Читать книгу The Luck of the Irish - Harold MacGrath - Страница 11

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NEXT morning William went to breakfast rather early. He ate oranges, oatmeal, beefsteak and fried potatoes, bacon and liver, three squares of toast, and drank two cups of coffee.

William's cabin-mates were two old archeologists, bound for mid-Africa. Clausen sat opposite and eyed William with profound envy. To possess a physical organization that demanded such a start-off for the day! He sighed.

"Young man, I'd give a million—if I had it!—for an appetite like yours."

"Well," replied William, genially, "I guess it 'd take a million to keep it going. I've been the ruination of half a dozen boarding-houses." He folded his napkin and patted it down beside his plate, a thrifty habit he had acquired from years of living in boarding-houses where one napkin must go through three campaigns before it is turned into the laundry. "Say, Mr. Clausen, you've been over before. Ever ride an elephant?"

"Yes"—mournfully.

"What's it like?"

"It's like straddling the roof of a wooden house during an exceedingly violent earthquake."

​"You can't scare me," said William, as he turn-stiled himself out of the chair and made for the upper deck.

Could anything have scared him that glorious morning, his appetite satisfied, his lungs full of fresh sea-air, the blood bounding through his veins? I doubt it.

William hurried away to his chair, but, finding that the school-teacher's was unoccupied, he immediately lost interest in the spot. He next turned into the smoke-room; nobody home there. Where were they all, anyhow? It was after nine, and not two dozen souls were up and abroad. Could anybody possibly be seasick on a day like this? There was only what the chief engineer called a fair beam sea running up from the south-west; not enough to spill the cat's milk.

He began to worry. Supposing she was seasick? That would mean a long, lonesome day for him.

A fit of restlessness laid hold of him. He tramped up and down the decks, explored the library, the barber's shop, and the steerage. In the end he found temporary anchorage against the weather rail, near the entrance to the smoke-room. He blinked in the dazzle of the leaping blue water, took out a Partaga, turned it over and over in his fingers, and grinned pleasurably. Back of that little roll of Havana was a twenty-thousand-dollar interest in Burns, Dolan & Co., master plumbers, about four thousand in the Corn Exchange, and a letter of credit for three thousand in his inside pocket, la-de-dah.

​He lighted the cigar and puffed luxuriously. He had read about Partagas. Sir Percival was always smoking one as he faced the lions, or Hockheimer, the theatrical magnate, as he gave a million in royalties to the poor playwright, or Reginald Van Wiggs as he heard his doom read in his uncle's will. William was always playing pranks mentally with some of the heroes he had read about. But that he, William Grogan, should live to stick this brand of perfecto between his teeth was like a dream in hashish. And once upon a time—two months since, in fact—his wildest dream would have stopped short of a box of George W. Childs's! Maybe it was a dream, after all, the ship, the cigar, the girl. Impulsively he brought the heel of his left shoe down upon the toe of his right. He felt it.

"I should worry!" he murmured.

The cigar slowly vanished in ashes. Truth to tell, while he enjoyed it to a certain extent, he would have preferred his corn-cob and "scrap." There wasn't any "kick" to these perfectos.

"Beautiful morning, isn't it?"

William looked up slowly. "Yes, it is."

Panama hat, white flannels, white shoes, silk shirt, just exactly like those chaps on the stage dressed. The man was good-looking; William admitted this grudgingly, but he knew in his soul that he wasn't going to like the man. Why? Oh, it was one of his "hunches."

"Going all the way around?"

"Ye-ah. Always wanted to see the Orient."

​"You'll enjoy it. I took the grand tour seven years ago. My name is Richard Camden. I believe we sit at the same table."

"Mine is William Grogan, and this is my first trip anywhere that amounts to anything."

"I envy you. Everything will be new and strange. I'm not going around myself. Called to Europe suddenly; and this was the only boat leaving at the time. I had to hustle."

"Ye-ah. I noticed that when you came on board."

Camden laughed. "I recollect bumping into you. I apologize again."

"Passed by the censor," said William, with a wave of his hand. "I wonder these gulls never get tired."

"Gulls never tire."

"Same class as suckers; I see. They keep coming back."

Camden laughed again. This red-headed young man was keen. Trust a New-Yorker to get the undertow. Merely the inflection of tone, and yet he had caught the ironic spirit back of the words.

"The young lady who sat between us last night at dinner is charming."

An indefinable something warned William to be wary. He had a natural distrust for well-dressed idlers, especially when they spoke of women. Was the man trying to pump him?

"You're right; she is. I've known her for three years."

​"Three years? Why, you're old friends, then!"

