III
“You are rather stunning as well as other things,” said Clement limply.
He really was feeling a trifle dazed. The little man had so hustling a manner. Also, his own knowledge of the girl, Heloise Keys, was of the faintest kind. She was just a tall, slim girl whom he had found attractive enough to want to know again after his first meeting. She was quite pleasant, quite English, quite natural. Apart from her special attraction, she was just one of the millions of crisp, self-assured and self-contained young women of Britain.
He had met her, as he had said, twice. The first time had been a delightful accident. He had arrived to book his passage at the Canadian Pacific Ocean Service Office in London, to find her there on the same errand.
What is more, there was a certain sense of comradeship in that action, for both intended to sail to Canada in the same ship, the Empress of Prague. One shipping clerk attended to both, he left the one cabin plan before them from which to choose their rooms, while he went away on the business of registering their tickets.
Clement had only to glance once at the cabin-plan to make his decision. He had sailed on the Empress before. All he had to do was to see whether his old cabin, which had been a comfortable one, was unoccupied. It was unoccupied. He jotted down its number to give to the clerk when he came back.
Heloise and her companion were not so decisive. Heloise, at least, showed all the hesitance proper to people unaccustomed to sea travel. The other woman was making suggestions, but Clement did not pay any attention to her. She was so obviously a companion, a servant, though of the cultured sort.
The clerk had tactfully pointed out a large cabin. After having spoken in glowing terms of it, he had gone off leaving the decision to the ladies. Clement had nothing against that clerk. As a clerk, he knew his business, which was to fill up cabins. He was merely doing his duty in suggesting that cabin to people who did not know the art of selecting cabins—there were so many people who knew it too well, and would leave that cabin on his hands.
Clement noted the battle of indecision with some amusement. Also with some interest, because Heloise (only he didn’t know she was Heloise, then) was extremely pretty. Also he thought she was of that trusting and sweet disposition that will take the word of anybody—even of shipping clerks. Obviously, she was going to follow his suggestion.
When the shipping clerk went to the back of the office Clement saw to it that she didn’t. He looked up at her as she puzzled over the deck plan, smiled in a disarming way, and said, “I say, if you don’t mind my butting in, I wouldn’t take that inner room. You’ll find it hot and rather airless, and there’s no light at all except artificial light.”
She answered him before she thought about who he was. “Are you sure of that?”
“Quite,” he told her. “I know the Empress of Prague well; you’ll be quite comfortable on her, particularly if you take, say, that cabin over there, instead of that inner one.”
As he spoke he heard an indignant sniff from the companion. He looked beyond the girl and saw a comely, chilly, thick-set, middle-aged woman. A woman who had a broad and attractive smile which, somehow, did not seem to penetrate deeper than the surface of her skin. It was the sniff and the smile that led Clement to christen her the Gorgon, then and there.
But the girl herself was not sniffing in moral indignation. She was pleased and friendly. “But it is jolly of you to help,” she cried. “You are sure that one over there is the better cabin?”
“As sure as I like light and fresh air,” Clement smiled at her. “You’ll get both in that, you see, it’s an outside cabin. Has—windows—ports, you know. And it’s roomier.”
“Then, that’s the one we’ll have, Méduse,” said the girl, and the Gorgon (really, Clement had been very apt in his nickname) said in a light voice slightly tipped with frost, “That is also the one I suggested. Remember I, too, have traveled on the sea before, Loise.”
The girl paid no attention to that. She did not allow herself to be distracted from Clement, as she was obviously meant to be distracted. She was, in fact, rather pleased to meet a young, good-looking, polished man, who was also to be a companion during the voyage across the Atlantic. She said, smiling, “I’m thoroughly mystified by all this sort of thing. I’ve never done anything but the cross-Channel trip before, and then only by daylight. The tricks of cabins and comfort are dark secrets, as yet. It is really very good of you to give me that tip.”
“Oh, travelers are a brotherhood who should band together in the face of the common enemy,” said Clement cheerfully.
“Are we going to have common enemies?” she asked pleasantly.
“Not on the Empress,” said Clement. “It’s a happy ship. But still there are always little things where the hardened traveler can help.”
