Mrs. Rust grunted. She showed no tolerance for the thing that was not sensational. Nor had she any discrimination in her search for the novelty. Still, energy is something.
“But I am only ship’s gardener in theory,” persisted the gardener. “In practice I don’t even know where the watering-can is kept.”
“Then you are here under false pretences,” retorted Mrs. Rust a little more genially, for his last remark was not everybody’s remark.
“I am,” said the gardener, suddenly catching a fleeting perspective of the path to her good graces.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust, and turned her little bright eyes upon him.
When she opened her eyes very wide, it meant that she was on the track of what she sought. When she shut them, as she often did, it meant that she did not understand what was said. But it gave the fortunate impression that she understood only too well. She was instinctively ingenious at hiding her own limitations.
It was the end of that interview, but a good beginning to the campaign.
The sea to some extent recovered its temper within that day. Towards the evening, when slate and silver clouds, with their backs to the Caribbeania, were racing to be the first over the horizon, the garden was invaded by passengers, racing to be the first over the boundary of sea-sickness. The silence of the unintroduced at first lay, like a pall, along the deck-chairs, but a mutual friend was quickly found in Mothersill, whose excellent invention was represented in every work-bag. The bright noise of women discussing suffering rippled along the garden. Abuse of the Caribbeania’s stewardesses sprang from lip to lip. It was a pretty scene, and the gardener turned his back on it, and went below to water Hilda.
The gardener’s cabin, which was impertinently shared by a couple of inferior souls, was as square as a box, and furnished with nautical economy. The outlook from its porthole was as varied in character as it was limited in size. At one moment one felt oneself the drunken brain behind the round eye of a giant, staring into green and white obscurity; at another one blinked, as a mist of spray like shivered opal spun up over one’s universe; again one enjoyed an instantaneous glimpse of the flat chequered floor of the Atlantic; and at rare intervals the curtain of the sky slid over the porthole, and the setting sun dropped across the eye like a rocket.
Hilda sat wistfully on the recess of the porthole, leaning her forehead against the glass. She had a bud, chosen to match Courtesy’s hair. Just as Hilda’s stalk was necessary to hold her bud upright, so Courtesy herself was necessary to support the conflagration of her hair on the level of the onlooker’s eye. Both were necessities, and both were artistically negligible.