WHITE BOMBAZINE
I
And, like all serious patrons of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, we devoted our last afternoon to the Spring Academy. Of course it turned out to be as academysh as ever, and the medals had as usual gone to people who deserved them less than I. We therefore amused ourselves by playing our favourite Academy game. The Academy game consists in stalking haughtily by the obvious pictures, eyes averted and noses on high, and in darting with delight upon some forlorn hope, worrying over it until everybody else comes to stare—when you silently steal away. The success of this game, I must admit, depends largely upon Nick. For he has inches, hath Nick, and an air that overalls cannot bottle up.
We had thus decoyed the multitude from the first Hallgarten picture to a skied futurism that nobody could make head or tail of, and were casting eagle eyes about for our next pounce, when what should I spy but the familiar signature of Zephine Stumpf! I was feeling silly anyway, and the sudden recollection of Zephine was too much for me. I collapsed on to a sofa.
“What is it?” asked Nick, ready for the coming pounce.
I could only wag my head hysterically and wave at the wall in front of us. It was enough for Nick, however, who always had superhuman intelligence and a catalogue.
“What is loose mit Zephine?” demanded he.
Nothing was loose with Zephine—except her painting, as it ought to be. Her picture, as a matter of fact, was very decent—some children, sketchily but becomingly dressed in splashes of sunlight, in an orchard. Zephine had been painting pink infants in sunshiny orchards ever since I first knew her in darkest Greenwich Village—when she could get hold of the orchard or the infant—and this was quite the best of the lot. But I could only gibber like an imbecile and wipe my streaming eyes.
Nick gave me up as a bad job. He proceeded to examine the picture. He looked at it from one side, he looked at it from the other side, he poked his nose into it to see how it was painted, he cocked his eye at it from across the room. Finally he came back to me.
“You can have delirium tremens till you’re black in the face, if you choose,” he announced, “but I like Zephine. I’m going to buy her.”
“I wish you would,” I managed to hiccough. “She deserves it.”
“But why do you go on about her like a demented cockatoo?”
“It’s only her—her clothes!” I snorted, going off again.
Nick went off too—to the Secretary’s office. And he presently returned, brandishing a receipt at me.
“There now! She’s mine and I shall stand up for her!” he exclaimed. “Why, species of a beast, do you make fun of a sister brush’s clothes?”
“I don’t make fun of them,” I retorted. “I always admired them very much. Only——” I had to stuff my handkerchief into my mouth lest my inept cachinnations profane anew the decorous shades of the National Academy of Design.
“Only what, animal?” pursued Nick severely.
“They were so—so original!” I gasped.
“Original? How can anyone’s clothes be original?” inquired Nick. “I have tried all my life to invent original clothes, and never achieved anything more original than when I was young enough to induce a scandalised tailor to sew blue serge with green thread.”
“Well, hers were,” I insisted. “And do you have the courage to tell me, Nick Marler, that you never saw them—or heard of them?”
Nick signified that such was the case. And at the thought of what lay before me I was near erupting again. But Nick held me to sanity with a cold grey eye.
“I suppose she wasn’t very well off,” I began. “None of us were, of course. And I suppose she must have had some German philosophy in her system. Her people came from Halle. So she set about solving the problem of dress. She said no woman could begin to dress who hadn’t at least ten thousand a year to do it on. For other women, then, the only thing was a sort of uniform—like postmen, or peasants. She really would have liked the costume of Thuringian village girls, she said, but was afraid it might be too conspicuous for New York. She therefore evolved a uniform of her own—always the same thing for the same time of day.”
“Very sensible, too,” put in Nick.
“The real beauty of it, though, was its compactness. She only kept three or four things going, and they were all”—I caught my breath—“reversible.”
“Reversible! How do you mean reversible?”
“How do I mean reversible? I mean reversible. I remember a certain brown skirt in which I oftenest saw her. When Zephine went to a party, Nicholas, what did Zephine do? Zephine turned her brown skirt inside out, Nicholas, and then it suffered a sea-change to a pea-green rich and strange, Nicholas, with brown leather bindings and big silver buttons—for Schönheit’s sake.”
The madness began to flicker again within me. But Nick, out of the perversity of his heart, refused me the shadow of a smile.
“What else had Zephine?” queried he.
