I Her name was Stella, and she did not like her name. Her hair was quite lustrous, but she did not like her hair, either, and stood combing it jerkily before a glass which possessed in its midst one of those unfortunate waves capable of drawing the face of the beholder into a sad and sometimes startling distortion. Nor did she take the trouble to keep out of range of the wave, which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that things were not going very well with her. Stella’s face was by no means a discredit to her sex; but a woman is never seen to the best advantage when at odds with her hair—one of the few generalities that may fairly be called safe. Her life was a failure—that worst of all possible failures:—the kind of failure one just misses grasping. She phrased it all supremely: “I guess I’m about as deep in the mire as any one could get without being swallowed up entirely.” Her eye chanced to light upon a cheaply framed photograph. With an impulsive, half desperately searching air she took it in her hand, and her regard assumed a passing gleam of softness. What she held was the likeness of a young man about her own age—apparently around twenty—with a somewhat groping look. Her inspection became hard, critical, unrelenting. When she put him down it was with a thrust of annoyance. The young man tottered a moment on the dizzy edge of a rouge pot and then fell prostrate. She did not bother to put him on his feet again. As she reached the dining room, chairs were just being scraped into business-like adjacency with the table. Stella was really supposed to come down in time to set the table for breakfast; but now and then, either despite her high impatience or because of it, she overslept, which was likely to signify that she had been into the small hours with a novel. It also meant, in the ruthless way of life’s dispensations, checks, and balances, that her sister Maud must contrive to set the table between stirrings and slicings and fryings in the kitchen. Maud was plain and capable, always pressed for time, very serious about everything. But she was amiable, and even owned a sense of humour, of a sort—which at any rate was better than none at all. Exclamations of delight were in the air, emanating from Aunt Alice. “Goody—muffins!” She sniffed approvingly. “Some more of your grand corn muffins, Maud? Or—no, it seems to me—Maud, don’t I get a whiff of graham?” And now her nose was lifted in sheer transport. “Corn muffins this morning,” Maud replied, a pleased smile on her somewhat formless lips. “Goody again, say I!” It was a zest which seemed really to congratulate all present. Stella eyed her aunt dully. God had made her, and she had a good heart: a wide-chested, cheerful, talkative lady of uncertain years, and a little taller than Maud’s husband, even when he wore his special high heels. Ted was far from being a vain man, but he didn’t like to be thought of as a little man, either, and the cobbler said he’d done that kind of work before. Romance? thought Stella, looking unhappily about her. Where was it? She longed for charm and luxury and brilliant contacts, but her father was in the harness business. Well—as he bent low over each sibilant spoonful of orange juice, wrinkling both eyes a great deal while he delved into the independable fruit, Frank Meade, stolid and honest and plain, wouldn’t strike any one as perhaps quite bloated with romance; and yet, abruptly, a wisp of remorse softened the daughter’s mood a little as she watched him—almost a little errant burst of spiritual vision. But it faded quickly, and she was brooding: “He might have been worth millions if he’d switched in time!” Millions, not for themselves but what they could do to one’s life. It was a distinction, though perhaps a trifle fine. Into this sombre reverie broke the quiet voice of her sister: “Stella, dear, another cup?” “Such delicious coffee!” endorsed Aunt Alice, who could always be depended upon to edge in something with the sly apology of the parenthesis. Stella suddenly remembered how Irmengarde, in the chapter where they had afternoon tea somewhere in the Tyrol, waved aside the entreaties of all her admirers, declining urged dainties on every hand because the particular romance of her situation recommended an attitude of delicate ennui. Stella would have liked borrowing the technique of the Tyrolese mood, but there you were again. This wasn’t a resort in the Tyrol but just the familiar San Francisco dining room with walls of cracked cream. Her name was not Irmengarde. She was at war with life, but her cup went back to be refilled notwithstanding. After breakfast Maud called out to her husband: “Ted, dear, I wish you’d bring home one of those new patent wringers with you tonight. The handle’s come off my old one, and the man at the repair shop said if it ever came off again he couldn’t fix it.” “They’re grand!” echoed Aunt Alice over the rail of the banister. “I think Bert said there were ball bearings inside.” Ted said all right, his eyes winking behind very bright-looking glasses, and Maud gave him a capable yet withal affectionate kiss. Aunt Alice, though afar off now, heard and shouted unquenchably: “Another one for me, Maud! You’re all right, Teddy! You’re a good boy! ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes....’” Her voice strode irrepressibly off in song. Stella half consciously heard too; and, out in the kitchen, her hands in the eternal suds of dish-washing, it set her thrilling over one of the golden sentences in that chapter where Irmengarde steals out to view the ruins by moonlight. “For one who has kissed as I have kissed,” sighed Irmengarde, “there are no longer any mysteries in the world!” II So long as her hands were immersed in the kitchen suds, Stella could more or less successfully build up about her an illusion of romance, for it is perhaps the one solid virtue of dish-washing that it releases the mind to rambles far afield. However, this task completed and the pan on its peg, life slumped again badly. She had not, it is true, always felt this way—until quite recently, in fact, had not been greatly concerned about the things that didn’t go with her destiny. But she had encountered the novel heroine Irmengarde, and then—well, then the letter from Elsa, brief but wonderful, and really the first letter since they were small girls living on the same street—before the Utterbournes began mysteriously to rise. There had been postcards through the years: now and then from the eastern school where Elsa had gone so young to escape domestic unpleasantness; sometimes, later on, a card startlingly from Europe or the Orient. For her part, Stella had answered as many as she could with long, impulsive letters, in which lay revealed the germ which had at length so unhappily sprung to flower. Of course Elsa was never very demonstrative, and a postcard is only a postcard; but that she hadn’t forgotten was the essential fact. Then, at last, the letter: “I’m going to open the house in Berkeley for dad. He’s been living at his club long enough, he says. When I get there I’ll look you up.” Stella had waited, and watched the mails eagerly for another glimpse of Elsa’s thrilling scrawl. Perhaps she would ask her over to tea. Or perhaps she would take her to a matinÉe and they would pour out their hearts to each other afterward. However, the time since Elsa must have reached town had at length run into weeks—and no word. Stella thought of phoning; had even sketched problematical telephone conversations; but hadn’t, after all, brought herself to do it. There was something about Elsa—well, something that always made approaches a little difficult. This seemed a part of her almost terrible charm. Yet once they had come together again, everything would be quite simple and natural. And so restlessly did she long for a breath of that richer life, that at last she asked herself: “Why not just go and see Elsa without waiting to hear—just drop in as though I happened to be passing by? I’ll do it!” Her day gave promise of turning out rather better than it had begun. A desperately conventional maid seated her in the Berkeley drawing room. Then there was a long, long wait. Stella, nervously fingering her gloves, adjusting and readjusting her hat, had plenty of time to note her surroundings: a room sumptuous yet severe, but above all incommunicative—formal to a degree which suggested its ostracism from familiar domestic uses; yes, forbidding. It was like a blind, a decorous faÇade, behind which who knew what might be in progress? And the silence—something almost ominous—a sense of something beyond or underneath it all.... She rejoiced in the luxury, but at length grew restive, as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—half an hour crept by. She stirred, coughed. Finally she crossed the room. Just as she reached the door, however, the spell was broken. A figure came racing down the stairs. It was Elsa—an active girl, yet inscrutably calm, heavy dark curly hair and very droopy eyes at once extremely soft and extremely bold, and possessed of a kind of unassailable bovine quality. She stopped abruptly at sight of Stella, stood a moment facing her with an expression of wholly tactless blankness, then came forward with hands hospitably extended. “Stella—you old peach! Hello there!” They kissed lightly. “Please forgive me. I forgot all about you.” Stella wished she hadn’t come; but her friend went on with really disarming cordiality: “We can talk for a couple of minutes while the car’s being brought round. I’m sorry I have to run off. I’ve been rushed to death getting ready for my dance—the biggest thing I ever attempted, and a good deal of a bore, but I’m horribly indebted.” (The Utterbourne family tree was aristocratic—men now and then in public life, and streaks of real genius, always more or less money—and of course the social fruits were proportionate.) “Sit down.” Her eyes drooped very much indeed at the corners. Certainly Elsa couldn’t be called a snob; the fact is, she was so very much at ease with everybody that no one could accuse her of not treating all people exactly alike. There was even something a little humorous in her utter disregard of anything even approaching the conventions; and what made it the more surprising just now was her background of the most immaculate conventionality. Stella leaned forward, obviously constrained, and wriggled nervously. “You mustn’t let me keep you.” But Elsa gazed at her in a perfectly steady yet detached manner, and exclaimed out of a silence which, it was clear, bore no impress of awkwardness for her: “You’re looking ripping!” Stella longed to throw her arms around Elsa and free her heart of its accumulated turbulence. Instead they merely sat facing each other on conventional chairs. Talk of the dance resumed. “A week from tomorrow—I’m dreadfully excited.” The girl’s eyes drooped pleasantly, however, and certainly didn’t display any excitement to speak of. She just gazed on, with disconcerting blankness; and since it couldn’t have occurred to her that any embarrassment might accompany this frank chatter about the approaching festivity, it must have been sheer impulse that brought out the suggestion: “If you’d care to come, Stella, I’ll see you get an invitation. Aunt Flora’s engineering everything. If you like I’ll give her your name.” All very quiet, ordinary, off-hand; yet Stella flushed and felt her heart plunged into confusion. She was at once delighted and terrified. “I shouldn’t know a single person but you—I’m afraid....” Pride, at first, prevented her framing it any more forcefully; but the next moment she felt so very wretched about her life that her pride just caved in and she was faltering, though with a stiff little laugh: “I’m afraid a ball gown would be a good deal of a problem!” Her eyelids were burning. She was furious. She felt crushed. Elsa’s gaze was still upon her, yet it was plain her friend’s commotion of soul made no overwhelming impression. Her eyes drooped to signify a forthcoming confidence. “If you’ll promise not to let it out—we’re planning to announce something that night—during the supper dance!” Stella thought miserably of her own lagging and forlorn engagement. But it didn’t appear that the other girl, with everything so bewilderingly romantic, was particularly thrilled. All at once, her expression never changing, she disconcertingly demanded: “Was that the horn?” and strode to the door. “Let me take you wherever you’re bound for, Stella—I’ve a little time to spare. Sorry I can’t stay and talk.” “Oh, thanks—I think I’ll just be going back to San Francisco. Please don’t bother, Elsa.” “Come along. I’ll take you as far as the ferry.” The doggy little car in which one sat luxuriously low gave one a sense of distinction, made one forget, even, that in a few short hours there would be dish water again. Elsa drove expertly. She could almost have driven a locomotive. Stella, a little bewildered by the rate at which things had moved since her slow wait in the silence of the drawing room, watched her friend with awe and admiration. The only trouble with the ride to the ferry was its appalling brevity. And Elsa’s affectionate drawl was in her ears: “Here we are. I’m going to look you up one of these days. Bye-bye.” She nodded pleasantly without smiling, and Stella alighted. “Oh, by the way—hold on a minute.” Elsa dove into one of the car’s leather pockets and with blithe tactlessness produced a current Vogue. “It will amuse you going across, and you’ll find some nifty patterns near the back.” A moment later she had departed, full speed in a bath of blue smoke—breezed off exactly as she had breezed in, leaving behind her a vast unhappy vacuum. Stella felt desperately let down. It was only now she realized how much she had counted on Elsa. “I’ll never hear from her again,” she brooded darkly; for she was rather given to indulging in premonitions. Of course there would be no invitation to the dance. Elsa would tremble for what her friend might arrive in! She beat back the tears angrily with her lashes. This was all that had come of her hopeful, desperate little expedition. In the plodding ferry boat Stella thumbed the fashions, her mood growing ever darker. “What will come next?” she muttered. The murk of discontent settled thicker and thicker in her heart, like the fog across the harbour, where whistles were hooting “Beware!” on every side. III At about the same hour that Stella reached her decision to call on Elsa Utterbourne, the employes of the business houses along lower Market street were streaming out into the hazy noon in quest of lunch, the stomach being sovereign and benevolent tyrant there as in all walks of life. A few had brought lunches from home wrapped in a bit of paper, and among these was Jerome Stewart, an employe of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley, Ships’ Chandlers. He was one of a little group sprawled on the doorstep of a wholesale candy factory which made a leader of forty-nine-cent chocolates. He sat huddled somewhat, his knees raised so high as to provide a very slanting table indeed for his stock of viands. However, the clerk was quite unconscious of the fact that his position in the universe might not be considered a thing of overwhelming delight. He never had anything much to say at these times—a dearth which by no means applied all round. A clerk from a fishing tackle store was delivering a very graphic lecture on the difficult art of casting for bass, and exacted the half guarded attention of the little group. “The mistake most fishermen make is to whip their rod when they cast—like that.” You saw exactly. “But,” he demonstrated, “the right way is like this—v-e-r-y gently.” Jerome thought he would like to be