Mr. Kretchmer and Mr. Wilkes had very little in common. Mr. Kretchmer loved his wife and his family of five daughters and most of all he loved horses. Mr. Wilkes was an unrepentant misogynist to whom the very word "lingerie" was something vaguely nauseating, and whose natural habitat was the smoking room, and the leather club chair. But both men, Kretchmer and Wilkes, were prodigious eaters.
After Mr. Wilkes had silently supped three plates of turtle soup, and then with an equal lack of commotion munched his way through five pieces of toast liberally spread with hare pate, and four dove breasts in aspic, Mr. Kretchmer reached across the dining table and tapped him on the back of the hand.
"You'll forgive my saying so, sir, but I do believe I'm looking at a gentleman after my own heart. Or should I say stomach."
Mr. Wilkes swallowed his last forkful of juniper-flavoured dove and wiped his mouth. "I care for my food, sir, if that's what you're saying. My late mother was one of the finest cooks in Madison County, Indiana, which was one of the reasons my late father married her. I was brought up on good food and plenty of it. My late mother's biscuits were like Paradise on a plate, that's what my late father used to say. "Renata", he used to say, "these biscuits are like Paradise on a plate." "
"Well, sir," said Mr. Kretchmer, "perhaps we ought to make a little wager between us, so that we both take advantage of all of the fine food on this voyage. Supposing I wager that I can eat every single item of every single meal that is served to the passengers between here and New York; and supposing I wager that you cannot."
Quartermaster Oliver Lennox, at the head of the table, said jovially, "That's a wager that you can never win, Mr. Kretchmer. I've seen the menus for this voyage, and you can take my word for it, a man would explode if he ate everything on offer. If you think tonight's banquet is something, wait until you see what we have for you tomorrow. A whole lamb in pastry stuffed with herbs, and breast of woodcock with orange liqueur."
"I'll wager I can eat a serving of everything," said Mr. Wilkes quietly, mopping up his plate with a bread roll. "I was intending to do so, in any event."
"Now, gentlemen," put in Quartermaster Lennox, "we don't want to turn this table into a gambling hell."
"Let them do it," said Lord Willunshaw, loudly from the far end of the table. "It's good for chaps to have an enthusiasm in life. Makes a change from all this postwar slackness we've been getting from the coal-miners and the civil service, and God knows who else. Let them do it! And I'll put twenty pounds on Mr Kretchmer."
"Yes, do let them," twittered Grace Bunyon, the stage actress. "I just adore to see people making pigs of themselves. It reminds me so much of those hysterical royal garden parties."
"Well, I'm not sure that I ought to," frowned the quartermaster.
"Damn it, man, they've paid for their food. You can't stop "em," said Lord Willunshaw.
"No, well, I suppose I can't," Lennox admitted. "In that case, very well."
Mr. Kretchmer stuck out his hand, and Mr Wilkes took it and shook it; a pink trotter clasped within a Neanderthal paw. "You're on," said Mr. Wilkes, in his quiet, quiet voice; and Grace Bunyon was to say later that she had never heard such a gently threatening voice in her whole life, not even when Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Othello.
Right then, the dining-stewards cleared the covers and brought on the sole in Pouilly Fume, the Spanish mackerel a I"Arcadia, and the sweetbreads a la Toulouse.
"Would you care for the sole, the mackerel, or the sweetbreads, sir?" the steward asked Joe Kretchmer.
Joe Kretchmer looked Duncan Wilkes straight in the eye, and said, "Yes."
Henrietta Chibnall, the daughter of Laurence Chibnall, the English champion show jumper, applauded loudly and squealed, "It's wonderful! It's too wonderful! They're both going to be frightfully sick!"
Another fateful encounter: a mild, amiable-looking man in a noticeably dishevelled dinner suit, his hands in his pockets, sauntered into the men's smoking room after the banquet was over and proceeded to stroll from table to table, nonchalantly but systematically picking up anchovy sandwiches and crackers spread with ripe Stilton cheese as if he hadn't eaten anything at the banquet at all. As a matter of fact, he hadn't, because no place had been set for him. He was Maurice Peace, stowaway and professional gambler, and he had only emerged two hours ago from the steam-heated sanctuary of the first-class linen cupboard.
