Poor Relations. Compton Mackenzie
it off! Yet, after all, I suppose in a way that without vanity I might presume they would be rather interested to meet me. Because, of course, there's no doubt that people are interested in authors. But, it's no good … I can't do that … this is really one of those moments when I feel as if I was still seventeen years old … shyness, I suppose … yet the rest of my family aren't shy."
This took John's thoughts back to his relations, but to a much less complacent point of view of them than before that maliciously apposite remark overheard in the saloon had lighted up the group as abruptly and unbecomingly as a magnesium flash. However inconsistent he might appear, he was afraid that he should be more critical of them in future. He began to long to talk over his affairs with that girl and, looking up at this moment, he caught her eyes, which either because the weather was so gusty or because he was so ready to hang decorations round a simple fact seemed to him like calm moorland pools, deep violet-brown pools in heathery solitudes. Her complexion had the texture of a rose in November, the texture that gains a rare lucency from the grayness and moisture by which one might suppose it would be ruined. She was wearing a coat and skirt of Harris tweed of a shade of misty green, and with her slim figure and fine features she seemed at first glance not more than twenty. But John had not passed her another half-dozen times before he had decided that she was almost a woman of thirty. He looked to see if she was wearing a wedding ring and was already enough interested in her to be glad that she was not. This relief was, of course, not at all due to any vision of himself in a more intimate relationship; but merely because he was glad to find that her personality, of which he was by now more definitely aware than of her beauty (well, not beauty, but charm, and yet perhaps after all he was being too grudging in not awarding her positive beauty) would be her own. There was something distinctly romantic in this beautiful young woman of nearly thirty leading her own life unimpeded by a loud-voiced husband. Of course, the husband might have had a gentle voice, but usually this type of woman seemed a prey to bluffness and bigness, as if to display her atmosphere charms she had need of a rugged landscape for a background. He found himself glibly thinking of her as a type; but with what type could she be classified? Surely she was attracting him by being exceptional rather than typical; and John soothed his alarmed celibacy by insisting that she appealed to him with a hint of virginal wisdom which promised a perfect intercourse, if only their acquaintanceship could be achieved naturally, that is to say, without the least suggestion of an ulterior object. She had never been a poor relation yet, and she did not intend to start being one now. Of course, such a woman was still unmarried. But how had she avoided being a poor relation? What was her work? Why was she coming home to England? And who was her companion? He looked at the other woman who walked beside her with a boyish slouch, wore gold pince-nez, and had a tight mouth, not naturally tight, but one that had been tightened by driving and riding. It was absurd to walk up and down forever like this; the acquaintance must be made immediately or not at all; it would never do to hang round them waiting for an opportunity of conversation. John decided to venture a simple remark the next time he met them face to face; but when he arrived at the after end of the promenade deck they had vanished, and the embarrassing thought occurred to him that perhaps having divined his intention they had thus deliberately snubbed him. He went to the rail and leaned over to watch the water undulating past; a sudden gust caught his cap and took it out to sea. He clapped his hand too late to his head; a fragrance of carnations breathed upon the salt windy sunlight; a voice behind him, softly tremulous with laughter, murmured:
"I say, bad luck."
John commended his deerstalker to the care of all the kindly Oceanides and turned round: it was quite easy after all, and he was glad that he had not thought of deliberately letting his cap blow into the sea.
"Look, it's actually floating like a boat," she exclaimed.
"Yes, it was shaped like a boat," John said; he was thinking how absurd it was now to fancy that swiftly vanishing, utterly inappropriate piece of concave tweed should only a few seconds ago have been worn the other way round on a human head.
"But you mustn't catch cold," she added. "Haven't you another cap?"
John did possess another cap, one that just before he left England he had bought about dusk in the Burlington Arcade, one which in the velvety bloom of a July evening had seemed worthy of summer skies and seas, but which in the glare of the following day had seemed more like the shreds of barbaric attire that are brought back by travelers from exotic lands to be taken out of a glass case and shown to visitors when the conversation is flagging on Sunday afternoons in the home counties. Now if John's plays were full of fierce hues, if his novels had been sepia studies of realism which the public considered painful and the critics described as painstaking, his private life had been of a mild uniform pink, a pinkishness that recalled the chaste hospitality of the best spare bedroom. Never yet in that pink life had he let himself go to the extent of wearing a cap, which, even if worn afloat by a colored prizefighter crossing the Atlantic to defend or challenge supremacy, would have created an amused consternation, but which on the head of a well-known romantic playwright must arouse at least dismay and possibly panic. Yet this John (he had reached the point of regarding himself with objective surprise), the pinkishness of whose life, though it might be a protest against cynicism and gloom, was eternally half-way to a blush, went off to his cabin with the intention of putting on that cap. With himself for a while he argued that something must be done to imprison the smell of carnations, that a bowler hat would look absurd, that he really must not catch cold; but all the time this John knew perfectly well that what he really wanted was to give a practical demonstration of his youth. This John did not care a damn about his success as a romantic playwright, but he did care a great deal that these two young women should vote him a suitable companion for the rest of the voyage.
"Why, it's really not so bad," he assured himself, when before the mirror he tried to judge the effect. "I rather think it's better than the other one. Of course, if I had seen when I bought it that the checks were purple and not black I dare say I shouldn't have bought it—but, by Jove, I'm rather glad I didn't notice them. After all, I have a right to be a little eccentric in my costume. What the deuce does it matter to me if people do stare? Let them stare! I shall be the last of the lot to feel seasick, anyway."
John walked defiantly back to the promenade deck, and several people who had not bothered to remark the well-groomed florid man before now asked who he was, and followed his progress along the deck with the easily interested gaze of the transatlantic passenger.
For the rest of the voyage John never knew whether the attention his entrance into the saloon always evoked was due to his being the man who wore the unusual cap or to his being the man who had written The Fall of Babylon; nor, indeed, did he bother to make sure, for he was fortified during the rest of the voyage by the company of Miss Doris Hamilton and Miss Ida Merritt and thoroughly enjoyed himself.
"Now am I attributing to Miss Hamilton more discretion than she's really got?" he asked himself on the last night of the passage, a stormy night off the Irish coast, while he swayed before the mirror in the creaking cabin. John was accustomed, like most men with clear-cut profiles, to take advice from his reflection, and perhaps it was his dramatic instinct that led him usually to talk aloud to this lifelong friend. "Have I in fact been too impulsive in this friendship? Have I? That's the question. I certainly told her a lot about myself, and I think she appreciated my confidence. Yet suppose that she's just an ordinary young woman and goes gossiping all over England about meeting me? I really must remember that I'm no longer a nonentity and that, though Miss Hamilton is not a journalist, her friend is, and, what is more, confessed that the sole object of her visit to America had been to interview distinguished men with the help of Miss Hamilton. The way she spoke about her victims reminded me of the way that fellow in the smoking-saloon talked about the tarpon fishing off Florida … famous American statesmen, financiers, and architects existed quite impersonally for her to be caught just like tarpon. Really when I come to think of it I've been at the end of Miss Merritt's rod for five days, and as with all the others the bait was Miss Hamilton."
John's mistrust in the prudence of his behavior during the voyage had been suddenly roused by the prospect of reaching Liverpool next day. The word positively exuded disillusionment; it was as anti-romantic as a notebook of Herbert Spencer. He undressed and got into his bunk; the motion of the ship