able to cast well. “I suppose it’s only a knack,” he mused. But how did one go about it to learn the knack? The tackle clerk might have told him, in a general way: application, patience; but Jerome seldom carried his inchoate ambitions that far. Another clerk, though his profession was selling typewriters, had a passion for architecture, and began expatiating a trifle thickly across his hard boiled egg. And Jerome followed him with considerable interest, musing in much the same strain as before. Still, Jerome had never, at best, felt more than a flirtatious interest in architecture, though he had talked some of studying it on the side. Well, when analysed, it proved to be pretty much in a class with many other idle ambitions: for example, the sea. The sea, oddly enough, had come very near amounting to a passion with Jerome Stewart. He had spoken rather grandly once of taking to the high seas. Even to this day a mild penalty pursued him; one of the group, suddenly leaning over to jog his shoulder, urged: “Come on! You haven’t done your jig for months. Boys, are we going to let him sit here and hide his talent?” The crowd laughed goodnaturedly. “Sure! Out you go! Limber up!” And there was a shuffling movement, as though the clerk might be about to find himself precipitated on to the sidewalk, where an admiring ring would form. Jerome, however, had a very well developed sense of his own dignity. He resisted, and the interest waned; however, it was quite true that he had an accomplishment. In the dim long ago, a seaman at the waterfront had taught him the hornpipe. Those were the brave, adventurous days. But after all, he had been content in the end to take up ship chandlery; and it must ever remain not the least of his humiliations that once when the chance came to go out for a day in a fishing tug he had grown fatally reluctant at the last moment because, to his land-locked eyes, there was a deal of a sea slopping in. Jerome had come at length to take it modestly for granted that nearly everything in life was more or less unattainable. As he consumed his bread and cheese, with a generous dessert of home-made cocoanut cake in the offing, the clerk scanned such snatches of relatively current news as revealed themselves down the columns of the Chronicle from which his banquet had emerged. This helped him keep posted on the affairs of the great world. Sometimes there would be only advertisements, in which case he knew how to accommodate himself without a struggle. Or it would be the sporting page, and he always liked that. Jerome seldom saw a game, but, like most normal individuals, read the sporting news religiously—almost superstitiously. Today it was mostly small type about stock and bond matters. Sometimes he wondered dimly about the stock exchange. But after all it was no great matter, one way or another. Some young lady stenographers, arms linked and lips vocal with fun, strolled past, leaving in their wake a havoc of masculine eyes. One of the clerks sketchily whistled a perfectly unsuggestive tune suggestively. The little passing thrill subsided; and then Jerome began thinking about his own affair of the heart. It was a curious thing, but the clerk, although he saw her nearly every day, could never conjure in his mind a wholly satisfactory picture of the girl he was going to marry. There was no doubt about his loving her. He loved her very much indeed. Besides, he was very anxious to be married; the desire for a hearth of his own “and kiddies” was firmly fixed in his soul. But it was always just a little through a haze that he saw the girl herself. He could never, for one thing, remember definitely whether she had a dimple; though he knew she was fair, with fresh colour, and that her hair looked like gold when the sun caught it right. Jerome filled his short little pipe and lighted it. The pipe always gave him a faintly jaunty feeling. If he ever thought of his destiny as a bit obscure it was certainly never at such times as this. And at worst, though his destiny obviously lacked a great many things he more or less desired, he wouldn’t be willing to change it for anybody else’s. The world moved busily on every side, heeding him not a bit. Every one, as a matter of fact, had more important things to do than notice a chandlery clerk who wasn’t even sure if his girl had a dimple. What all the world missed, therefore, was a young man of about twenty or so, thin but quite well built, a little unkempt, with a somewhat sallow look. His hair was parted in the middle, and in the back it overlapped his collar just a trifle—it was that kind of hair. His clothes had been, in their jeunesse, a bit loud, which would be a weakness belonging to his years and the fact that he was engaged; but they had never fitted any too well, and long continuance of careless carriage had scarcely improved matters in this direction. Finally, he wore a bright tie which was fastened near its extremities to his shirt by means of a patent clip. The clip seemed urging his shoulders forward and downward. Yes, upon the whole he seemed pretty obscure; yet it wasn’t that he didn’t want to learn the knack of life, but only that he thought he couldn’t. Some whistles blew presently, and a city clock boomed. The group on the steps of the candy factory broke up, and Jerome took his way back to the ancient and musty mercantile house with all sorts of things pertaining to ships displayed in the windows. He proceeded automatically to a special peg and hung up his hat, encountering in the vicinity Mr. Ormand Whitley, the junior partner, indulging in a drink of water at the old-fashioned cooler. Whitley was only seventy-five and decidedly spry yet. He eyed the returning clerk over a crockery cup and very solemnly announced, with a gesture toward the water: “My boy, that killed off every one once except Noah and a few animals!” And then he laughed—a laugh which had a bursting start, like the operation of a steam valve. Yes, there was something undeniably frivolous about the junior partner, even though, curiously enough, his head made one think instantly of the head of some profound Greek philosopher. It might almost have been the head of Socrates. IV Closing time never found Jerome napping. His legs had been wrapped all the afternoon about the rungs of his stool with the cheerful yet sluggish permanence one encounters commonly in the plant kingdom; but now he unwound them, took down his hat, and went out into a thick winter fog. His legs really belonged somewhat in the category of beanpoles, but they carried him over the ground. His gait, indeed, possessed a slightly headlong quality, without being quite eager. All his movements seemed a little automatic, even his head being held at a more or less fixed angle—a habit indubitably acquired through prolonged association with the ledger, and encouraging a suspicion that to change its focus a lever somewhere would have to be touched, or a spring pressed. Some blocks along he caught sight, through the fog, of a familiar back, a little in advance, and the automatic walk accelerated to an automatic dog-trot. “Stella!” He was grinning all over with welcome. She raised her head abruptly and returned his greeting, with just that degree of impatience which is likely to accompany a rebound from startled solitude. “What are you doing ’way down here at such a time of night?” She told him, a bit curtly, of her visit to Elsa. Ordinarily she would have taken a car uptown from the ferry terminus, but today it had occurred to her that exercise might tend a little to relieve her sense of depressing futility. So far as he was concerned, it had been a most happy decision. They walked on together, talking of immediate things, or not talking at all; and he kept sliding his admiring eyes round for brief surveys of the fair face he could never seem to keep vividly in his mind. It rather exasperated Stella to be looked at this way. She might, she thought, almost as well be an article in any one of the shop windows they were passing. At length she demanded: “Is something the matter with my hat?” “No, indeed! I like it very much, Stella.” She sighed sharply. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Nothing.” “You seem rather mad. Anything up?” She shook her head, and there followed a space of silence, during which she was conscious, as never hitherto, of her companion’s imperfections. It couldn’t be denied—the engagement was dragging. There wasn’t even a ring. They had decided for the present to call themselves engaged and save the money a ring would cost. Today, however, she eyed her vacant finger scornfully, and remembered with a turbulent pang how Elsa had whispered her own forthcoming engagement; what a romantic, exciting engagement it promised to be; such a propitious beginning! “Well,” she sighed at length, rebelling against so wooden a silence, “anything new at the store today?” “No,” Jerome laughed shortly. “Doesn’t anything ever happen there?” “No.” He laughed again. And she was thinking: “What a stupid conversation!” Stella sometimes had sparkling enough conversations with persons her mind conjured to flashes of fragmentary tÊte-À-tÊte, though they might not, it is perhaps true, stand up under a test of modern psychology. “Don’t you ever think of getting into something else?” she demanded. “Oh, I’ve thought of plenty of things I’d like to do, but”—he drew a fine distinction—“this seems to be about the only thing I really know how to do.” “Because you’ve never tried.” “Well, what would you like to have me try?” “Isn’t there anything you’d like to try yourself?” She lifted her head impetuously. “If I were a man I think I’d discover something besides being a clerk in a ship supply store!” She was really scolding him now, though she hadn’t meant to speak with quite such driving scorn. It was a day when everything grated, nothing went well; a day when blouse strings knotted and buttons flew off; a day aggravated by everything and everybody. By this time her mood of revolt was poignant indeed. Jerome looked at her in mild, inquisitive amazement. Stella was groping. She saw herself deep in a mire of eventlessness and humdrum, and longed to reach out after the dazzling things in life—romance, excitement, the luxury of gay, brilliant contacts. In her heart rose a blind little cry of opaque desire. Abruptly, right at her elbow, a door slammed. She started quite violently and turned, in time to behold an arrestingly handsome man emerging from a railroad and steamship travel bureau, his hand full of bright-coloured tourist pamphlets. Her glance was hurried and thrilled. But a tiny miracle was to happen. A moment later the handsome man came running up behind her, with quick chivalrous steps. “Pardon me,” he requested, raising his hat in an almost lavish way; and she saw that he was handing her a pattern page from her fashion magazine, which she had detached on the ferry boat and thrust in loosely. It had fallen to the sidewalk just as she was passing the travel bureau. “Oh—thank you so much!” she fluttered, flushing with vague excitement. The stranger, smiling with an ample bewitchment, restored her property, lifted his fashionable hat again, and strolled into oblivion. Her last searching glance discovered a single fresh violet in his buttonhole. “That was a stroke of luck!” Jerome observed in his calm, automatic manner. “You don’t often get back things you lose in a crowd.” Stella, though she beheld in what had just occurred a sly stroke of irony in that the chivalrous act should have fallen to another than Jerome, made no immediate reply. Indeed, for the moment her mind surged richly with excited imaginings. It was like the beginning of a romance! “I was just wishing,” she mused, still flushed. “Then a door slammed—as though fate had been listening all the time, and then....” Yes, she liked to view life in terms of indefinite grandiloquence. Still, it had all ended there. The handsome stranger, who might be a prince setting out on some fabulous tour of the universe, had quickly disappeared. She would never see him again. Once more the fog settled about her. Life slumped. She felt more dismally hemmed in than ever. Jerome cheerfully broke the silence with easy commonplaces, to which she responded moodily if at all. Each time a space of stillness came between them, Stella was reminded in a curious, haunting way, of the silence of that long wait in the Utterbourne drawing room, where there had seemed something ominous or impending, invisible yet more palpable, too, than mere fancy. At length Jerome fell taciturn also; and it was then that the girl reËstablished the theme which the episode of the fashion page had broken. “Don’t you ever have a feeling,” she wearily insisted, “you ought to be getting more out of life?” This time his laugh was slightly constrained. “I’ve thought of cutting quite a figure in the world some day. How do I know but I still may? You never can tell.” “You certainly won’t unless you make up your mind to!” “Oh say!” he protested, his masculine dignity beginning to feel menaced. “Why do you want to jump on me all of a sudden? I guess I’m no worse off, at least, than I was a year ago.” But his defensive nonchalance infuriated her. “A year ago!” “Well,” he replied easily and a trifle coolly, “I lay a whole lot of plans I don’t always discuss, because I prefer to wait till I’m ready to spring something definite.” Their voices were taking on a sharper quality as they carried their lovers’ quarrel through the home-rush of the ignoring fog-choked city. “Anything’s better than submitting! I must say I’d admire you more if you didn’t just take what’s handed out.” “You would?” “Oh,” she cried, with a hot fling of her voice, “if you could only plunge!” His reply was indeed provoking. “Where to?” “Almost any place would be better than where we are!” It was beginning to get under his skin. He smarted, looking straight before him as he walked. “Oh, I think I might be a little worse off. Oaks-Ferguson is a good old house.” She gestured blindly with the fashion magazine. “It isn’t so much just money. It’s settling down right here in one spot for the rest of our lives!” And at length, since he made no reply, she sighed angrily and stopped. “I’m tired. I guess I’ll wait at this corner for a car.” He paused moodily beside her, and she turned on him with a heavy look in which there seemed no glint now of affection. “Don’t bother to wait. I know you always walk.” “You mean you’d rather go the rest of the way without me?” She stood with pressed lips, staring gloomily down the street. Finally he continued: “If so, all you’ve got to do is say the word.” She was witheringly thinking: “It oughtn’t to be necessary.” As a matter of fact, she hadn’t really intended bringing about such a situation; yet even now, as she had it in her heart to speak more gently, words of greater harshness rose perversely. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere with each other, Jerome.” He addressed the ground: “You mean you’re tired of me for good?” His very directness irritated her. “I’m certainly tired of the way we just drag along.” “Well,” he said at last, speaking with an emotion which, while genuine enough, also seemed to him rather pleasurably smacking of the heroic, “if you can do better without me, all I can say is you better try. Nothing I do seems to suit you.” And, in his aroused mood of masculine ire, Jerome found it expedient to add: “It’s my private opinion you don’t exactly know what you do want.” The thrust was so palpably true, in a sense, that the girl abandoned her last scruple of lingering reserve. “I guess it’s high time we broke off our engagement!” Her car arrived and she stepped aboard, while Jerome turned and marched off without a word.
