As she came along the main corridor, deserted now since all of the room stewards were at their dinner, she heard a door banging, banging, with the slow swing of the ship and irritatedly wondered why no one had fastened it.
Turning down the small corridor that led to her own cabin she noted that the swinging door was that opposite her own. If someone were ill in there, the door must be extremely annoying. She opened her own door, switched on the cabin light, found her sketch book and stepped out again. Again the door opposite slammed back. The cabin light was on. She tapped gently on the doorframe. Perhaps the occupant was too ill to get up. But no one answered.
Cynthia put her hand on the knob to close it, but the door was partly wedged by a suitcase which had slid against it—the suitcase which she recognized as the same she had tripped over when she first came on board. Or was it the same? There was that Mexican Airways label, and next to it a circular yellow paster which formed a pattern her mind had already recorded, but something was missing. She closed the door gently, shoved it to see that it was firmly latched, and hurried along the corridor. But as she ran up the stairway she remembered what was missing. The Ottawa label had been sponged off. There was a darker spot on the leather where it had been.
At the entrance to the lounge, the color and light and music burst on her like a shower of thrown confetti. Figures whirled and swayed to the music, the room was a shifting patchwork of bright color. Even Miss Mitchall had been persuaded to dance and jigged round and round happily with a little Hungarian whose bent knees and extreme speed were relics of an older era.
Cynthia passed behind the row of chairs at the end of the dance floor and skirted the room to where, in a remote corner behind an empty card table, she could be comfortably inconspicuous yet have a good view of the dancers. She leafed through her sketch book, found some blank pages and began to work.
Between encores the couples paused, chatted, and applauded. That scarecrow with his whitened face and clay pipe ... Cynthia got it with a few strokes of the pencil. Then Miss Mitchall’s rapt expression as she gazed into her partner’s face, radiant, unconscious. Oh darn! The music had started again.
Cynthia made a dozen rapid action sketches of the dancing couples (some of them so close to caricatures she wouldn’t have cared to have the models see them), yawned, and looked about her. Perhaps it would be more fun to go back to dancing.
Most of the older people had drifted away and were talking at the further end of the room, or had gone in to the card tables. How different some of them looked in costume. She would scarcely have recognized Mrs. Moody, for instance, in the white hair and patches of a colonial belle. And the man with her ... Cynthia frowned, trying to place him. Oh yes, it was the hat that had put her off. He was the man in the golf cap who tramped the deck all day long ... “walking to Europe,” Johnnie Graham had said. But the middle aged man who sat alone, not far from Cynthia? Surely she had never seen him before, surely she would have remembered that beak-like nose, the hollow cut deeply on either side of it and the thin lipped mouth.
She made a few strokes of her pencil on the blank page of her sketch book, then, noting how still her unconscious model sat, became absorbed in the portrait. Not a good face, but a strong one. The brows were as heavy as her pencil could etch, the graying hair at the temples disappeared beneath the tightly drawn edge of a stocking cap and the long chin dipped into a wide pierrot ruff. The costume was that of a harlequin and had probably been rented from the ship’s barber, who carried a stock of fancy costumes for these parties.
Cynthia, absorbed in her sketch, worked rapidly. The claw-like hand that had reached up to pull away the ruff ... the long white scar just showing at the side of the chin, not an old scar, she thought, for it still showed pink at the edges. Her model sat quietly, unaware of the attention he was receiving.