"Well, you wouldn't exactly call it that. What you might call a passing acquaintance." William considered that very good. "She's a school-teacher around the corner from my shop. I had no idea she was going to make the trip; and she was surprised to see me." Inwardly he communed, "William, you're some Ananias, take it from me!"

What was his purpose in these half-lies? It was too remote, too vague for him to define. He was doubtless endeavoring to throw some kind of protection around the lonely girl by letting the world at large know that William Grogan's two fists were hers for the asking. In a sense it was primordial, the ancient male idea, the warning off of all other males.

"I did not quite get the name," said Camden.

"Grogan—William Grogan," said William, a sardonic grin pulling at the corners of his mouth.

"I mean the young lady's name."

"Oh!" William eyed the racing foam below speculatively. "Miss Jones; not very hard to remember."

"You can't remember anything you don't hear distinctly. Will you have a cigarette?" asked the man Camden, offering his case.

"I roll a Durham once in a while, but no dope for mine. Say, I wonder if there's any professional gamblers on board? Signs are hanging up in the smoke-room."

"Professionals on a trip like this? Good Lord, ​no! They'd starve to death. They ply generally between New York, Liverpool, and Cherbourg."

"Well, that's too bad. I thought of course there' d be a few sharks in this school of mackerel. I've been building for weeks on seeing the gambler held up by some handsome outsider and the foolish young man, traveling with the firm's money, paid back his losses. Shucks!"

"I don't believe you stand in much danger." Camden narrowed his eyes as the smoke from his cigarette volleyed past his cheek.

"They couldn't take a peek at a nickel of mine. This little old letter of credit," said William, slapping his coat pocket, "is for expenses only. I play a game of pinochle once in a while; but beyond that, nothing doing. There's no something-for-nothing on my program. Work and cards don't mix."

"True enough. I like to gamble for small stakes, just enough to make the game interesting. But there'll be no chance on board the Ajax. There is, however, a lot of sport in double canfield. You can knock half a day galley-west with a pack of cards. Drop into the smoke-room to-night and I'll teach you a game or two of solitaire."

"That 'll be fine. So long as I don't have to dig in my jeans, any kind of a game for mine."

"All right, then; any time after dinner. Good morning."

William did not leave the rail at once. He was puzzled. Anything which did not appear to come in the natural order of events made him suspicious. ​He knew instinctively that he was not of the sort of men the Camden caliber picked out for acquaintanceship, not even on a ship like the Ajax. What was he really fishing for? Why should this matinée idol bother to ask William Grogan what the school-teacher's name was, when all he had to do was to look at the dining-room chart? The puzzle was not solvable.

"Pumping me, all right. But I know all about pumps; and a lot you'll get up through my pipes, Percival."

Nevertheless, he sought his chair, vaguely perturbed; and it took him some time to get back into the final pages of Cellini. He had laid the book aside and was in a half-dream when he heard the foot-rest of the other chair rattle. He jumped to his feet.

"Good morning," he greeted.

"Good morning. No, thanks; don't bother with the rugs. You're a good sailor, too, it seems. Isn't it wonderful, the sky, the sea, and the wind? So you've finished Messer Cellini? Isn't that a tremendous chronicle? Think of being a personal friend of Michelangelo and his contemporaries!"

"Say, if he was alive, we wouldn't need to worry about white hopes. He wouldn't spill the beans over a pound or two in weight."

"Beans?"

"Aw, there I go, into the rough-neck stuff again! I've got so used to talking that way I can't help it."

"Perhaps you don't try hard enough."

​"Say, supposing you start in and tell me where I get off on the straight talk?"

"You mean correct you? That's a pretty large order. Suppose you make it a point not to use slang whenever you talk to me?"

"All right. But I'll have to let down easy. You see, I couldn't make myself understood if I had to give it up all at once. You understand me?" He wondered why she smiled.

"Oh yes. School-children have a marvelous faculty of picking up slang phrases."

"Say, but this Cellini guy—"

"What does guy really mean?"

"A guy? Why, a guy is a guy!" William rumpled his hair perplexedly.

"Mr. Grogan, you don't know what the words mean yourself, half the time. How, then, do you expect us outsiders to understand?"

"I guess you've got me there, all right. Well, this Cellini—Dumas wrote a story around him."

"Ascanio."

"That's the boy. My! but the old geezer did some tall scrapping. He only ate when he couldn't get anybody to fight with. And I thought this Cellini person was an invention of Dumas'! Well, I'm on my way around the world, and maybe my bumps won't be strained when I land in little old New York again!"

