The Thread of Flame

Chapter 4

From the spectacle of sea and sky I turned away at last, only because my senses could take in no more. Then I saw beauty in another form.

A girl was advancing down the deck who embodied the evanescence of the cloud and the grace of the bit of jewel-weed in a way I could never convey to you. You must see me as standing near the stern of the boat, and the long, clean line of the deck, with an irregular fringe of people in deck-chairs, as empty except for this slender, solitary figure. The rise and fall of the ship were a little like those of a bough in the wind, while she was the bird on it. She advanced serenely, sedately, her hands jauntily in the pockets of an ulster, which was gray, with cuffs and collar of sage-green. A sage-green tam-o'-shanter was fastened to a mass of the living fair hair which, for want of a better term, we call golden. Her awareness of herself almost amounted to inference; and as she passed under the row of onlookers' eyes she seemed to fling out a challenge which was not defiant, but good-natured, defiant but good-natured was the gaze she fixed on me, a gaze as lacking in self-consciousness as it was in hesitation. A child might have looked at you in this way, or a dog, or any other being not afraid of you. Of a blue which could only be compared to that in the rifts in the cloud overhead, her eyes never wavered in their long, calm regard till they were turned on me obliquely as she passed by. She did not, however, look back; and reaching the end of the promenade, she rounded the corner and went up the other way.

Thinking of her merely as a vision seen by chance, I was the more surprised when she entered the dining-saloon, helping my friend Drinkwater. I had purposely got to my place before any one else, so as to avoid the awkwardness of arriving unknown among people who already have made one another's acquaintance. Moreover, the table being near to one of the main entrances, my corner allowed me to take notes on all who came in. Not that I was interested in my fellow-passengers otherwise than as part of my self-defense. Self-defense, the keeping any one from suspecting the mischance that had befallen me, seemed to me, for the moment, even more important than finding out who I was.

Transatlantic travel having already become difficult, those who entered were few in number; and as people are always at their worst at sea, they struck me as mere bundles of humanity. Among the first to pass my table was Boyd Averill, who gave me a friendly nod. After him came a girl of perhaps twenty-five, grave, sensible, and so indifferent to appearances that I put her down as his sister. Last of all was she whom Drinkwater had summed up as "one of the prettiest." She was; yet not in the way in which the vision on the deck had been the same. The vision on the deck had had no more self-consciousness than the bit of jewel-weed. This richly colored beauty, with eyes so long and almond-shaped that they were almost Mongolian, was self-conscious in the grain*********, expensive, and languorous.

My table companions began to gather, turning my attention chiefly on myself. I had traveled enough to know the chief steward as a discriminating judge of human nature. Those who came asking for seats at table he sized up in a flash, associating like with like, and rarely making a mistake. On journeys of which no record remained with me I had often admired this classifying instinct, doubtless because any discrimination it may have contained was complimentary to myself. To-day I had occasion to find it otherwise.

On coming on board I must have followed the routine of other voyages. Before turning into my bunk for my long sleep I had apparently asked to be assigned a seat at table, and given the name of Jasper Soames. Guided by his intuitive social flair, the chief steward had adjudicated me to a side table in a corner, where to-day my first companion was a lady's maid. The second was a young man whom I had no difficulty in diagnosing as a chauffeur, after whom Drinkwater and the vision of the deck came gaily along together. She probably informed him that I was already in my place, for as he passed me to reach his chair at the head of the table, he clapped me on the shoulder with a glad salute.

"So, old scout, you've got ahead of us! Bully for you! Knew you'd eat a whale when once you got started. Say, what we'd all like to sit down to now is a good old-fashioned dinner of corned beef and cabbage instead of all this French stuff." He had not, however, forgotten the courtesies of the occasion. "Miss Blair, let me make you acquainted with Mr. Soames. Mr. Soames, Miss Mulberry; Mr. Finnegan, Mr. Soames."

For the ladies I half rose, with a bow; for Mr. Finnegan I made a nod suffice. Mr. Finnegan seemed scarcely to think I merited a nod in return. Miss Mulberry acknowledged me coldly. As for Miss Blair, she inclined her head with the grace of the lilium canadense or the nodding trinity-flower. In the act there was that shade of negligence which tells the worldly wise that friendliness is not refused, but postponed.

We three formed a group at one end of the table********** having Miss Blair on his right and myself on his left***** Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry forgathered at the other. The table being set for eight, there was a vacant seat between Miss Mulberry and Miss Blair, and two between myself and Mr. Finnegan. This breaking into sets was due, therefore, to the chief steward, and not to any sense of affinity or rejection among ourselves.

After a few polite generalities as to the run and other sea-going topics the conversation broke into dialogues**. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry, Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair. This seeming to be the established procedure, it remained for me to take it as a relief.

For again it gave me time to ask why I was graded as I found myself. A man who knows he is a general and wakes up to see himself a private, with every one taking it for granted that he is a private and no more, would experience the same bewilderment. What had I done that such a situation could have come about? What had I been? How long was my knowledge of myself to depend on a group of shattered brain cells?

I had not followed the conversation of Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair, even though I might have overheard it; but suddenly the lady glanced up with a clear, straightforward look from her myosotis eyes.

"Mr. Soames, have you ever lived in Boston?"

The husky, veiled voice was of that bantering quality for which the French word gouailleur is the only descriptive term. In Paris it would have been called une voix de Montmartre, and as an expression of New York it might best be ascribed to Third Avenue. It was jolly, free-and-easy, common, and sympathetic, all at once.

My instinct for self-defense urged me to say, "No," and I said it promptly.

"Or Denver?"

I said, "No," again, and for the same reason. I couldn't be pinned down to details. If I said, "Yes," I should be asked when and where and how, and be driven to invention.

"Were you ever in Salt Lake City?"

A memory of a big gray building, with the Angel Moroni on the top of it, of broad, straight streets, of distant mountains, of a desert twisted and suffering, of a lake that at sunset glowed with the colors old artists burned into enamels* memory of all this came to me, and I said, "Yes," I said it falteringly, wondering if it would commit me to anything. It committed me to nothing, so far as I could see, but a glance of Miss Blair's heaven-colored eyes toward her friend, as though I had corroborated something she had said. She had forgotten for the moment that Drinkwater was blind, so that of this significant look I alone got the benefit. What it meant I, of course, didn't know; I could only see it meant something.

The obvious thing for it to mean was that Miss Blair knew more about me than I knew myself. While it was difficult to believe that, it nevertheless remained as part of the general experience of life which had not escaped me, that one rarely went among any large number of people without finding some one who knew who one was. That had happened to me many a time, especially on steamers, though I could no longer fix the occasions. I decided to cultivate Miss Blair and, if possible, get a clue from her.