The Girl on the Boat
“Little by little, bit by bit,” he said, “I am beginning to form a sort
of picture of this girl, this—what was her name again? Bennett—this
Miss Bennett. You have a wonderful knack of description. You make her
seem so real and vivid. Tell me some more about her. She wasn’t keen on
golf, by any chance, I suppose?”
“I believe she did play. The subject came up once and she seemed rather
enthusiastic. Why?”
“Well, I’d much sooner talk to a girl about golf than poetry.”
“You are hardly likely to be in a position to have to talk to
Wilhelmina Bennett about either, I should imagine.”
“No, there’s that, of course. I was thinking of girls in general. Some
girls bar golf, and then it’s rather difficult to know how to start the
conversation. But, tell me, were there any topics which got on this
Miss Bennett’s nerves, if you know what I mean? It seems to me that at
one time or another you may have said something that offended her. I
mean, it seems curious that she should have broken off the engagement
if you had never disagreed or quarrelled about anything.”
“Well, of course, there was always the matter of that dog of hers. She
had a dog, you know, a snappy brute of a Pekinese. If there was ever
any shadow of disagreement between us, it had to do with that dog. I
made rather a point of it that I would not have it about the home after
we were married.”
“I see!” said Sam. He shot his cuff once more and wrote on it:
“Dog—conciliate.” “Yes, of course, that must have wounded her.”
“Not half so much as he wounded me. He pinned me by the ankle the day
before we—Wilhelmina and I, I mean—were to have been married. It is
some satisfaction to me in my broken state to remember that I got home
on the little beast with considerable juiciness and lifted him clean
over the Chesterfield.”
Sam shook his head reprovingly.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. He extended his cuff and added
the words “Vitally Important” to what he had just written. “It was
probably that which decided her.”
“Well, I hate dogs,” said Eustace Hignett querulously. “I remember
Wilhelmina once getting quite annoyed with me because I refused to step
in and separate a couple of the brutes, absolute strangers to me, who
were fighting in the street. I reminded her that we were all fighters
nowadays, that life itself was in a sense a fight; but she wouldn’t be
reasonable about it. She said that Sir Galahad would have done it like
a shot. I thought not. We have no evidence whatsoever that Sir Galahad
was ever called upon to do anything half as dangerous. And, anyway, he
wore armour. Give me a suit of mail, reaching well down over the
ankles, and I will willingly intervene in a hundred dog fights. But in
thin flannel trousers, no!”
Sam rose. His heart was light. He had never, of course, supposed that
the girl was anything but perfect; but it was nice to find his high
opinion of her corroborated by one who had no reason to exhibit her in
a favourable light. He understood her point of view and sympathised
with it. An idealist, how could she trust herself to Eustace Hignett?
How could she be content with a craven who, instead of scouring the
world in the quest for deeds of derring-do, had fallen down so
lamentably on his first assignment? There was a specious attractiveness
about poor old Eustace which might conceivably win a girl’s heart for a
time; he wrote poetry, talked well, and had a nice singing voice; but,
as a partner for life ... well, he simply wouldn’t do. That was all
there was to it. He simply didn’t add up right. The man a girl like
Wilhelmina Bennett required for a husband was somebody entirely
different ... somebody, felt Samuel Marlowe, much more like Samuel
Marlowe.
Swelled almost to bursting point with these reflections, he went on
deck to join the ante-luncheon promenade. He saw Billie almost at once.
She had put on one of those nice sacky sport-coats which so enhance
feminine charms, and was striding along the deck with the breeze
playing in her vivid hair like the female equivalent of a Viking.
Beside her walked young Mr. Bream Mortimer.
Sam had been feeling a good deal of a fellow already, but at the sight
of her welcoming smile his self-esteem almost caused him to explode.
What magic there is in a girl’s smile! It is the raisin which, dropped
in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation.
“Oh, there you are, Mr. Marlowe!”
“Oh, _there_ you are,” said Bream Mortimer with a slightly different
inflection.
“I thought I’d like a breath of fresh air before lunch,” said Sam.
“Oh, Bream!” said the girl.
“Hello?”
“Do be a darling and take this great heavy coat of mine down to my
state-room, will you? I had no idea it was so warm.”
“I’ll carry it,” said Bream.
“Nonsense! I wouldn’t dream of burdening you with it. Trot along and
put it on the berth. It doesn’t matter about folding it up.”
“All right,” said Bream moodily.
He trotted along. There are moments when a man feels that all he needs
in order to be a delivery wagon is a horse and a driver. Bream Mortimer
was experiencing such a moment.
“He had better chirrup to the dog while he’s there, don’t you think?”
suggested Sam. He felt that a resolute man with legs as long as Bream’s
might well deposit a cloak on a berth and be back under the
half-minute.
“Oh yes! Bream!”
“Hello?”
“While you’re down there, just chirrup a little more to poor Pinky. He
does appreciate it so!”
Bream disappeared. It is not always easy to interpret emotion from a
glance at a man’s back; but Bream’s back looked like that of a man to
whom the thought has occurred that, given a couple of fiddles and a
piano, he would have made a good hired orchestra.
“How is your dear little dog, by the way?” inquired Sam solicitously,
as he fell into step by her side.