“What else had Zephine?” echoed I, nettled at Nick’s gravity. “Let me see. Zephine had else a creation of écru silk, which in conjunction with the pea-green skirt and the leather bindings and the silver buttons completed her effect of splendour for varnishing days and studio teas. But minus the pea-green skirt it might be a morning dress, or a painting apron, or a dust cloak, or—who knows, Nicholas?—perchance a robe of night.”
Nick looked at me and I looked at Nick.
“Do I shock you, my Nicholas? Nicholas mine, be not shocked. You know the morals of Greenwich Village, how milk-mild they are, as compared to its scarlet conversation. And Zephine never made any bones about the secrets of her toilet. She had, for instance, a——No, Nick; I cannot pronounce it. You gaze at me too solemnly, and we are surrounded by too many of what you would call the best people in New York. Very likely you’re right. It is not given me to read their hearts. But it is given me to inform you that Zephine also had a shiny grey skirt of state, of super-state, which by means of unimaginable buttonings, hookings, loopings, and heaven knows what, transformed itself at will into a blouse or an opera cloak. And she had only one hat, which in summer was a sailor and in winter a sort of Turk’s turban. The other girls said she was always urging them to go and do likewise.”
I giggled to myself at the remembrance of it. But as for Nick, he obstinately continued to frown upon me like a Spanish inquisitor.
“Look here,” he pronounced at last. “I don’t know whether you’re drawing on the recollections of an extremely lurid past, or whether you’re being visited by the divine afflatus. But it strikes me that you’re more amused than anyone else. It also strikes me that this is a pretty sleazy line of stuff for one man to pull or another to listen to.”
With which Zephine dropped abruptly from our conversation.
II
Having done his duty by the arts and crafts of his country, Nick was suddenly moved, on that eve of his departure, to go miles uptown—to Washington Bridge. He has rather an eye, Nick. I had forgotten how the tall arches of High Bridge stand up against the bright water and smoking gold of a Harlem sunset. It was better than the Academy, if I do so say who am a slave of the brush. And it inspired us to pick up a dinner somewhere in the neighborhood.
I don’t know whether it was because the place was German or whether it was that the proprietor produced for Nick such a Moselle as you didn’t come across every day even in that faraway year. But as we sipped the last of it and debated how we might worthily spend our last evening on our native shore, Nick casually proposed:
“Let’s go and see Zephine.”
I am not usually the one to lag behind. But Nick had refused, with opprobrious implications, to play with me, and it seemed good to me to refuse to play with Nick.
“Come on, Herb,” he persisted. “Don’t be a spotted zebra. Let’s go find Zephine.” And he called for the bill.
“How on earth do you propose to find Zephine at this time of day—and we sailing for Norway at ten to-morrow morning?”
“Where do you think I was born—Island Pond?” inquired Nick suavely. “There’s a telephone book in front of your nose, and a directory beside it. In addition to which I might remind you that her address was in the catalogue.”
“What was it?” I asked. I knew in my reluctant soul that if Nick had made up his mind there was no use sulking.
“O, Corlear’s Hook some place,” answered Nick, charming the heart of an anxious-looking waiter—if the heart may be charmed by that which is put into the hand.
“Corlear’s Hook!” I exclaimed. “She’s moved then, though it sounds enough like Zephine. But it’s some way from Washington Bridge.”
Nick didn’t mind, however. Neither the taxi man who presently undertook to jounce us from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. And I am happy to add that we ran over no one on the way, though we did run out of gasoline. Incidentally Nick soothed my ruffled feelings by making me tell him about Zephine all over again. I fancied, though, it was really the Corlear’s Hook that caught him. He made me promise that I would say nothing to Zephine about the picture.
At Corlear’s Hook there was no Zephine. It wasn’t that she was dining out, or anything so simple as that. She had gone up to paint at Fort Lee, in a farmhouse whose whereabouts the janitor endeavored to make plain to us in the accent of Warsaw. To Fort Lee we accordingly proceeded, to the vast delight of the taxi man. Luckily it was a moonlight night, or we never would have succeeded in tracking Zephine to her farmhouse. As it was, we nearly tumbled off the Palisades a dozen times.
I have no idea what time of night it was when we finally floundered through an orchard to Zephine’s dark and silent lair. I bet Nick she wouldn’t be in it. Nick bet me she would. She was—fast asleep in bed. But we routed her out, and she parleyed with us through a window while we kicked our heels on the edge of the piazza. It was rather like the third act of “Faust”—except that Zephine was a contralto. She had a pleasant gurgle in her voice that I had forgotten. She also had the proper yellow braid over her shoulder, if not two of them. And the whole place was operatic with apple blossoms and moonlight.
