naughty men. I’ll forgive you, however, this once,” she answered. “Do ring, please.”
The Semitic man’s flaccid face and dark compassionate eyes presided at the head of the table. Gordon stood for a time after the others were seated, then he came andtook the seat between Mrs. Maurier and her niece, with abrupt arrogance. The niece looked up briefly. “Hello, Blackbeard.” Mrs. Maurier smiled at him automatically. She said:
“Listen, people. Mr. Talliaferro is going to make an announcement. About promptness,” she added to Mr. Talliaferro, putting her hand on his sleeve.
“Ah, yes. I say, you chaps almost missed lunch. We were not going to wait on you. The lunch hour is half after twelve, here-after, and everyone must be present promptly. Ship’s discipline, you know. Eh, Commodore?”
The hostess corroborated. “You must be good children,” she added with playful relief, looking about her table. Her worried expression returned. “Why, there’s an empty place. Who isn’t here?” She roved her eyes in growing alarm. “Someone isn’t here,” she repeated. She had a brief and dreadful vision of having to put back short one guest, of inquest and reporters and headlines, and of floating inert buttocks in some lonely reach of the lake, that would later wash ashore with that mute inopportune implacability of the drowned. The guests stared at one another, then at the vacant place, then at one another again. Mrs. Maurier tried to call a mental roll, staring at each in turn. Presently Miss Jameson sai
d:
“Why, it’s Mark,” isn’t it?”
It was Mark. They had forgotten him. Mrs. Maurier dispatched the steward, who found the ghostly poet still at full length on the upper deck. He appeared in his ironed serge, bathing them briefly in his pale gaze.
“You gave us rather a turn, my dear fellow,” Mr. Talliaferro informed him with reproof, taking upon himself the duties of host.
“I wondered how long it would be before someone saw fit to notify me that lunch was ready,” the poet replied with cold dignity, taking his seat.
Fairchild, watching him, said abruptly, “Say, Julius, Mark’s the very man for Major Ayers, ain’t he? Say, Major, here’s a man to take your first bottle. Tell him about your scheme.”
The florid man regarded the poet affably. “Ah, yes. It’s a salts, you see. You spoon a bit of it into your—”
“A what?” asked the poet, poising his spoon and staring at the florid man. The others all poised their tools and stared at the florid man.
“A salts,” he explained. “Like our salts at home, y’know—”
“A—?” repeated Mrs. Maurier. Mr. Talliaferro’s eyes popped mildly.
“All Americans are constipated,” the florid man continued blithely, “do with a bit of salts in a tumbler of water in the morning. Now, my scheme is—”
“Mr. Talliaferro!” Mrs. Maurier implored. Mr. Talliaferro girded himself anew.
“My dear sir,” he began.
“—is to put the salts up in a tweaky phial, a phial that will look well on one’s night table: a jolly design of some sort. All Americans will buy it. Now, the population of your country is several millions, I fancy; and when you take into consideration the fact that all Americans are con—”
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Talliaferro, louder.
“Eh?” said the florid man, looking at him.
“What kind of a jar will you put ’em in?” asked the nephew, his mind taking fire.
“Some tweaky sort of thing that all Americans will buy—”
“The American flag and a couple of doves holding dollar marks in their bills, and a handle that when you pull it out, it’s a corkscrew,” suggested Fairchild. The florid man glared at him with interest and calculation.
“Or,” the Semitic man suggested, “a small condensed table for calculating interest on one side and a good recipe for beer on the other.” The florid man glared at him with interest.
“That’s just for men,” Mrs. Wiseman said. “How about the women’s trade?”
“A bit of mirror would do for them, don’t you think?” the florid man offered, “surrounded by a design in colors, eh?” Mrs. Wiseman gave him a murderous glance and the poet added:
“And a formula for preventing conception and a secret place for hairpins.” The hostess moaned, “Mr. Talliaferro!” Mrs. Wiseman said savagely:
“I have a better idea than that, for both sexes: your photograph on one side and the golden rule on the other.” The florid man glared at her with interest. The nephew broke in once more:
“I mean, have you invented a jar yet, invented a way to get the stuff out of the jar?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve done that. You spoon it out, you know.”
“But tell ’em how you know all Americans are constipated,” Fairchild suggested. Mrs. Maurier rang the service bell furiously and at length. The steward appeared and as he removed the plates and replaced them with others, the florid man leaned nearer Mrs. Wiseman.
“What’s that chap?” he asked, indicating Mr. Talliaferro.
