“I feel terribly about it.” His voice was taut and trembling.
“Then kiss me.”
The deck was empty. He bent over her swiftly.
“No, really kiss me.”
He could not remember when anything had felt so young and fresh as her lips. The rain lay, like tears shed for him, upon the softly shining porcelain cheeks. She was all new and immaculate, and her eyes were wild.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I can’t help loving you, can I? When I first saw you—oh, not on the boat, but over a year ago—Grace Heally took me to a rehearsal and suddenly you jumped up in the second row and began telling them what to do. I rewrote you a letter and tore it up.”
“We’ve got to go.”
She was weeping as they walked along the deck. Once more, imprudently, she held up her face to him at the door of her cabin. His blood was beating through him in wild tumult as he walked on to the bar.
He was thankful that Eva scarcely seemed to notice him or to know that he had been gone. After a moment he pretended an interest in what she was doing.
“What’s that?” “She’s painting the Eiffel Tower on my shirt front for tonight,” explained Butterworth.
“There,” Eva laid away her brush and wiped her hands. “How’s that?”
“A chef-d’oeuvre.”
Her eyes swept around the watching group, lingered casually upon Adrian.
“You’re wet. Go and change.”
“You come too.”
“I want another champagne cocktail.”
“You’ve had enough. It’s time to dress for the party.”
Unwilling she closed her paints and preceded him.
“Stacomb’s got a table for nine,” he remarked as they walked along the corridor.
“The younger set,” she said with unnecessary bitterness. “Oh, the younger set. And you just having the time of your life—with a child.”
They had a long discussion in the cabin, unpleasant on her part and evasive on his, which ended when the ship gave a sudden gigantic heave, and Eva, the edge worn off her champagne, felt ill again.
There was nothing to do but to have a cocktail in the cabin, and after that they decided to go to the party—she believed him now, or she didn’t care.
Adrian was ready first—he never wore fancy dress. “I’ll go on up. Don’t be long.”
“Wait for me, please; it’s rocking so.” He sat down on a bed, concealing his impatience. “You don’t mind waiting, do you? I don’t want to parade up there all alone.”
She was taking a tuck in an oriental costume rented from the barber.
“Ships make people feel crazy,” she said. “I think they’re awful.”
“Yes,” he muttered absently.
“When it gets very bad I pretend I’m in the top of a tree, rocking—to and fro. But finally I get pretending everything, and finally I have to pretend I’m sane when I know I’m not.”
“If you get thinking that way you will go crazy.”
“Look, Adrian.” She held up the string of pearls before clasping them on. “Aren’t they lovely?”
In Adrian’s impatience she seemed to move around the cabin like a figure in a slow-motion picture. After a moment he demanded:
“Are you going to be long? It’s stifling in here.”
“You go on!” she fired up.
“I don’t want—”
“Go on, please! You just make me nervous trying to hurry me.”
With a show of reluctance he left her. After a moment’s hesitation he went down a flight to a deck below and knocked at a door.
“Betsy.”
“Just a minute.”
She came out in the corridor attired in a red pea-jacket and trousers borrowed from the elevator boy.
“Do elevator boys have fleas ?” she demanded. “I’ve got everything in the world on under this as a precaution.”
“I had to see you,” he said quickly.
“Careful,” she whispered. “Mrs. Worden, who’s supposed to be chaperoning me, is across the way. She’s sick.”
“I’m sick for you.”
They kissed suddenly, clung close together in the narrow corridor, swaying to and fro with the motion of the ship.
“Don’t go away,” she murmured.
“I’ve got to. I’ve—”
Her youth seemed to flow into him, bearing him up into a delicate, romantic ecstasy that transcended passion. He couldn’t relinquish it; he had discovered something that he had thought was lost with his own youth forever. As he walked along the passage he knew that he had stopped thinking, no longer dared to think. He met Eva going into the bar.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked with a strained smile.
“To see about the table.”
She was lovely; her cool distinction conquered the trite costume and filled him with a resurgence of approval and pride. They sat down at a table.
