Read Ebook: Cynthia Steps Out by Berry Erick

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Ebook has 865 lines and 48459 words, and 18 pages

She knew what it was. She had done too little work for days. This wasn't the first time that idleness had made her miserable, and it would be useless to explain this to her puzzled partners. Between dances she would slip off and dive below for her sketch pad. Drawing would bring the relief it always had brought and as for models, they were all about her. All she needed was her book to make a record, not just of the clever costumes around her, but of the movement and the groups that the dancers made. Why not get it? Left, for the moment, between dances without a partner, Cynthia decided that she would, and sped down to the cabin.

As she came along the main corridor, deserted now since all of the room stewards were at their dinner, she heard a door banging, banging, with the slow swing of the ship and irritatedly wondered why no one had fastened it.

Turning down the small corridor that led to her own cabin she noted that the swinging door was that opposite her own. If someone were ill in there, the door must be extremely annoying. She opened her own door, switched on the cabin light, found her sketch book and stepped out again. Again the door opposite slammed back. The cabin light was on. She tapped gently on the doorframe. Perhaps the occupant was too ill to get up. But no one answered.

Cynthia put her hand on the knob to close it, but the door was partly wedged by a suitcase which had slid against it--the suitcase which she recognized as the same she had tripped over when she first came on board. Or was it the same? There was that Mexican Airways label, and next to it a circular yellow paster which formed a pattern her mind had already recorded, but something was missing. She closed the door gently, shoved it to see that it was firmly latched, and hurried along the corridor. But as she ran up the stairway she remembered what was missing. The Ottawa label had been sponged off. There was a darker spot on the leather where it had been.

At the entrance to the lounge, the color and light and music burst on her like a shower of thrown confetti. Figures whirled and swayed to the music, the room was a shifting patchwork of bright color. Even Miss Mitchall had been persuaded to dance and jigged round and round happily with a little Hungarian whose bent knees and extreme speed were relics of an older era.

Cynthia passed behind the row of chairs at the end of the dance floor and skirted the room to where, in a remote corner behind an empty card table, she could be comfortably inconspicuous yet have a good view of the dancers. She leafed through her sketch book, found some blank pages and began to work.

Between encores the couples paused, chatted, and applauded. That scarecrow with his whitened face and clay pipe ... Cynthia got it with a few strokes of the pencil. Then Miss Mitchall's rapt expression as she gazed into her partner's face, radiant, unconscious. Oh darn! The music had started again.

Cynthia made a dozen rapid action sketches of the dancing couples , yawned, and looked about her. Perhaps it would be more fun to go back to dancing.

Most of the older people had drifted away and were talking at the further end of the room, or had gone in to the card tables. How different some of them looked in costume. She would scarcely have recognized Mrs. Moody, for instance, in the white hair and patches of a colonial belle. And the man with her ... Cynthia frowned, trying to place him. Oh yes, it was the hat that had put her off. He was the man in the golf cap who tramped the deck all day long ... "walking to Europe," Johnnie Graham had said. But the middle aged man who sat alone, not far from Cynthia? Surely she had never seen him before, surely she would have remembered that beak-like nose, the hollow cut deeply on either side of it and the thin lipped mouth.

She made a few strokes of her pencil on the blank page of her sketch book, then, noting how still her unconscious model sat, became absorbed in the portrait. Not a good face, but a strong one. The brows were as heavy as her pencil could etch, the graying hair at the temples disappeared beneath the tightly drawn edge of a stocking cap and the long chin dipped into a wide pierrot ruff. The costume was that of a harlequin and had probably been rented from the ship's barber, who carried a stock of fancy costumes for these parties.

Cynthia, absorbed in her sketch, worked rapidly. The claw-like hand that had reached up to pull away the ruff ... the long white scar just showing at the side of the chin, not an old scar, she thought, for it still showed pink at the edges. Her model sat quietly, unaware of the attention he was receiving.

No, that chin wasn't right. Cynthia flipped over another page and made a more detailed study of the lower part of the face. This was a type she could use, sometime, in an illustration. She wondered vaguely what the man did when he wasn't on ship board. Then the music stopped.

Perhaps it was that his attention had wandered from the dancers or perhaps it was a sudden sense of being watched, but the man turned quickly in his seat and sent such a glare of enmity at the astonished Cynthia that she started and dropped her book. When she emerged from groping beneath the table her model had disappeared. He must have moved very quickly for he was already slipping through the door. Cynthia shook herself. That man certainly didn't like artists! But this was a good waltz, why not enjoy it.

It was after midnight when she tiptoed into the cabin. Miss Mitchall was already asleep. Her tall green hat and the long cape were neatly disposed on the couch beneath the window. She was still asleep when Cynthia dressed silently next morning, when she left for breakfast. The dining saloon was almost deserted. Nearly everyone seemed to be sleeping late or breakfasting in bed.

"My last day on shipboard," thought Cynthia a little mournfully. What to do to stretch it out to its full length? She decided to spend the morning on deck, sketching; the afternoon in the lounge with a book, or perhaps a game of deck tennis with Stasia. But in the middle of the morning a thunder shower drove everyone indoors and Cynthia found Stasia and her father over coffee and toast in the lounge.

"This is Dad's second breakfast and my first," announced Stasia. "Have some coffee, Cynthia?"

Cynthia declined the coffee. "I was up with the larks, or at least the seagulls," she said. "Do you mind if I sketch you while you eat? I've wanted to get you all week." But what she really wanted was Mr. Carruthers with his rugged beak of a nose, his thin, slightly curling mouth. In fact she became so intent on her sketch that she forgot she was supposed to be drawing Stasia till the tall girl laughed:

"Dad, she's found you more beautiful than I am!"

