“Oh! Well, Susannah--You see, Susannah, Portate furnishes all the poetry The Union Electric Company will stand. They can't afford to let me decorate the situation too. That's why I have some doubts about the ultimatum and the insurrection. They were rather decorative, weren't they?”
“I'm going to make poetry about you,” said Susannah.
She got up and walked away across the deck, in the manner of one conducting powerful operations with the muses. She came to where the dingy heap of eastern wisdom sat against the cabin wall.
“Ram Nad!” we heard her say, with a stamp of the foot, “you go this minute and get your shawl!”
He rose silently, pale and venerable, and went down the companionway.
“He catches cold easily,” Mrs. Ulswater explained. “I told him not to sit out evenings without his shawl.”
Chepa and Hagan had gone forward sometime before. Susannah paced the deck apart with folded arms, making poetry about me. Mrs. Ulswater sat in her rocking chair, knitting, listening, talking.
I was thinking that she would have been a dangerous woman, with all that will and reserve, if she had not happened to be honest and kind. She could not help but foresee and devise. I wondered if she were plotting and planning at the moment, and for whose benefit. Likely it was for mine. I wondered if the Mayor were plotting and planning for my distress or destruction at the same moment. Likely he was. I didn't much care. Mrs. Ulswater had rearranged the tropics here and there, but they had not rearranged her. It was about eleven o'clock. Susannah was extraordinarily pretty. As the subject of a ballad by Susannah, of a plot by Mrs. Ulswater, and another plot by the Mayor, supposing all these things were going on, I seemed to be in the centre of things.
At that moment the sound of oarlocks startled us. We rose and went to the rail. A boat drew near on the dark water. On the surface of the water the lights of the distant city made long broken reflections. The boat drew up at the foot of the gangway, and Dr. Ulswater mounted, followed by a large powerful man, gray-haired, with a long dangling moustache and lean throat, carrying on his broad shoulders a large oblong box. Behind them came up one of the boatman, carrying a trunk. Susannah cried: