And I explained to the young fellow how long years back my chum Monaghan had taught me how to talk these tropic languages: the way to do was to wave both hands, stick an "o" onto every other word and yell like a bo'son's mate in the morning watch, and, with the waiter maybe knowing a little American to help you out, you could get what you ordered every time.
"But I'm wondering who it was called her," I said when the lemonades had come. "There she was, sort of standing on one foot like she wanted to talk to somebody, and I know that somebody wasn't me, when 'Marguerite!' a voice called—like that—and whing! she was gone, with sighs soft as the bubbles in the wake of a torpedo to mark her going."
"Marguerite?" says the young fellow, coming wonderfully back to life. "What did she look like?"
"Queen o' the Movies—nothing less for looks, but with a touch o' home and mother and little babies clinging to her neck."
"That's Marguerite! Why didn't you call me?" he says.
He reminded me in his indignation of the rookies aboard ship when they're first shook up to go on night watch. If you don't haul 'em out of their hammocks and throw them ten feet down the passageway by their necks and ankles, they bellow to the skipper at the mast next morning how no one called them. But I would not tell him that. Let him who has never felt the sting of the barbed arrow rub salt in the wound it makes.
"I coughed so loud at you the second time that I had all the Johnnies along the row looking up over their coffee demi-tasseys, and all the stout señoras were eying me with more than ordinary female suspicion," was all I said to that.
He ran inside the hotel then. By and by he comes back. "She was here, but she's gone, the clerk doesn't know where."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I says; and, moved by my further words of sympathy, he tells me how he's been steaming in the wake of the beautiful young lady through seven European monarchies and four Central American republics, and of how, whenever he thought he was safe alongside, the mother would up anchor and leave him riding to a lonesome mooring in the dark of some foreign port.
"Just ten minutes with Marguerite and her mother together and I know I could explain how it came about I got mixed up in what they think was a disgraceful row, but I can't get the chance."