The gale was rising hour by hour and the mere traversing of a passage had become a rough matter. In every stateroom trunks were lashed to the washstands, and the Vestris disaster was being reviewed in detail by nervous ladies, tossing, ill and wretched, upon their beds. In the smoking room a stout gentleman had been hurled backward and suffered a badly cut head; and now the lighter chairs and tables were stacked and roped against the wall.
The crowd who had donned fancy dress and were dining together had swollen to about sixteen. The only remaining qualification for membership was the ability to reach the smoking room. They ranged from a Groton-Harvard lawyer to an ungrammatical broker they had nicknamed Gyp the Blood, but distinctions had disappeared; for the moment they were samurai, chosen from several hundred for their triumphant resistance to the storm.
The gala dinner, overhung sardonically with lanterns and streamers, was interrupted by great communal slides across the room, precipitate retirements and spilled wine, while the ship roared and complained that under the panoply of a palace it was a ship after all. Upstairs afterward a dozen couples tried to dance, shuffling and galloping here and there in a crazy fandango, thrust around fantastically by a will alien to their own. In view of the condition of tortured hundreds below, there grew to be something indecent about it, like a revel in a house of mourning, and presently there was an egress of the ever-dwindling survivors toward the bar.
As the evening passed, Eva’s feeling of unreality increased. Adrian had disappeared—presumably with Miss D’Amido—and her mind, distorted by illness and champagne, began to enlarge upon the fact; annoyance changed slowly to dark and brooding anger, grief to desperation. She had never tried to bind Adrian, never needed to—for they were serious people, with all sorts of mutual interests, and satisfied with each other—but this was a breach of the contract, this was cruel. How could he think that she didn’t know?
It seemed several hours later that he leaned over her chair in the bar where she was giving some woman an impassioned lecture upon babies, and said: lovely, Eva began to cry. “But he’s gone to bed,” her last attendants assured her. “We saw him go.”
She shook her head. She knew better. Adrian was lost. The long seven-year dream was broken. Probably she was punished for something she had done; as this thought occurred to her the shrieking timbers overhead began to mutter that she had guessed at last. This was for the selfishness to her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to marry Adrian; for all the sins and omissions of her life. She stood up, saying she must go out and get some air.
The deck was dark and drenched with wind and rain. The ship pounded through valleys, fleeing from black mountains of water that roared toward it. Looking out at the night, Eva saw that there was no chance for them unless she could make atonement, propitiate the storm. It was Adrian’s love that was demanded of her. Deliberately she unclasped her pearl necklace, lifted it to her lips—for she knew that with it went the freshest, fairest part of her life—and flung it out into the gale.
III
When Adrian awoke it was lunchtime, but he knew that some heavier sound than the bugle had called him up from his deep sleep. Then he realized that the trunk had broken loose from its lashings and was being thrown back and forth between a wardrobe and Eva’s bed. With an exclamation he jumped up, but she was unharmed—still in costume and stretched out in deep sleep. When the steward had helped him secure the trunk, Eva opened a single eye.
“How are you ?” he demanded, sitting on the side of her bed.
She closed the eye, opened it again.
“We’re in a hurricane now,” he told her. “The steward says it’s the worst he’s seen in twenty years.”
“My head,” she muttered. “Hold my head.”
“How?”
“In front. My eyes are going out. I think I’m dying.”
“Nonsense. Do you want the doctor ?”
She gave a funny little gasp that frightened him; he rang and sent the steward for the doctor.
The young doctor was pale and tired. There was a stubble of beard upon his face. He bowed curtly as he came in and, turning to Adrian, said with scant ceremony:
“What’s the matter?”
“My wife doesn’t feel well.” “Well, what is it you want—a bromide?”
A little annoyed by his shortness, Adrian said: “You’d better examine her and see what she needs.”
“She needs a bromide,” said the doctor. “I’ve given orders that she is not to have any more to drink on this ship.”
“Why not?” demanded Adrian in astonishment.
“Don’t you know what happened last night ?”
“Why, no, I was asleep.”
“Mrs. Smith wandered around the boat for an hour, not knowing what she was doing. A sailor was set to follow her, and then the medical stewardess tried to get her to bed, and your wife insulted her.”
“Oh, my heavens!” cried Eva faintly.
“The nurse and I had both been up all night with Steward Carton, who died this morning.” He picked