“Hardened?” she echoed. “You must have begun before your teens then.... But it is rather nice, oh, and lucky, to meet some one who is going by the same boat. I have a feeling that going by boat must be rather like going to a new school—everybody is new and reserved. So that if one knows some one already....” They went galloping off into that chatter which overtakes vivid people who have found a common ground, and not even the sniffs of the Gorgon could check them. Definitely, Clement thought then, the Gorgon wanted to claw the girl away. She disliked the acquaintance.
Still, she did not have her way, though she hurried the girl off with some speed when the bargain over the counter had been completed. Even then the girl, as she went, held out the pleasant promise of their future meeting.
“We’ll meet again, then, on board,” she had nodded to him as she left the shipping office.
“Or on the boat train,” said Clement. “You’ll go up to Liverpool by that?”
“Of course,” she said, smiling. “Until then.”
Clement completed his own reservations, and went out of the office with a feeling of elation. He was already looking forward to his trip to Canada, where he hoped to get some sport: trout and salmon fishing, and later some duck shooting, and, perhaps, a chance at moose. But now his trip seemed a much jollier affair, and he wasn’t thinking of sport when he felt that.
She had been so pretty. She had such an extraordinary charm. She was fine and upspringing if she was slim. She carried herself so well. And her face was so vivid and alluring. Her skin was cool and white and glowing, and her features delicate and exquisite. She was more than pretty, she was beautiful.
And that candor and kindness that seemed to be her nature. A sort of honesty, a nobility that placed her right above petty feminine things—yet there was no denying the warm and tender femininity of her nature. A real woman, a beautiful woman. A woman in a million.
And yet he had not found out her name. Beyond the fact that her companion called her Loise, he knew nothing about her. He might have inquired from the shipping clerk. He did not inquire. He was as young and as straight-minded as that.
He had thought about her a great deal between that time and the sailing of the boat. And he was early at Paddington on the day that the boat train left. He had got all his own luggage stowed with the celerity of an old traveler and was looking out for her some time before she arrived.
He helped her and her companion, the Gorgon. He had already found them a compartment, had secured it with a healthy tip. It was to be his own compartment, too, if she gave permission, and, delightfully, she did. He traveled with her all the way to Liverpool, but, looking back at it now, it had been rather a curious journey.
He had put certain things down to accidents, those accidents that will beset travelers at times. But now—he wondered.
In the first place, he had nearly missed the train. They had been sitting there, chatting, quite serenely, gazing with slightly amused contempt at those passengers of the breed always doomed to be late for trains. Then the Gordon discovered that a rather special parcel left in the baggage room yesterday (heaven knows why!—the Gorgon seemed the sort of feminine mystery who would do just that sort of thing) had not been retrieved. When the Gorgon mentioned the parcel, the girl Loise had made an exclamation of acute vexation.
Clement was young enough (and she was pretty enough) to seize such an opportunity of doing her service. He said decisively it might be rescued, and he asked crisply, “How much time have we?”
It was the Gorgon who had pulled her watch with (now he could see) astonishing celerity. The watch showed that there was a full thirteen minutes to spare before the train went. That was ample. The Gorgon gave him the cloakroom ticket for the parcel. The girl described its nature rather well in one or two words, and she indicated the shelf on which it had been placed.
Clement darted out to the cloakroom, not looking at the station clock, as he should have done. He reached the counter, put the ticket and a large tip on the zinc surface and exhorted the attendant to hurry. The attendant smiled happily at the tip, examined the ticket and said blandly, “Na-poo.” It wasn’t his ticket at all, it was one issued by another station, Victoria.
“Hang!” shouted Clement. “I must get that parcel ... there it is over there.” The girl Loise’s description and directions had helped him out. He told the attendant in vivid language who had left it. He was not kind to the Gorgon, but his picture of her was unmistakable.
“I remember,” said the attendant. “Remember the lady wot was wit’ ’er. A very pretty lady.... All the same, you ain’t got the right ticket.”
“Hang it all, man, don’t argue!” shouted Clement. “I’ve got to catch the boat train....”
And when he said that the attendant had suddenly become very much alive. He snatched at the parcel and swung it over. “’Ave you got to catch it, well you’ve got to run blame ’ard ter do it. It’s just about going out.”
As Clement, sprinting like the deuce, ran for the train, he glanced at the station clock. Heavens! that wretched woman’s watch must be frightfully and femininely wrong. The train was just due to leave.