Many ladies might have betrayed a certain surprise at receiving a visit at an unknown hour of the night, in a New Jersey orchard, from a New York taxicab and two men of whom they had never seen one before in their life. Not so Zephine. She accepted it as perfectly natural that I, who had not seen her for longer than either of us could remember, should feel irresistibly impelled to bid her farewell before sailing for Norway, and that Nick, whose name she had apparently never heard, should pay this somewhat unusual tribute to a lady whose work he had happened to admire.
In token of his admiration Nick invited her to join us in a little drive—at this I heard a snicker from the direction of the taxi—and help us pick up an ice on the way. Zephine judicially considered the matter, stroking one of her Marguerite’s braids, but eventually opined that she would better not. She had models coming at sunrise, and she couldn’t paint if she were sleepy.
“O!” sighed Nick in evident disappointment. “Couldn’t you put your models off? What I really hoped was that you would get a little acquainted with us, or with me, and consent to go to Norway too.”
That was what I heard Nick Marler say, in Zephine’s moonlit orchard, swinging his long legs off her rickety little piazza! And I listened for her answer with my mouth open. For I knew she was perfectly capable of taking Nick at his word. Her deep gurgle however, reassured me.
“That is awfully nice of you, Mr. Marler. If I had sold my picture in the Academy, I might. But as it is, I’m afraid Norway is not for me.”
“O, I didn’t mean that!” cried Nick, secretly giving me an infernal pinch of reminder. “I do hope you won’t think me rude, or anything like that. But Herb here is going as my guest, to give me his expert opinion on some old enamels we have an idea of hunting up, and we’d be ever so pleased if you’d be good enough to come along too and make one of the jury.”
III
She went!
Reader, whom I feel it unworthy to cajole by the use of any epithet so simple or so designing as gentle,—reader, I who went too, I who heard, who saw, and who now narrate, do not profess to have the charcoal sketch of a notion how we really embarked on our fantastic adventure. I therefore feel somewhat hopeless of communicating it to you, or of convincing you that you have not unwittingly been seduced into starting a story unfit for ladylike or gentlemanly ears. To charge it to the account of the Moselle, however, is what I refuse. I can only propound the thesis that the geography of “this goodly promontory,” the unstable planet whereon we spin, has as yet been imperfectly mapped out. I am unable, at all events, to accept the popular theory that its surface face is divided between the World and the Half World. Even you, epithetless reader, have heard of a tract lying between the two, and overlapping them both, vaguely designated as Bohemia. But my own mild explorations have convinced me that Bohemia is a name not comprehensive enough for a certain dark intervening continent of which are denizens my very good friends Nick and Zephine. And I hereby invite you, if not to comprehend their case, at least in a spirit of tolerance to consider the same.
Do not expect me, therefore, to fill up valuable space by assuring you in so many words of Zephine’s epic simplicity, or of Nick’s romantic freedom to do whatever came into his head. He told me afterward that when he saw our friend and her braids and the apple blossoms and everything, he just had to find out whether I had been lying about her; and if she hadn’t agreed to go with us he would have cancelled our passage.
As a matter of fact, he did. Not many hours after our return from Fort Lee he sent me off by myself to get Zephine. “And by the way” he added, just as I was starting, “come to the Cunard pier.”
“What pier?” demanded I in astonishment.
“The Cunard,” he repeated. “We shall get over quicker by the Pactolia. And it may amuse Zephine more.”
I, who am of the submerged tenth, had been dying to cross by the latest flier. But Nick, who won’t—or who wouldn’t—have a yacht because it’s duller and less comfortable, has a passion for discovering boats that nobody ever heard of, by which queer people take forever to get to out of the way ports. He had therefore engaged passage on a line that sails to Christiania—when it doesn’t hit some outlying portion of Scotland and go down with all on board. It was on the tip of my conventional tongue to object that we were too late to get anything by the Cunard or any other line than our own, three hours before the ship was to sail, in the migrating season. I have travelled with Nick before, however. He is not like me, credulous enough to believe steamer agents and hotel clerks and sleeping car men when they solemnly swear they haven’t a berth left. He always insists, on some dark theory that what they really prefer is not to sell out, that they’ve got something up their sleeve. And heaven has gifted him with the art of getting it down.
