Ardita Farnam
The nineteen-year-old on the yacht in “The Offshore Pirate,” who would rather be kidnapped than bored.
To live entirely as she likes. Her stated creed is courage — not only overriding people and circumstances, she says, but overriding the bleakness of living.
The book
At a glance
- The central character of “The Offshore Pirate,” the first of the eight stories
- Nineteen
- An uncle, Mr. Farnam, and an aunt. Her parents are not in the story
- The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, which she finishes on the fourth day
- Palm Beach, to meet a man with a scandal behind him and a Russian bracelet in his pocket
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeArdita Farnam is the young woman at the centre of “The Offshore Pirate,” the story that opens Flappers and Philosophers. She is nineteen, an orphan in the care of an uncle she despises, and the reader meets her lying on the deck of his steam yacht off the Florida coast, reading a novel by Anatole France and licking a half-lemon. She is on the cruise for one reason: to be delivered to Palm Beach, where a man with a disreputable past is waiting for her with a bracelet that once belonged to a Russian empress.
Then a rowboat comes alongside carrying seven men who take the yacht, and Ardita, who has been told she can go ashore if she keeps quiet, declines to leave. What follows is a week of talk on an unnamed island, and the talk is the story. She has built a philosophy and she recites it: courage as a rule of life, faith in her own resilience, and an absolute refusal to apologise for anything.
How the book draws them
- How she answers her uncleHis first three attempts to get her attention produce a yawn, then three words: “Oh, shut up.” Then a demand that he put it in writing. The conversation ends with a copy of The Revolt of the Angels thrown at his head and a sucked half-lemon catching him in the neck.
- What she refuses to doOrdered in to dinner with a colonel and his son: “I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state.”
- The word she will not be calledWhen the man who has taken the yacht says she seems to have a lot of nerve for a flapper, she answers, “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” He begs her pardon. It is the only thing in the story that gets under her guard.
- Nerve, by her own account“As to nerve,” she continued slowly, “it’s my one redeeming feature. I’m not afraid of anything in heaven or earth.” To be afraid, she says, a person has either to be very great and strong or else a coward, and she is neither.
- What she found at eighteenShe describes two years of restlessness: going from man to man, a frightful sense of transiency, wanting things now. Then she names the thing she settled on: “Courage — just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always.” She began separating courage from everything else and found it in every idol she had ever had.
- The diveShe tells the rest of it in instalments from the water, climbing from ledge to ledge up a cliff by moonlight and diving off each one while he talks. The last ledge is forty feet up. She stands with her arms spread, describes going through the black air like a dolphin, and goes.
- Her definition of faithChallenged that her courage is really a pride of birth, she answers: “My courage is faith — faith in the eternal resilience of me — that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity.” Until it does, she says, she keeps her lips shut and her chin high and her eyes wide, and not necessarily any silly smiling.
- What she says about loveAsked whether every man she meets tells her he loves her, she nods and explains why he should: “All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase — ‘I love you.’” Then she says the remark does not mean anything especially, it is just clever.
A revenue boat finds the island and anchors offshore, and the pirate gives up without a fight. At dawn he hands her a bracelet with a Russian inscription inside it and admits where it came from. They are kissing when the boarding party comes up the ladder. Ardita tells her uncle he is an old fool and walks below.
The whole thing was a fabrication. The man calling himself Curtis Carlyle is Toby Moreland, the colonel's son she had refused to go to dinner with, and the two old men on the revenue boat, her uncle and Colonel Moreland, had sat up all night hoping it would work. The white sacks contained Florida mud.
She takes it better than anyone expects. She asks him to swear that the story was entirely his own invention, he swears, and she kisses him. “What an imagination!” she said softly and almost enviously. “I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.”