CHAPTER TWO
THE AMAZING CUSTOMER I Alone in the street car, Stella brooded it all miserably. “How unhappy I am,” she thought. And then she faltered: “I didn’t realize....” Yet she asked herself, too, what could be left unsaid if the scene were to be played over—“except, maybe, the actual breaking off...?” Everything she had said was quite true, yet her heart was not at rest. “I don’t seem to know which way to turn any more,” she told herself darkly, almost in tears. Meanwhile Jerome, continuing home on foot, argued that what had occurred was no great matter. She had succeeded really in arousing him, and his mood was surprisingly energetic. “Well, if she feels that way....” He muttered the opening phrases of many very vigorous statements designed to cover his feelings; but for the most part they were destined to an eternal suspension. “I guess I’m not quite so hopeless....” Well, the thing had happened, and there was an end of it. There would be no longer any special reason why he should vividly picture her in his mind when they were apart; yet, curiously enough, now their ways were sundered, he found himself picturing her with singular vividness. “A fine thing,” he thought, “to keep at a fellow about!” Perhaps there was more to be got out of life, but had she given any hint as to how it was to be managed? She had not! He bolstered his outraged ego the whole of the way. Arrived at his own house, Jerome went at once to his room. He washed in a desultory manner, then proceeded to plaster his hair down very slick, even dipping the brush into the water pitcher to facilitate the process. His evening toilet completed, the young man sat down in a straight chair, tipped himself rakishly back against the wall, knocked the caked ashes out of his jaunty little pipe, filled it with tobacco from a tumbler supposed to hold his toothbrush, and began pulling away in a comfortable, dignified fashion. He flattered himself he didn’t exactly resemble the traditional conception of a man who has just passed through the ordeal of a broken engagement, and tried to persuade himself that Stella would be the heavier loser of the two. II The next day Mr. Whitley, the junior partner of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s, was waiting on a couple of old regulars—joking with them in his undignified yet senile fashion, and laughing explosively as he wrapped some small purchases. Jerome presently became aware of the entry of another customer, and not unwillingly climbed down from the stool of his destiny. The customer was peering into one of the dusty show-cases: a large man, about forty-five, perhaps, dressed in a Palm Beach suit and wide-brimmed hat. Both hands—and they lay conspicuously outspread on the showcase before him, almost as though they were in reality goods whose purchase he was considering—were amazingly encrusted with precious stones. On one finger alone were two massive rings set with diamonds and rubies of almost incredible magnitude, while on another finger was a curious constellation of tiny stones set into a golden cube which stood well out from the band itself. The man was, from head to foot, an exotic—with Italian blood, probably, though above all a cosmopolitan—and seemed so full of contradictions that at first one found it simply impossible to make him out at all; yet regarding his amazing picturesqueness there could, at least, be no mistake. He had about him a gorgeous flavour of romance and mystery. The customer began with some hesitation: “I wonder—could you give me any sort of idea what it would take to feed say about thirty-five people and a small crew during a voyage to Honolulu?” Jerome stared. What else could he do? But the customer smiled and tried to be more coherent. “The fact is,” he said, in a very friendly, confidential, optimistic manner, “I’m altogether a novice at this sort of thing, and just dropped in because I saw up over the door that you deal in ship supplies. I thought I might as well stop and enquire, even though I haven’t had time yet to draw up any lists or such things. Lord, isn’t it a busy life?” His eyes—large and black and enthusiastic—swam with a vague yet enkindling glow as he gazed about. “You see,” he explained, in a voice peculiarly booming and rich, “I’ve just rented a schooner—taken it for a year—yes, a fine little fourmaster, with a brand new coat of paint!” Jerome, of course, noticed that to the man across the counter ships were sexless objects, and that he spoke of chartering a vessel exactly as a real estate man might speak of letting or acquiring a piece of property. Yet, oddly enough, all this seemed but adding to his charm. “To tell the truth,” confessed the glittering stranger, removing his hat and disclosing a black toupee which contrasted a little queerly with a greying fringe lower down, “I’ve not more than the remotest idea what you stock up with.” “For the galley?” asked Jerome, desiring to be nautical, yet at the same time wishing to avoid an appearance of self-consciousness which he always more or less felt when he spoke of the sea or the things of the sea. “That’s it!” “But couldn’t all such be left to the steward, sir?” “The steward?” For a moment the warm black eyes appeared a trifle blank. “Well, now I suppose so. Lord, yes, I suppose the steward would take all such loads off my mind. But you see,” he leaned across in a perplexed way, speaking very confidentially indeed, “the fact is I haven’t got any steward yet.” “No steward, sir?” “Well, no, I haven’t yet,” the other apologized. And then he broadened the confidence, his eyes petitioning and not a little wistful: “You see the fact is I haven’t got any crew at all yet.” His face relaxed into a smile of singular sweetness. “Lord, what a busy life! It seems to me as though I never more than get started!” “The trouble is, sir,” said Jerome, “we deal only in ship’s hardware here.” “Ah?” returned the customer, obviously a little dismayed; and he looked about in a helpless way, yet almost hopefully, too, as though half anticipating, out of the very abundance of his optimism, that he might discover displayed somewhere goods which would welcomely disprove the clerk’s assertion. III “What’s wanted?” asked Mr. Whitley with crisp, rising inflection. He had come up and was standing beside Jerome, his hands on his hips, looking more than ever like an intellectual colossus. “Why, I’ll explain a little more about it,” replied the customer, turning from Jerome to the old man. “My name’s Xenophon Curry—you may have heard of me. Here’s my card—here’s two of ’em.” And he drew forth a wallet from the pocket of a vast expanse of black and white checked woolen vest and took from it two generous bits of pasteboard, which he handed across with a little bustling gesture. “You see, I’ve rented a schooner called the Skipping Goone—nice name, kind of, isn’t it? As I was just explaining to your young man here, I don’t know just how to go about it to get a crew and so forth, and I suppose—good Lord, yes!” he laughed, “first of all there will have to be a captain! Well, it will come right somehow. I always manage to blunder through. I guess it must be part of my luck!” Both Jerome and Mr. Whitley were absorbed in the customer’s card, and the latter finally observed: “I see you head an opery troupe!” “Yes,” replied Xenophon Curry, drawing in deeply and expanding his ribs exactly the way his singers always did when they were going to attack a high note. “We’ve just closed a triumphant tour of the States, and now,” he added, with a little fling of his head which can only be described as magnificent, “we’re going to keep right on—west! That’s where the schooner comes in, do you see? I wouldn’t say—no, I wouldn’t say but we might go clear round the world! It’s a wonderful thought, in a way, isn’t it?” The mouths across the counter were dropped in astonishment; but Mr. Whitley, being so ancient a pupil in the school of life, possessed rather more ballast to withstand the puff of unexpected gales than did his clerk. He recovered first, and made a very smart remark indeed to the effect that he wouldn’t so much mind going along himself if there were as many pretty chorus girls as some shows carried. He winked naughtily. And of course this remark was but the forerunner of one of his bursting, infectious laughs, which, once released, ran along quite placidly. Laughter never seemed to discomfit the junior partner in the slightest degree. When he had sobered sufficiently, Mr. Whitley began an inventory of commission houses. “There’s Silvio’s over the way, and Chiappa’s in Mission street—couldn’t go far wrong. Your steward, when you find one, will know where to get the best prices.” “How about Gambini’s?” asked Jerome. “Oh, there’s no end of ’em,” remarked the old man opulently. For it was, in truth, a neighborhood abounding in lures for the marketing steward. Chicken feathers were forever wafting on the whiff of limes and pineapples, and when it rained, mouldy oranges sped down on the muddy breast of gutter streams. Presently the junior partner felt it incumbent on him to do a bit more honour to the prodigiousness of what the customer had disclosed. “An opery troupe!” “Yes,” replied Xenophon Curry with warm and lingering affection. “And I want to tell you, gentlemen, I’ve got some of the finest songbirds in captivity! Next time we play here I’ll send you down some passes.” “Be sure they’re well toward the front,” stipulated the old man. The laugh was crowding in, but he just managed to add: “My eyes aren’t quite as good as they used to be!” “I suppose,” observed Jerome respectfully, “you’ve been in the business all your life?” “Almost as far back as I can remember,” the impresario assured him. “Lord, gentlemen, you couldn’t get me to give it up for a million dollars! It’s the glory of doing what you’re made to do! I was made for music as sure as God made little green apples! Music—” he poised it a moment, quite ecstatically, his eyes raised toward the ceiling, “—that’s what I’m made for!” But then he seemed to realize that emotion was rather carrying him away, and that, after all, here he was in a ship chandlery store, with a clerk and an old man blinking at him behind the counter; so he ended, very simply, and with another of his fine smiles: “I’m sorry to have bothered you about the supplies, but you see I never tried to run a schooner before. Gentlemen, I’ll wish you good day!” He made them a gallant flourish and was about to take his departure, when Jerome suggested: “If you like sir, I could go through the Skipping Goone to see if there’s anything in our line you might need. There usually are a lot of odds and ends missing.” Mr. Whitley showered looks of affection upon his clerk. Yes, he was really an ornament to the establishment. But Xenophon Curry looked positively radiant. “That’s a fine idea, young man! Say, would you? I’ll show you through myself, from top to bottom, upstairs and down!” Jerome came around the counter and accompanied the impresario to the door. In the street where trucks were thundering endlessly by along the cobblestones, afternoon was on the wane, foggy and black. On the threshold the man extended a hand. “I’ll come down here in a cab and pick you up, and we’ll go to the wharf together. It’s ’way over somewhere,” he waved vaguely. After they had shaken hands the amazing customer hurried off. His whole being seemed to exude a fierce yet always benevolent energy—the most amazing customer who had ever come into the store. “I’ll be able to tell Stella something’s happened at Oaks-Ferguson’s today!” he mused; and then he remembered that she’d no longer be interested to know whether things happened there or didn’t. The look of animation faded wanly, and he felt very much alone. “Maybe I’ll go over anyway and see if she’s ready to make it up,” he thought, as he stood there in the doorway beside a swinging shiny oilskin coat and hat, gazing out into the murk of the dying winter day. But another voice within him followed close: “Maybe I won’t, too—anyway not yet awhile.” The first was the voice of the heart, hungry for the return of a girl’s affection; but the second was the voice of a still squirming masculine ego. However, could he have known that at this very moment Stella was receiving from the postman an invitation, after all, to Elsa’s dance, and could he have beheld the look of rapture that came into her face as she realized the good fortune which had befallen her, Jerome would have experienced greater difficulty than ever persuading himself that she was going to be the heavier loser of the two.