And so it was on this memorable occasion. Zephine and I arrived at the foot of Fourteenth Street at three minutes to ten, purple and panting but still on speaking terms. For I had all but abducted her. At the decisive moment I had discovered in this emancipated lady a scruple. She was calmly painting in the orchard, and before she would dismiss the sunrise models, or pack her straw suitcase, it became necessary for me to prove to her that Nick could take the entire Academy of Design to Norway every summer, if he chose, and still have enough left for enamels. However, we were hustled by that gentleman aboard the Pactolia just as the gang-plank went up. Zephine and her straw suit-case were installed in an ivory-and-gold royal suite which had until the last moment been reserved for a Cattle Queen of the South-West, her retinue, and her wardrobe trunks. But the Cattle Queen had been so imprudent as to indulge in an excess of Nesselrode pudding, plus Crême d’Yvette, during the fated hours that Nick and I were taxying around New York and New Jersey. We contented ourselves with the captain’s cabin—Nick vowing they had another somewhere and would cough it up as soon as they started. Which, in fact, they did. But as Nick wouldn’t let me take it, and I couldn’t let Nick, I suppose the captain must have slept there instead of in the steamer chair with which Zephine’s sympathetic imagination endowed him.
I have been lucky enough to cross the ocean as often as most people, and oftener than some; but I never made a voyage like that. The howls with which I had greeted Zephine’s reappearance on my horizon were constantly upsetting my equilibrium. While I have enough in common with her and Nick to travel in their company even to this day, I also have too much in common with Mrs. Grundy not to be conscious how horrified she would be when it came out, through the pronunciation of names and the confidences of stewardesses, that the lady of the royal suite was not the famous Cattle Queen of the sailing list but a simple damsel of the brush, voyaging under the protection of the far from obscure Mr. Nicholas Marler. Such cases, of course, are not absolutely unknown on ocean greyhounds. The beauty of this case was its perfect difference from anything good Mrs. Grundy was capable of conceiving. And what a picture-play I could make out of it if I had the time!
Zephine’s clothes were naturally what interested the more inquiring of our fellow passengers. Yet the glances which followed our companion were not, I noted, of disdain. I concluded that the royal suite of the Pactolia lent Zephine’s uniform a new value, or at any rate gave her a freedom to wear what she chose. For she was good enough to justify my account of her. Having marked out a sartorial course for herself, Zephine had never wasted time in reconsideration. She duly produced the brown skirt, or the pea-green, or the shiny grey, as occasion demanded. And each was a pure delight to Nick, who couldn’t get over her. But he had had the flair to know, which I hadn’t, that Zephine would not suffer by comparison with the laces and jewels of the saloon. It surprised me, in that company, to discover what an air she had. She had been through the mill of the studios, of course, and it would take a good deal to startle her. In fact she sometimes startled more delicately nurtured dames by the things she took for granted. She was not Marguerite, though. She was nearer Juno, in her large, fair, easy, Germanic way. Her braids were magnificent in the light. As for her throat and her shoulder, they were incomparable.
“Really Nick,” I burst out one night, “you are a born connoisseur. Did you know, or were you mad—just seeing her like that, in a window, for a quarter of an hour, in the moonlight?”
Nick’s rejoinder, which was no reply, edified me to the limit of edification.
“She says they wash,” he seriously observed.
My jaw dropped, for only to the wise is a word sufficient. But then I howled anew.
“Of course they wash, you cracked walnut! That’s the killing part of it, because she doesn’t save anything by her famous system—she has to keep so many of them going.”
“Why didn’t you ever marry her?” continued Nick inconsequently.
“I never thought of it, for one thing. Neither did she, for another. If she had, she scarcely would have failed to mention it. And neither of us could afford it, for a third. Want any more reasons? I can think them up as fast as you can ask them.”
“Herb, you’re an ass,” commented Nick without forms. “But it’s never too late to mend. We’ll build a Norwegian cottage in the lake orchard at Island Pond, and you can both paint apple trees and live happily ever after.”
“Thanks,” said I.
