Little Miss Grouch.
by Samuel Hopkins Adams.
I
First day out.
Weather horrible, uncertain and squally, but interesting Developments promised Feel fine.
SMITH"S LOG.
Several tugs were persuasively nudging the Clan Macgregor out from her pier. Beside the towering flanks of the sea-monster, newest and biggest of her species, they seemed absurdly inadequate to the job. But they made up for their insignificance by self-important and fussy puffings and pipings, while, like an elephant harried by terriers, the vast ma.s.s slowly swung outward toward the open. From the pier there arose a composite clamor of farewell.
The Tyro gazed down upon this lively scene with a feeling of loneliness.
No portion of the ceremonial of parting appertained personally to him.
He had had his fair fraction in the form of a crowd of enthusiastic friends who came to see him off on his maiden voyage. They, however, retired early, acting as escort to his tearful mother and sister who had given way to uncontrollable grief early in the proceedings, on a theory held, I believe, by the generality of womankind in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, that a first-time voyager seldom if ever comes back alive. Lacking individual attention, the Tyro decided to appropriate a share of the communal. Therefore he bowed and waved indiscriminately, and was distinctly cheered up by a point-blank smile and handkerchief flutter from a piquant brunette who liked his looks.
Most people liked his looks, particularly women.
In the foreground of the dock was an individual who apparently didn"t.
He was a fashionable and frantic oldish-young man, who had burst through the barrier and now jigged upon the pier-head in a manner not countenanced by the Society for Standardizing Ballroom Dances. At intervals he made gestures toward the Tyro as if striving, against unfair odds of distance, to sweep him from the surface of creation. As the Tyro had never before set eyes upon him, this was surprising. The solution of the mystery came from the crowd, close-pressed about the Tyro. It took the form of an unmistakable sniffle, and it somehow contrived to be indubitably and rather pitifully feminine. The Tyro turned.
At, or rather underneath, his left shoulder, and trying to peep over or past it, he beheld a small portion of a most woe-begone little face, heavily swathed against the nipping March wind. Through the beclouding veil he could dimly make out that the eyes were swollen, the cheeks were mottled; even the nose--with regret I state it--was red and puffy. An unsightly, melancholy little spectacle to which the Tyro"s young heart went out in prompt pity. It had a habit of going out in friendly and helpful wise to forlorn and unconsidered people, to the kind of folk that n.o.body else had time to bother about.
"What a mess of a face, poor kiddy!" said the Tyro to himself.
From the mess came another sniffle and then a gurgle. The Tyro, with a lithe movement of his body, slipped aside from his position of vantage, and the pressure of the crowd brought the girl against the rail.
Thereupon the Seven Saltatory Devils possessing the frame of the frantic and fashionable dock-dancer deserted it, yielding place to a demon of vocality.
"I think he"s calling to you," said the Tyro in the girl"s ear.
The girl shook her head with a vehemence which imparted not so much denial as an "I-don"t-care-if-he-is" impression.
Stridently sounded the voice of distress from the pier. "Pilot-boat," it yelled, and repeated it. "Pilot! Pilot! Come--back--pilot-boat."
Again the girl shook her head, this time so violently that her hair--soft, curly, luxuriant hair--loosened and clouded about her forehead and ears. In a voice no more than a husky, tremulous whisper, which was too low even to be intended to carry across the widening water-s.p.a.ce, and therefore manifestly purposed for the establishment of her own conviction, she said:
"I wo-won"t. I _won"t_. I WON"T!!!" At the third declaration she brought a saber-edged heel down square upon the most afflicted toe of a very sore foot which the Tyro had been nursing since a collision in the squash court some days previous. Involuntarily he uttered a cry of anguish, followed by a monosyllabic quotation from the original Anglo-Saxon. The girl turned upon him a baleful face, while the long-distance conversationalist on the dock reverted to his original possession and faded from sight in a series of involuted spasms.
"_What_ did you say?" she demanded, still in that hushed and catchy voice.
""h.e.l.l,"" repeated the Tyro, in a tone of explication, ""is paved with good intentions." It"s a proverb."
"I know that as well as you do," she whispered resentfully. "But what has that to do with--with me?"
"Lord! What a vicious little spitfire it is," said he to himself. Then, aloud: "It was my good intention to remove that foot and subst.i.tute the other one, which is better able to sustain--"
"Was that your foot I stepped on?"
"It _was_. It is now a picturesque and obsolete ruin."
"It had no right to be there."
"But that"s where I"ve always kept it," he protested, "right at the end of that leg."
"If you want me to say I"m sorry, I won"t, I _won"t_--I--"
"Help!" cried the Tyro. "One more of those "won"ts" and I"m a cripple for life."
There was a convulsive movement of the features beneath the heavy veil, which the Tyro took to be the beginning of a smile. He was encouraged.
The two young people were practically alone now, the crowd having moved forward for sight of a French liner sweeping proudly up the river. The girl turned her gaze upon the injured member.
"Did I really hurt you much?" she asked, still whispering.
"Not a bit," lied the Tyro manfully. "I just made that an excuse to get you to talk."
"Indeed!" The head tilted up, furnishing to the Tyro the distinct moulding, under the blurring fabric, of a determined and resentful chin.
"Well, I can"t talk. I can only whisper."
"Sore throat?"
"No."
"Well, it"s none of my business," conceded the Tyro. "But you rather looked as if--as if you were in trouble, and I thought perhaps I could help you."
"I don"t want any help. I"m all right." To prove which she began to cry again.
The Tyro led her over to a deck-chair and made her sit down. "Of course you are. You just sit there and think how all-right you are for five minutes and then you _will_ be all right."
"But I"m not going back. Never! Never!! _Nev-ver!!!_"
"Certainly not," said the Tyro soothingly.
"You speak to me as if I were a child!"
"So you are--almost."
"That"s what they all think at home. That"s why I"m--I"m running away from them," she wailed, in a fresh access of self-commiseration.
"Running away! To Europe?"
"Where did you think this ship was bound for?"
"But--all alone?" queried the other, thunderstruck.
"All alone?" She contrived to inform her whisper with a malicious mimicry of his dismay. "I suppose the girls you know take the whole family along when they run away. Idiot!"
"Go ahead!" he encouraged her. "Take it out on me. Relieve your feelings. You can"t hurt mine."