He spoke quite savagely, and both Tish and I felt that he was making a mistake, and that gentleness, with just a suggestion of the caveman beneath, would have been more efficacious. Indeed when we knew Mr. Burton better—that was his name—we ventured the suggestion, but he only shook his head.
“You don’t know her,” he said. “She is the sort of girl who likes to take the soft-spoken fellow and make him savage. And when she gets the cave type she wants to tame him. I’ve tried being both, so I know. I’m damned—I beg your pardon—I’m cursed if I know why I care for her. I suppose it’s because she has about as much use for me as she has for a dose of Paris green. But if you hear of that Weber who hangs round her going overboard some night, I hope you’ll understand. That’s all.”
That conversation, however, was later on in the voyage. That first night out Tish saw the captain and he finally agreed, if we said nothing about it, to have a sailor’s hammock hung in Aggie’s cabin.
“It wouldn’t do to have it get about, madam,” he said. “You know how it is—I’d have all the passengers in hammocks in twenty-four hours, and the crew sleeping on the decks. And you know crews are touchy these days, what with submarines and chaplains and young shave-tails of officers who expect to be kissed every time they’re asked to get off a coil of rope.”
We promised secrecy, and that evening a hammock was hung in Aggie’s cabin. It was not much like a hammock, however, and it was so high that Tish said it looked more like a chandelier than anything else. Getting Aggie into it required the steward, the stewardess, Mr. Burton and ourselves, but it was finally done, and we all felt easier at once, except that I was obliged to stand on a chair to feed her her beef tea.
However, just after midnight Tish and I in our cabin across heard a terrible thud, followed by silence and then by low, dreadful moans. Aggie had fallen out. She did not speak at all for some time, and when she did it was to horrify Tish. For she said: “Damnation!”
Tish immediately turned and left the cabin, leaving me to press a cold knife against the lump on Aggie’s head and to put her back into her berth. She refused the hammock absolutely. She said she had forgotten where she was, and had merely reached out for her bedroom slippers, which were six feet below, when the whole thing had turned over and thrown her out.
She insisted that she did not remember saying anything improper, but that the time Tish’s horse had thrown her in the cemetery she had certainly used strong language, to say the least.
I remember telling Tish this, and she justified herself by the subconscious mind, which she was studying at the time. She said that the subconscious mind stored up all the wicked words and impulses which the conscious mind puts virtuously from it. And she recalled the fact that Mr. Ostermaier, our clergyman, taking laughing gas to have a tooth drawn, tried to kiss the dentist on coming out, and called him a sweet little thing—though Mrs. Ostermaier is quite a large woman.
We became quite friendly with Mr. Burton during the remainder of the voyage. He formed the habit of coming down every evening before dinner to our cabin and having a dose of blackberry cordial to prevent seasickness.