IV
It was great fun showing Norway to Zephine. They went very well together. Norway is the least conventional of countries, where you have the most room in which to swing cats. There is nothing to look at but Norway itself, and you aren’t overrun by fellow bearers of the red book. It doesn’t distress me a bit that the mountains are only half as high as the Swiss ones. They are twice as effective when they climb sheer out of still green fiords. That is the great point about Norway, of course—the water, and those fingers of the sea feeling for leagues among the mountains. And the peasants are quite the most perfect among peasants, if a shade too honest.
Zephine was entranced by everything, from our first view of the Christiania Fiord. That’s too much like Island Pond to suit me. However, disdaining trains, boats, and the outcries of the Grand Hotel, we embarked in three of those funny little carts, drawn by three of those fat friendly little ponies, and travelled post—when we could—across to the Hardanger Fiord. When we could not, we walked. We nearly froze to death, too, in the high fjelds, just as the Grand Hotel had promised with tears in its eyes. But Zephine and I made no end of sketches, and Nick got no end of ideas for cottages—with arches of rough stone, and outside stairs, and loggias of carved wood, and roofs overgrown by turf and pansies and bluebells. We also picked up, out of such cottages, some old silver that made our eyes pop out of our heads. Altogether we had the time of our lives.
We hardly saw a tourist the whole way. Consequently we were surprised enough to drive into Odde one evening, at the head of the fiord, and be told there was not a room in the hotel. We might have expected it, for the time was just when people flock to the North Cape. And there was no other hotel in the place—which then consisted of two or three cottages and a pier. Nick, however, took his usual course with the landlady. He blandly persisted in demanding three rooms, until the landlady produced them. Very good rooms they were, too—or at least mine was. It looked out through festoons of blossoming honeysuckle into a little garden, and beside it a river ran gaily into the long avenue of the fiord, whose rocky walls were still gilded by the late summer light. As I stood there, looking and listening and sniffing, an old lady stepped from a wing of the house to make a last touch of local colour with her wonderful white cap, which stood out frilled and starched around her head like an aureole.
Still more wonderful, in his way, was a man whose acquaintance we struck up at dinner. He was an Angle, though he might have been a Saxon. He was all pockets, and he travelled with everything he had in the world in them. You never saw such bunches in such unexpected places. Some of the pockets were too inaccessible for him to get at without taking off his clothes; so he had bags inside of them, detachable by means of tagged strings which hung within reach. He showed us some of the things in the bags—rocks and weeds and beasts of the field. For the man was by way of being a naturalist. And his back was so stiff and so flat that you couldn’t conceive what was the matter with him, until you learned that somewhere in it he kept a life-sized atlas!
“Nick,” I observed after a hilarious evening, as we stood in my window looking at the twilight of the gods that hung in the fiord, “a crown of righteousness shall be laid up for you on high. You have made Zephine’s fortune.”
“O?” he grunted noncommittally.
“That Englishman! I see it all. They were formed by heaven for one another. It’s a case of coup de foudre, as the alienists say. We shall have to go home without Zephine.”
“Herb,” remarked Nick, turning his back on the twilight of the gods and on me, “your inside is as baroque as that bird’s outside. Stop being a pickled peacock, if you can, and go to sleep.”
It was not written, however, that slumber should instantly visit our eyelids. We presently became aware of a tremendous commotion downstairs. We then became aware of the cause of the commotion. The commotion was caused, as no one in the house could help learning in the broken and squeaky English of its fount and origin, by no less a personage than His Serene Highness the Prince Ernst Paul XXIII of Waldeck-Hohenkugel, who had reserved, as it appeared, the very rooms which Nick had pulled out of the landlady’s sleeve, and who clamoured that those rooms be delivered up to him at once. The landlady, good woman, had made her bed and she lay in it. She refused at all events to turn us out of ours, arguing that no reservation held after dinner. And she liberally offered his far from serene Highness his choice of bath rooms, billiard rooms, reading rooms, drawing rooms, or dining rooms. His Highness rejected them all, very profanely, and vowed he would go on to the next post-station. But as there happened to be no road to it except by water, and as no steamer would leave till morning, he was forced to accept what hospitality the landlady proffered him. So silence descended at last upon the solitudes of Odde.
