“The sooner you get accustomed to it, the better,” he said.
“I’ll furnish you with cloth, needles, and thread,” he added. “I hope it will not be too dreadful a hardship for you to make yourself a dress or two.”
She made a wry pucker with her mouth, as though to advertise her ignorance of dressmaking. That she was frightened and bewildered, and that she was bravely striving to hide it, was quite plain to me.
“I suppose you’re like Mr. Van Weyden there, accustomed to having things done for you. Well, I think doing a few things for yourself will hardly dislocate any joints. By the way, what do you do for a living?”
She regarded him with amazement unconcealed.
“I mean no offence, believe me. People eat, therefore they must procure the wherewithal. These men here shoot seals in order to live; for the same reason I sail this schooner; and Mr. Van Weyden, for the present at any rate, earns his salty grub by assisting me. Now what do you do?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Do you feed yourself? Or does some one else feed you?”
“I’m afraid some one else has fed me most of my life,” she laughed, trying bravely to enter into the spirit of his quizzing, though I could see a terror dawning and growing in her eyes as she watched Wolf Larsen.
“And I suppose some one else makes your bed for you?”
“I HAVE made beds,” she replied.
“Very often?”
She shook her head with mock ruefulness.
“Do you know what they do to poor men in the States, who, like you, do not work for their living?”
“I am very ignorant,” she pleaded. “What do they do to the poor men who are like me?”
“They send them to jail. The crime of not earning a living, in their case, is called vagrancy. If I were Mr. Van Weyden, who harps eternally on questions of right and wrong, I’d ask, by what right do you live when you do nothing to deserve living?”
“But as you are not Mr. Van Weyden, I don’t have to answer, do I?”
She beamed upon him through her terror-filled eyes, and the pathos of it cut me to the heart. I must in some way break in and lead the conversation into other channels.
“Have you ever earned a dollar by your own labour?” he demanded, certain of her answer, a triumphant vindictiveness in his voice.
“Yes, I have,” she answered slowly, and I could have laughed aloud at his crestfallen visage. “I remember my father giving me a dollar once, when I was a little girl, for remaining absolutely quiet for five minutes.”
He smiled indulgently.
“But that was long ago,” she continued. “And you would scarcely demand a little girl of nine to earn her own living.”
“At present, however,” she said, after another slight pause, “I earn about eighteen hundred dollars a year.”
With one accord, all eyes left the plates and settled on her. A woman who earned eighteen hundred dollars a year was worth looking at. Wolf Larsen was undisguised in his admiration.
“Salary, or piece-work?” he asked.
“Piece-work,” she answered promptly.
“Eighteen hundred,” he calculated. “That’s a hundred and fifty dollars a month. Well, Miss Brewster, there is nothing small about the Ghost. Consider yourself on salary during the time you remain with us.”
She made no acknowledgment. She was too unused as yet to the whims of the man to accept them with equanimity.
“I forgot to inquire,” he went on suavely, “as to the nature of your occupation. What commodities do you turn out? What tools and materials do you require?”
“Paper and ink,” she laughed. “And, oh! also a typewriter.”
“You are Maud Brewster,” I said slowly and with certainty, almost as though I were charging her with a crime.
Her eyes lifted curiously to mine. “How do you know?”
“Aren’t you?” I demanded.
She acknowledged her identity with a nod. It was Wolf Larsen’s turn to be puzzled. The name and its magic signified nothing to him. I was proud that it did mean something to me, and for the first time in a weary while I was convincingly conscious of a superiority over him.
“I remember writing a review of a thin little volume – ” I had begun carelessly, when she interrupted me.
“You!” she cried. “You are – “
She was now staring at me in wide-eyed wonder.
I nodded my identity, in turn.
“Humphrey Van Weyden,” she concluded; then added with a sigh of relief, and unaware that she had glanced that relief at Wolf Larsen, “I am so glad.”
“I remember the review,” she went on hastily, becoming aware of the awkwardness of her remark; “that too, too flattering review.”
“Not at all,” I denied valiantly. “You impeach my sober judgment and make my canons of little worth. Besides, all my brother critics were with me. Didn’t Lang include your ‘Kiss Endured’ among the four supreme sonnets by women in the English language?”
“But you called me the American Mrs. Meynell!”
“Was it not true?” I demanded.
“No, not that,” she answered. “I was hurt.”
“We can measure the unknown only by the known,” I replied, in my finest academic manner. “As a critic I was compelled to place you. You have now become a yardstick yourself. Seven of your thin little volumes are on my shelves; and there are two thicker volumes, the essays, which, you will pardon my saying, and I know not which is flattered more, fully equal your verse. The time is not far distant when some unknown will arise in England and the critics will name her the English Maud Brewster.”
“You are very kind, I am sure,” she murmured; and the very conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick thrill – rich with remembrance but stinging sharp with home-sickness.
“And you are Maud Brewster,” I said solemnly, gazing across at her.
“And you are Humphrey Van Weyden,” she said, gazing back at me with equal solemnity and awe. “How unusual! I don’t understand. We surely are not to expect some wildly romantic sea-story from your sober pen.”
“No, I am not gathering material, I assure you,” was my answer. “I have neither aptitude nor inclination for fiction.”
“Tell me, why have you always buried yourself in California?” she next asked. “It has not been kind of you. We of the East have seen to very little of you – too little, indeed, of the Dean of American Letters, the Second.”
I bowed to, and disclaimed, the compliment. “I nearly met you, once, in Philadelphia, some Browning affair or other – you were to lecture, you know. My train was four hours late.”
And then we quite forgot where we were, leaving Wolf Larsen stranded and silent in the midst of our flood of gossip. The hunters left the table and went on deck, and still we talked. Wolf Larsen alone remained. Suddenly I became aware of him, leaning back from the table and listening curiously to our alien speech of a world he did not know.
I broke short off in the middle of a sentence. The present, with all its perils and anxieties, rushed upon me with stunning force. It smote Miss Brewster likewise, a vague and nameless terror rushing into her eyes as she regarded Wolf Larsen.
He rose to his feet and laughed awkwardly. The sound of it was metallic.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said, with a self-depreciatory wave of his hand. “I don’t count. Go on, go on, I pray you.”
But the gates of speech were closed, and we, too, rose from the table and laughed awkwardly.
CHAPTER XXI
The chagrin Wolf Larsen felt from being ignored by Maud Brewster and me in the conversation at table had to express itself in some fashion, and it fell to Thomas Mugridge to be the victim. He had not mended his ways nor his shirt, though the latter he contended he had changed. The garment itself did not bear out the assertion, nor did the accumulations of grease on stove and pot and pan attest a general cleanliness.
“I’ve given you warning, Cooky,” Wolf Larsen said, “and now you’ve got to take your medicine.”
Mugridge’s face turned white under its sooty veneer, and when Wolf Larsen called for a rope and a couple of men, the miserable Cockney fled wildly out of the galley and dodged and ducked about the deck with the grinning crew in pursuit. Few things could have been more to their liking than to give him a tow over the side, for to the forecastle he had sent messes and concoctions of the vilest order. Conditions favoured the undertaking. The Ghost was slipping through the water at no more than three miles an hour, and the sea was fairly calm. But Mugridge had little stomach for a dip in it. Possibly he had seen men towed before. Besides, the water was frightfully cold, and his was anything but a rugged constitution.