By the time the steward's boy came around with the broth and crackers William had told the story of his life, the humdrum of it, his ambitions which had promised to die of attrition, and then the ​magical windfall out of nowhere. Her summing up of this serio-comic tale would have dumfounded him, for it consisted solely of the conviction that he possessed the most expressive blue eyes she had ever seen.

On her side, however, she had no confidences to exchange. Indeed, William hadn't expected any. He was perfectly content to find an ear into which to pour his own. It was something new to have so good a listener. She seemed to understand, too; and it was a rare treat to watch the varying expressions of her face as he went along. He was faring forth on quicksands, bravely and boldly, only he was not aware of it.

He amused her, scattered self-thought, made her forget, temporarily at least, the ghosts which haunted her. She really wanted to be alone, and yet she knew that in loneliness lay her danger. … An impulse came to her. Why not take this whimsical young man under her teacher's wing, and without his sensing it teach him what paintings meant, music, architecture, and peoples? Six months; within that time she might give him the basis of a good education. He was quick enough mentally; all he needed was direction. Perhaps this impulse was born of selfishness, a desire to keep her mind occupied. That she might spoil his life never entered her thoughts.

On Saturday morning Camden came out of the smoke-room, bored and irritable. He was about to go forward in quest of amusement when he heard feminine laughter the quality of which was ​rather tuneful in his ear. He paused. Then he stepped around the corner of the deck-house and discovered the Irishman in the act of describing some incident evidently humorous. Unobserved, he studied the girl's face. It was one of those singular countenances which in repose is pretty, but which is really beautiful when successive waves of animation pass over it.

He approached, bowed easily, and asked permission to sit upon the coil of rope.

"I heard some one laughing; and as there was no one in the smoke-room but professors and preachers and missionaries to whom the odor of tobacco is objectionable, I had to run for it. They have all the comfortable lounges, and the noise is like a church bazaar. I haven't found a soul on board yet who is going around the world just for the fun of it. You are not making the trip, are you, Miss Jones, for the uplift of the spirit?"

"I am not. I am going around the world to see things, to be amused, and to have other people wait upon me. To sit back and be waited on, that's been the dream of my life."

"Anything you'd like just now?" asked William.

Camden threw him an admiring glance. The very words had been on the tip of his own tongue. The Irishman had beaten him out. Then he deliberately set himself about the task of interesting the girl and blanketing William; and by the time the bugle announced luncheon William felt that he had been eliminated. Camden thoroughly enjoyed the play; but it was certain that the ​possibility of his becoming a friend of William Grogan was more than ever remote. William was no fool; he understood that he had been smothered, side-tracked, left at the post; but he took his medicine without murmur.

He never looked into his likes and dislikes. They formed instantly. Being a philosopher in the rough, he had no determinate phrases by which to express himself upon the subject. He had "hunches." He was not infallible by any means, but the margin of his mistakes was remarkably small. His "hunch" in this particular case was that Camden was a little too "previous." The East Side vernacular had a synonym, and naturally William preferred it. Camden was a "shine." And somewhere along the route he was going to prove it to his individual satisfaction.

The idea that he had been put on board the Ajax by a special act of Providence to watch over this girl became more fixed, an obsession perhaps. He had drawn a Friar Tuck circle around her, and woe to the man who was unwise enough to step inside.

He turned in early that night. He was half asleep when his cabin-mates came in. Neither would see sixty again. Greenwood was generally irritable, while Clausen, the Dane, was invariably amiable. What little William had seen of them convinced him that they were as tough as rhinoceroses. Over sixty, and still going back to the deserts with shovels and sun-umbrellas! And what was it all about, anyhow? He gave it up.

​Evidently they had been haranguing on deck. They were still arguing as they came in. Vaguely William heard "Nineveh" and "excavations" and "authority." The bone of contention seemed to be the restorations of Shalmaneser I. Finally the audience of one opened his eyes and leaned sleepily over the edge of his bunk. By this time one of the patriarchs was violently waving his shirt to drive home his point.

"Want a referee?" William asked, gently.

The two old fellows looked up, blank of eye.

"Who is this guy, anyhow?"

"Who, Shalmaneser?"

"Ye-ah."

"He was one of the kings of Assyria."

"Well, say! I thought maybe he was that new Dutchman who's after Hans Wagner's left mitt."

"Frightful ignorance!" grumbled the shirt-waver.

Clausen smiled. "Shalmaneser was born thirteen hundred b.c."

"That lets me out," declared the unregenerate one. "What's the matter with writing one of his descendants and putting the bet up to him? I wouldn't lose any sleep over a guy that's been dead all that time."