CHAPTER THREE
FATE BEGINS TO PLAY HER CARDS I At eleven o’clock the ballroom was crowded. Elsa Utterbourne, in a handsome, severe, somehow almost boyish gown, was the centre of interest, and about her revolved giddily the established dances of the year—a year when all that was most outrÉ was also most popular. Young interests and enthusiasms and hopes and despairs and infatuations and intrigues merged and were stirred into a gay musical shuffle. All the season’s debutantes were there and a great many of last season’s debutantes; all the important marriageable young ladies, in fact, and a few of the important unmarriageable older young ladies, and a great many young married folks, with their air of unimpeachable savoir-faire and often an inclination to be as scandalous as possible without quite incurring the frown of the community; even a sprinkling of blithe young divorcÉes, since connubial life can’t be expected to be a grand sweet song in every single instance, and how can you always tell until you’ve tried it whether married life with one mate will prove as nice as married life with another mate—or in extreme cases, a state of unmarried life with somebody else’s? In a word, the dance was an entire success. Captain Utterbourne, looking immensely civilized and wholly unnautical, sat all in a sort of cynical little slump on a davenport, his hands lightly thrust into his pockets—a rather short, stockily built man with somewhat thick neck and wrists, and a round full face. His eyes were middling small under a sloping brow, while the nose was inclined to be outstanding. Having observed Elsa one is equipped in really superlative degree to graduate to the Captain; for if ever there was a logic in relationship, it demonstrated itself here! If Elsa’s eyes were unassailable, the Captain’s whole face was unassailable. In fact he possessed what is commonly known as a poker face—inscrutable, always superbly clean shaven; a man of mystery and enigma; subtly terrifying. As she sat beside him for a moment now, it became vividly apparent that the Captain could not possibly be any one else but the father of Elsa, just as Elsa could not possibly be any one else but the daughter of the Captain. There was something restful in the very completeness of heredity’s achievement—only it must be clearly grasped that whatever was remarkable in Elsa was doubly and trebly remarkable in him. There were muffling traits of the long-divorced mother in her—traits of vague impulsiveness and even an elusive warmth; but in the Captain one found everything sheer. Their snatch of talk concerned a singularly handsome man standing not far from them, leaning negligently yet with impeccable elegance against a high-backed chair, and gently swaying a monocle, which never went to his eye. “At any rate, and even if Flora did arch her brows over his coming, you can hardly deny that Mr. King is by all odds the most fascinating person the present occasion has yielded,” drawled Captain Utterbourne in a tone of subtle affection. Nor was Elsa prepared to deny this. King had been wafted into the West under the hushed though wholly laudatory auspices of her father. It was a good deal of a mystery. There was something not altogether coherent about his having been picked up at sea somewhere. But whatever the facts, certain it was that his eyes, supremely blue and round, captured all on whom their gaze rested, and that, in short, he was fascinating beyond question or argument. “Almost too good to be true,” admitted Elsa humorously “—like the coloured postcards of Sorrento and Egypt and the CÔte d’Azure.” Her eyes drooped with whimsical appreciation. Suddenly she jumped up—“I have it!”—and sped off. II Left alone, Captain Utterbourne, humming gently, gazed across in a quizzical way at the man their talk had just concerned. He watched him with eyes a little narrowed; and underneath his lazy quiet there seemed to lurk something keen and purposeful. It was as though some subtle preparation were afoot. Presently he got up, strolled over to where King was lounging watching the dancers, and nodded with a smile flickering icily on his lips. “King,” he began abruptly, yet in the dreamy, drawling tone which characterized most of his speech, “did you ever sit down before a map of the world and just let your mind go? H’m? It’s a gorgeous piece of adventure!” There was a tiny thrill of fire, and he seemed to be pulling the sentences up from some profound abyss. “A map of the world—h’m? What it has cost in toil and ingenuity—the long sifting of facts—the grim wrestle with legend—h’m?” What could it mean? What was this new mystery of approach? There were forces busy here. “Think,” embroidered the Captain,“—think of the slough of the Middle Ages, when what bothered the map-makers most was the pressure of the Church, holding up before them those obscuring metaphysical allusions to ‘the four corners of the earth’—when the best they could do was to conceive of a rectangular world—h’m?—surrounded by—by the unknown! Just think of it, King!” A waltz swayed the dancers all about them. Yes, there were forces busy here. Elsa dashed up. “Oh, here you are!” She laughed easily and not very mirthfully. “Yes, I know—I’m coming,” she soothingly interpolated over her shoulder to a youth with mussed hair who had wildly pursued her waving a program with its flying cord and pencil. “I wanted Mr. King to meet Miss Meade.” She grasped his arm and informally hurried him off, with a slight nod toward her father, which somehow fulfilled every demand of etiquette. Not far away sat Stella, looking quite as delightful for the occasion as she felt over her thrilling share in it. She was wearing a dress Elsa had insisted upon lending her—“since you seem to be so tired of your own clothes”; it was her way of being tactful. There had been some demur, but Elsa, as usual, had her own way—said, indeed, she would positively have the invitation withdrawn unless Stella agreed to take the dress too. There was a good deal of whimsy about Elsa. Mr. King saluted Stella with one of his most fascinating smiles. He bowed, too, in a courtly way, which made her catch her breath a little. “I’m delighted,” he murmured. And Stella, her eyes strangely full of light, paused just short of exclaiming: “There’s something about you—something I seem to remember....” Elsa prepared to dance off with her impatient partner, but turned to her father, who had strolled up, and warned him with dry playfulness: “Please keep an eye on them, and don’t let them get so interested in each other that they forget about supper, because Stella has that dance taken—haven’t you, Stella?” She had been unflagging and a little brazen in her friend’s behalf. “I believe so,” fluttered Stella, excitedly glancing at her card, though in truth, her face all alight with momentarily realized dreams, she wasn’t much concerned over the possibility of any mere individual’s being able to subtract her attention from the glittering whole. Nevertheless, that is exactly what did happen. She fell right into the trap Elsa had mockingly cautioned against; and this is how it all came about. III Captain Utterbourne, with faint petulance, his lips twitching to a smile of finely etched satire, scrupulously withdrew; but he turned back a moment and faced King with the most affectionate and least complex expression of which he was capable. “By the way, would you mind dropping in at my office tomorrow? You know where we are—Hyde’s. There’s something I’d like to go into—h’m?” His mere look subtly completed the sentence; for Captain Utterbourne had perfected the art of intelligible suspension. Mr. King agreed eagerly, though he kept his monocle spinning in a thoroughly sophisticated and idle fashion. Utterbourne had been but glancingly arrested in his departure—all this was very high art. With a faint bow to Stella, which delicately rebuked her for having been the means of interrupting him at a moment when he had cryptically begun to open his mind to his new favourite, the Captain was gone; and they saw him pause, in passing, to banter his sister Flora, just glancingly, as she sat in a little whirl of gentle gossip near the punch bowl. “May I sit down here?” suggested Mr. King gracefully; and found her looking up at him almost coyly, as though having tÊte-À-tÊtes with men of his calibre were indeed an established phase of her life. But naturally her heart was fluttering very much. He talked easily and in a conventionally flirtatious manner: had been noticing her all evening, he said—though as a matter of fact, he was but recently arrived. And she, almost painfully excited, played back in quite the same spirit, though it privately cost a greater effort. Mr. King was so bewilderingly nice that she used every instinctive gift in an effort to please and impress him: yes, just giddily let herself go. They talked of pleasant immediacies. When she dropped her handkerchief, he stooped to pick it up; and when he handed it to her something—something vaguely reminiscent—made her feel as she had felt when the introduction was taking place. Certainly no one had ever before treated her with such a wealth of worldly chivalry. “Oh, thank you!” she fluttered; and he returned a deft little gesture. Then another flash of reminiscence brought a gay cry to her lips. “Oh, now I know! We’ve met before—though I’m sure you’ll never remember!” And as she spoke of the episode of the rescued fashion page, Stella saw again a handsome stranger emerging from the travel bureau, his hand full of alluring pamphlets, and in his buttonhole a single violet. Surely she hadn’t been mistaken? Just at first he didn’t seem to remember, but in an instant he chivalrously remembered it all with the utmost vividness. They discussed the curious little coincidence. It was quite wonderful. Her romantic nature made the lavish most of a circumstance which to another might seem casual in the extreme. Such things really happen pretty often, but her mood insisted upon the most rosy values; and indeed, the tiny episode, from the moment he did remember, seemed to carry them swiftly along toward an intimacy undreamed of a moment since. He looked at her, she felt, almost consumingly with his magnetic round blue eyes. Presently he asked whether she wouldn’t like some punch, and she said she would, so they got up and he gave her his worldly arm. She had never before been so satisfyingly thrilled. Mr. King handed her a glass of punch, making a minute ceremony of it; and she fluttered again, and smiled across at him quite archly over the rim as she sipped. He asked her: “I suppose you spend about all your time dancing, Miss Meade? It seems to be the rage nowadays.” And while she ought, of course, to have laughed it off, or been at least flirtingly evasive, she looked at him instead with an impulse of wistfulness out of her meagre life, and a wave of unassuming candour brought out the admission: “I really don’t very much, but I enjoy it immensely. Don’t you think this is a very nice party?” He seemed to regard her with subtly keener interest; and, curiously enough, it was just that impulsive little flash of candour in Stella, to begin with, that stimulated in Mr. King a sentiment destined at last to involve her most surprisingly. She had a very definite picture, however, of the sort of impression she wanted to make on this man—the impression he seemed irresistibly to invite—and it would have bewildered her to think he might be getting another picture altogether. He asked her if she wouldn’t like to dance, and without even glancing at her card she said yes she would; and then half wished she had said no, because she was hazy about the new steps, and was desperately afraid Mr. King would find her, after all, disappointing. But they danced, and everything went splendidly, and he didn’t find her so disappointing, although himself so immaculately proficient in the new steps. IV After that Stella thought of course he would leave her and find some one else on whom to spend his superlative charms. It seemed incredible he shouldn’t. But instead he gave her his ceremonious arm again and escorted her to a romantic, shadowy nook, and sat down beside her. And it was then, for the first time, that Stella dared think he might be growing really interested in her. “He must be impressed!” she thought, thrilling more than ever. “Perhaps....” But she dared not, even in secret, tempt herself with all the delirious possibilities that crowded her brain just then. King leaned a little toward her as she sat excitedly opening and shutting Elsa’s fan in her lap. “You must feel warm, even though you don’t show it,” he said, smiling gallantly. “Let me fan you.” And when she had surrendered the fan, with a delighted, coquettish gesture, Mr. King began waving it slowly back and forth as he talked—not really stirring up a great deal of breeze, but beautifully establishing an atmosphere of coolness and languor. “You can imagine you’re an Egyptian princess, and I’m one of those nice glossy black slaves, with a fan of papyrus or ostrich plumes—what is it they use?” “Oh, dear,” replied Stella in a very worldly tone, “I’m afraid I don’t know, really!” She laughed a brief, happy laugh, and, after a little more appropriate repartee, she insisted: “I’m sure your arm must be getting tired. Suppose the Egyptian princess tells her slave he may stop fanning her until ...” “Until after she’s danced again?” Too late Stella realized she had gauchely precipitated a second invitation. But he seemed genuinely to welcome it (“That’s a divine waltz,” he observed irreproachably) and anyhow she couldn’t resist appearing on the floor again with him. As they danced she could hardly help noticing how people watched them. It was a delicious sensation. Fortunate for her he had come late—too late to fill his card. Normally, she guessed, it wouldn’t require much exertion on his part! And still he didn’t leave her. Jesting merrily they went about in search of another shadowy nook, and when they had found one to their liking, sat down and resumed their talk. Of course in talk they didn’t go beneath those superficial currents which sociologists tell us are essential to mutual soundings-out within the herd. One talks of the weather or the high cost of everything, or if one is especially gifted, perhaps, one talks about Egyptian princesses—and all the while keeps his ears alert for that “low growl” which shall warn him he is in the wrong pew. But behold! there was no low growl. She heard none, he heard none. And yet it would seem as though these two: this girl in revolt against life and this the most fascinating man at the ball, must belong in very widely severed pews indeed. “Where is your home, Mr. King?” she asked. “Ah, how shall I answer?” he cried in mock consternation. “I’m afraid I’ve become a kind of permanent tramp—travelling a lot and—well, jogging about generally.” “Abroad?” she asked, clasping her hands but making otherwise a valiant effort not to be overcome with awe. “Pretty much all over the globe,” he admitted. “I’ve whistled up the sun sitting astride the pyramids; I’ve strummed a ukulele on the beach at Waikiki; I’ve dabbled a bit at Monte Carlo; I’ve sipped tea with little doll-like geisha girls in Yokohama. What haven’t I done, and where haven’t I been?” He looked honestly almost appalled at his own wealth of experience; and she hung on his words, her face responsive to the thrill in her heart. A little later on they were speaking of the earthquake and how the city had developed out of calamity. And then, since she had quoted, in this connection, something her father had said, and since they were on the subject of business generally Mr. King suggested: “May I ask what your father’s business is?” And Stella—unhappy Stella. She ran her fingers nervously along the feathers of the fan in her lap, and was silent for just a moment, the old rebellion, impotent