Pleased to Meet You/Chapter 14
The summer moon poured on Farniente its soft endearing lunacy. The terrace, where Nyla and the Colonel were sitting out this dance, was a milky twilight; from the ballroom came the sweet innuendo of the latest Viennese waltz. Tilyria is haunted with music. It sounds in chorus from village inns, it chimes from old belfries, gypsies fiddle under vineyard arbours, even the cowbells in mountain pastures cry a queer elvish clang. The Colonel can be pardoned if in that perfect blend of evening and congenial company he had laid aside international cares for a moment. The music in the ballroom ceased; he took out his mouth-organ and repeated the air, which his quick ear had accurately caught.
"I wish they wouldn't play such emotional tunes," he remarked. "It makes the roots grow so quickly."
"Beautiful, beautiful world!" exclaimed Nyla happily. "It doesn't make me feel like roots. It makes me feel like escaping into that magic paleness, going farther and farther—on and on and on. Doesn't moonlight make you feel like that, Gene; almost as though something was after you?"
"I know the feeling," said the Colonel. He played the tune again, retarding it in an absent thoughtful fashion. "Speaking of travelling and all that sort of thing, I've got some important papers to get off to the League. Confidential reports, you know. I ought to let them know that the republic has been successfully inaugurated. What I mean is, I suppose there's a late train that I could send them on?"
"There's the two o'clock. That connects with the sleepings at Laibach. I know, because Daddy had to take it once when they summoned him to Geneva. Gene, you're so conscientious. Couldn't your work wait till to-morrow?"
"Oh well, perhaps it could," admitted the Colonel tenderly. "But the last thing—one of the last things—Ramsay Macdonald said to me was, Get your reports in promptly."
"Please forgive me," she said, conscience-stricken. "I mustn't forget, just because you've been so perfectly darling to me, that you have to attend to business."
"Supposing that you'd never met me," he began earnestly, and then interrupted himself. "By Jove, that just fits the music!" he cried, and played a snatch of the air again. "We can make up some words of our own. Come on now, take turns with the lines."
The orchestra indoors just then took up the tune for an encore. To that soft accompaniment the Colonel sang his first line:
"Supposing that you'd never met me"
"In that case let's never suppose—" she hummed in reply.
"But then you could never forget me.—" continued the Colonel.
"I'm stuck," she said. "I can't get it. Wait a minute—Our poetry never be prose."
"Grand!" said the Colonel. "We'll knock Irving Berlin for a loop. Here we go: That ts the tragic in every sweet magic"
"Yes, even the fairy tales end—" she improvised, in a prettily pretended pathos.
Both paused, struggling for the next rhyme. The Colonel got it first, and warbled in a thrilling espressivo:
Let's pretend Not To Pretend."
He finished off with a fine rich flourish on the mouth-organ.
"Gene, you're wonderful!" she cried ecstatically. "You're much too good for the old League of Nations, you ought to be a bandmaster or something."
The delighted virtuoso replied with both arms and the one word that was his favourite ejaculation.
"Darling!" was his simple declarative statement. One word and two arms, he used to remark, could best express a tender crisis.
"I do so like to be admired," he murmured, "and I've had so little of it."
"Nonsense," whispered the infatuated Nyla. "The League must be frightfully proud of you, going round making people happy."
"Never mind the League," he said. "Let's forget the League for the nonce. In fact, for several nonces. We'll go off and found a republic of our own. We haven't had that voyage on the moat yet."
But the affairs of state are not so easily forgotten. Others were also finding the terrace useful, though perhaps less pleasant. Herr Leutz, escaped from the dance floor to a tilting ground not less perilous, was strolling with the ambassador. From the ambassador came only a mild fragrance of cigar while Herr Leutz's words of woe were audible.
"Von hondred eight million six hondred and sefenty four tousand fife hondred and tventy fife florin," he was saying. "Blus aggrued interests up to now, blus interests for sixty-two year—Ach, Herr Ambassador, you call dat gapacity to bay, dot sound to me like de massacre of de innocents. Und if de florin she go any lower ve haf to hire a plomber to hunt for her down de drain pipe."
The tactful Colonel was about to lead Nyla away from this painful scene when a dark figure that had been peering about in the moonlight approached cautiously and proved to be Romsteck.
"Your pardon, Fräulein," he said politely. "Colonel, here are the dispatches you were expecting." He handed an envelope.
"Oh yes," said the Colonel, at first a little annoyed at the interruption. Then the shape and feel of the envelope reassured him. "The dispatches, yes. I wouldn't have missed them for—for a couple of hundred florins."
"Exactly, sir. The Colonel is always accurate."
