That night we did the foolish things one does on a ship the last night out. We exchanged addresses with people we would never see again. We ate too much of the good food. We caught the steward stealing our cigarettes, and the people in the next cabin kissing strangers behind the lifeboat; and we gave a concert at which I stood up and recited “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” “So well you could hear the horse running,” Aunt Fran told the Author. After that the vaudeville act did a wire-walking act
It was very easy to see that the Author was mad about Mama and Aunt Fran. The poor dope was like a kid between two bowls of whipped cream. He was, to quote Gramp, “Raide et très audacieux.”
“Une vieille rengaine,” he added in the card room, where he was playing draw poker with a fat old bag who owned oil wells in California and part of a railroad. She had lived in Europe for fifty years and spoke better French than Victor Hugo….
She said, “I got a full house. La feuille a l'envers.”
“Your hand,” said Gramp. “More chips, Stevie. I hate authors. This one is un taureau triste.”
“What have you got?”
Gramp showed his aces… and Mama came into the card room and looked at Gramp, and Gramp saw she had been weeping.
“What's the matter. Your author fall overside?”
“Gramp, I'm worried over Fran. I'm a married woman who can take care of herself… but Fran is young and innocent, and he says he's coming to London with us. He wants to show us Hogarth.”
“He'll have to dig him up… been dead a few hundred years,” said The Fat Old Bag, mixing the deck with skill.
“Gramp, you must scare him off…. He's got Aunt Fran on the boat deck and he's telling her he can't let either one of us go… it will kill him if he can't make up his mind soon….”
The Old Bag said, “How about a horsewhip, Longstreet?”
Gramp shook his head. “In affaires de coeur whips are no good. Sara, you forget this until I finish this game… I'll think of something.”
I think the Old Bag took Gramp for three hundred dollars… but even I could see Gramp's mind was not on his game. I must explain that in those days it was pretty dreadful for a young girl and a married woman to be trailed over Europe by a man both married and a writer of lurid love tales. If you don't understand this, then the whole thing looks silly.
If Papa or Aunt Fiona back home ever heard of this, it would be dreadful.
I remember going to sleep. Gramp and I shared a mouse-nest in heavy gold and rubbed fumed oak. I remember going to bed, and the sea splashing against the steel skin of the ship, and Gramp sitting in his bunk smoking long black stogies and thinking hard. Just before I dozed off I heard him say, “By the left wheel of Buddha, I think I know how to fix that author so he'll not autograph a copy of his books for a woman for a year!”
What, Gramp?” I said, and slept until morning….
Morning came, bright and yellow with fog. In England the weather is always clearing, or getting worse… it is almost never nice… but then, I may be wrong. The boat went slowly, and trunks were coming up from the hell of the ship's belly, and everyone was standing on deck brushing off stewards gathering to collect their honey.
Gramp was in the red leather bar… in a private corner, a booth the Cockney barman had reserved for him. I went forward and found the Author breathing down Mama's neck and holding Fran's hand… and I said could he step into the bar a minute.
Gramp rose and bowed the Author into the booth, and he poured him a Three Star brandy. And he said, “Well, it's lucky we ran across you.”
“Oh, really?”… said the Author.
“I'm a broad-minded man… very broad-minded… and I want to get away to Paris alone to broaden still more. Stevie, ask the barman for those sweet crackers.”
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