V
When I unwillingly came back to consciousness I thought His Serene Highness must be getting under way again. Then I didn’t know what to think. For who should be at my chaste bachelor bedside, shaking me vigorously and shouting something about Nick, but Zephine. It didn’t take me long, however, to make out a strong smell of smoke, a most unpleasant glare, and horrid sounds of crackling. What happened next I don’t quite remember. We only just had time to run for it. You have no idea how quickly a small wooden hotel can burn up at two or three o’clock of a cool June morning. There turned out, thank heaven, to be no casualties. But there were some pretty tight squeezes. And nobody saved much of anything.
As the flames died down and the survivors began to regard each other in the cold light of day, we presented one of the most inspiriting spectacles I ever hope to admire. It made me think of what I have heard described in rural regions as a white shower. The only completely dressed persons in the party were a few sympathetic citizens of Odde, plus my old lady in the white cap and the Englishman of the pockets. A fairly complete exhibition of the night-wear of civilisation was there, hovering for warmth in the neighbourhood of the smoking ruins or lurking for privacy in an orchard I had not noticed the evening before. There were a few blankets and counter-panes in the assembly. Some had clutched odd garments as they fled, and now retired behind apple trees to put them on. One lady had had time to rescue her hat—“only this and nothing more.” A squire of two dames had clothed one of them in his dinner-jacket and the other in the waistcoat appertaining thereto. He himself boasted a pair of pumps and a Baedeker. As for me, I discovered myself to be the happy possessor of a pair of trousers and a travelling rug. The latter in particular was highly comforting, in the air that drew down the valley from the white fjelds.
I likewise discovered, however, that with the rest of my belongings I seemed to have lost my companions. I had been so diverted, for a time, that it did not occur to me to be uneasy about them. And I was unable to imagine that two such competent persons would ever allow themselves to be roasted alive. I began, though, to wonder what had become of them—when in the wearer of a splendid Persian dressing gown I suddenly recognised Nick. We fell, so to speak, upon each other’s necks.
“But where is Zephine?” we simultaneously demanded.
She could scarcely have come to any harm, for she it was who rescued us both. And we both vaguely remembered having, in our excitement, seen her afterward. But where on earth was she? And, poor wretch, in what condition?
Just as we were setting forth to find out, we were arrested by a loud and lamentable “Ach Gott!” This outcry enabled us, indirectly, to identify the Prince of Waldeck-Hohenkugel. I had first picked out for that nobleman the most distinguished looking person present, a blond and curly-haired Apollo who stalked about with an air of proprietorship, classically draped in a sheet. But a squeaky voice, issuing in response to the “Ach Gott!” from an unnaturally distended suit of purple pyjamas, rebuked my ingenuousness. His Highness, less serene than ever and now past all power of English, nevertheless took us at once into his confidence, pouring out the history of his woes from the moment of his arrival in Odde, and intimating that the fire was a just judgment from on high upon an unrighteous Wirthin. As for the princely consort, she shivered in the lee of an apple tree and refused to be comforted. She had reason!
I looked at Nick and Nick looked at me. We had not much more cause for happiness than those disillusioned pleasure seekers. Nor had we burned the roof over their heads. Yet we had, as it were, snatched the pillows from under them. Moreover we could not help being conscious that our own case was less dire than theirs, and that one of them was a lady. So Nick, like a hero, took off his Persian dressing gown. I, not to be outdone, divested myself of my English travelling rug. As one man we advanced toward the princely apple tree, whose branching trunk intervened between us and the shrinking Serenity of Waldeck-Hohenkugel. And each of us, holding out at arm’s length his offering, invited Her Highness, in a strange mixture of tongues, to accept the same.
Her Serene Highness—such is the inconsistency of womankind—eyed us through the fork of her apple tree with no little confusion. In the candle-light of her ancestral halls, or even in the sunlight of the beach at Swinemünde, she would have been unconscious of exposures more expansive than she now presented. But to parley, under a Norwegian apple tree, in a single voluminous garment of white, with two honourably intentioned gentlemen in pyjamas, seemed to shake the serenity even of a mediatised house. Yet that Her Highness’s emotions were of a complex nature was patent from the hungry glances which she cast, now upon the English travelling rug, now upon the Persian dressing gown.
I know not how long this painful scene might have been drawn out, had it not been for Zephine, our lost Zephine, who suddenly reappeared before us, trim and miraculous in her famous écru silk and her famous brown skirt, with the Englishman of the pockets. Behind them marched the curly-haired Apollo in the sheet, respectfully bearing Zephine’s straw suit-case. It was really too much.