A steward asked him if he would care for a drink. He thought about it for a while, his cheeks crammed up with cheese crackers like a ruminative rabbit, and then he said, "A half-bottle of Pommery and Greno Sec, if you don't mind. And perhaps a Welsh rarebit, with lots of cayenne pepper."
"You'll forgive me if I ask your stateroom number, sir," said the steward. "I don't appear to recognise you."
"Of course you don't recognise me," smiled Maurice, "I'm travelling incognito."
There was a difficult little silence. Then the steward licked his pencil and said, embarrassed, "Your stateroom, sir?"
Maurice leaned towards the steward and whispered, "B-mmph." Then, smartly swivelling around on the worn-down heel of his patent-leather pumps, he raised his arm in cheery greeting to the first man who came through the mahogany swing doors. "My dear fellow! I've been waiting for you!" he cried enthusiastically, and the steward, too concerned about the consequences of annoying a first-class passenger to press the matter of his stateroom number further, scribbled on the kitchen order, "B-13', which he happened to know was occupied by Mrs. Archibald Zuckerman, the widow of the recently deceased automobile tyre millionaire. Mrs. Zuckerman handed out five-dollar bills as if they were Salvation Army leaflets, and he was pretty sure that she wouldn't query her price of a half-bottle of champagne.
The man whom Maurice Peace had greeted so robustly was Mark Beeney, returning briefly to the smoking room to look for the cigarette lighter he had left there earlier in the day. He said, "Hello, old boy," in an abstracted way, but he didn't give Maurice the brush-off that someone with fewer friends and acquaintances might have done. For all Mark knew, Maurice might have been a regular American TransAtlantic passenger, and business across the North Atlantic was far too competitive these days to allow any shipowner to say the kind of things about his customers that William Henry Vanderbilt had once said about his railroad passengers—"The public be damned!"
Maurice Peace said, "A fine dinner, hey? A real fine dinner." The steward, moderately satisfied with Maurice's credentials, left the smoking room to fetch him what he had ordered. Mark Beeney lifted up one or two cushions, peered at the top mantelshelf above the fireplace, and said, "You haven't seen a gold and enamel cigarette lighter, by any chance?"
"Well, no," said Maurice. "But if it's been handed in, then the purser will have it. He's your best bet."
"I guess so," said Mark. Then, "Do I know you?"
Maurice Peace held out his hand. "We met in New York, about three years ago," he lied. "I don't suppose you'd remember me. I'm Maurice Peace."
"Mark Beeney," replied Mark, shaking hands. "Listen, I must say that I'm damned annoyed about that lighter. It had sentimental value, you now? I'm not usually one for losing things, either. Only money."
"You're a gambling man?" asked Maurice hopefully.
"I believe in luck, if that's what you mean," Mark told him.
"You're bidding in the ship's pool?"
"Of course. There isn't any chance at all that the owner of American TransAtlantic isn't going to bet on the distance the Keys flagship can travel in a day. No chance at all. Do you know what time they're bidding?"
"In about a half-hour, I gather," said Maurice. The time and location of the ship's pool was one of the few reliable facts he did have to hand, having accosted one of the smoking room stewards almost as soon as he had managed to struggle out of the linen closet. This was because more money rode on the outcome of the ship's pool than almost any other gambling event aboard, with the exception of some very humourless and long-running card schools, and some notably eccentric wagers. The ship's pool was the nightly auction of twelve potentially winning numbers, and it was conducted in the smoking room by the officers of the ship and a celebrity auctioneer, picked from the passengers. The numbers were determined by the first officer, and represented a field of ten estimated mileages for the next day's steaming, plus "low field" and "high field'. If the Arcadia was running at twenty-six knots, she could reasonably be expected to sail 624 nautical miles in twenty-four hours, from noon to noon, and therefore the numbers 619 through 629 would be auctioned—with "high field" to cover the possibility of the shipping company ordering extra speed and "low field" to take care of any possible engine breakdowns or bad weather. When there was a particularly persuasive auctioneer in charge of the proceedings, the pool could frequently exceed 1,000 pounds which in 1924 was worth almost $5,000. For $7,000, you could buy a brand-new custom-built Pierce-Arrow two-seater runabout.