To me, this evening’s gaiety seems highly charged with glamor and romance, but it is clear that to him, since he elects to behave farcically, it must be a matter of very little importance. His serious attention is, of course, reserved for higher things than this, and though his good breeding forbids him to remain insolently aloof from the company, he saves his dignity by joining them only in a jesting way.

“Or, perhaps,” she continued, bringing her right foot gently to the ground, “it is possible that he considers the Comic Muse to be as worthy of reverence as any other, and all the worthier, perhaps, in this degenerate age, when romance is bedecked in the tinsel of Wardour Street, and sentiment is become the pander to every weakly sensual instinct. Then, when all caricature is good, self-caricature is best and most salutary, for our vanities may survive being mocked as ours, but to see another mocking them in himself must leave us in no doubt as to either his sincerity or his knowledge of the subject. Well, if I am to be a jest, I’ll see to it that I am a hearty one. I’ll dance the cancan. Ridi, Pagliaccio!” and she promptly obeyed Mr. Fatigay’s eager beckoning, as he set off to gain audience with the stewardess.

That night the lights of the Stella Mundi shone bright on its first-class Nordic chivalry, on brave women and fair men. They all looked very vulgar.

In the silence which followed the second dance, a trivial and wispy tune tinkled outside, and the door flew open, revealing the broad shallow steps of the companionway, and standing in them was Mr. Fatigay, cold-colored in the outside starlight, which was very blue, and he was wearing the velvet smoking jacket, and a pair of tight trousers, and a little hat. Before him hung a child’s hurdy-gurdy, and, as it dropped reluctantly each strained unearthly note, the tune being the ‘Barcarolle’, Emily, from where she crouched at his feet, arose in her scarlet jacket and trousers, and, shrinkingly brazen, kissed her hands to the company, and began to execute the postures of her dance.

“Oh! How beautiful it is,” she thought, as she skipped with exaggerated skimpy care from one extravagant attitude to another, “that this jot of quintessential humor, expressed in an almost meaningless abstraction, should be capable of entering differently every different mental structure that beholds it, and, like a radium needle, can disintegrate each cancerous collection of experiences into pure laughter and virgin chaos.

“One will think of his career,” thought she, revolving, with an appearance of painful conscientiousness, upon one leg, “and another perhaps of his love or of his god. Laughter and new beauty must fuse together in the only aqua regis which may dissolve these golden illusions.” And, bending down, she turned a couple of somersaults very gravely and precisely.

And as she solemnly high-kicked there between the rottenly phosphorescent seas without and the rottenly shining faces of her audience within, she exulted in her conception of a renascent humor, remote from the funny as Picasso is from Louis Wain.

“Bless my dear Mr. Fatigay,” she murmured, painfully attempting the splits, “for thus weaning me from my cheap and inartistic romanticism. Garbed according to my original ideas, I could have at best been reflected, albeit glowingly, in the shoddy consciousness of my beholders, but now I am breaking up that consciousness, and shedding a clear and bitter light on the dark deeps below. How they will love me!”

But at that moment a couple of sharp raps were heard, and a volcano of treacle buried all subtleties under the strains of “Maggie! Yes, Ma! Come Right Upstairs.”

“Look here, old man,” said a subaltern, approaching the suddenly arrested work of art in the doorway, “are you coming in or staying out?”

Like broken instruments of music, the disconcerted pair stumbled in. Not a hand! The dancers shot forward, marked time, and shot back again as hydrometer insects do on the surface film of water. Each pair of eyes was fastened, as if by some quickly grown fleshly tentacle, to the pair opposite, and not so much as even a casual glance was bestowed on the discomfited performers.

An interval followed, and then another dance, then another and another, and still no response was accorded by the feminine element to any of Mr. Fatigay’s shy smiles, nor did Emily hear, as still she half hoped to, any manly bass voice at her elbow, murmuring excuses to her partner, and entreating of her the favor of a dance.

Indignation now began to mount the chimp’s bosom, less on her own account than because of the effect, becoming increasingly marked in her master’s dejected bearing, that their cold reception and this almost pointed neglect was having upon him. It seemed as if he was beginning to feel himself a failure.

All at once an idea came into her head. Unostentatiously, she slipped from his side, and quietly left the great saloon. In a few minutes she had gained the upper deck, whence she clambered perilously down a stanchion till she could gain footing in the porthole which lit the stateroom of an American heiress. She leapt noiselessly to the floor, and, peeping behind the curtain of a hanging cupboard, she drew forth the object of her search, a magnificent scarlet shawl which she had once noticed that lady to be wearing.

In this she hurriedly draped herself, and, taking from the dressing table a pair of large jade earrings, she screwed these on, and hastened from the room in search of a rose and a low-crowned black hat.

In the saloon the heat had grown intense, and the dancers halted more and more frequently for refreshments. Stewards glided easily among the flashing throng, bearing claret cup, Cydrax, and iced lemonade. Champagne was to be purchased at a sufficient price. Bright eyes now shone with an extra brightness; the hot blood bloomed in every cheek. Masculine murmurs, tapping at the heart as a neurologist taps on the patella reflex, or Moses on the rock, elicited silvery laughter in sudden fountains all about the saloon. The bandsmen paused a moment, leaning back to mop their foreheads, yet even without the music the mounting spirit of the evening went on, up to the moment of full tide.

“Now,” said the emcee to himself. “Now’s the time for the balloons.”

But before he could leave the room to call for these, the doors sprang apart, and there stood Carmen, glowing dark and deadly as a poppy, drawing all eyes by her fatal southern attraction, her lips, behind the crimson flower, curving in a smile wherein passion and scorn slumbered lightly side by side.

“Carmen!” The word burst forth simultaneously from every male throat in the saloon. The conductor, an artist to the fingertips, instantly gave the word to the band, and, as Emily advanced towards the spellbound assembly, the opening chords of ‘Toreador’ blazed out into the vibrant air.

“Carmen!” Subalterns, civil servants, diamond smugglers, judges, motor salesmen, confidence men, all that well-tubbed clean-limbed throng advanced to do her homage.

“Carmen!” And as the band rises once more in the more modern and almost equally appropriate notes of ‘Valencia’, the crowd, in one eager husky murmur, entreats her to dance.

But now, with a superb and tigerish gesture of contempt, she passes through their dividing midst to where a single solitary figure droops disconsolate against the wall. Plucking the hot-hued blossom from her lips, she laughingly flings it at his feet, and, extending a graceful hand, she has drawn the suddenly awakened Mr. Fatigay into the whirling mazes of the dance.

Chapter 6

We drifted o’er the harbor-bar,

And I with sobs did pray —

O let me be awake, my God!

Or let me deep alway.

The steamer now drove out of the Gulf of Guinea, and turned her bows to the northeast and home.