but hot, bringing its flush to her face. Then slowly she raised her eyes to his, unexpectedly found in them the inspiration she had missed elsewhere, and replied quite frankly, with the same sort of candour that had slipped in more than once already: “My father’s business is harness.” Did he hear a growl? Was he in the wrong pew? Destiny seemed to hold her breath. But if there was any growl now it was so faint as to recommend no drastic alarums and excursions. “Harness—ah.” That was all. And he went on in the same gracefully adjusted tone: “Perhaps not quite so much demand, but still an important item.” And he added, breaking into the more general field the topic seemed prompting: “I like a good horse. I suppose you ride, Miss Meade?” “Oh—occasionally,” she replied, her face still slightly flushed with suppressed rebellion, but smiling with that attempt at archness she told herself the situation required. “Occasionally”—yet what she really meant was a long time ago; for it was highly possible the staid old family horse, used only for driving now, might expire of amazement were Stella to take a notion to mount. “It would give me ever so much pleasure if I might call. May I?” He looked very worldly and pleading over the conventional request. And then—ah, but one knows in advance what she must say, and one sees most clearly, at length, how it was that she forgot the supper dance entirely. Here seemed the dawn of a wonderful dream indeed—as though gates were suddenly opening in her life. She responded to Ferdinand King in waves of delirium. Just once she thought of Jerome; and his defects, under the warm spell of beauty which surrounded her now, turned him into almost a caricature. Jerome and Mr. King! She forgot herself and laughed aloud; then, flushing, made her head toss flirtingly and pretended she had been thinking of something else entirely. Well, in truth, the contrast would be nothing short of striking; for at this stage of his career Ferdinand King was in the finest prime of his incontestible fascination. He was about forty, with rich plumy hair, white at either temple. His face, so arrestingly handsome, was just a little too ruddy, perhaps, to allow any one’s crediting his destiny with never having wooed the heartening cup. His mouth was almost a perfect “cupid’s bow.” A very grand, big, daring, gallant, adventurous sort of man, who appeared altogether superb in evening clothes, and would make a magnificent perpetual best man at fashionable weddings. One at once associated him with gardenias and teacups; yet there was always that indefinable grandness and air of difference about him which made the man seem far indeed from any mere usual type of social flÂneur. A gay old dog, though a mature and worldly and white-templed dog, too—which from the beginning of the world, has been the most fascinating type to be encountered.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FOOTBALL OF THE INDIAN OCEAN I Captain Utterbourne was involved with a vague but immensely lucrative corporation calling itself the Hyde Packet Company. The business was tramp freighters—vessels of one or two thousand tons, mostly, with business-like mien, which poked nondescript noses into every corner of the navigable world where commerce was to be scented. The Star of Troy was Captain Utterbourne’s own cherished and particular tramp: a sturdy craft with bulging, broad-beamed bow and very decent living quarters—for the Captain was somewhat particular how he lived. How he happened to be a sea captain was a supreme enigma. It baffled everybody. There hadn’t been a grain of salt in the family until now. But that he was a sea captain had to be accepted as a fact. To tell the truth, that was all you could hope to do with Utterbourne—simply accept him. There was no alternative. The Hyde offices (despite the prosperity of the stockholders) were just one large dusty room, the walls smoky and cluttered with maps; but it was always a lively place. A good many desks were crowded into it, at one of which, in a modest corner, sat Captain Utterbourne. Men mostly in shirt sleeves kept up a busy drone, abetted by intelligent-looking girls deep in dictation and the clatter of typing. The Captain, however, sat unheeding in the midst of everything. When Ferdinand King arrived he found Utterbourne absorbed in a sheet of paper before him, upon which he was engaged with a pencil. The caller hesitated a moment, half glancing about for an office boy; but almost at once his presence was perceived, and, flinging down his pencil with a tiny gesture, the Captain rose and held out a hand. “Come in, please,” he said in a quaint sing-song, his lips parting with a smile which might be called almost insolent were one not at the same time conflictingly sure that the emotion behind it was wholly amiable. “Have a chair. We’re not very sumptuous, since our business doesn’t call for much style.” When one came into the presence of Captain Utterbourne one seemed coming into the presence of a man about whom strange currents eddied. He wasn’t wholly reassuring—in fact, no one standing before him could feel quite easy or as though his soul was his own. Still, this aura about him had a haunting and insidious attraction, too, so that even though it might prove fatal, one would not care altogether to escape. King was a little startled to observe that the sheet of paper on which the other had been so diligently at work was covered merely with a lot of scrawled anchors, which the Captain had depicted in a variety of positions: now upright, as though in the act of being lowered, with the stock horizontal and the shank standing perpendicular; again in a position of repose, with the stock and one fluke resting, one assumed, on the bed to the sea. Whenever Utterbourne grew absorbed in anchors it was plain to those who knew him as well as it is ever possible to know a man with a poker face, that he was concentrating on some new enterprise. The Captain, half sheepishly noticing that his handiwork had been detected, muttered: “No doubt every one has his own unconscious emblem—a stray out of the past, perhaps—h’m?” His lips moved with apparent reluctance, as though it annoyed him to think that nobody, even after all these centuries of progress, had been able to render speech possible without visible effort. He tilted back in his chair somewhat rigidly, his toes just touching the floor as he rocked, and hummed Macdowell’s To a Wild Rose a moment in a mood of vaguely pleasureable detachment. At length, however, there was a reviving “Well, now,” and King leaned a little toward him, prepared to hear unfolded the mysterious substance which had seemed hovering in the air last evening. What was going forward behind that card-player’s mask? II The Captain’s little eyes looked quite mild and affectionate, but they also held their tiny glint of fire. He gazed at Ferdinand King in an unwavering, disconcerting way, tapping with his pencil upon the wooden shelf he had pulled out of the desk to form an improvised table between them, and uttering an occasional dreamy “H’m?” But in a moment or so the pencil was laid aside, and he began speaking, his chin nestled cosily in his hands. “King,” he said, “did you ever hear of Hagen’s Island?” The other man shook his head, but seemed at the same time to recognize the curious little prelude about maps as hinging here. He waited almost breathlessly. “Hagen’s Island,” resumed the Captain, “had governments quarreling over it in its time. I don’t doubt but it might once have been quite capable of bringing on a war somewhere. Oh, heaven! the laughter behind it all—behind all life, for that matter, King! H’m?—h’m? I spent a whole dreamy spring afternoon once, with crocuses just blooming outside, going through speeches about far off Hagen’s Island delivered in Parliament. That was in connection with the coaling station project which got under way and then was abandoned, with engineers right on the spot. Maybe it was all politics—I don’t know.” He shrugged. “The island proved to be too remote. In short, it was a failure. Some newspaper wag dubbed it ‘the football of the Indian Ocean,’ and then the last ripple died out.” He seemed to lose himself a moment, as in a fog at sea; and King, mystified but much interested, waited for him to go on. The narrative was characteristically resumed from a rather startlingly new angle. “Once upon a time there was a Dutchman—long before the coaling station. His name was Vander Hagen, and his mania was to start an ideal commonwealth. Every generation somebody or other tries it. Isn’t it funny? Vander Hagen had passionate ideas about representation and individual rights. There seems to have been a lot about the Greeks in his plan. Well,” the Captain shrugged, “he died of a broken dream, and was buried on the island where the commonwealth had been tried and found wanting. The remnant of his disciples went back home in a mist of disillusion. A few years later if his name chanced to be mentioned anywhere, people would exclaim: ‘Who was Vander Hagen?’ Isn’t it disillusionizing, King? Isn’t it?” Utterbourne smiled one of his most enigmatic smiles, and after another of the half quizzical pauses continued: “I found a copy of the Dutchman’s Journal a few years ago in one of those little book stalls along the Seine in Paris. It was an English translation, and on the fly leaf was written: ‘From Daisy to Paul, with compliments of the season.’ He smiled in a flickering way—it was just a little like the play of light and shade beneath a tree in summer. “Months later, with a cargo of wheat for Madagascar, I began reading the Journal, and a strange—King, an almost uncanny—desire to pay the island a visit came upon me. My people on the Star of Troy thought I was mad. That was a good while ago—they know me better now—h’m? Well, I couldn’t seem to shake that sombre and majestic Dutchman off my back, King. He’d settled, and I knew there was only one way to be rid of him. Besides—h’m?—I’d thought of a little scheme of my own. “There were reefs—a wicked necklace with a conscience of lead. We found some ruined docks and a spectral derrick—all that remains of the coaling station fiasco—and silence, King. Silence.... Not a soul on the island, of course. Every venture ever started there has fallen through.” And after a moment he murmured: “By the way, King, are you superstitious?” “No,” the other laughed shortly, beginning just in a hazy manner to piece things together in his mind and feel along toward conclusions. “Good,” mused Captain Utterbourne, his voice barely audible. “Good. I think we’re making progress, King.” And he gazed at him tenderly, yet with eyes half shut, as when he sat watching and watching while the dancers whirled about them.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SKIPPING GOONE GETS A MASTER I Xenophon Curry, impresario extraordinary, sat sipping his breakfast coffee and perusing the morning paper. He looked extremely optimistic. The day before he had shown an obliging chandlery clerk over the Skipping Goone, “upstairs and down,” and the clerk had an eagle eye for such missing items as deck hose and cabin door knobs; and though the clerk was but a humble clerk, and although his contribution to the progress of events was frankly minor, the impresario nevertheless felt himself appreciably nearer the realization of his daring project. He and the clerk had partaken of ice cream soda together afterward in a queer little confection emporium near the waterfront. And, all in all, it had seemed a highly important day. Another cause for optimism was the fact that rehearsals were going surprisingly well. He would make people sit up after the tour had got under way! Indeed, his songbirds were artists to be proud of—not so much, perhaps, because of special genius as for their almost uncanny sticking proclivities. It was, in truth, an organization of the most amazing sort, which had built itself up gradually about Xenophon Curry’s vast heart. Surely no organization was ever before so supremely an affair of the heart. Curry had drawn his songbirds to him from all over the world. Essentially a cosmopolitan himself (“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool hybrid”) he had kept open house in his heart for all sorts and conditions of people. Under his wing, one by one, he had gathered the struggling, the discouraged, the heavy-laden—even a soul now and then that called itself plainly down and out. And not only songbirds, but a tiny orchestra had been drawn in, too, by patient degrees: now a violinist with aspiring soul rescued from some dreadful little cafÉ chantant in Vienna; now a flute player off the hills of Sicily; again a lowly snare drummer in a band somewhere in Kentucky, who had a deep-seated passion for the kettles. They knew they could count on him to the last ditch, and so were willing to follow anywhere he led. It was really a little touching. Certainly in no other way would it have been possible for Mr. Curry to do the things he had done, for, from a worldly point of view, no impresario, barring none, ever met with such shocking and consistent adversity. Over his eggs the impresario read of an auction sale to be held that afternoon at Crawl Hill and the list sounded promising. Mr. Curry made it a point to attend auctions whenever possible, for in this manner he was sometimes able to pick up odd bits to use as properties in his necessarily heterogeneous productions. He decided to stroll around and nose for bargains that might fit into the world tour. The weather being delightful, Curry literally did stroll. But when he had at length covered some considerable distance he began to ask himself where Crawl Hill was, after all. He remembered it vaguely, and was certain of the general neighbourhood; but just how to get there was developing into another matter. He would have to begin inquiring. He half paused. And as he did so a pleasant voice challenged him at his elbow. The impresario turned and faced a tall, quite handsome lady, near his own age, gowned expensively and somewhat complexly. Her eyes were frank, her demeanour that of one who has been much about and feels at home in the combinations of a moving life without sacrificing a rather unusual fund of freshness. “I beg your pardon,” she said, smiling easily and just a little grandly, “but I wonder if you could tell me how to get to Crawl Hill?” Mr. Curry’s face lighted humorously. “A moment more and I might have put the same question to you.” “Oh, I see!” she observed, simply and even graciously, much as though they were old friends. “Quite a coincidence—isn’t it? I thought I knew perfectly well when I started out, but this part of the city has changed so!” “Lord, hasn’t it! Crawl Hill used to be one of those big places”—he enlarged a little upon the circumstances, adding: “Since we’re both headed for the same auction, we might walk on together, and I’ll ask the way.” “It’s very kind of you, I’m sure!” she told him, her manner more than ever gracious. So the stroll was thus resumed, and Mr. Curry was struck with the peculiar ease he felt from the very beginning in his new companion’s company. Their talk, as they proceeded, widened gradually to embrace a considerable range of subjects: cheerful commonplaces—just, as a contemporary puts it, “the talk which goes up the chimney with the spark of the wood fire.” Discreet, polite side-glances revealed, for him, an undoubtedly romantic lady nearly as tall as himself, vaguely lavish, just faintly overpowering in her enthusiasms, who walked along with free, hopeful stride and lifted her arching brows in an unbroken expression of communicative pleasantness. She wore a cloak made from an Arabian gondura—a fabric of rusty plum with intricate embellishment of bright green braid. There were wide flowing sleeves; and underneath the cloak one now and then caught sight of confusing