“Well, Orde, can you stow this thing some place out of our way?”
Orde eyed the bandbox doubtfully. “I dessay I can find a plice for it,” he said at length.
“Do, please.”
“Very good, sir. Then-Q.” Possessing himself of the bandbox, Orde retired.
“And now,” suggested Iff with much vivacity, “s’pose we unpack and get settled.”
And they proceeded to distribute their belongings, sharing the meagre conveniences of their quarters with the impartiality of courteous and experienced travellers…
It was rather late in the afternoon before Staff found an opportunity to get on deck for the first time. The hour was golden with the glory of a westering sun. The air was bland, the sea quiet. The Autocratic had settled into her stride, bearing swiftly down St. George’s Channel for Queenstown, where she was scheduled to touch at midnight. Her decks presented scenes of animation familiar to the eyes of a weathered voyager.
There was the customary confusion of petticoats and sporadic displays of steamer-rugs along the ranks of deck-chairs. Deck-stewards darted hither and yon, wearing the harassed expressions appropriate to persons of their calling – doubtless to a man praying for that bright day when some public benefactor should invent a steamship having at least two leeward sides. A clatter of tongues assailed the ear, the high, sweet accents of American women predominating. The masculine element of the passenger-list with singular unanimity – like birds of prey wheeling in ever diminishing circles above their quarry – drifted imperceptibly but steadily aft, toward the smoking-room. The two indispensable adjuncts to a successful voyage had already put in their appearance: item, the Pest, an overdressed, overgrown, shrill-voiced female-child, blundering into everybody’s way and shrieking impertinences; item, a short, stout, sedulously hilarious gentleman who oozed public-spirited geniality at every pore and insisted on buttonholing inoffensive strangers and demanding that they enter an embryonic deck-quoit tournament – in short, discovering every known symptom of being the Life and Soul of the Ship.
Staff dodged both by grace of discretion and good fortune, and having found his deck-chair, dropped into it with a sigh of content, composing himself for rest and thought. His world seemed very bright with promise, just then; he felt that, if he had acted on impetuous impulse, he had not acted unwisely: only a few more hours – then the pause at Queenstown – then the brief, seven-day stretch across the Atlantic to home and Alison Landis!
It seemed almost too good to be true. He all but purred with his content in the prospect.
Of course, he had a little work to do, but he didn’t mind that; it would help immensely to beguile the tedium of the voyage; and all he required in order to do it well was the moral courage to shut himself up for a few hours each day and to avoid as far as possible social entanglements…
At just about this stage in his meditations he was somewhat rudely brought back to earth – or, more properly, to deck.
A voice shrieked excitedly: “Why, Mr. Staff!”
To be precise, it miscalled him “Stahf”: a shrill, penetrating, overcultivated, American voice making an attempt only semi-successful to cope with the broad vowels of modern English enunciation.
Staff looked up, recognised its owner, and said beneath his breath: “O Lord!” – his soul crawling with recognition. But nothing of this was discernible in the alacrity with which he jumped up and bent over a bony but bedizened hand.
“Mrs. Ilkington!” he said.
“R’ally,” said the lady, “the world is ve-ry small, isn’t it?”
She was a lean, angular, inordinately vivacious body whose years, which were many more than forty, were making a brave struggle to masquerade as thirty. She was notorious for her execrable taste in gowns and jewelry, but her social position was impregnable, and her avowed mission in life was to bring together Society (meaning the caste of money) with the Arts (meaning those humble souls content to sell their dreams for the wherewithal to sustain life).
Her passion for bromidioms always stupefied Staff – left him dazed and witless. In the present instance he could think of nothing by way of response happier than that hoary banality: “This is indeed a surprise.”
“Flatterer!” said Mrs. Ilkington archly. “I’m not surprised,” she pursued. “I might have known you’d be aboard this vessel.”
“You must be a prophetess of sorts, then,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t know I was going to sail, myself, till late yesterday afternoon.”
“Deceiver,” commented the lady calmly. “Why can’t you men ever be candid?”
Surprise merged into some annoyance. “What do you mean?” he asked bluntly.
“Oh, but two can play at that game,” she assured him spiritedly. “If you won’t be open with me, why should I tell all I know?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re driving at, Mrs. Ilkington.”
“Would it improve your understanding” – she threatened him gaily with a gem-encrusted forefinger – “if I were to tell you I met a certain person in Paris last week, who talked to me about you?”
“It would not,” said he stiffly. “Who – ?”
“Oh, well, if you won’t be frank!” Mrs. Ilkington’s manner implied that he was a bold, bad butterfly, but that she had his entomological number, none the less. “Tell me,” she changed the subject abruptly, “how goes the great play?”
“Three acts are written,” he said in weariness of spirit, “the fourth – ”
“But I thought you weren’t to return to America until it was quite finished?”
“Who told you that, please?”
“Never mind, sir! How about the fourth act?”
“I mean to write it en voyage,” said he, perplexed. From whom could this woman possibly have learned so much that was intimate to himself?
“You have it all mapped out, then?” she persisted.
“Oh, yes; it only needs to be put on paper.”
“R’ally, then, it’s true – isn’t it – that the writing is the least part of play construction?”
“Who told you that?” he asked again, this time amused.
“Oh, a very prominent man,” she declared; and named him.
Staff laughed. “A too implicit belief in that theory, Mrs. Ilkington,” said he, “is responsible for the large number of perfectly good plays that somehow never get written – to say nothing of the equally large number of perfectly good playwrights who somehow never get anywhere.”
“Clever!” screamed the lady. “But aren’t you wasteful of your epigrams?”
He could cheerfully have slain her then and there; for which reason the civil gravity he preserved was all the more commendable.
“And now,” he persisted, “won’t you tell me with whom you were discussing me in Paris?”
She shook her head at him reprovingly. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You can’t guess?”
“Not to save me.”
“R’ally?”
“Honestly and truly,” he swore, puzzled by the undertone of light malice he thought to detect in her manner.
“Then,” said she with decision, “I’m not going to get myself into trouble by babbling. But, if you promise to be nice to me all the way home – ?” She paused.
“I promise,” he said gravely.
“Then