Old Clausen laughed. "I am sorry we waked you, Mr. Grogan."

"Passed by the censor," replied William, bunching his pillows anew.

"Sleep? Well, that's reasonable," mumbled ​Greenwood, dropping his shirt indifferently to the floor. "But still I contend—"

"Low bridge!"

The cabin became as silent as the tomb of Shalmaneser himself save when a roller broke on the metal sides of the ship under the open port.

Of course, William had to recount this little adventure the following morning, and thereupon had his first glimpse behind the corner of his school-teacher's past.

"Can't you see the pair of them rowing over every tombstone they come to? If there's anything left of the Tower of Babel, believe me, some bricks are going to be missing. What's it all about? Who cares? Thirteen hundred before Christ; some past!"

"Wouldn't you be interested to know how they got water up to the hanging gardens of Babylon, there in the desert? Wouldn't you like to know what machinery they had, how they manufactured their cloths, made their weapons, lived, worked, and died?"

"Why, sure I would!"

"Well, your ancients, as you call them, are endeavoring to find out these very things, to learn if humanity has really progressed in all these centuries. My father was a scientist and spent most of his time trying to find some method of overcoming gravity or neutralizing it. There is no other quest so interesting as that pursued by the man of science, the explorer. What hardships accepted unmurmuringly! For money? No. ​Great scientists are dreadful spendthrifts. They ask for nothing but the fact itself, and most of them die in poverty. My father did; and he never found his fact."

"I'm sorry. I suppose it's because I'm young, alive, and hungry three times a day. You never ran across a young archeologist, did you?"

"Not that I can recall," she answered, smiling suddenly. After all, she had no right to lecture him. She could have stated her facts without unnecessary heat.

"So you've had to fight for bread and butter, the same as I have?"

"Yes." And the little corner of the curtain fell, to be stirred no more that day.

William figuratively heard the tinkle of falling glass. His captivating romance lay shattered at his feet. She was not a rich man's daughter; she was the daughter of a man who had died in poverty. It took her down from the stars, but on the other hand it wrapped her in a fog. Perhaps the clerk in Cook's was wrong, after all; perhaps she wasn't running away from anything.

On Monday afternoon there were games; and with his usual enthusiasm William entered each contest, winning the pillow-fight astride a spar. He wasn't afraid to laugh, and his roars could be heard above the general laughter. He was like a boy of ten in enthusiasm, but behind this was the strength of a lion and the agility of a leopard. For the rest of the afternoon he was a hero to the children, who followed him about the deck; and ​when he sat down, his legs crossed tailor-fashion, and told them bloody pirate tales, his conquest was complete. Children and dogs always came at a beckon from William, and he was serenely unconscious of the magnetism which made this possible.

Camden and the school-teacher had witnessed William's exploits from the skirts of the crowd.

"Odd character," was Camden's comment.

"Yes; but strong and clean. And he is funny."

"You've known him long?"

"Oh no. I never saw him before we came aboard; but it seems he has known me for three years. He has a wonderful eye and memory. For three years he watched me go past the cellar window of the shop he works in. And, would you believe it, he identified me by my feet, never having seen my face!"

"What does he do?"

"He's a plumber."

"Ye gods!"

They both laughed; but her laughter ceased first. She became suddenly and guiltily conscious of the snobbery in it.

The beautiful days slipped past. Never, in all his dreams, had William found such fun in life. He made friends, port and starboard; even the aristocracy smiled at and with him. And he had his own secret fun, the gamin's outlook. There were always four or five kiddies trailing at his heels; and whenever he paused to play with them ​there was a strange beauty in his face. He loved children.

The only D. A. R. in northwest Kansas consulted him about taking up the collection for the seamen's fund; the only poet in southwest Pennsylvania complained to him of the inconsistencies of D'Annunzio's flights; the first mayor of Spottsville, Oklahoma, (Mr. Spotts) discoursed on our foreign policies; and the most important invalid on board drew diagrams of his various operations for William's edification. The two young Misses Doolittle (from up-State)—their father had served a term in the State Legislature—described William as "delicious"! The old men called him the human dynamo; the old ladies whose feet he sometimes tucked in declared that he was "a dear"; and the children called him "great." Such a man may be a "character," but he is never insignificant.

They dropped the Azores, and that night William ran afoul a most peculiar adventure. He had finished his second cigar after dinner it was about eleven and was taking a three-times-around before turning in. His thoughts centered upon his school-teacher, naturally.

This train of thought was abruptly and painfully derailed by human energy. Some one fell upon his back like the old man of the sea, out of nowhere.