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?”