The Vultures | Page 4

manner curtly known at a girls' school as
"poking." He was a clean-shaven man, with bony forehead, sunken
cheeks, and an underhung mouth. His attitude towards the world was
one of patient disgust. He had the air of pushing his way, chin first,
doggedly through life. The weather had been bad, and was now
moderating. But Mr. Mangles had not suffered from sea-sickness. He
was a dry, hard person, who had suffered from nothing but chronic
dyspepsia--had suffered from it for fifty years or so.
"Fine weather," he said. "Women will be coming on deck--hang the
fine weather."
And his voice was deep and low like a growl.
"Joseph," said Miss Mangles, "growls over his meals like a dog."
The remark about the weather and the women was addressed to a man
who leaned against the rail. Indeed, there was no one else near--and the
man made no reply. He was twenty-five or thirty years younger than
Mr. Mangles, and looked like an Englishman, but not aggressively so.
The large majority of Britons are offensively British. Germans are no
better; so it must be racial, this offensiveness. A Frenchman is at his
worst, only comically French--a matter of a smile; but Teutonic
characteristics are conducive to hostility.
The man who leaned against the rail near to Joseph P. Mangles was six
feet high, and rather heavily built, but, like many big men, he seemed
to take up no more than his due share of room in this crowded world.
There was nothing distinctive about his dress. His demeanor was quiet.
When he spoke he was habitually asked to repeat his remark, which he
did, with patience, in the same soft, inaudible voice.
There were two men on board this great steamer who were not business
men--Joseph P. Mangles and Reginald Cartoner; and, like two ships on
a sea of commercial interests, they had drifted together during the four
days that had elapsed since their departure from New York. Neither
made anything, or sold anything, or had a card in his waistcoat-pocket
ready for production at a moment's notice, setting forth name and
address and trade. Neither was to be suspected of a desire to repel
advances, and yet both were difficult to get on with. For human
confidences must be mutual. It is only to God that man can continue
telling, telling, telling, and getting never a word in return. These two
men had nothing to tell their fellows about themselves; so the other

passengers drifted away into those closely linked corporations
characteristic of steamer life and left them to themselves--to each other.
And they had never said things to each other--had never, as it were, got
deeper than the surface of their daily life.
Cartoner was a dreamy man, with absorbed eyes, rather deeply sunk
under a strong forehead. His eyelids had that peculiarity which is rarely
seen in the face of a man who is a nonentity. They were quite straight,
and cut across the upper curve of the pupil. This gave a direct, stern
look to dreamy eyes, which was odd. After a pause, he turned slowly,
and looked down at his companion with a vague interrogation in his
glance. He seemed to be wondering whether Mr. Mangles had spoken.
And Mangles met the glance with one of steady refusal to repeat his
remark. But Mangles spoke first, after all.
"Yes," he said, "the women will be on deck soon--and my sister Jooly.
You don't know Jooly?"
He spoke with a slow and pleasant American accent.
"I saw you speaking to a young lady in the saloon after luncheon," said
Cartoner. "She had a blue ribbon round her throat. She was pretty."
"That wasn't Jooly," said Mr. Mangles, without hesitation.
"Who was it?" asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who
have no self-consciousness--who are absorbed, but not in themselves,
as are the majority of men and women.
"My niece, Netty Cahere."
"She is pretty," said Cartoner, with a spontaneity which would have
meant much to feminine ears.
"You'll fall in love with her," said Mangles, lugubriously. "They all do.
She says she can't help it."
Cartoner looked at him as one who has ears but hears not. He made no
reply.
"Distresses her very much," concluded Mangles, dexterously shifting
his cigar by a movement of the tongue from the port to the starboard
side of his mouth. Cartoner did not seem to be very much interested in
Miss Netty Cahere. He was a man having that air of detachment from
personal environments which is apt to arouse curiosity in the human
heart, more especially in feminine hearts. People wanted to know what
there was in Cartoner's past that gave him so much to think about in the
present.

The two men had not spoken again when Miss