"Well, I'd better get back to the dancing," said Mark. "Maybe I'll see you later."
"You want a private wager on the mileage?" asked Maurice.
Mark, halfway through the smoking-room door, turned and looked at Maurice narrowly. He was quite sure he had seen him before, but the time and the place completely escaped him. Mind you, Maurice Peace had one of those featureless faces that you could never really remember and never actually forget. He had short mouse-brown hair, parted in the centre—but then so did millions of other men. He had brown neutral eyes, and a nose with a slight bump at the bridge. His mouth was soft and pale and undistinctive, except for a thin clipped moustache along the upper lip. And yet so many wore thin clipped moustaches, particularly since the release of The Thief of Baghdad.
"Okay, I'll make you a private wager," said Mark. "How about a hundred dollars?"
"Make it five," said Maurice. He had 120 pounds in his left spatterdash, enough for one big personal wager like this, and for a small opening stake in a poker game.
"We don't know the numbers yet," Mark replied.
"What does that matter? Whatever number you buy in the ship's pool, high or low, I'll bet you five hundred dollars that it's at least three miles fewer."
Mark smiled. He had been deliriously conscious all evening of the harmonic vibration of the Arcadia's reciprocating engines, and the humming of her turbines, and he knew that she was running smoothly and quickly. He wanted this ship for himself, and any criticism of the headway she was making was almost like hearing from his lawyers that a girl he was dating had a reputation for being too "fast'. Maurice Peace didn't know it, but he had instinctively given Mark Beeney the one challenge that he couldn't refuse. That was the way Maurice Peace made his precarious living, however: by the seat of his unpaid-for trousers, and by his supernatural sensitivity to all those perverse prides and private weaknesses which led men to lay down good money, in any currency, simply to prove themselves right.
"Very well," Mark said. "Make it five hundred. I'll have pleasure in collecting it from you."
Maurice Peace took another sandwich, and pushed it into his mouth. Somehow Mark couldn't take his eyes off him; he felt in some inexplicable fashion that this man was to have an eerie and significant hand in his destiny, or had already done so in the past. What had Marcia said at Brown's Hotel about a shiver coming over her, like cold water?
"I'm trying to place where I've met you before," Mark told Maurice. "A speak, maybe, in New York? The Marlboro Club, on 61st? The Tree, on 55th?"
Maurice Peace shrugged and shook his head. "I've been in Ireland for the summer. The flat racing, you know. Good horseback racing in Ireland, the best. What the Irish don't know about horses, you could tell your sister Sue in a two-cent telegram."
"You came aboard at Dublin?" frowned Mark.
Maurice took two more sandwiches, one in each hand, and bit at
them alternately. "A thirsty fish, the anchovy," he said in a noncommittal
voice. Mark said slowly, "Yes... I guess it is," and went back to the Grand Lounge for the after-dinner dancing. The swing door swung behind him.
Then, on the curving staircase leading up on to the promenade deck from the first-class lounge, there was an encounter between Rudyard Philips and Mademoiselle Narron. Mademoiselle Narron had changed out of her red gown because she had felt the first twinges of a migraine headache coming on. Red made her migraines worse. Now she wore a low-scooped gown by Martial et Armand in turquoise crepe du Maroc, trimmed with gold thread. Between the stately freckled custards of her breasts lay a green-and-gold enamelled pendant, one of the last gifts she had received from Raymond Walters before Raymond had decided to put his wife and his cello before the uncertainties of operatic passion. (How Raymond had loved her once, though! How he had gripped the girdle of fat that surmounted her hips, and squeezed it with all the speechless appreciation of a man who had once stood for two-and-a-half hours in front of Rubens" Arrival of Marie de Medici in the Louvre, completely missing his lunch.)
Rudyard said, "Mademoiselle, we ought to talk, you and I. I mean—we really ought to get things straight between us. It seems that we've rather got off on the wrong foot."
"The wrong foot?" Louise Narron asked him. It was an English idiom which, inexplicably, she had never heard before. She looked down at her green slippers and then back at Rudyard, frowning in bewilderment.
Rudyard took her arm and shepherded her upstairs to the foyer.
"The thing is," he told her, "I may have given you the wrong impression."
"I see," she said thoughtfully. "In what way?"
"Well," said Rudyard, "you asked me if I would help you. And, I said yes, I would."
"And you no longer wish to do so?"
эNot at all. That's not what I'm saying at all. I do wish to help you, very much. It's just that I'm not sure you took what I said the right way."
"A misunderstanding, you mean? Une mesintelligence?"
Rudyard clasped his hands together, but then realised that he looked and felt like an Anglican priest, and dropped them immediately down to his sides. One of his housemasters at school had always called him "the Reverend Philips" because of his unctious mannerisms. He said, "Quite frankly, I'm in just as much of a mess as you are. I don't think I'm really going to be very much help."
"You told me. You had to leave someone behind in England whom you loved. But that is fate, isn't it? We cannot help fate."
Rudyard guided Mademoiselle Narron to the window. In the glass, their reflections stared back at them with dark secrecy, two supercilious ghosts who could cynically and magically float in the night. Rudyard could smell Mademoiselle Narron's perfume, and the closeness of her statuesque body made him feel strangely feverish and uncertain of what he was going to say.
"Perhaps it's better if we look for our own answers," he said. "I think, if I were to try to help you, and if you were to try to help me... well, I'm afraid that there might be an entanglement."
"Des complications? Mais pourquoi? Je veux vous calmer. Rien plus."
"Well, I know," said Rudyard. "The trouble us, I think I might be rather inclined to take your solicitude for something else ... for affection, for instance."