The Back Wheel Read online

  I repeated: “When do I go?”

  “How soon can you go? The Susan Ann reached Miami this morning.”

  “If you’ll arrange with the hospital,” I said, “I’ll hop the plane tomorrow.”

  “Wait for me,” he said, and went out I marshalled what I knew of Benson, which wasn’t much. Corporation counsel and famous—some called it notorious —immensely wealthy, suspected of sitting in on many a political jackpot a fighter and a hater, a bad man to have as an enemy.

  I had seen pictures of his daughter. A slim girl with broad, low forehead, determined little chin, and eyes too big for her heart-shaped face. She looked something like Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante. She also looked like a nice girl, and her name was Penelope.

  I knew more about the Susan Ann. Benson’s greatgrandfather had been a skipper in the China trade back in the ’40s, owner of one of the first of the Yankee clippers. It, too, had been named the Susan Ann. Benson was proud of his ancestor; collected everything he had owned that he could find. He couldn’t collect the original Susan Ann because she had been long broken up, but one of his scouts had been lucky enough to unearth her plans and a crude but obviously accurate old painting of her. About five years ago, after Benson had become very rich and had turned most of his business over to his partners, he had built a clipper which outwardly was an exact copy of the original, and christened her the Susan Ann. Inside, she was fitted with modem sea-going luxury, except the Captain’s quarters, which Benson used for himself, and the dining saloon. Both of these were exact copies of those in his greatgrandfather Benson’s boat. The reborn Susan Ann had Diesel auxiliaries, but they were never used if there was wind enough to push the clipper along.

  I had gotten that far when Kurtson came back.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You need take only your own medical kit along. There’s a complete medical and surgical outfit on the boat. Even a small laboratory. How are you off for clothes?”

  I said I was fairly well provided, and could get what I lacked in a few hours.

  “Well,” he said, “goodbye and good luck. It ought to be a good rest.”

  A good rest… I was to remember that often.

  I spent the afternoon shopping and putting my affairs in order. And Thursday morning, following a confirmatory message to Kurtson from Benson instructing me to come straight to the boat. I was streaking south on the plane to Miami.

  McTeague was the first I met of the Benson party. As I got off the plane I heard my name mentioned, and my attention was focussed upon a head of red hair approaching me, about as spectacular a red head as I had ever seen. It was unruly hair, a peculiar copper, and the glaring lights of the landing field seemed to stimulate in it a radiation of its own. I stared at it, fascinated, and then its owner laughed and I began to stammer some apology. He cut me short:

  “Forget it. Score one, in your favor. If you’d ignored this torch I’d have said of you—too polite, or too sophisticated, or too unobservant to be a good doctor. Big Jim makes me sleep port. He’s afraid if he put me starboard some passing mariner might see me some night and get our lights all confused.”

  He laughed again, and held out his hand. He was about my height, which is just two inches under six feet, and in his early thirties I judged. But his broad shoulders and deep chest gave an impression of bigness my own scrawniness cannot achieve. He had clear grey-blue eyes set rather too widely apart, a short and pugnacious nose, a square and as pugnacious a chin, cheek-bones almost as well defined as a Slav’s, a wide and humorous mouth, and a good forehead. Not a beauty by any means; his face more that of a Hermes than an Apollo, but eminently likeable … without doubt this swift summing-up was transmuted muscularly in the grip of my hand, and was recognized as such, for his oddly searching, impersonal gaze became suddenly friendly.

  “I’m McTeague,” he said. “One of what is somewhat humorously called Mr. Benson’s partners. If you’re wondering how I knew you, Benson wired Dr. Kurtson for a minute description of you, which he sent in one thousand words, even to the shape of your ears and the scar on your right wrist. If you wonder why you are worth one thousand words of telegraphed description—rush and collect, full rate—Mr. Benson has to be cautious and cannot run the risk of any masquerading evil-doer. If you wonder why I, partner McTeague, came to collect you—it’s because one of my duties is the preliminary survey of important unknowns. And if you wonder why I’m spilling all this to you using so many words, it’s because I’m a lawyer and therefore couldn’t think of making one word do if I can use ten.”