He simply flung himself by the ticket collector at the platform gate. The man shouted at him, but Clement fought his way by—if they wanted to question him they must do it at the other end. The train was just moving.
He flung himself at the door of the guard’s van. And the evil chance of such things seemed to be against him. A very large, a very bulky man was trying to do the same thing. He was an idiot of a man. He stumbled and fumbled. He blocked the way with his hideous ineptitude. So stupid was he that Clement had the feeling that exasperated people get, that is, the fool was doing it all purposely.
Clement Seadon was young and very active. While the excessive man still stumbled and blundered along beside a train steadily gathering pace, he nipped ahead of him, and with an agile twist was on to the footboard and into the van.
He turned at once to help the large fool. With a surprising access of nimbleness the big fellow was already in the train, standing beside him in the van. Already saying with a sort of purring urbanity, “Well, that was the nearest shave—nearer for you, sir. I must apologize. I did not actually realize you were trying to get on the train. I thought you were a porter or some one trying to help me. I must apologize, sir.”
He said this with the utmost geniality, which, at the same time, seemed to be reserved. It was as though he spoke automatically the right things; but what he said had no relationship to what he felt. And while he spoke he stared fixedly across Clement’s shoulder, and Clement was aware of the smallness of his eyes and their astonishing closeness together.
Still everything had ended well, and he said as much. He parted with this far too much of a man, and made his way along the corridor to his compartment. Here he was not at all sorry for the accident. Both ladies were in a lively state of alarm, and that alarm gave way to a cheery thankfulness at seeing him safely on board once more.
Or rather with the girl Loise that was how things worked out, and, as far as he was concerned, the journey was made even more attractive by the emotion this little episode had called up. It was not quite so with the Gorgon. She seemed overwhelmed by the knowledge that it was her stupidity in the matter of her watch and the wrong cloakroom ticket that had nearly caused Clement to miss the train and the boat. Her apologies were profuse, and she endeavored to make an amende by correcting, rather late in the day, the time on her watch.
The rest of the journey was uneventful (and Clement was now seeing things in a more acute light)—unless one could see something grave in the tiny incident on the landing stage.
The whole of Clement’s baggage had gone astray.
Now that he looked at it, Clement began to see the strangeness of the happening. He had not been careless. He had instructed a porter fully before returning to help the ladies. He had even chuckled at his own efficiency when, on looking back, he saw the big man who had all but prevented his gaining the boat train, standing helpless near his own busy porter.
Nevertheless twenty minutes later Nicholson, his cabin steward, told him he could not find his luggage anywhere. Nicholson was not a man to make mistakes and if he said luggage could not be found, it could not be found. Angry as he was at the mishap Clement wasted no time. He had to have that luggage. Naturally, he could not possibly sail without a rag to his name.
The stuff that was in Clement Seadon came out in the way he handled this contretemps. He went straight to the Canadian Pacific shipping agent, and put the problem up to him. The man belonged to a service that suffers attractively from an ideal of complete efficiency. The agent began to hustle.
He was, of course, helped by Clement. Clement had the type of mind that pays attention to a porter’s registration number when the porter holds up the metal plate upon which it is stamped to the hirer’s gaze. Clement remembered and repeated the number, and left the matter in the hands of the agent. In half an hour his luggage was on board the Empress.
A foreman had named the porter from the number; a dock policeman had stated that he had seen this man trundling the barrow-load of luggage away from the shed in the direction of the Cunard dock; the luggage was run to earth. The porter, on being taxed with his strange behavior, offered a wild and absurd story of having been told that Mr. Seadon had suddenly received orders to go by Cunard. A steward had come off the Empress just as he was going on to it, and given this very definite command.
He was, so the porter said, “a littlish, mean-looking ’ound of a steward.” Nicholson was a big man. And, though the porter may have based his description of the offending steward on anger, Clement, with a sudden blaze of comprehension, now recognized how well that description fitted the steward who had just tried to turn the little lawyer off the boat. Had that steward tried to keep him off the boat also? It looked extraordinarily like it.
Thus, though he might have been inclined to scout the whole idea of the gang of rogues who were working to accomplish the undoing of the girl Heloise and her million pounds, as something absurd and unreal, actually the train of circumstances forced him to say limply:
“You are rather stunning as well as other things.”