“Much better now, thanks. I’ve made friends with a girl on board—did
you ever hear her name—Jane Hubbard—she’s a rather well-known big-game
hunter, and she fixed up some sort of a mixture for Pinky which did him
a world of good. I don’t know what was in it except Worcester Sauce,
but she said she always gave it to her mules in Africa when they had
the botts ... it’s very nice of you to speak so affectionately of poor
Pinky when he bit you.”
“Animal spirits!” said Sam tolerantly. “Pure animal spirits. I like to
see them. But, of course, I love all dogs.”
“Oh, do you? So do I!”
“I only wish they didn’t fight so much. I’m always stopping
dog-fights.”
“I do admire a man who knows what to do at a dog-fight. I’m afraid I’m
rather helpless myself. There never seems anything to catch hold of.”
She looked down. “Have you been reading? What is the book?”
“The book? Oh, this. It’s a volume of Tennyson.”
“Are you fond of Tennyson?”
“I worship him,” said Sam reverently.
“Those——” he glanced at his cuff—“those ‘Idylls of the King!’ I do not
like to think what an ocean voyage would be if I had not my Tennyson
with me.”
“We must read him together. He is my favourite poet!”
“We will! There is something about Tennyson....”
“Yes, isn’t there! I’ve felt that myself so often.”
“Some poets are whales at epics and all that sort of thing, while
others call it a day when they’ve written something that runs to a
couple of verses, but where Tennyson had the bulge was that his long
game was just as good as his short. He was great off the tee and a
marvel with his chip-shots.”
“That sounds as though you play golf.”
“When I am not reading Tennyson, you can generally find me out on the
links. Do you play?”
“I love it. How extraordinary that we should have so much in common.
You seem to like all the things I like. We really ought to be great
friends.”
He was pausing to select the best of three replies when the lunch bugle
sounded.
“Oh dear!” she cried. “I must rush. But we shall see one another again
up here afterwards?”
“We will,” said Sam.
“We’ll sit and read Tennyson.”
“Fine! Er—you and I and Mortimer?”
“Oh no, Bream is going to sit down below and look after poor Pinky.”
“Does he—does he know he is?”
“Not yet,” said Billie. “I’m going to tell him at lunch.”
CHAPTER IV.
SAM CLICKS
§ 1
It was the fourth morning of the voyage. Of course, when this story is
done in the movies they won’t be satisfied with a bald statement like
that; they will have a Spoken Title or a Cut-Back Sub-Caption or
whatever they call the thing in the low dens where motion-picture
scenario-lizards do their dark work, which will run:—
AND SO, CALM AND GOLDEN, THE DAYS WENT BY, EACH FRAUGHT WITH HOPE AND
YOUTH AND SWEETNESS, LINKING TWO YOUNG HEARTS IN SILKEN FETTERS FORGED
BY THE LAUGHING LOVE-GOD.
and the males in the audience will shift their chewing gum to the other
cheek and take a firmer grip of their companion’s hands and the man at
the piano will play “Everybody wants a key to my cellar,” or something
equally appropriate, very soulfully and slowly, with a wistful eye on
the half-smoked cigarette which he has parked on the lowest octave and
intends finishing as soon as the picture is over. But I prefer the
plain frank statement that it was the fourth day of the voyage. That is
my story and I mean to stick to it.
Samuel Marlowe, muffled in a bathrobe, came back to the state-room from
his tub. His manner had the offensive jauntiness of the man who has had
a cold bath when he might just as easily have had a hot one. He looked
out of the porthole at the shimmering sea. He felt strong and happy and
exuberant.
It was not merely the spiritual pride induced by a cold bath that was
uplifting this young man. The fact was that, as he towelled his glowing
back, he had suddenly come to the decision that this very day he would
propose to Wilhelmina Bennett. Yes, he would put his fortune to the
test, to win or lose it all. True, he had only known her for four days,
but what of that?
Nothing in the way of modern progress is more remarkable than the
manner in which the attitude of your lover has changed concerning
proposals of marriage. When Samuel Marlowe’s grandfather had convinced
himself, after about a year and a half of respectful aloofness, that
the emotion which he felt towards Samuel Marlowe’s grandmother-to-be
was love, the fashion of the period compelled him to approach the
matter in a roundabout way. First, he spent an evening or two singing
sentimental ballads, she accompanying him on the piano and the rest of
the family sitting on the side-lines to see that no rough stuff was
pulled. Having noted that she drooped her eyelashes and turned faintly
pink when he came to the “Thee—only thee!” bit, he felt a mild sense of
encouragement, strong enough to justify him in taking her sister aside
next day and asking if the object of his affections ever happened to
mention his name in the course of conversation. Further _pour-parlers_
having passed with her aunt, two more sisters, and her little brother,
he felt that the moment had arrived when he might send her a volume of
Shelley, with some of the passages marked in pencil. A few weeks later,
he interviewed her father and obtained his consent to the paying of his
addresses. And finally, after writing her a letter which began “Madam,
you will not have been insensible to the fact that for some time past
you have inspired in my bosom feelings deeper than those of ordinary
friendship....” he waylaid her in the rose-garden and brought the thing
off.
How different is the behaviour of the modern young man. His courtship
can hardly be called a courtship at all. His methods are those of Sir
W. S. Gilbert’s Alphonso.
“Alphonso, who for cool assurance all creation licks,
He up and said to Emily who has cheek enough for six:
‘Miss Emily, I love you. Will you marry? Say the word!’
And Emily said: ‘Certainly, Alphonso, like a bird!’”