Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
certainly go to pieces physically as well. On this conclusion he felt
no further inclination for observations. But that did not prevent him
from hearing what she had to say. She had struck up a little
conversation with the man on the other side of her, speaking in a
nervous contralto voice that, without being throaty, contained a curious
husky tremor giving almost the suggestion that she wore a veil over it.
Without the assistance of his previous deductions Westenra would have
known it at once for the voice of a temperamental woman, as well as that
of a woman of the world; and was the more astonished therefore, at her
free _bon camarade_ manner with her neighbour, a French Jew with a mean
expression on a clever face--a financier or dealer in jewels Westenra
judged, and a none too scrupulous one at that. They talked about the
ice on the table and where it had come from. The Jew was not sure
whether it was Norwegian ice or manufactured on the boat, but was full
of information about the New York supply and the great frozen lakes from
which it was cut in enormous blocks.
"I must go and see them!" said the woman eagerly, "and the far solitary
tracts of ice and snow in Alaska! I _must_ see them."
She talked like a woman who had fever in her veins.
"You like cold places?" asked the Jew curiously.
"No! No! I hate cold, but I like wide, solitary, empty lands and
countries I have never been to. I would love to wake up every morning of
my life in afresh place."
Westenra admired reserve in a woman, and was thoroughly astounded at
such a lack of it. There was worse to come. Her friendly candour
revived the French heart of the Jew to a corresponding friendliness
which by some persons might have been considered impertinent, but did
not seem in the least to offend this one.
"Excuse me, mad'moiselle, but I never saw such original bracelets.
Might one ask what they are made of?"
"Ivory," she answered pleasantly. "I got them in Central Africa. They
were cut green from an elephant's trunk."
"Elephant's trunk!" murmured the Jew, and even Westenra had to smile.
"Oh! tusk I mean, of course. And the red things imbedded in them are
garnets from De Beers's Mine in Kimberley. I think they are ever so
much nicer than diamonds, don't you?"
The Jew tried to look as if he did, and succeeded fairly well.
"Here is another in my silver ring. A Zulu made this ring for me in
Natal, out of a half-crown. I gave him the garnet to put in, and
another half-crown for making it."
If the Jew were outraged at the idea of any lady wearing such cheap
jewellery, he concealed his feelings under a silky smile.
"Then you know Africa, mad'moiselle?"
"I know every country except America," she said. "But I think Africa is
the only one in the world that I could stay in always without getting
bored."
"Ah! Is it Johannesburg you like?"
"Oh, no--Rhodesia--Zululand--the Drakenberg Mountains--the open veldt."
The Jew stared.
"For a lady you have been to very unusual places," he commented, and if
the words were ambiguous the tone was not lacking in courtesy.
"I love to travel," she said, "and it is my business to see things and
places. I am a journalist."
"Indeed!" said the Jew, and stared again, for she was quite unlike any
journalist he had ever met or heard of. But she gave him no time for
any further astonished questions.
"I must go," she said abruptly. "This saloon is too hot." Smiling
pleasantly at him she drank up her brandy-and-soda and departed, the Jew
rising up also and bowing her out of her seat in a way that Westenra
considered officious, yet could not but notice that with a courteous
smile on him the fellow was not so mean-looking after all. The Irishman
gave a glance after the figure of his late neighbour. She was tall and
slight with a firm light walk, but as she went down the aisle made by
two long dining-tables the ship rolled gently, and she put out her pale
brown hands here and there touching a chair back.
Proceeding with his dinner, which had as yet only reached the second
course, Westenra reflected that it would be difficult for any woman,
even with a bet to win, to give herself and her affairs away more
thoroughly in a short space of time than his late neighbour had done.
"With both hands she did it--and her tongue," he mused cynically. "In
no longer a time than it took to dine off a brandy-and-soda and the
outline of a sardine!"
After sitting next to her for a matter of twenty minutes he knew all
there was to be known of her tastes, her profession, her temperament,
her habits. She had travelled, she wrote for the
newspapers,--sensational stuff probably, her head was too small for a
thinker's head,--she was entirely modern, cursed with nerves,
restlessness, and dissatisfaction; she was unreserved, unreposeful,
uncontrolled, undisciplined; she drank, she smoked. He really could not
think of anything about her, except her charming voice, which of course
she could not help, that was not in violent opposition to his every idea
of what a woman should be, and the fact filled him with resentment born
of a kind of chivalrous discontent that any woman should be so far from
the ideal standard. He entirely withdrew his earlier supposition that
she was a woman of the world, in spite of the evidence of travel and
experience.
