PAGE 3
A Sarah Walker
by
There was so much truth in this that I involuntarily drew back abashed. The nurse-maid ejaculated “Sarah!” and lifted her eyes in hopeless protest.
“And he needn’t come seeing YOU,” continued Sarah, lazily rubbing the back of her head against the chair; “my papa don’t allow it. He warned you ’bout the other gentleman, you know.”
“Sarah Walker!”
I felt it was necessary to say something. “Don’t you want to come with me and look at the sea?” I said with utter feebleness of invention. To my surprise, instead of actively assaulting me Sarah Walker got up, shook her hair over her shoulders, and took my hand.
“With your hair in that state?” almost screamed the domestic. But Sarah Walker had already pulled me into the hall. What particularly offensive form of opposition to authority was implied in this prompt assent to my proposal I could only darkly guess. For myself I knew I must appear to her a weak impostor. What would there possibly be in the sea to interest Sarah Walker? For the moment I prayed for a water-spout, a shipwreck, a whale, or any marine miracle to astound her and redeem my character. I walked guiltily down the hall, holding her hand bashfully in mine. I noticed that her breast began to heave convulsively; if she cried I knew I should mingle my tears with hers. We reached the veranda in gloomy silence. As I expected, the sea lay before us glittering in the sun–vacant, staring, flat, and hopelessly and unquestionably uninteresting.
“I knew it all along,” said Sarah Walker, turning down the corners of her mouth; “there never was anything to see. I know why you got me to come here. You want to tell me if I’m a good girl you’ll take me to sail some day. You want to say if I’m bad the sea will swallow me up. That’s all you want, you horrid thing, you!”
“Hush!” I said, pointing to the corner of the veranda.
A desperate idea of escape had just seized me. Bolt upright in the recess of a window sat a nursemaid who had succumbed to sleep equally with her helpless charge in the perambulator beside her. I instantly recognized the infant–a popular organism known as “Baby Buckly”–the prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood. Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in its present repose it looked moist and shiny from indiscriminate and promiscuous osculation.
“Let’s borrow Baby Buckly,” I said recklessly.
Sarah Walker at once stopped crying. I don’t know how she did it, but the cessation was instantaneous, as if she had turned off a tap somewhere.
“And put it in Mr. Peters’ bed!” I continued.
Peters being notoriously a grim bachelor, the bare suggestion bristled with outrage. Sarah Walker’s eyes sparkled.
“You don’t mean it!–go ‘way!”–she said with affected coyness.
“But I do! Come.”
We extracted it noiselessly together–that is, Sarah Walker did, with deft womanliness–carried it darkly along the hall to No. 27, and deposited it in Peters’ bed, where it lay like a freshly opened oyster. We then returned hand in hand to my room, where we looked out of the window on the sea. It was observable that there was no lack of interest in Sarah Walker now.
Before five minutes had elapsed some one breathlessly passed the open door while we were still engaged in marine observation. This was followed by return footsteps and a succession of swiftly rustling garments, until the majority of the women in our wing had apparently passed our room, and we saw an irregular stream of nursemaids and mothers converging towards the hotel out of the grateful shadow of arbors, trees, and marquees. In fact we were still engaged in observation when Sarah Walker’s nurse came to fetch her away, and to inform her that “by rights” Baby Buckly’s nurse and Mr. Peters should both be made to leave the hotel that very night. Sarah Walker permitted herself to be led off with dry but expressive eyes. That evening she did not cry, but, on being taken into the usual custody for disturbance, was found to be purple with suppressed laughter.