“Well Zephine,” I was just able to remark, well-nigh overcome by my superhuman attempts to ward off another attack of hysteria, “this is a scene to your taste. Here is an orchard and here are models—more or less as you like them. I think we would make you a stupendous success in the next Academy!”
Zephine, taking in the situation at a glance, wasted no time in unprofitable speech. She made a sign to the Englishman of the pockets, who for a wonder understood it. At least he forthwith presented to our little company his atlas façade. She made another sign to the gentleman in the sheet, who put down her suit-case, pulled his uncombed yellow fore-lock, and stalked away. She then, under the admiring eyes of her travelling companions and of Their Serene Highnesses of Hohenkugel, proceeded to open the suit-case, revealing her palette, her little folding easel, and the rest of her painting paraphernalia.
“Gracious!” I burst out. “Are you going to do it? Or are you going to paint clothes on us?” And at the same instant Nick demanded: “Who’s your friend?”
Zephine evidently considered the latter question more worthy of a reply.
“He’s the stable boy of the hotel,” she said, “and he’s been helping me telephone. I’ve engaged rooms for us all in Bergen. And the captain of the steamer says we can go on board any time we like. They’re making coffee for us there. Keep your clothes, for I’ve saved mine and can lend some to this lady.” As a matter of fact, there they were, under her painting kit! “But first turn your backs and hold this behind you, so that we can have a dressing room.” And she handed us a green silk petticoat.
It is not for me to record what took place behind that petticoat. I can only testify that it was upon a much more serene Highness we were at last permitted to turn—attired in Zephine’s shiny grey skirt of super-state, with other necessary adjuncts, and abounding in the most complicated expressions of gratitude.
“Kolossal!” let out the Prince. “But I—!” he added mournfully, beating his brilliant breast.
“You can wrap this around your shoulders,” said Zephine comfortingly, presenting him with the green silk petticoat. “And you might give him something, Herb,” she added. “You seem to have more than you need.”
“Ah!” archly exclaimed Her Serene Highness. “Then he is the one! I asked myself which of these gentlemen was the gracious lady’s husband.”
The violence of my efforts to maintain a decorum suitable to the occasion must have made me turn a colour not far from that of the princely pyjamas. I hardly dared meet the eyes of my accomplices. Yet when I did so it was to discover in Zephine not quite the amused self-possession I expected.
As for Nick, he stared a little, he drew himself up in his Persian dressing gown, he did his best to click a pair of bare heels, he made Their Serene Highnesses of Waldeck-Hohenkugel such a bow as they knew how to appreciate, and he said:
“Pardon, Highness, but you are mistaken.” Then he turned, somewhat less ceremoniously, to me. “Look here,” he threw out, in a way that made me stare in turn. “I don’t know how much the mantua-makers of Bergen are up to, but Zephine’ll have to get some new clothes, like the rest of us. She’s given away most of her own. And I think it’s about time she tried a new system. Anyhow, the first thing she’s going to have is one non-reversible garment of white bombazine, garnished with mosquito netting and whatever in the flora of the country may answer to orange blossoms. Do you get me?”
I signified, not without a grin of surprise, that I got him.
“I suppose you imagine that I owe you something,” proceeded Nick, “and so I won’t ask you to listen to any remarks on the subject of a habit you have latterly developed of snickering at inopportune moments. I will ask you, though, if you don’t mind, to go to Trondhjem and look up those enamels. I’m afraid Bode may be after them. In the meantime I think Zephine and I will beat it to the North Cape. I shouldn’t wonder if we ran around to Archangel and Nova Zembla too. I’m going to telegraph to England for a yacht. So you can take your time. But you must be ready for us to pick you up on our way back.”
At first, you know, I thought they had cooked the thing up between them. But Nick’s air—rather of a horse with the bit in his teeth—and Zephine’s unmistakable pinkness, and a queer look they at last exchanged, when Nick finished his speech and offered Zephine his arm, told me that not until that moment, when two Serene Highnesses, a baroque Englishman, and I, were staring at them, had those extraordinary young persons come to the point of undertaking the delicate negotiations vulgarly known as getting engaged. Zephine, at any rate, did not refuse Nick’s offered arm. And with a somewhat less magnificent bow they strolled away, leaving me to deal with the situation as best I might.
I did take my time. I bagged the enamels, and then I went on a two months’ walking tour with the Englishman of the pockets.