Pleased to Meet You/Chapter 15
In the great hall, under the beam of many candles, Herr Guadeloupe and Nyla were saying good-night to the departing guests. The President looked senile with fatigue. Not the caducity of the florin, nor the anxieties of the American bondholders, nor height nor depth nor any other created thing could much longer keep him from bed. But Nyla, shining in her golden frock, radiated the divine vitality of girlhood. Her dark hair, her lilac eyes, her pretty tinge of excitement, were caught in a mild flush of quivering light. The impressionable Colonel, halting on the curved stair by the portraits of old lords of Farniente, vowed to himself that those painted ruffians had never looked down on prettier neck and shoulders. "I'll bet you never did," he remarked to the Duke Friedrich, whose yellow canvas face looked biliously at him. "Never one so lovely. Or so chaste," he added with a sigh.
"It would be a pity if the Dalmatian Navy never had any sea service," he said to her as she turned from dispatching the last leavetaker. "I have the punt all ready."
Now in the ancient flat-bottomed boat, tilting heavily aft, they idled gently. Low under those licheny walls the water was dark, scribbled here and there with silver where the moon leaked through the chestnut trees. The Colonel paddled softly with an oar, then with the optimism of a true Dalmatian navigator entrusted his vessel to destiny. The small melody of the Moating Song sighed from his mouth-organ. A gradual diminution of brightness in the windows above them showed that candles were being puffed out one by one. In Illyria the gayety of evening is not blackened at one flick, by snapping a switch. Windows extinguish like stars, paling softly.
"It would be preposterous," he said, "not to pay such a night the tribute of an embrace."
They paid it. The florin may depreciate but the Illyrian kiss remains always perfect par, a sterling medium of exchange.
"Pinch me," she said at last. "I guess I've been enchanted into a different world. I thought for a moment you were some kind of fairy prince."
It was too comprehensive to be described as a pinch.
"Let's do this every evening. Your work won't take up very much of your time, will it? Is this going to be included in your reports?"
"One has to exercise discretion," said the Colonel. "Otherwise everybody at Geneva would be after the job. Republics would be breaking out all over the place."
"I wonder if you do this sort of thing because you like it, or because the League makes you?"
"Geneva expects every man to do his duty," he said tenderly.
From the distant cathedral came the boom of midnight, followed by small tinny chimes tinkling in various quarters of the town.
"Those little churches had really quite forgotten the time," said Nyla, "but as soon as the big one shouted twelve o'clock they all hurried to pretend they knew it too."
"I wish they wouldn't make such a point of it. There oughtn't to be any time in a place like Illyria. Nothing but eternity, like this."
"Mention it to the League," suggested Nyla happily. "Darling, you can do anything. You are a fairy prince."
The Colonel seemed troubled. Perhaps he remembered that at midnight fairy princes turn back into disinherited cadets, coaches of state into pumpkins. Fairy tales have so many disquieting analogies.
The slow current had drifted them round the North Tower, under the terrace balustrade. All that face of the house lay in thick shadow.
"Gene!" she whispered, clutching him in sudden panic. "What's that? Look, over there on the parapet. Something white."
"I don't see anything," said the Colonel. "Great place for a ghost, though. Surely this house ought to be haunted by Dukes with bullet holes in them. Or maybe the ghost of the florin."
He pushed the boat off from under the wall into midstream, where they had a wider view.
"Jove, there is something there."
Far along the terrace hovered a glint of white, apparently suspended above the ground. It was small enough truly to be the wraith of the florin. Then it disappeared. There was a splash and a faint choked cry.
"Gene, it's the little girl! Hurry, hurry."
The old punt was unwieldy in the dark. The rowlocks were missing, and though each seized an oar their desperate paddling only succeeded in twirling the craft in a wild swing which brought them bumping back against the wall. The Colonel hastily scrambled up the rough stonework. He would have fallen but Nyla boosted him fiercely from behind. He vaulted the balustrade and ran along the terrace. Now he could see a small white commotion in the water. With a leap he cleared the parapet and dived in.