  I laughed, my liking for McTeague growing.

  “Well, come along,” he said. “You look O. K. to me. But Benson is our Supreme Court.”

  He whistled to a porter who took my bags. He led the way to a speedy looking little roadster. There was a girl in it; a slight girl whose face was almost hidden under a big-brimmed hat.

  “Throw the bags in the back, son,” McTeague said to the porter, and tossed him a quarter; then said to the girl: “This is Dr. Fenimore, Pen. He looks kosher to me.”

  The girl tipped back her hat and smiled. I recognized her as Penelope Benson. She was prettier even than her pictures. Her eyes, though too large for her face by classical standards, had nothing of the protruding aspect of the hyper-thyroidic type so much admired by certain past and present painters who, of course, did not know that what they took for beauty was, in fact, disease. The color of her eyes was close to that of the Jersey Beauty Viola, which I particularly admire, and they were the only eyes I had ever found with that peculiar shade of purple. Very interesting. Though slight, her development was admirable. Her nerve responses, I thought, must be excellent, her emotions pleasantly under control. I had the idea she could quite as happily manage a hut as a palace.

  She gave me her hand and said: “If Mike is satisfied, so am I. Climb in.”

  McTeague swung behind the wheel, and we hummed away. Penelope said to McTeague:

  “I hope Lady Fitz and Boriloff will be at the dock. Jim’s all set to come in on the flow and sail on the ebb. He’ll be furious if they’re late.”

  McTeague said, morosely: “If they never reach the dock it’ll still be too soon. Where did they go, Pen?”

  “Shopping.”

  McTeague asked, nastily: “Boriloff needs some new camisoles?”

  Pen giggled: “No. Randolph has some of those new bathing suits made out of glass. Lady Fitz is curious about them.”

  McTeague grunted: “I’ll bet she is, the damned exhibitionist.”

  “Oh, well, let Deborah worry,” said Penelope.

  “Deborah,” said McTeague to me, “is Lady Fitz-Man-ton’s maid. She had fallen arches, and a morality as high as they are low. Treat Deborah for her flat feet and study her elevated morality, Doetor Fenimore—and then write a paper about which made which. Do it right, and it’ll make you famous.”

  Pen giggled again: “How about substituting Lady Fitz for the flat feet, Mike? And throw in Boriloff. Make it a trilogy.”

  “No, Pen,” said McTeague. “I insist that Deborah’s feet are heavier in the cosmic balance than is Lady Fitz. I grant you that she’s a bitch, but her roots stop far short of hell. I grant you, too, that Boriloff is a Narcissian bastard, but still only a sympton of Lady Fitz. No, I am for the flat feet. And I am for Deborah. She takes the bad taste out of my ears after I have had to listen to the other two.”

  “Mike,” said Penelope admiringly, “you get descriptiver and descriptiver.”

  I had listened with some surprise. Hospital frankness I am, of course, accustomed to, but I am somewhat unused to social contacts and this conversation was beyond my depth. Penelope didn’t look like the kind of girl with whom one would use such words, nor, in fact, the kind of girl who would tolerate them. Yet she seemed only amused. She asked me:

  “Know anything about Lady Fitz?”

  I said I didn’t She said:

  “She’s really quite interesting. She amuses Jim
, that’s my father, no end. It’s why she’s along. And of course she wouldn’t come without Boriloff. Lady Fitz does interior decorating for very rich people who don’t know enough to do it themselves. She charges enormously. Alexis Boriloff is on her payroll. She says he has a marvellous color sense. He’s her lover, of course, and I don’t like him. Not because he’s her lover, but—oh, well,” prattled Penelope, “when he kisses my hand I’m always sorry I haven’t a glove on … you know. Still, he’s amusing too—at times.”

  McTeague grunted. Pen said:

  “But he is amusing, Mike. He has a beautiful baritone voice, Doctor, and after he has drunk two bottles of brandy he can sing the drunken song from Boris Godonoff to perfection. The trouble is he will break up the furniture. But I’m told he’s not nearly as bad as some of the others have been. Lady Fitz, Doctor, is the one who invented the phrase—‘A husband is as much use as a headache.’ Lady Fitz’s deepest emotions are stirred with difficulty. It must be something exotic. Boriloff s predecessor was a Turkish wrestler….” She paused.

