"That's enough," said the steward roughly, and pushed Harry back with the heels of both hands. Harry, still smiling, all prickly hair and eye-glasses, jabbed the steward with two stiffened fingers, deep into his crotch. The steward exhaled loudly, and then stepped back a pace or two, panting, his face white.
"Never push me, all right?" said Harry, and made his way back down the stairway. The fat man with the pipe moved aside for him again without even lifting his eyes.
"Do you know something?" he said, as Harry reached the foot of the stairs. "That Glenna Collett was fantastic. A natural athlete. Yet she was licked by a grandmother—a sixty-year-old grandmother. Can you believe that?"
Harry paused. Then he said, "Yes, I think I can. I mean, today I saw a man trying to return a lost doll to a young girl, and being refused that small pleasure because he was short of 1,960 pounds."
The fat man didn't reply, but went back to his book as if it were the greatest revelation since the Book of Mormon. "Bobby Jones would've licked her," he muttered to himself.
Back on the third-class deck, Harry went to the rail and stared for a long time at the sea. Now and then, he turned around, shielding his eyes from the sun, to see if Lucille Foster was looking down from the first-class promenade. But there was no sign of her pink cloche hat, nor her pink coat, nor her pale sad face. Whoever Mrs. Hall was, she must have taken her charge further along the deck, out of sight of the riff-raff, or inside to her cabin.
He had no idea why he had felt such immediate liking for Lucille. She was wealthy, after all—a child of the filthy rich. She had blandly referred to the Arcadia's third-class passengers as cattle. But her social attitudes weren't really her fault: they were the only attitudes she knew. He supposed that if he had been brought up in swanky hotels in fashionable European cities, and never had to worry about money, then he might have grown to think the same way.
Maybe it was her aura of tragedy that moved him to respond to Lucille so immediately. Maybe it was the fact that, in the face of a lonely child, he had seen something that he had never quite wanted to believe before now: that the rich were human, too.
While he was leaning on the rail, a girl in a turban hat, a short blue skin and rolled-down stockings came up to him with an unlit cigarette perched in her fingers. Without a word, Harry took a box of Ship matches out of his pocket, struck one, and cupped his hands to protect the flame from the wind while the girl lit up.
"My name's Philly," the girl said, blowing out smoke. She was quite pretty, but she wore far too much make-up around her eyes, so that they looked like two bright blue marbles dropped into pots of black shoe cream. Even in the afternoon wind, Harry could smell her strong perfume.
"Philly from Philly?" he asked her. He couldn't help smiling at her; she was trying so hard to be a Scott Fitzgerald-type "vamp'.
"Philomena from the University of Minnesota," she said. She had a cute lisp which belied all her posturing as a campus vamp. "I'm just on my way back from fifty-five days in Europe."
"Good to meet you," said Harry, clasping her hand. "Did you learn anything?"
"I learned how abandoned the Europeans are. And I mean, abandoned."
" "Don't you think it's pretty abandoned coming up and asking a strange man for a light for your cigarette?"
Philly blinked. "What's abandoned about that? You're an American, aren't you?"
"I guess I am," said Harry. "My name's Harry, by the way."
"I think I'm tired of Europeans," said Philly. She kept her cigarette dangling between her lips while she took out her powder compact, bent down, and enthusiastically powdered her bare knees. "You can only take so much decadence, if you know what I mean. In fifty-five days, I've had decadence up to here. And I'm gasping for a decent malted milk. Not that I'm stuck on dairy produce, of course. I'd rather have a shot of giggle water any day. That's why we came back on a British ship. At least you can drink on a British ship."
"We?" asked Harry. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his handkerchief. The salt in the wind kept misting them up.
"Hey, you look much nicer without your cheaters," said Philly, with a smile. "Mind you, I've always been a sucker for guys in glasses."
Slightly embarrassed, Harry put them back on again. "You said "we"," he repeated.
"Oh, yes—me and my girlfriend Lydia. She's gone back to the cabin right now to throw up. Lydia and the ocean never did get on."
"Poor Lydia."
"Hey," said Philly, "I could use a walk around the deck. Do you want to take me for a walk around the deck?
Harry shrugged, and then took her arm. "Okay. Which way round do you want to go? Clockwise or anticlockwise?"
Philly snuggled close to Harry's side as they crossed the shelter deck to the stairway which led up to the stern deck. She giggled, "Did you hear the one about the girl who said to her date, "Do you consider my legs long?" and do you know what he said, "Yes," he said, "whenever possible"."
Together, they circled around the stern deck, while the Red Ensign flapped and rumbled from its mast, and Philly chattered and pranced and told endless collegiate jokes. "Did you hear about the girl who was so dumb she always used to wonder how they got electric light poles to grow in a straight line?"
As they came around the deck for the third time, Harry glanced up at the rail of the first-class promenade, and there stood Lucille Foster in her pink fur-collared coat. She seemed to be searching for him amongst the crowd on the stern; and when she eventually caught sight of him, she gave him a quick and happy little wave. Harry, discreetly, waved back.
"Who are you waving at?" demanded Philly.
Harry squeezed her hand. "Just a friend," he told her.
FIFTEEN
They had been shown the kitchens, where the chefs were noisily preparing tonight's banquet of filet de boeuf Robespierre, crabs maitre d'hotel, and Pigeonneaux royaux au sauce paradis, amid a pandemonium of steam and whisks and copper saucepans and the relentless bellowing of the black-bearded Monsieur Vincent, chef extraordinary, who had once astounded London society by serving Edward VII and his mistress Lily Langtry with cuisses de grenouilles in pink-tinted aspic, a dish which in those days had been considered suggestive to the point of culinary pornography.
Now Rudyard Philips led them with all the informative courtesy of a well-bred ship's officer to the brightly-lit shopping gallery; where he pointed out the boutiques of Van Cleef & Arpels, sparkling with diamonds and rubies; of Zoroastra, where lizard and alligator pocketbooks gleamed alongside jewel-encrusted evening purses; and of Alciatore, in which absurd and insanely expensive objets d'art and adult jouets were offered for the amusement of anyone whose tastes one to onyx rocking horses with sapphires for eyes, or hip-flasks which played "The Sheik of Araby" when you unscrewed them, and whose bank balance was near enough bottomless.
Rudyard said, "This shopping gallery is two hundred and ten feet long, and houses thirty different boutiques and agencies. You can buy anything here from a tube of toothpaste to a ranch in Montana."
"Thank you," said Mark Beeney, "I already have a ranch in Montana. a a tube of toothpaste."
Rudyard Philips managed the suggestion of a smile, but that was all. After his jostle with Mademoiselle Narron outside the dining lounge , he hadn't been feeling at all like himself. His thoughts were aa jagged and mixed-up as the bits and pieces in a child's kaleidoscope.