"'You haven't seen Philip Carter-Helm, have you?" asked Catriona.
"He wasn't at dinner," said Mark. "But I did see Marcia playing footsy with that fellow Sabran. And believe me, that Polish baroness lady didn't care for it one bit. I think she could have bitten his head off."
Catriona reached across the table and took Mark's hand. "Anyway," she said, "I have something to say to you, something really remarkable, and a proposition to make, too."
"Do you know something," smiled Mark. "I just love that clipped British way you say remarkable."
"Listen," Catriona insisted; but Mark shushed her.
"You listen first," he told her. "I have something really re-mark-able to say, too; and I have a proposition to make. And since I'm the guest around here, and you're the hostess, I think I have first bite at it, don't you?"
Catriona looked into his eyes, and his eyes were sparkling with affection and good humour; and so she said, "Very well. But don't take all night over it."
"Okay," said Mark, adjusting his necktie. "You see, the truth is, I've been giving this business some careful consideration. Normally, I'm impetuous. I take a fancy to something and I have to have it straight away, no arguments, no poodle-dogging around. But this is one of those decisions that is going to affect my whole life, and maybe yours, too, and so I've really got to think this one out."
"Go on," said Catriona. She couldn't think why her heart was rising so high. She couldn't think why she felt so tense, and thrilled.
Mark reached into his pocket and produced a black ring box. He opened it; and there, nestling in black silk, was a gold ring set with a trio of diamonds, the largest of which must have weighed three or four karats.
"Catriona, I want you to marry me, that's my proposition. I don't believe that I'm a particularly bad catch. I'm extremely rich, and not too ugly, and apart from that I've fallen in love with you like I've never fallen in love with anybody before. Let me tell you something, Catriona, when you come out in the evening, the stars have to hide themselves in shame, and that's a scientific fact."
Catriona suddenly found that there were tears in her eyes.
"You're not upset, are you?" asked Mark worriedly.
Catriona shook her head. "I'm delighted," she choked.
"You mean—"
She nodded. "Yes, you idiot. Of course I do."
Mark picked the ring carefully out of the box, held Catriona's hand, and slid the ring on to her finger. Then he sat back, took out his handkerchief, and mopped at his forehead. "Phew," he said. "I thought for one moment there..."
She reached across the table and squeezed his hand tight.
"Shall we make an announcement?" asked Mark. "We could at least persuade the pianist to play something less dreary."
"Not yet," Catriona asked him. "Let me tell you my proposition first."
"You mean you weren't going to ask me to marry you?"
"I don't know. Sort of. Listen."
She talked to him for almost a quarter of an hour, while he listened intently, his head slightly lowered. Then, later, they walked hand in hand to the first-class staircase, where they stood for a moment under the towering illuminated funnels, and under the stars, which like the stars in Yeats' poem had been blown across the sky like sparks from a smithy. There was a scent in the air which was peculiar to luxury Atlantic liners—of expensive fragrances, of fuel-oil, and of Turkish tobacco, all mingled with ozone and salt.
"If only my father could have been here tonight," said Catriona, although not regretfully; for in a strange way she felt that he was.
SIXTY-SEVEN
It was well past one o'clock on Friday morning, and the Arcadia was now steaming ahead at full speed, with only a light southwesterly on her port quarter to resist her, and the vibration of her turbines thrilling through everything on board, from the vases of fresh roses on the tables, to the ice-cubes in the cocktails.
Tonight the Arcadia was alive, and thrusting her way through the ocean at nearly twenty-nine knots. Sir Peregrine had left the dinner table and was now commanding the bridge personally. Although he would never have admitted it, not even to Nurse Queensland, he was determined that the Arcadia should win the Blue Riband on her maiden voyage. He wasn't only fighting for the Arcadia, nor for the future of Keys Shipping. He was fighting for himself. Docking in New York in record time was his only hope of retaining his position as commodore of the Keys fleet—if there could be any hope. And, by God, he needed to be commodore. He needed the sea. What would he do without it? Sit in his gloomy Victorian house in Lytham St. Anne's, listening to his housekeeper warbling while she boiled him up a mutton and lentil soup? Pace the corridors afternoon after afternoon, listening to the steady tick of the Viennese clock, and staring back at the sullen dogs which peered at him from all those cracked oil paintings in the hall?
Dream of Maude? No, never. Not dream of Maude. The sea was all that had mercifully kept him from dreaming of Maude every night and every day for all these years. He had been too busy commanding his ships, and too busy entertaining his passengers, to dream of Maude. Maude was a lost love, a letter left unopened on a mantelpiece in some Victorian room, a girl seen from afar in a soft dress and a picture hat, while children played around her with hoops and sticks. Maude was a memory from a time that had disappeared forever behind a slowly closing diaphragm, a time before flappers and automobiles and airplanes and jazz and electric light. A time before anybody knew what "heebie-jeebies" meant and girls had dared to show their ankles.
Maude, Maude. The Arcadia surged forward to the rhythm of Maude. And all the while she did so, with Sir Peregrine standing so proudly and so lopsidedly on the bridge, and with Harry Pakenow gnawing his fingernails in his first-class bedroom, the timing device in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Mannon turned around to twelve o'clock again, and this time the sear was nudged so closely by the moving hands that there was an audible click. The dock was running down, but there was a chance that it would continue to run until twelve o'clock noon on Saturday. So there was at least one chance for the hands to tip the boomerang-shaped sear so that it connected with the trigger and exploded the dynamite. Harry Pakenow could only wait and worry, while everybody else on the Arcadia drank and danced and cooed and copulated, or stared hopelessly out into the night.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Coney Island appeared through the warm summer mist at 7:56 on Saturday morning, after a night when the ocean had been warm and dark as treacle, with the Arcadia sliding over her at high speed. To Catriona, as she stood with Mark by the forward rail to catch her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, the Arcadia's maiden voyage now seemed to have been curiously short, a strange abrupt interval of fantasy, what the German passengers would have called an Augenblick, a blink of the eye.
After hearing last night who Philip Carter-Helm really was, and what Catriona proposed to do, Mark had agreed, a little reluctantly, to postpone the announcement of their engagement. But this morning when she had woken up, the ship's florist has brought her heaps of trembling gardenias, over a hundred of them, with the message "I Adore You. So There."
Catriona had left a note under Philip's door begging him to call her, and she had asked Monty Willowby to catch his arm if he should see him. But there had been no reply to the note, and Philip had not appeared at breakfast. As the Arcadia neared New York, Catriona was beginning to grow anxious that she would not be able to find him, let alone persuade him to help her with her proposition. Once the ship had docked and he had gone ashore, it could very well be too late; and she was terrified that Keys might have to go to George Welterman by default.