details; a bit of Paisley, blue serge, large decorated brass buttons. Her hat was an oddly shaped straw with an ample feather falling off behind. The lady, for her part, quickly noted his air of bustling optimism and seemed responding to it with unconscious warmth; at first, it is true, she had eyed his rings and general air of the exotic with some slight twinges of doubt: but after she had received one or two of his radiant smiles it was only too plain she felt it would be unhandsome to hold so small a matter against him. Indeed, he seemed to perceive in her at once an element of happy tolerance, at the same time that he was very sure he caught a genuine passion for the artistic. Above all he couldn’t but be impressed with the uplifting and flowing quality in her rich voice. “I learned about the auction from some friends who have been spending months in Morocco, where they heard about Mr. Hoadley’s death and immediately thought about the lovely ‘things’ every one remembers having seen in his house here in San Francisco!” Her sentences, inclined to be “Germanic,” moved with the liquid fluency of a wide, well-mannered river. And there were words she stressed saliently or perhaps rather lingered over; it was a little quaint. One came to listen for them. Other words, too, which, by the most marvellous yet wholly artless subtlety in shading, she managed to slip within quotation marks—although, as a matter of fact, there was seldom any real reason for their being quoted. “I don’t expect to find a thing that I’ll really buy, for everything’s sure to be quite dear, you know, considering how immensely rich Mr. Hoadley was when he did his collecting, although it’s always pleasant to just visit these ‘sales’ and look around and perhaps pick up some little trifles that catch one’s fancy—as trifles have such an irresistible way of doing!” II Crawl Hill, when at last they reached it, proved to be a tall frowning old house, whose once considerable grounds had shrunk to a mere wisp of withered lawn. Within they breathed a heavy mustiness. It was a bit ghostly, too—decidedly a place to be visited by daylight. And as for the little adventure—well, it didn’t, after all, lapse at the door. Mr. Curry, as they moved on together through the crowd, told himself there was nothing so very unusual in their having met like this. He was always meeting people—was a Bohemian—freely admitted it. But was this lady a Bohemian also? And who was she? He was on the verge of learning, and the method was rather happy. It chanced that somewhat apart from the throng stood a satin-wood console of the French Renaissance period, on which reposed an ornate silver card tray. She liked the tray—“not that one would really want it, you know, for of course it is a little ‘overdone’; but it reminds one of the Victorians—doesn’t it?—and I think there was much to admire in them, although it has become the fashion to sneer at their dust-catching ‘ideas.’” And the tray gave Mr. Curry an unexpected cue. He smiled and drew out his wallet, then, selecting one of his cards, tossed it humorously down. Her eyes lighted quickly, and, without a word, she brought out one of her own, too, and placed it beside his on the tray. Then they stood there side by side, like two absurd children, reading each other’s cards. Hers was very modest and simple: Flora Utterbourne, with no address. But his, being so ambitious, not to say overwhelming an affair, naturally called for a small smiling effusion on her part. “I know you by ‘reputation,’ though I’ve never had the pleasure of attending one of your performances. It’s always sounded so interesting!” And then—well, then he just plunged in and began telling her all about the world tour; and she suggested they sit down “in those delightful Lorenzo di Medici chairs;” no one would object, she was sure; and if they wanted to sell the chairs before he had finished telling her about the world tour, why then they would just move over to “that ‘Huguenot’ bench in the hall, which is sure not to be ‘put up,’” she laughed, “until quite the last thing!” So they sat in the Lorenzo di Medici chairs while the auction hummed on about them, and he opened his ardent heart, and she followed everything he said with an immense facial responsiveness. (Sometimes people found this a trifle disconcerting, because her feeling about whatever you were saying had a way of seeming just a bit stronger than your own.) And, in her large, rich, impulsive way she would keep interrupting him with fragments of delighted appreciation. “By Schooner!” for instance: “but this is the most amazing thing I ever heard of!” Or again: “No crew, but a fresh coat of paint!” She could grasp the essential high points of humour in a situation and bring them together; yet there was nothing the least satirical or mocking. The impresario felt on friendly turf, and deluged her with eager, bustling words. He became inspired, impassioned. He gestured a little wildly. But she found it all wildness with an appealing tang, and rejoiced in the current of his really electric enthusiasm. When he had finished, his whole eloquent person relaxed slowly. Mr. Curry was like a superb engine, which couldn’t be expected to cool off just in a minute. III A gate-legged mahogany table had arrested Miss Utterbourne’s notice. She calculated its fineness with an eye accurate from long and loving experience. She became enthusiastic, and finally, smiling excitedly at the impresario, whispered: “I’m going to bid on it!” Of course Mr. Curry at once took a step and cleared his throat, gallantly ready to do the actual bidding for her; but he was surprised to find himself wonderfully eclipsed by the lady herself, who pressed resolutely up through the crowd toward the auctioneer, her manner all at once proclaiming her an adept at this sort of thing. “Fifty!” she tendered firmly. “Fifty-five,” countered a man with cold eyes and shiny elbows. “Sixty!” She was serene and undaunted, and the opponent withdrew at seventy-five. “I got it!” she exulted, giving her head a small toss. “And of course an absurd ‘bargain,’ considering its unusual size, though a less expensive one would have served my purpose, if it weren’t that ‘gate-legged’ tables are my special weakness!” He couldn’t conceal his astonishment. “You went after it as though you made a real business of such things.” And she had another of his fine smiles. “Well, you see I do—in a way!” “What! A business of bidding at auctions?” “Oh, no,” she laughed, “my ‘business’ is apartments!” “Apartments!” She had put on her gold-rimmed nippers, and they straddled her nose in a humorous, faintly pompous manner. “It’s the only way I can gratify my craving for rare and ‘intriguing’ possessions! You see I take an apartment, furnish it with all the lovely ‘things’ I couldn’t afford for myself, and then turn the key over to a tenant who will pay me the difference!” Her face displayed tokens of the anxiety which belonged to an at length pretty involved background of sub-leased domiciles. “Of course,” she confessed, speaking now slowly, almost cosily, “it’s always a pang to move out, though there’s the new apartment to begin ‘planning,’ and then,” her voice dropping a little and her eyes smiling in a deliciously sly way behind their friendly nippers, “I sometimes just have to slip a few things along with me—my tendency is to ‘over-furnish’ anyhow.” He by no means missed the note of pathos in her brave little scheme; yet she had assured him, too: “You’d be surprised how settled I manage to feel in the midst of what, of course, in one sense, doesn’t really belong to me!” “That’s the only home you have, then—the home that only lasts until it’s furnished?” “Yes,” she slowly admitted, “I’m afraid so. Sometimes there does seem a good deal of ‘irony’ deep down underneath everything!” “Ah!” sighed the impresario, though a radiant smile broke through in spite of him, “no one understands such things better than I. Life’s just full of irony, isn’t it?—whichever way you turn!” “My brother, Captain Utterbourne,” she observed, “has all sorts of subtle theories about it, though I never can remember just how they go afterward, since, you see, he has a way of ‘conveying’ so much and yet really saying so little!” There was a breath of musing silence between them, and then Mr. Curry’s eyes lighted suddenly. “You mean—a sea captain?” “Yes,” she told him, “although I often feel it’s more a hobby with him than exactly a profession.” Her smile was full of humour and a kind of furtive family loyalty. “I wonder,” ventured the impresario impulsively, “if your brother would be willing to help me—that is, give me a little advice....” “Oh, I see!” she cried, quickly catching the drift behind his eagerness. “About the ‘world tour’! Of course,” she hesitated, “Christopher is sometimes a trifle set in his ‘ideas’ about how things ought to be managed: but he knows hundreds of ‘seafaring’ men—some of them really quite remarkable; and unless he should get swept away from us on one of his whims of ‘perversity’, I’m sure he could get your schooner equipped with something more than a coat!” Curry’s delight was almost speechless. He ardently scribbled his San Francisco address on one of his cards, and she put it carefully away inside her bag—a large and complex bag, which the beholder could not but assume entered conspicuously into the manipulation of a complex existence. IV Flora, full of her new theme, went straight to her brother about it that very evening. “Oh, Chris—such an interesting impresario—clear around the world in a schooner: the Skimming Duckie, or something like that—quite daring and original”—it was just a little breathless and sketchy at first. But her brother bantered, in his freezing way: “You make it all crystal clear, Flora. A schooner?” And then he shouted. He did not laugh, he shouted. It was a little uncouth; but the Captain liked to be a little uncouth sometimes. It helped him with the sea captain atmosphere, which, after all, as has been suggested, wasn’t quite a native emanation. Utterbourne had perhaps out of sheer perversity taken to the sea, and made a success of it; yet he had a meditative, quizzical trend of mind, and leaned a little to hesitancies, a great deal to analysis. He was an enigma of the first water; yet to those who knew him best it sometimes seemed as though he possessed the heart of a mystic—almost of a poet. “Oh, well,” was the upshot of the talk, “if you like. I’m busy—h’m? But tell him to phone in for an appointment.” The tone was one of cold generosity, which never failed more or less to frighten the listener—a stab of formality that not even his own sister could hope to escape. But she didn’t mind in the least, even though she may have been a little frightened. She just arched her fine brows gratefully and said: “Thank you so much, Chris! You’ll never regret it, I know, and he’s really quite celebrated, in a way—though I presume the ‘world tour’ will add a great deal to his fame!” And her hand rested a moment upon her brother’s responseless arm. Well, in no time at all the excited impresario was phoning for an appointment. Then he called at the smoky offices of the Hyde Packet company, which he brightened enormously with his glowing, optimistic enthusiasm. Utterbourne, from the first, of course, looked upon Flora’s new friend as a figure of comedy; nevertheless it only showed a little in the quivering of his lips; and he knew of a skipper, he said—a Captain Bearman—who might be prevailed upon to take hold, in case he happened to be without a ship just now. Luck was kind. Captain Bearman was very much without a ship, and, in his own rather acid fashion, seized almost avidly upon the opportunity at hand. His fashion, it developed, was full of snarls and shrouded in a rind of perpetual crustiness. But he was an authentic sea captain, notwithstanding, and the impresario rejoiced over him ardently. A little dinner was arranged at the Pavillon d’Orient—an Armenian resort famous for its skewered meats and imported cheeses. Utterbourne actually came himself, and brought Bearman along; while, out of the warm abundance of his generosity the impresario invited a certain young clerk of his acquaintance. (“He’s got such a shut-in, humdrum look.”) And there was champagne, which more or less went to the clerk’s head, and made him feel, for the time-being, a person of considerable consequence. Naturally Utterbourne talked of everything under the sun except the subject that had brought them together. He spoke poisingly of fate and art and habit and flayed immortality within an inch of its life and said “H’m?” a great many times and hummed To a Wild Rose. And when, later on, Curry referred to the merchandise which the Skipping Goone would carry by way of defraying expenses as a “sideline,” then Utterbourne drawled over his shish kÉbab: “It’s to be presumed we all have our sidelines, of one sort and another—h’m? With some it’s gambling, with others art, literature, some branch of scientific research—h’m? With most of us, perhaps, it’s just women”—more sea captain atmosphere. But Curry staunchly defended his sideline—said it had come to him in Oshkosh while he was directing the last act of the Gondoliers one night—really an inspiration, nothing short of that! And Utterbourne said “Yes,” while the other captain, out of a flaming profusion of auburn whiskers, echoed it: “Er—yes,” with a most curious, quick little side-glance of his narrow green eyes, which somehow instantly set him down as a satellite. Captain Bearman was big and bluff-looking, with the sea quite oozing from his whole personality; there was even a little gold braid, and, in spite of some rather doubtful cuffs, he looked like an admiral; yet for all that it was only too plain he fawned on Captain Utterbourne—and fawned very acutely. He couldn’t seem to be obsequious and echoing enough—it was rather baffling. He would always echo: “Er—yes,” or “Er—no,” as the case might be, and ordered all the dishes the other captain ordered, and, in brief, took the cue from him in everything. At first Utterbourne by no means went out of his way to avoid conveying the impression that the project of the Skipping Goone was unseaworthy; and Captain Bearman, simply because he possessed what the psychologists call an “inferiority complex,” and though it might mean a lapsing of his present opportunity, made his embittered lips curl in sympathetic disdain. But as the impresario climbed to higher and ever higher levels of honest zeal, gradually Utterbourne thawed somewhat, leaning negligently back, his knife prying about the base of his goblet, often rather gravely menacing its equilibrium; and at once, of course, the other captain began to thaw too. From that time on the prospects were ever so much better. Of course Xenophon Curry was an enthusiast, and of course the champagne had made him exhort a good deal about the supreme virtue of his songbirds (“It’s not that they’ve all got million dollar voices, for I can’t keep that kind; but they’ve all got million dollar hearts!”) And of course he talked a little wildly about his great dream—New York and the capitals of Europe.... Yet the serene and glacial Captain Utterbourne felt in spite of himself a little touched, and merely thought it expedient at last to observe, his voice slipping out between reluctant lips like a thin ribbon of lazy ice: “You must take care, Mr. Curry—h’m?—not to let a possible material success ... I mean,” he cleared his throat with faint petulance, “you mustn’t let your sideline turn you into a rival of ours rather than of Gatti Cassazza’s.” It was finally settled, and Bearman became the master of the Skipping Goone, and the radiant impresario, as he hailed a taxi for the entire party by way of ending the evening in a blaze of style, cried: “The schooner will turn the trick—you’ll see!” In a word, it was nothing short of a triumph.