"A woman of her type could never contend with any kind of social life.
The way she let that Jew draw her was childish."
At that moment something happened that thrilled through his nerves and
veins like an electric shock, and left him mentally stunned.
The woman of whom he had been thinking was coming back down the long
saloon, her delicate hands put out to the chair backs in the same little
frond-like movement as before. For the first time he saw her face clear
and full; and he did not have to look twice to recognise it. Though it
had always eluded his memory in waking hours he knew it now that he saw
it as well as his own. _It was the face of the woman he had dreamed of
for years_. He knew her hair, her eyes, her mouth, the grey gown she
had on, the deep collar of fine lace ivoried by age that turned away
from the base of a long throat that had fine ivory tints of its own. He
even knew the necklace of luminous grey-green beads that swung to her
waist. The wistfulness of the Irishry that he remembered so well lurked
elusively about her eyes and mouth, and the touch of Orientalism was
there too, though it was hard to tell of what it came, for if her hair
was black and her skin Arab-pale, her sad eyes were not dark but of a
curious smoky blue. As she came nearer she looked straight at him, her
glance for a moment seeming to rest in his, and he saw that like the
eyes of many clever people hers possessed a slight defect; they were
different in shape and expression; one seemed to be long and sleepy and
almost cynical looking, the other, rounder, held an eager inquiring
glance that suggested great vitality and ardour. This was Westenra's
fleeting impression, there was no time for more, and he was almost too
aghast for clear thought; but a glance of his eye went a good deal
further than most people's, and in this instance his vision was
sharpened by the strange circumstances of his dream.
It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk
bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their
handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the
back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two
or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been
changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra.
Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat
next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was
the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had
for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic
roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious
and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The
beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was
shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not
a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland
keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race
welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the
taste of the waters of Marah.
----
There were few people on deck. The wind was chill, and the stars burned
with the brilliant sapphire pallor of electric light. There was a
special spot where Westenra always stood to smoke, because it gave him a
leaning place against the rail where he could command the length of the
deck, and yet get an uninterrupted view of the grey waves with their
pale sea palaces. Close beside him in a canvas-sheltered corner stood
his deck chair. He lit a cigar, but he might have been smoking seaweed
for all the aroma there was in it for him. Abstractedly he stared at
the phosphorescent waves, but his attention was on the door of the
companion-way, and presently, as he had felt sure she would, the woman
in grey came through it with her swaying movements and her hands put out
a little. She had wrapped herself in a long silky cloak that gleamed in
the starlight, and as she strayed up and down the deck like a grey
ghost, the wind took hold of it and flicked it about her making it crack
like a silken sail. It took fronds of her hair too and made them into
lashes that beat her face and blew above her head. She laughed a little
to herself as she was blown this way and that, and for the first time
that night she pleased Westenra, for he loved the wind, and it seemed to
him that she loved it too. He stood very still listening to the
tap-tapping of her heels, thinking of--
"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow...?"
and of how long he had listened in office and hospital for the sound of
a woman's feet coming towards him. He remembered the bare broken feet
of the woman in his dream, though he had always dimly recognised that
the mud and blood were symbolical of the rough paths she had walked.
These that tapped the deck near him were daintily shod in grey _suede_,
but from her own telling they had strayed in far places of the earth and
echoed in lonely spots before they came his way, as they were coming
now. Would they halt when they reached him? Resentful, antagonistic,
and disillusioned as he was, something in his fatalistic Irish nature
responded, some bird sang in a pale green palace when she stood still
beside him, and spoke:
"Do you think I might sit in this nice sheltered corner?" She looked at
the chair and then at him, with a boyish _bon camarade_ smile that
banished all the sadness and shadows from her face.
"I 'm sure you might--please do."
He moved forward swiftly and arranged the chair for her. She sat down,
and as he did not move away began to talk to him in the same friendly
easy way as she had used to the Jew, and he found himself, like the Jew,
answering her if not eagerly at least with interest. However they
touched only on generalities. She did not tell him nearly so much as
she had told the Jew and he found in that too something to resent.
Possibly she missed the French receptivity, or with the quicksilver
sensitiveness of some women divined antagonism, for something like a
little note of appeal came presently into her voice: it was as though
she were trying to soften his heart towards her. In answer to some
observation of his with regard to travelling she said rather wearily:
"Yes; one discovers these things when one has knocked about the world
long enough."