"And it frightens you?" asked Catriona.
"Yes, frankly, it does. Capitalism is the essential tool for the general improvement of the human condition, and for the stability of nations."
"It also keeps me in silk socks," said Douglas Fairbanks.
"I'm serious," said George Weherman.
"Well, maybe that's your trouble," Douglas Fairbanks grinned at him.
Catriona said, "Don't you ever take time off, George? Ever? Don't you have a hobby?"
"Does it worry you that I shouldn't?"
"Yes, I suppose it does. If you don't take any time off, how can you ever look at your business with a fresh eye?"
George realigned his place card so that it squared up with his dessert fork. "I'm a self-contained kind of man, I suppose. An internal combustion engine. Everything I need in life is inside of me."
"You can't be that self-contained. Nobody is."
Douglas Fairbanks said, "Were you ever married?"
"No," admitted George. "But once I was in love."
"Only once? Didn't you know that love is the essential tool for the improvement of the human condition, and for the gradual erosion of the bank balance?"
George smiled, but didn't answer directly. Instead, he said, "Her name was Myrtle Greensleeves."
"Myrtle Greensleeves the motion picture actress?" asked Douglas Fairbanks. "Seriously?"
"I told you, I'm always serious." There was no hint of mockery on George Westerman's face, none at all.
"Hey, darling," Douglas Fairbanks called Mary Pickford. "Did you hear that? Our friend here was once in love with Myrtle Greensleeves."
"Oh, really? asked Mary Pickford, her face bright. But then she frowned and said, "But didn't she—"
George Welterman fastidiously arranged his fish knives and forks so that they were all parallel. "Yes," he said. "Idiopathic muscular dystrophy. Well, that's what her doctors called it. She wasted away."
"She was so pretty," said Mary Pickford. She plainly didn't know what else to say.
"Yes." George Welterman nodded. "She was so pretty, and she was so talented, too, and I suppose that's why I loved her. To some people, almost every love seems like the great love of their life, but Myrtle was truly mine."
"Those are very romantic words," said Catriona without sarcasm.
"Romantic?" asked George Welterman. "I don't think so. I'm not a romantic man, Miss Keys. I'm just describing the way it was."
"I never heard," said Douglas Fairbanks. "Did Myrtle... well, what l'm trying to ask is, What ever happened to her?"
"She's still alive if that's what you mean. She's in a sanitarium in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona now. You wouldn't recognise her."
"Do you ever go to see her?" asked Catriona.
George shook his head. "She made me promise to stay away. The last time I saw her, she was like a skeleton. All she can do is lie on her bed all day and watch her old movies. She watches them over and over. Do you remember Bitter Roses? Well, she was making that picture when I first met her. We had a hand in some of the finance. She watches that one all the time."
Now the stewards were hurrying around with terrine of guinea fowl, quenelles of pike, and dove breasts in gin-flavoured aspic. Catriona looked at George Welterman, and said, "Let's talk about something else, shall we? I didn't want to upset you."
"I'm not upset," said George. "I simply wanted you to understand that just because a man doesn't take vacations, and just because he sees human tragedy in terms of economic failure, that doesn't mean that he doesn't have a soul."
Douglas Fairbanks said loudly, "Did anyone here ever try to run fifty feet with an orange between his knees?"
TWENTY-ONE
By the time the banquet was over, it was almost midnight, and the Arcadia had begun to demonstrate her own distinctive rolling motion for the first time. Actually, it was more of a roll—hesitate—and then a roll back again. Baroness Zawisza said, "This ship is a young virgin, you see... she can't make up her mind whether she wants to roll or not."
The seas, in fact, were preternaturally calm, and the Arcadia glided through them like an illuminated carnival float being wheeled across a dark and deserted plaza. This was just as well, since a fifteen-course dinner which had included filets de boeuf Robespierre, goose stuffed with chestnuts, sweetbreads a la Toulouse, and supreme of chicken with truffles was not likely to quell the sensitivities of anyone prone to seasickness. The meal had finished with strawberries, over which Mark Beeney sprinkled pepper. "It's something my daddy taught me," he said. "Pepper brings out the flavour of strawberries like nothing else."
There were several toasts. The loyal toast, to their majesties King George and Queen Mary. A toast to the financiers and the shipbuilders who had made the Arcadia possible. A toast to Catriona, and a toast to the Arcadia herself. There was applause and laughter, and the orchestra played "Pomp and Circumstance" to swell the breasts of the assembled company so that they matched their swollen stomachs.
Then Sir Peregrine announced one minute's silence in memory of Catriona's father, and sixty tables of first-class passengers stood with their heads bowed while Catriona herself closed her eyes and tried to remember those walks with her father along the dunes at Formby. It was five after midnight now, and the day of his funeral had passed. Tomorrow it would be a week since he had died. Catriona thought how irresistibly true that old cliche was, that time goes on, and leave the dead behind. She and the Arcadia and all of these hundreds of guests had already travelled into Wednesday, June 18th, while her father would be arrested forever at June 11th. "They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old."
In the second-class dining-saloon, with its pale veneered panelling and its stainless-steel motifs of mermaids, dinner had finished about a half-hour earlier, and the passengers were waltzing to the music of the Ted Bagley Sextet. The stewards served complimentary brandy (two-star) and complimentary cigars (King Edwards) to the gentlemen; while their lady wives were offered creme-de-menthe and Cadbury's chocolate mints (in comparison to the handmade pralines by Leonidas of Antwerp which were offered to the ladies in first).
Even deeper down in the social layer-cake, in the third-class saloon, the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the passengers were dancing a conga. The bar was serving whisky and ginger, port and lemon, and five different brands of bottled beer. But the singing was loud and cheerful, and streamers were unfurled all across the dance floor, and there were funny hats and red papier-mache noses, and hooters and squeakers for those who had drunk too much to do anything much more than hoot or squeak. In the opinion of the chief third-class steward, it was "a knees-up to remember'.
Harry Pakenow had spent most of the dinner talking to a French Communist schoolteacher with a harelip and a photographic memory of the works of Karl Marx. To this schoolteacher, the dictatorship of the proletariat was everything—that, and cassis, and Pont l"Eveque cheese, and his black-haired wife with her greasy forehead and smudged red lipstick. Harry, however, was not in the mood for discussing politics in any depth. Discussion was all very well, but it didn't win revolutions. Only violence won revolutions—swift and committed acts against the capitalist establishment. To what else would the rich pay any attention? But there was nothing Harry could say to this schoolteacher, with all his intense and recitative opinions about the distribution of wealth and the opium of the people—especially when Harry had already committed a political act far more telling than anything this poor man would ever manage in the whole of his active life.