CHAPTER SIX
STEALING THE THUNDER FROM IRMENGARDE I Meantime, Elsa Utterbourne’s ball had certainly proved the turning point for Stella! All at once her life seemed packed with romance, and the bewildered girl who had rebelled so bitterly against the eventlessness of everything hadn’t time half to realize the wonders that were taking place. The whole house seemed the brighter for Stella’s having gone to the party. Yes, even near-sighted Ted smiled quite knowingly after Maud had whispered a mysterious something in his ear behind the pantry door—for Maud was shrewder than most people imagined, despite her fatal plainness. She had guessed there were happy secrets in the air. As for Stella—she refused to give in to those darker promptings which suggested that Mr. King might, alas, have been merely amusing himself, and had no intention really of calling. No, it was too wonderful to turn out thus. Even Irmengarde would be thrilled—she couldn’t help herself. The evening after the party Jerome came, and wanted to make it up. “I don’t see what I’ve done all of a sudden,” he said, “to make you turn against me like this!” And a moment later he was assuring her, with most unusual vigour, that he didn’t intend to let a girl throw him down just because she “gets an idea in her head.” Indeed, as he urged his cause, Jerome looked quite roused and fiery. He rather amazed her, and finally, by way of overwhelming climax, produced a ring. “I got to thinking,” he covered it very simply. “Not such a big stone, of course—the big ones cost like a house and lot. But the clerk at Ascher’s said we could trade it in toward a larger one any time, and he told me it was a good little diamond, even if it’s not so very showy.” “Oh, Jerome—!” She clasped her hands in bewilderment. “Let’s see how it fits!” he pleaded. So she let him slip it on to her finger—how life galloped! And after that—well, since she knew less now than ever which way to turn, Stella ended by consenting to keep the ring, at least until she’d definitely made up her mind. Tenderness and remorse and tears nearly overcame her. “You must let me think.... I—I’ll send you a note!” Her eyes were soft with romance. And they kissed—for one may kiss, even if one doesn’t know which way to turn. From the time he left her until the next morning when the florist’s boy arrived, Stella’s mind was indeed in a state of quandary, and Jerome had at least a fair fighting chance. However, the florist’s boy brought a small but authentic box of violets, and a note from Mr. King written on the stationery of Captain Utterbourne’s club; he was going to call that evening! And then—had Jerome but known it as he sat poring over the ledger, he might just as well have withdrawn from the arena altogether. The only drawback, except that Mr. King must necessarily learn what a shabby house she lived in, was the fact that Stella would have to receive him in the same gown she had worn to the ball, and which fortunately hadn’t yet been returned. Nothing in her wardrobe would suffice. However, capable Maud found that the neck of Elsa’s gown could be temporarily built up with a bit of chiffon so that it would appear a less formal creation; and in fact, her mouth mumblingly impeded with pins, Maud very soon proved how surprisingly it might be disguised as another gown altogether. Just at the last minute Stella ran to her sister and pressed a tiny package into her hand. “Won’t you please ask Ted to run around to the Stewarts’ and give this to Jerome? There won’t be any answer—he’ll understand.” Then she turned up the gas in the parlour and sat in glittering state to receive her caller. After a quarter of an hour of more or less breathless readjustment, the situation began to show signs of growing manageable. His ample charm and magnetism carried everything before them. Their talk led them by degrees into a simpler intimacy than it had been possible to establish at the ball. He told her, discreetly, more of his romantic life; and she managed to tell him of her life, too, without quite letting the cat out of the bag—that is, without quite letting him see that what she showed him was the wistful all.... He left with reluctance, but they were to meet again the next afternoon, at the matinÉe. The house was still and dark; yet she was partly mistaken in deciding all the family were asleep at the time of Mr. King’s departure. Hardly had she turned out her light on an image in the glass which had become strangely tolerable, when she heard slippered feet, and Maud was kneeling beside the bed, searching her hand. “Oh, Stella!” she whispered in tones of throbbing and unselfish delight, “I think Mr. King’s just grand, dear!” II It all seemed so bewildering—so utterly incredible. They went to the matinÉe. They strolled in Golden Gate Park and watched the swans and laughed a great deal over hot tamales on the beach. He became a frequent caller—and sometimes it seemed to the delighted girl that the florist’s box was even more frequent. He seemed to know so expertly how everything should be done: such intoxicating manners, such style! He seemed to have dropped right from the skies into her dazzled heart. From this time forward her little romance moved swiftly indeed. Before she had half time to realize—yes, even begin to realize—what was really taking place, he had asked her to become his wife. “You’re the first girl I’ve cared enough for,” was the way he phrased it; though it goes without saying that a man of Mr. King’s temperament must more or less have cared for a good many girls in his day. “I guess I can manage to make you happy, little girl,” he assured her, with a certain splendid imperiousness, “though perhaps you might come to long for a more settled life....” He had just arrived from a secret conference with Captain Utterbourne under the shadow of an august map of the world. But of course Stella was up in arms at once: “I never want to stop! I want to go on and on, out in the world, seeing new things, meeting new people...!” And, in his graceful way, he allowed her to carry the point. Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny! “I just have to blush right to his face every time he looks at me, he is so handsome!” was one of Aunt Alice’s voluble confidences shared by Maud out in the kitchen. “I’ve got a psychic feeling he’s just the one for our little Stella, and yet don’t it beat all! My gracious, Maud, you’d think he’d never look at any one less than a countess! And his side view makes me think of a picture I saw once in the paper of a man who was going to marry a duchess!” Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny! The afternoon was idyllic. Mr. King and Stella were sitting together before a tiny fire, and there was tea. It was very cosy and romantic. She had been doing some mending before he came, and had hurriedly laid her basket aside. Breaking off in the midst of a very glowing description of the Riviera when at its gayest, however, he suddenly begged her to go on with her sewing. She demurred, naturally: “It’s such awfully plain and uninteresting work!” But he insisted that it completed the “domestic picture,” and added: “You don’t know how charming it is to see a woman sitting before the fire busy with needlework.” At length she complied; but it vaguely alarmed the girl. “All I want to do is to get away!” she cried throwing her arms wide, though she still grasped the garment she was mending, bringing it thus a little whimsically into the gesture. “What you’ve told me of your life sounds so wonderful!” she sighed happily. “Well, it’s adventurous,” he conceded. And then he asked her: “What does your father think about it?” “Why, what could he think but what every one thinks?” King might have asked, not perhaps egregiously or unreasonably, what every one did think; but he merely amplified: “I had in mind my immediate prospects.” “With Captain Utterbourne?” “Yes—and its having to be handled in so hushed and confidential a way.” “Oh, but to me the mystery—that is the most wonderful part!” she cried. “I love having everything mysterious!” He gave her hand a little squeeze, and she looked up at him, happily thrilled. She pictured herself going through life with him like this, thrilled, always thrilled, each day full of delicious mystery and romance. He began murmuring a bit of nursery jingle, which sounded in her charmed ears like the rarest music: “‘Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine? Thou shalt not wash dishes nor feed the swine, But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, And feast upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!’” “Oh, I wonder,” she laughed softly, “—will it really be like that? How did this wonderful thing ever happen to me?” III As he rather suspected, Mr. King was destined to encounter a brief impediment in the person of Stella’s father. Who was Mr. King? What did any one really know about him, and why so much mystery about the future? But the answer was always simply: “Why, Utterbourne—your old friend Captain Utterbourne.” Mr. Meade’s position was certainly not a simple one, especially since he seemed to be the only one attempting, even hesitatingly, to stand in the way of true love. And, though he tried to see the situation all clearly and advise what seemed best, the worst of it was he felt Mr. King’s peculiar fascination, too, in a sense, and so seemed unable to make up his mind as to the values of an unusual situation. “Stella,” he said, in his grave way, “are you sure—that’s the point—dead sure, girlie?” And Stella was thinking excitedly: “If father really makes a fuss, we’ll elope!” It was just the tang of fire which completed the romance of this whole unbelievable circumstance. Captain Utterbourne, as a matter of fact, was inclined, in his faintly quizzical and even petulant way, to dissuasion, when he learned the length to which affairs had run. He tried delicately to ease his mind. Meade was so simple. “King’s all right, of course—h’m? Though perhaps romantic....” It was as near as he could come to uttering platitudes like Iago. “The trouble with King is, he’s too irresistible. How he’s managed to escape all these years is beyond my comprehension! I must say,” the Captain complained, “it’s something of a calamity he should have chosen this particular time—h’m? But the man, it seems, refuses to listen to reason, just as the woman refuses. However,” he added, in a thin, hand-washing tone, “from your point of view I can see how it may appear something of a catch—h’m?” And he left, humming To a Wild Rose. But at length the creases were quite ironed out. Mr. Meade called King into the back parlour and told him it was all right—though his voice broke just a little as he added: “I only want my girl to be happy.” They were definitely to be married, and Stella naturally didn’t have time for anything any more. Even sleep was an indulgence almost crowded out. How life tore along! One day she unexpectedly met Jerome downtown. The contrast between them was really startling. It seemed unbelievable a man so hopelessly obscure and a girl so conspicuously important could have been engaged to each other only a few short weeks ago. What a pace she had gone! But Jerome, with the clip on his tie and his jaunty little pipe between his lips, looked more than ever irrevocably fixed in a certain niche. He tried still to flatter his ego into believing that, despite appearances, Stella would be the heavier loser; but such flattery was obviously growing harder every day. When they met, Stella was bound for a tea engagement with Elsa. Indeed, just as they were speaking, Elsa herself came along. “Ah?” she said, with cool uplifting voice and cool down-drooping eyes. “Oh, am I late, Elsa?” “No. But even if you were, a bride-to-be is always forgiven anything.” She gave Jerome a glancing look. “I’d like you to meet my friend Miss Utterbourne,” said Stella, turning to Jerome, and feeling that the situation might possibly develop embarrassments. The two nodded formally, Elsa’s eyes merely drooping a little more. Then Jerome felt so profoundly unhappy that he just mumbled something, raised his hat, and left them. But as he walked he unconsciously straightened his shoulders a little, and held his head surprisingly high. “Isn’t that the young man you threw over, Stella?” “Yes, we were engaged for awhile,” Stella replied with a tone of attempted lightness. Elsa gazed after him. “Something tells me you’ll never see him again.” Her friend appeared rather startled. “What do you mean, Elsa?” “I don’t know,” the other shrugged. “The way his back looked, I guess. Things come to me like that, and I always speak them out.” “Do you mean he might do something—something desperate?” faltered Stella. Then Elsa laughed. “No, little one, you miss my meaning. What I meant was he’d never give you another chance.” She chuckled cryptically. “I suppose, in a way, it does look like rushing into matrimony,” observed Stella happily, sipping her tea and trying to be convincingly sophisticated. Elsa stared in her blank way. “Everybody admits he’s wonderful,” she etched. “Still, to be perfectly frank, it does seem somewhat pell-mell, even assuming the man to be wealthy and—well, a kind of prince.” Her eyes were whimsical. But since Mr. King had to dash away to parts unknown in the Star of Troy, without giving any one a chance to catch one’s breath, was there anything to be done about it, after all? “Parts unknown,” mused Elsa. Yes, rather a complete mystery, all round. “I can’t tell you any more about it, Elsa, because I don’t know any more. Hasn’t your father even mentioned it?” Elsa smiled with not a little of the parental cynicism, though it flickered more warmly upon her kindlier mouth and in her cow-brown eyes. “I haven’t a bit of pull, dear child. The Captain, though he’s a sort of an old dear, is just about as communicative as a clam, even with me.” “Whenever I say anything about it all,” admitted Stella, but with shining eyes, “Ferdinand tells me to remember what happened in the case of Lohengrin. What did happen, do you remember?” she smiled. Still, though she had coaxed very prettily at times, especially toward the last, she had also come, perhaps even a bit consciously, as the closer intimacy developed, to live up to that doll-like ideal King seemed rather to nurse in his high-sailing heart. “Leave everything to me, little lady,” he had urged, in his magnetic, irresistible fashion. “Never you worry that dear little head of yours about business. It doesn’t belong in a woman’s sphere. Does it, peaches? You just leave things to me, and if we’re successful in this deal, I’ll take you to Paris and buy you all the hats in the rue de la Paix!” Elsa warned her young friend against “letting any man make a ninny” of her. “You seem to be quite hypnotized, Stella. It’s all very well,” she observed, her eyes drooping so much that it looked as though she were pulling the corners down with her fingers, “to let a man think he can run his business without you to begin with. They always lead off like that. But unless you mean to be a traitor to your sex, you can’t begin too soon letting it be known (I don’t care if he is a prince!) that the old lord-and-master idea has been converted into a sieve.” She paused, then smilingly dropped in an extra lump. “It’s because I refuse to be a traitor that I’m no longer wearing my engagement ring.” “What!” cried Stella in real dismay. Elsa held up the vacant finger with a philosophic grimace. “But—” “I’d rather not go into it now, if you don’t mind,” she half yawned. “It’s rather a boring business, and I’m trying to forget I was ever such a fool as to be taken in.” “Oh, but Elsa—after starting off so splendidly—the dance....” “Well, isn’t it better to wake up now than too late? Besides, it’s merely an episode. Love is only an episode, little one. Don’t you hang on so hard to your dangerous ideals!” And she reached across and pinched Stella’s cheek in her vaguely rough way. IV The wedding was a very quiet and modest affair—a little quieter and more modest, to tell the truth, than quite appealed to Stella’s ambitious notions of grandeur, though it was a church wedding, too, with a small reception afterward. Of course every one was tremendously impressed by the bridegroom, and everybody said how sweet the bride looked. Aunt Alice wept happy tears on people’s shoulders, and between whiles talked faster than any one else. Meade gave his daughter away, and looked very proud, though also a little pathetic in his dress suit. There were all sorts of nice gifts for the bride, most of which, for the time being, would have to be left behind. And one of the gifts gave Stella a real momentary, ungraspable heartache. It was a small cut-glass fruit bowl, and within lay a blank card on which, in cramped scrawl, appeared the single word: Jerome.