  “I think it must be glandular,” she said, meditatively.

  McTeague grinned. He said: “Well, the Doc’ll have plenty of chance for diagnosis. And by the way, there’s the Susan Ann.”

  We were running now along the Bay and I followed his pointing finger.

  I know little about ships, but had I been a master mariner I could not have realized more fully what a thing of beauty was the Susan Ann. And even today when I think of how she looked that night, and the death of all that beauty, there is a smarting in my eyes and a heaviness on my heart. She was moving slowly into the harbor. Every sail was spread and the searchlights were on their snowiness, so that all was soft purple darkness around her and she seemed to drift, poised upon the waters. It was as though some Goddess of Ships had painted her upon the dark soft purple of sky and water. Or rather, it was as though some lovely ghost of the brave old days had put on materiality and was sailing out of the past. She was not just a ship—she was alive. And I read courage and patience in her, and strange sea-wisdom … and suddenly I knew why for ten thousand years in every tongue a ship is thought of and spoken of as a woman.

  Those of you who do not love ships may not understand this, but those who do will understand. And again I say that when I think of the Susan Ann as I saw her that night, and think of what was her end, the tears are in my eyes and there is a weight on my heart. For I think of her less as of a ship destroyed than as of some high-spirited, gracious and lovely woman defiled and murdered …

  How long I stared at the clipper, so realizing her, I do not know, but I became aware that McTeague had stopped the car and that he and Pen were studying me, curiously.

  McTeague said to Penelope: “Love at first sight.”

  Pen said, seriously: “If he can put what was in his face into words, Jim will build him a hospital.”

  McTeague said: “I told you he was all right”

  Pen said: “Now I know he is.”

  I said nothing, still thrilling to that swift revelation of beauty. The car sped on, and we came to the dock. The Susan Ann had dropped anchor and lay waiting, her sails cut to riding rig. McTeague turned the car over to an attendant and we hurried down to the end where a launch was waiting. A man and woman rose and greeted Penelope. I was introduced to them—Lady Fitz-Manton and Mr.

  Alexis Boriloff. The woman said, indifferently: “How d’you do,” in a high-pitched, rather musical voice; the man was more cordial. Beyond a cool nod, neither paid any attention to McTeague.

  I looked them over as we swung out to the clipper. Lady Fitz-Manton was tall, straight and slender, with the peculiar angularity so many Englishwomen possess. Her hair was a rich auburn, short and curly; I suspected henna had much to do with its color. Her face was small and shrewd, and she had the greenest eyes; very clear, very bright, birdlike and wide apart; an excellent forehead, a determined small nose and well-shaped but thin-lipped mouth; a somewhat hard but decidedly attractive exterior.

  I don’t know why, but I had expected to find Boriloff effeminate in appearance. He wasn’t at all. He was as masculine a looking person as I’d ever seen; a good six feet tall, not heavy, muscular, long-legged. His eyes were a curious golden brown and the heavy lids, or the tilt of them, gave them a look of half-sleepy insolence. The breadth of the face at the cheek bones and their prominence showed him pure Slav. He was clean-shaven, his lips full, sensual, mobile—the mouth of a singer or an actor. I couldn’t see why McTeague had called him a Narcissian, but reflected that his definition of the term might be different from that of a medical man. One betraying sign was his ears, which were small and close to his head and distinctly pointed. He had close cropped, black hair. At first sight I rather liked Boriloff and wondered at Pen’s admitted physical repulsion for him … or was it physical?

  I turned to look at the clipper. Close, she was quite as beautiful as she had been when I had seen her from afar. More so, more friendly, more human—welcoming.

  And now we were beside her. And now I was on her deck. And someone bellowed:

  “Did you get him, Mike?”

  At the skipper’s wheel, fifty feet away, a long and gangling figure clasped sinewy hands around the spokes. His bald head glistened under the lights. He was bent forward peering at us with puckered eyes; and his nose was long and thin, his mouth wide and thin-lipped, his chin pointed like Pen’s but longer and none would have called it elfin.