“What is he?” Mrs. Wiseman repeated. “Why—I think he sells things downtown. Doesn’t he, Julius?” She appealed to her brother.
“I mean, what—ah—race does he belong to?”
“Oh. You’d noticed his accent, then?”
“Yes. I noticed he doesn’t talk like Americans. I thought perhaps he is one of your natives.”
“One of our—?” She stared at him.
“Your red Indians, y’know,” he explained.
Mrs. Maurier rang her little bell again, sort of chattering to herself.
TWO O’CLOCK
Mrs. Maurier put an end to that luncheon as soon as she decently could. If I can only break them up, get them into a bridge game, she thought in an agony. It had got to where every time one of the gentlemen made the precursory sound of speech, Mrs. Maurier flinched and cringed nearer Mr. Talliaferro. At least she could depend on him, provided—But she was going to do the providing in his case. They had discussed Major Ayers’s salts throughout the meal. Eva Wiseman had turned renegade and abetted them, despite the atmosphere of reproof Mrs. Maurier had tried to foster and support. And, on top of all this, the strange young man had the queerest manner of using knife and fork. Mr. Fairchild’s way was—well, uncouth; but after all, one must pay a price for Art. Jenny, on the other hand, had an undeniable style, feeding herself with her little finger at a rigid and elegant angle from her hand. And now Fairchild was saying:
“Now here’s a clean case of poetic justice for you. A hundred odd years ago Major Ayers’s grandpa wants to come to New Orleans, but our grandfathers stop him down yonder in those Chalmette swamps and lick hell out of him. And now Major Ayers comes into the city itself and conquers it with a laxative so mild that, as he says, you don’t even notice it. Hey, Julius?”
“It also confounds all the old convictions regarding the irreconcilability of science and art,” the Semitic man suggested.
“Huh?” said Fairchild. “Oh, sure. That’s right. Say, he certainly ought to make Al Jackson a present of a bottle, oughtn’t he?”
The thin poet groaned sepulchrally. Major Ayers repeated: “Al Jackson?”
The steward removed the cloth. The table was formed of a number of card tables; by Mrs. Maurier’s direction he did not remove these. She called him to her, whispered to him; he went below.
“Why, didn’t you ever hear of Al Jackson?” asked Fairchild in unctuous surprise. “He’s a funny man, a direct descendant of Old Hickory that licked you folks in 1812, he claims. He’s quite a character in New Orleans.” The other guests all listened to Fairchild with a sort of noncommittal attention. “You can always tell him because he wears congress boots all the time—”
“Congress boots?” murmured Major Ayers, staring at him. Fairchild explained, raising his foot above the level of the table to demonstrate.
“Sure. On the street, at formal gatherings, even in evening dress he wears ’em. He even wears ’em in bathing.”
“In bathing? I say.” Major Ayers stared at the narrator with his round china-blue eyes.
“Sure. Won’t let anyone see him barefoot. A family deformity, you see. Old Hickory himself had it: that’s the reason he out-fought the British in those swamps. He’d never have whipped ’em otherwise. When you get to town, go down to Jackson square and look at that statue of the old fellow. He’s got on congress boots.” He turned to the Semitic man. “By the way, Julius, you remember about Old Hickory’s cavalry, don’t you?” The Semitic man was noncommittal, and Fairchild continued:
“Well, the old general bought a place in Florida. A stock farm, they told him it was, and he gathered up a bunch of mountaineers from his Tennessee place and sent ’em down there with a herd of horses. Well, sir, when they got there they found the place was pretty near all swamp. But they were hardy folks, so they lit right in to make the best of it. In the meantime—”
“Doing what?” asked the nephew.
“Huh?” said Fairchild.
“What were they going to do in Florida? That’s what we all want to know,” Mrs. Wiseman said.
“Sell real estate to the Indians,” the Semitic man suggested. Major Ayers stared at him with his little blue eyes.
“No, they were going to run a dude ranch for the big hotels at Palm Beach,”
Fairchild told them. “And in the meantime some of these horses strayed off into the swamps, and in some way the breed got crossed with alligators. And so, when Old Hickory found he was going to have to fight his battle down there in those Chalmette swamps, he sent over to his Florida place and had ’em round up as many of those half-horse half-alligators as they could, and he mounted some of his infantry on ’em and the British couldn’t stop ’em at all. The British didn’t know Florida—”
“That’s true,” the Semitic man put in. “There were no excursions then.”
“—and they didn’t even know what the things were, you see.”