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIKE THE BARQUE OF CLEOPATRA I She was now Mrs. Ferdinand King, and had sailed away in Captain Utterbourne’s Star of Troy on a honeymoon full of mystery—one destined to carry her not even she knew whither or how far. But Jerome just remained a clerk immersed in the dust and antiquity of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s. He told himself he must keep up a worldly front behind which he could hide his great unhappiness. This attempt found expression in a certain rather superficial cockiness, valiantly aided and abetted by the jaunty little pipe. But he had lost the one girl he ever really cared for, and felt the loss bitterly. With Stella seemed to go out, too, forever, that dream of hearth and kiddies to which he had clung so lovingly and so long. He could not show these things, however. And his ego, though not morbidly sensitive or in the least vindictive, was still squirming—it was all pretty complex. During this unhappy period his defensive cheerfulness was made vaguely easier by a somewhat surprising friendship which had developed between himself and the picturesque impresario. After the visit to the schooner, and certainly after the dinner, the impresario might very logically have dropped from his horizon; nevertheless, Jerome went right on seeing him at odd times and places—and, most notably, had been permitted to attend several rehearsals. These were naturally dazzling experiences, which gave the clerk glimpses of a wholly new world and brought him into vivid if momentary contact with men and women who, in their blithe, impressively sophisticated manner, appeared to know about all there was to know about life. Some of the songbirds, it is true, rather kidded the impresario for taking up with the young clerk; and one of the singers, the official comedian of the company, worked up a highly successful imitation, which became one of the best things he did. Yet of course when he appeared upon the scene, Mr. Curry’s new friend was treated with tremendous respect. As for Jerome, he thought the members of the troupe without exception splendid; and, partly, no doubt, as a means of easing the distress in his heart, even began telling himself he was growing positively infatuated with a certain girl who did a few small rÔles, but mostly sang in the chorus. Her name was Lili—an extraordinary creature, with great wide, bewitching, wicked light brown eyes which were always beaming; a mouth that existed only for eating and loving; a wealth of rich massed hair and—well, nobody ever did know how much there was underneath it—perhaps a very great deal, for Lili was deep, in her way, despite genuinely child-like qualities. She was a truly delightful person, impulsive and affectionate and a trifle flighty, with a healthy desire to be a prima donna. Lili used to amuse herself, when Jerome came amongst them, by beaming on the poor clerk till he had to blink and would grow quite red. She had a way of gradually opening her eyes wider and wider as she beamed, which produced a really electric effect and would make any one’s pulse, pre-eminently the pulse of a clerk who had never been beamed on that way before, double and treble its accustomed beat. He didn’t dream it was she who laughed most heartily over the efforts of the comedian, and that she herself one day took round a petition, drawn up by the comedian, requesting signatures of all the male members of the troupe who would agree to adopt fashion’s latest mandate: a patent clip to hold down the ends of one’s tie and keep one’s shoulders from growing too haughty. II With everything vigorously under way, and the actual sailing day in sight, Xenophon Curry was calling on his friend and benefactress, Flora Utterbourne, to express for perhaps the hundredth time his overwhelming gratitude. He stirred his tea happily and looked about the little drawing room which Flora had made so much her own with the assistance of sales and auctions. Glancing about one understood Flora’s success. The tea things stood between them on the very gate-legged table acquired at Crawl Hill, and in which the impresario insisted upon feeling a whimsical part interest. Flora had just returned from a luncheon party—they had met, as a matter of fact, on her threshold—and as they sipped and chatted she informally lifted off a hat of faun straw and figured silk, thrusting the pins back into it, with the veil still where it had been brushed up out of the way across the crown. She laid the hat aside and touched her hair comfortably. His response to the geniality of this hour of early twilight, with a small clock ticking somewhere, was very whole-hearted, though of course sentimental, because everything about the impresario was sentimental. Some turn or other in the talk presently brought up the subject of his rings. “I’ve been noticing them,” she smiled. “It seems to me I’ve never seen so many—and some of the ‘stones’ seem quite wonderful!” “I know,” he laughed, “there are a good many more than there ought to be, but I get so attached to each new one that drops into my hands, I couldn’t bear to give any of ’em up.” “Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “Do they really come as easily as all that?” “Oh, well,” he confided, “it’s become a sort of custom that when one of my songbirds is offered a contract by one of the big managers and has to leave me—and I want to tell you I’ve discovered more than one now famous star and given the boost to begin with!—then I get a ring in remembrance. Sometimes it will be a great big stone—like this one, you see? Then again a more modest size, like this one. It depends,” he added confidentially, “a little on the contract; but I love every single ring on my fingers exactly the same, because each one stands for a songbird.” “A songbird who has flown away,” she murmured, her fine eyes a little sad. “Yes,” he sighed. “But it can’t be helped, and it doesn’t mean, you know, that they don’t go right on being loyal. We all have to make our way in the world. Lord, if it isn’t one thing it’s another! Money’s the main difficulty, and what can you hope to do if you never had any?” Ah, what indeed? The impresario set down his cup thoughtfully; and a moment later she sympathetically brought out her own special phase of that curious irony they had spoken of at the auction. “No one would think, to see how ‘entrenched’ we look, that I’d be out of here, ‘bag and baggage,’ early in the morning!” “What?” cried Mr. Curry, really quite shaken. She nodded and smiled at him over a slice of caramel cake she was nibbling. “Tomorrow!” “It’s really heart-breaking,” she admitted slowly, “though when I’ve had time to grow a little interested in the new ‘apartment’ it won’t matter. But it did strike me as so irresistibly funny, sitting here with you ‘over the teacups,’ that at eight o’clock the men will be at the door for my trunks!” Suddenly he leaned toward her with great earnestness. “Miss Utterbourne, I want to ask you a favour.” “Yes?” Her brows were arched in cordial interrogation. “It—it’s about this table—table we bought,” he said, quite steadily despite the brazen pronoun, and fixing her with his honest, eager gaze. “Of course,” she laughed softly, and with a subtle note of warm joyousness, “I’ve always thought of it as ‘our’ table! I shall never think of it otherwise!” “Well, I want to ask you,” he continued, earnestly thumping with one sparkling finger, “not to leave the table behind.” She coloured a little, and he pressed on: “I want you to take it with you to the new apartment for a kind of nucleus—to begin building around!” “Ah,” she sighed lightly, but with a gently glowing graciousness, “you’re a diabolical tempter at my elbow, for I’m sure you know my weakness for ‘gate-legged’ tables!” “I guess I have a weakness for them, too,” he admitted doggedly. “Well,” she laughed, blushing still more happily, “then I’m afraid the table will have to go along, really, though I’m sure the people who are subletting will notice! What would sound most plausible, do you think?” She was growing quite excited. “For it would hardly do to tell quite the facts—would it?” III Meantime, the Skipping Goone was taking on a lively appearance indeed, as the great sailing day drew close. She had hugged her wharf so long in apathetic solitude that it had begun to look as though she might be destined just to settle down in the peaceful calm of the harbour for the remainder of her days. She seemed a little weary and careless of reputation. Small urchins of the wharf played familiarly all over her decks, while a shore cat, who would have raised her paws in horror at the thought of becoming a ship’s cat, had strayed aboard through pardonable misapprehension and become parent to a generous brood of kittens. The hawsers had taken on a staid and permanent look. But lo! a great change was come about, and the Skipping Goone strained at her moorings, ready to launch forth upon the most strenuous period of her career. It was at length the very eve of departure. Jerome had been feeling very sad, with the hour of severance so nearly arrived; but as the night wore on he felt less and less sad in proportion to the augmenting glasses of claret poured out for him by the incomparable Lili, who, herself in a distinctly uplifted state, didn’t leave off beaming at all. His, just now, were sensations he could wish to prolong into an eternity; they eased his hurt at the same time that they encouraged in him a feeling that he might, if he would, cut a tremendous figure in life. Could Stella look in upon him now here in the dazzling midst of Girardin’s French table d’hÔte, surrounded by gay opera singers making the most of their last night on shore, she would think there had been strides since the day they had quarrelled in the fog. “Pass the bottle along down, dear old dear!” somebody shouted. All things considered, it was a remarkably democratic aggregation of songbirds. Naturally when he boasted about its being one big family, the impresario exaggerated a little; for of course there was a perpetual swarm of petty jealousies and artistic differences—though what are most families like, anyhow? By and large, the troupe was an extraordinary model of ruined caste. When the fun was at its height, Curry waved a gem-encrusted hand, gave his songbirds a departing smile, and removed himself to a distant corner of the restaurant where he could spread out all those “dreadful lists and things” which Captain Bearman insisted must be checked up. His retreat was deplored by a prodigious groan, and impulsively covered by Lili, who chased after him with a slopping goblet of wine and a depleted plate of sandwiches. “So you won’t starve to death, old dear!” And she flung her arms spontaneously round his neck before returning to beam upon her clerk. “You’d think it ought to be an easy thing to run a schooner,” Curry smiled up wanly at M. Girardin, who had strolled over from his little cash booth in a relaxed mood. “But Lord! there’s been nothing but trouble from the word go!” Captain Bearman was turning out to be a master full of whines and unforeseen exactions. There had been endless fault to find with the Shipping Goone. “What a vessel! Sails rotten, hull rotten! Rudder in the last stages!” Apparently there was nothing quite right about the poor old Skipping Goone, of which the impresario had been so proud, except perhaps the new coat of paint—and even the colour of that had been grumblingly objected to as unnautical. “And then,” Girardin was told, “the cargo!” “But mon dieu, do you intend to handle it all yourself? Have you no business manager, par example?” “Well, perhaps not in the strict sense,” admitted Mr. Curry in his petitioning, confidential way. “There’s a sort of treasurer—you see that man just waving the bottle? But he just handles the box office receipts. Then I’ve got a kind of assistant, too, who’s supposed to do things; but he’s been so crazy to go on the stage that I’ve had to let him sing in the chorus, and that seems to make him not much good for anything else.” An unusual amount of commotion on the other side of the restaurant made them look across. Most of the troupers had had sense, but a few were in a very mellow condition—notably Jerome, who wasn’t used to stimulants and so reacted to them with awful completeness. The songbirds were grouped in a crowding and boisterous circle. One of the men was whistling a jig tune, and several were clapping their hands in syncopated time, while in the centre, very much flushed and largely unable to keep his balance, was Jerome, doing the sailor’s hornpipe. IV In the cold grey dawn of the great sailing day, shadowy figures began going aboard the Skipping Goone. The city delivered them up. Then gradually the city awoke, and the waterfront went about its usual occupations. As morning advanced, the Skipping Goone became a setting for some of the wildest scenes in the history of opera in America. Red-eyed sopranos were bumped by stevedores; a stout lady whose forte was contralto matrons, went madly about in search of a trunk. Sailors were puttering, while Captain Bearman croaked out sullen orders through his beautiful flaming whiskers. Finally, the lord of all commotion, Xenophon Curry, who was sure, yes desperately and perspiringly sure, half the important things had been forgotten. And of course Flora Utterbourne was on hand to see them off. She walked right aboard the Skipping Goone, her face smilingly full of every good wish for the impresario as she stood beside him on deck conversing with unbroken animation, yet always in that fluid, gliding manner which he knew so well now. Yes, Flora in her speech flowed on like a gracious river. And there was just a faint sadness behind her frank gaze, which meant that this departure was going to leave an unexpected emptiness. However, if there was sadness in her gaze, there was sadness also in the impresario’s. Xenophon Curry, though borne up by unquenchable optimism, realized that it was going to be surprisingly hard to say good-bye—maybe for years or a lifetime—to the lady who had asked him the way to Crawl Hill. The Skipping Goone looked small and a little pathetic this morning. What was in store for them in the wide, wild ocean? A crowd was waving on the wharf. The last perfervid farewells had been said, and the singers went about nibbling bon voyage chocolates, defiant of mal de mer. There were flowers, there was even confetti. The drab old schooner had taken on a very festive look indeed—almost like the barque of Cleopatra! Every hand clutched a handkerchief, every handkerchief sought its niche in the vibrating atmosphere. A tenor tried his voice behind the deckhouse and emerged singing Auld Lang Syne. The last hawser was cast off. A tug hooted. And so it was that the Skipping Goone in her brave new paint, bearing a mixed cargo of merchandise and songbirds, gay with flutter and bloom, was trundled off down the bay and out upon the heaving vast, bound for parts remote and adventures cloaked in an impenetrable veil.
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