  McTeague shouted: “Yes, sir. Here he is.”

  He said to me, low: “That’s Benson.”

  But I had known it was Benson before McTeague had spoken, and the thought came that he might have well been the old Yankee skipper, his great-grandfather, and that his passion for recreating the Susan Ann went far deeper than whim.

  Benson bellowed again: “Is he all right?”

  McTeague shouted: “Yes. Want to talk to him?”

  “Later on.”

  McTeague grinned. He said:

  “You’ll have to get used to informality on this boat. We’ll stow your stuff in your cabin. You can go down and unpack, or stay up on deck and watch us go out. Benson’ll be an hour before he gives up the wheel.”

  I decided I would stay on deck. He said: “All right Then come over and meet the rest of the circus.”

  There was a group around Penelope and he led me toward it. A square-built, demure woman was pattering up to Lady Fitz-Manton. She walked like a plump pigeon in a hurry. Her face was as placid as the outside of an egg, and she was Scotch as a scone. She took the parcels from Boriloff and pattered away.

  “Deborah!” McTeague said.

  He joined the group and I was introduced. There was a rotund, rosy and smiling little man in the uniform of an Episcopalian clergyman who I learned was the Rev. Dr. Swastlow. And there was a tall, slim and very dark man of about McTeague’s age who was Thaddeus Chadwick, the second of Benson’s junior partners.

  The Rev. Dr. Swastlow seemed to be the typical rich man’s parson; urbane, tolerant, precisely the kind of shepherd to explain away that misunderstanding about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man into Heaven.

  His sister Flora was a beauty—a languorous wave-lined brunette with eyes she knew how to use, unbobbed black hair coiled around a small head, ripe and round breasts and a mouth that assuredly could not have been among the temptations of St. Anthony. She had a soft and husky contralto, so pleasant to hear that you seldom realized it was saying nothing. I had the thought that her extraordinarily attractive exterior was quite as illusory, that there were no banked fires in Flora; that what there was of warmth lay on the surface, and that the mind behind the outward screen was decidedly chill and calculating. An insulated ice-box in a tropic setting.

  None paid me much attention after the introductions, chattering among themselves as the anchor chains rattled over the winches, the sails were set and the Susan Ann’s bow swung toward open sea. I listened for a time observing them close
ly, since until now I had never been in anything but hospital proximity with their types. When we began to rock to the open sea they dispersed. McTeague took me to my cabin. He said:

  “Benson will send for you, but I don’t know when. Hours don’t mean much to him when he’s sailing the clipper. I’d get into my pajamas and sleep till he does send.”

  At the door he hesitated. “It’s a queer crowd on board. None queerer than Big Jim himself. I hope you’ll get along. I’m as queer as any. Anyway, I’m hoping you stick.”

  He went out. I unpacked, and put on my pajamas. I smoked a cigarette and reviewed impressions from my first brief contact. I thought of Chadwick. Rivalry for Penelope Benson might be one source, but I had the feeling that it went deeper. I thought that Flora Swastlow felt no ordinary interest in McTeague, and bore no goodwill toward Penelope. And I thought that Boriloff found Flora very interesting indeed, and that the marked acidity of some of Lady Fitz-Manton’s remarks to him while I had been on deck indicated that she knew it.

  A queer crowd, I reflected, even as McTeague had said. But in the light of Kurtson’s confidences, the one who interested me most was Benson; standing at the helm of his ship just as his great-grandfather must have stood at the wheel of his own, voyage after voyage; thinking as he conceived that ancestor must have thought. Ruler of the small world of the Susan Ann. Its high, low and middle justice on the high seas … with that thought, Kurtson’s apprehensions grew sharper in outline.

  I didn’t think for long. The gentle rise and fall of the clipper was hypnotic. I went to sleep.

  I woke up to find Benson sitting beside me, long legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and studying me. His eyes were cold grey under shaggy, iron-grey brows, and they had a network of fine wrinkles at the corners. Hair-lines such as those etched by sun and water at the corners of the eyes of old sailors. There was a touch of humor about the eyes, though, and a touch of it on the thin lips. I sat up and said:

  “Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting. I expected you to send for me.”