"A lovely evening, Romsteck. Are all the guests quite happy?"
"There is one, Colonel, who cannot be kept happy indefinitely."
"What does he mean?" asked Nyla.
"He must mean Frau Quackenbush."
"Poor Daddy, he's having a terrible time."
"If ve say von million florin a year for sixty-two year," continued the unhappy voice of Herr Leutz, "mit an average rate of interests of not more dan von per cent"
"This is too gruesome," said the Colonel, and they turned toward the dance.
Through the open French windows they could see glimpses of gliding couples, where the fashionables of Farniente did honour to the occasion. But there were also some whose ambit would require a bumpier participle. On those polished timbers the honest proletarians of Herr Guadeloupe's ministry had rallied bravely round their chief. One after another, with despair behind their creaking shirt fronts, the doomed men had partnered Frau Quackenbush in a series of exhausting oscillations. The unfortunate lady, jarred from clavicle to coccyx, wondered secretly whether even the hay fever would not have been an easier ordeal. Now the President, having vainly sought the apostate Colonel, was doing his best. Holding the lady gingerly at a distance, so that he could gaze downward unimpeded, Herr Guadeloupe was too busy codrdinating feet to attempt small-talk. Save for his automatic repetition "Excuse, I tell de vorld," or his anguished "Sorry to meet you" when they came solidly against the massy postern of some Illyrian dowager, he performed in anxious silence. The orchestra leader, keeping respectful watch on the chief magistrate's timing, made the mistake of trying to help him by halting the music when he went wrong. The unhappy man dared not raise his eyes from the floor except when he occasionally cast a haggard look in search of his adviser. The latter had been only a brilliant migrant in the crowded ballroom, seen sometimes in the distance floating serenely with Nyla, then disappearing again into the moonlight.
So Frau Quackenbush, aware that a few more such collisions would be fatal, did the steering. The President turned always in the same direction. His brow, fiercely intent, drooped lower and lower upon her generous acclivities until his head almost seemed to teeter there unstably like the rolling stone on its perch of moss. His English had vanished in his hour of need; he no longer could remember any phrase adequate to thank Frau Quackenbush for the honour and suggest recess. When the orchestra paused he waved an arm mechanically and continued his murderous rigadoon so that the musicians were forced to resume. Indeed, as Frau Quackenbush began to suspect, cocktails, heat, excitement and continuous rhythmic gyration had bewitched him into a sort of hypnosis. It began to seem a nightmare in which she was condemned to rotate forever while a small dervish in dangerously slack trousers drowsed uneasily on her 'bosom. She herself was succumbing to the unholy vertigo. Her face was flushed, her eyes closed, she had a strong desire to scream. She controlled herself, as I suppose many a strongminded matron has done in moments of hellish temptation, by forcing herself to recall the parliamentary procedure of the Ohio Federation of Women's Clubs. Through clenched teeth she murmured the sanative and gracious ritual. Minutes of the Last Meeting. Reports of Committees. Special Business. The Literary Program. Madam President, we have with us today the distinguished British poet—Already the Illyrian ladies had begun to stare and whisper, a buzz of scandalized sensation to pass round the room. Then the Colonel, who had seen the crisis, deftly slipped through the throng. He broke every rule of high etiquette by cutting in on the President's partner and unwound the spell by a few resolute twirls in the opposite direction. One on each arm he led the collapsing pair to the coolness of a window. He lent Frau Quackenbush a handkerchief, her own having slipped too far down to be decently retrievable; from his pocket he produced the forgotten hay fever atomizer and sprayed the panting President.
"Ha! My interpretations!" gasped Herr Guadeloupe. "Vere are you all dese years? Frau Quackenbush, you are phenomenon I never forget. Some chiropodist, I tell de vorld. Ha, ve demonstrate de Perpetual Motions, you and I. Gott, I try to keep my eye on your feets but dey spread like cockroaches. It look to me impossible you haf only two legs? I tink you must be quadruped in disguise. Tousand gratitudes for de agonies of a lifetime."
"You must pardon de Herr President his enthusiasms," explained the Colonel. "He is fanatical dancer, he dance till de cows come home to de nest."
Frau Quackenbush was temporarily beyond speech. The Colonel put a chair for her on the terrace, brought her an ice, removed her slippers.
"I'd like to go paddling in that moat," was all she said for a while.
"Ve go swimming if you like," said the Colonel, always ready.
"That's the second time you've rescued me," she said gratefully. "If you ever come to America I can show you how I appreciate it. As long as I'm chairman of the Entertainment Committee there'll always be a lecture platform waiting for you at the Cincinnati Women's Club."
It was the supreme tribute, and the Colonel bowed, greatly moved.