It was indeed Mildred. Nervous excitement, the cocktail, the uproars of the orchestra and a lively indigestion had made sleep spasmodic. Her dreams were all of the brilliant elevator man who was going to take her promenading by the moat in the morning. She had been put in a room by herself. Thence, after restless rollings in a vast canopied bed, she had eventually sallied out in an almost somnambulist trance which was half fatigue and half the uneasiness of colic. A rearward stair brought her unobserved to the postern door onto the terrace. Here, refreshed by the clear night, her extravagant and erring spirit desired one more tiptoe along the stone balustrade.
With considerable difficulty the Colonel held up the strangling figure while Nyla, groping along the wall, pulled the punt toward them and shouted for help. The dress uniform of Dalmatian admirals, as fortunately few of them have learned, makes an ill swimming suit. The Colonel was heavily sogged by his golden festoonery. He swam laboriously, grasping Mildred by her armpits; her nightgown had parted and gone adrift in his first attempts to seize her. Eventually they got her into the punt. The dripping Colonel scaled the wall, hoisted up the half-drowned child, and hauled Nyla afterward, leaving their shallop to drift where it would. Mildred, after groaning faintly, suddenly ejected several pints of moat and began to baw! lustily.
"I wanted to see the elevator man," she screamed. "Take me away from this rotten hotel."
Her slippery nakedness, shining skinnily in the dim light, was pathetic and yet irritating; the Colonel, exhausted, sat panting in a trickle, more than half prepared to lay a tingling palm on the chubs of her small bottom.
By this time the terrace was filling with all varieties of negligee. Romsteck, who had apparently made no move to retire, was the only presentable figure. Frau Quackenbush, who had seen her daughter safe in bed only half an hour earlier, came trailing ribbons with a scream of maternal dismay. The President sped out in a flannel nightshirt.
"Gott!" he cried. "Yet anodder attack on Frau Quackenbush?"
The ambassador was shouting inquiry from the bedroom window. He was beginning to wonder whether the post at Farniente might not prove too vivacious for a man of mature years.
"Mildred fell into the moat," explained Nyla to Frau Quackenbush, soothing the sobbing child, and trying to dry her with a handkerchief, "The Colonel saved her."
"De child," yelled Guadeloupe to the anxious parent at the window. "He fell drunk in de moat. But not dead drunk," he hastened to reassure. "Gott be tank, I feared it was anodder case for de billiards table."
Herr Quackenbush appeared in pyjamas with a blanket, and Frau Innsbruck with a bottle of the 1865 cognac, the universal specific. In the middle of an admiring circle Mildred was given a hasty friction, then blanketed and carried off. "That bed was too lonely, I couldn't sleep," she wailed. "I want to go to bed with the elevator man."
"You drink de cognac, Colonel," said the excited President. "Happy days, my interpretations save from de perils of de moat."
"My dear sir," said the ambassador, "obviously I cannot thank you for what you've done. But if there's any way I can show my gratitude—anythisir, anything. You have only to name it."
"De gustomary ting," said the Colonel, rising from his pool, "vould be to ask you de hand of your daughter in marriage. I spare you dat sacrifice. But dere is von little ting."
"Name it, sir, name it."
"You are here, Herr Ambassador, as blenipotentiary to negotiate de debt. I overhear de Herr Leutz say dat von million florin a year, blus de interests at von per cent. is Illyria's extreme gapacity to pay. Vill you promise me, on vord of honour, no matter vat happen, not to ask more dan dat?"
Herr Quackenbush was a little taken aback at this injection of politics into a sentimental scene. He paused an instant. The Colonel improved the moment with a sigh, expressive of bodily weakness and perils encountered. He wrung a small cascade of drippings from his dismal finery.
"By God sir, I promise."
"Goot!" said the Colonel calmly. "Remember de terms of de promise, vatefer happen. Ve half witnesses here. Besides, a gompact made among gentlemen in deir nightshirts must be specially sacred. Now I tink I go change."
He kissed Nyla's hand with a gallant air and went trickling across the terrace.
"Mr. President," said Herr Quackenbush, "if you sent that man to Washington as your minister you'd have the United States paying you the debt in six months."