"What, what? That so?" Mr. Carruthers had been the ideal model, absolutely unconscious of Cynthia's flying pencil. It seemed only fair, however, to show him the drawing when it was finished.

"And this is my roommate. Look, Stasia, I got her last night when she was dancing with the Hungarian."

Stasia murmured, "wish I could draw like that." Mr. Carruthers, too, seemed impressed. "Good work, young lady," he nodded. But Cynthia felt he wouldn't have much use for artists. He would have all the conventional ideas about them; temperament and talk and starving in garrets.

Stasia was turning the leaves slowly, making here and there a comment, Mr. Carruthers looking over her shoulder till he stopped her with a large forefinger suddenly on one page.

"Who is this? Where did you sketch him?" he asked.

Cynthia leaned across the table. "Oh, that man? Isn't it a wicked face? I wish you could have seen ..."

But Mr. Carruthers was impatient. He took the book from Stasia. "Tell me about this. When did you sketch this? Last night? And what was this, part of the costume? Make-up?"

"No," Cynthia laughed, "it was a bad scar, a fairly new one for it was still pink and raw-looking. I think he had tried to cover it with that harlequin ruff, but when he grew warm he forgot about it, and pushed the ruff away from his face."

Mr. Carruthers had already pushed the little electric bell with an insistent finger. Before the hurrying steward had reached the table, Mr. Carruthers barked, "Ask Captain Wain if we can see him immediately, in his office, and tell the purser to join us there." Then he turned to Cynthia, "I'd like you to come along and tell the Captain what you just told me. And may we borrow your sketch book for an hour or two?"

Puzzled and excited, Cynthia followed Stasia and her father out of the lounge, down the corridor towards the captain's office. Captain Wain was a plump little man with a ruddy complexion that had weathered many storms, white walrus whiskers, and a blue uniform with lots of glittering buttons. Behind him stood the purser whom Cynthia already knew, a lean, hatchet-faced man, with small sharp eyes and an apologetic manner.

Mr. Carruthers held the door for the two girls, then closed it firmly behind him and plunged immediately into his subject.

"It's this matter of Goncourt," he stated, and opened Cynthia's sketchbook where his thumb had been keeping the place. "I want you two to see this."

The Captain leaned to look at the portrait of the man in the ruff, and passed it to the purser with no comment save a brief "Mmumph!"

The purser examined it somewhat longer. "Miss Wanstead made this?" he asked.

Cynthia, bewildered, explained when and where she had made the sketch, and questioned further, explained about the scar.

"He really had such a scar? It wasn't grease paint, or whatever it is you use on your face?"

Cynthia shook her head. You didn't put things like that in a sketch when you were making notes from real life. It was, she told them, exactly as she had drawn it. She didn't have any reason to make it up.

Mr. Carruthers sat down and waved the others to chairs. "Might we," he suggested, "see Goncourt's passport again?"

Yes, the purser would bring it. He seemed glad to get away. Stasia, who had quietly watched all this now said, "Don't you think it would be a good plan, Dad, if we told Cynthia what this was all about?" And, at her father's nod of assent, explained: "Dad is owner of this steamship line, you see, and the night we sailed from New York the head of the Police Department came down to see us off. He had come, he said, especially to get track of a man with a scar on his face. It was then late in the evening, you see, and most of the passengers were on board, but the purser examined all passports for a man with a scar like that. It was said to be very conspicuous, and the men at the gate watched all other passengers who came in after that, but they decided that no such man was on board."

"He's wanted by the police?" asked Cynthia, feeling very much like a murder-mystery tale.

"Yes, for smuggling ... in ..."

"Here is the passport." The purser, returning, had a little blue book, not a dark red one, such as Cynthia's, in his hand. He passed the book to the Captain who gave it a brief glance, grunted non-committally and shoved it towards Mr. Carruthers. Stasia's father compared the photograph to the face in Cynthia's sketch book, but as one was full face, the other in profile, little could be gained by the comparison.

"Is this the man?" he asked Cynthia, indicating the passport photograph.

Cynthia got up and came around the desk. Passport in hand she moved to the window for a better light. As she examined the picture she was aware of the silent tenseness behind her and suddenly had an idea of how important all this was, important to several people. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember more fully the face she had sketched, not from the side as she had drawn him, but as he had quickly turned to gaze at her, full face, under the dark frowning brows. Then she looked again at the picture in her hand. It was very like. Still ...

"No, it's not the same man."

There was a little stir in the room and Mr. Carruthers got up and came to stand beside her.

"But it's very like him." Something teased at her brain. Like and not like ... like and not like ...

"It might be a relation," she hazarded dubiously. "This man," she tapped the passport, "has had a broken nose at some time. We had a model with one at the Academy, so I recognized the peculiar shape." It was not at all like the beaky feature she had sketched.

Absently she gazed at the cover of the passport. "What cabin is this man in? The one with the passport."

"He's in 376, Miss," the purser answered.

And Cynthia was in 374, right across the little corridor. The passport in her hand was Canadian, and Miss Mitchall had said ... "Look here," Cynthia said suddenly, "could my roommate be called? I think she might be able to help us;" and added, "you can be sure she won't talk."

The captain glanced dubiously at Stasia's father. "The less people who know about this ..." then, at the other's nodded gesture toward the purser, "ask her to come here," he commanded gruffly.

Miss Mitchall, slightly fluttering, was produced almost immediately. Cynthia didn't try to explain the circumstances, just showed her the passport. "Did you ever see this man? I mean, does he look familiar?"

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