CHAPTER TWENTY
A FEW UPS AND A LOT OF DOWNS
I
The marriage of Jerome and Lili naturally caused quite a bit of romantic stir among the members of Xenophon Curry’s little troupe. A very hilarious party was given to celebrate the event, at which the happy bride and bridegroom were toasted, and after which (for all this occurred just on the eve of departure from Tahiti) they were sent down to the Skipping Goone in a species of hack, much festooned with ribbon and old shoes, and spattered with rice.
Jerome felt the confusion of his curious position rather keenly; but Lili appeared to fall in with the whole idea easily enough. She enjoyed the send-off almost as much as though it had been legitimate. Indeed, she had nearly all the sensations of a legitimate bride. It was wonderful to be able to find so agreeable and so entire a solution for her problem!
From Tahiti the course of the Skipping Goone lay southwest, and the next stopping point in the world tour was New Zealand, where, in the words of the comedian, a prosperous fall season was “had by all.” New Zealand became ardent in its endorsement of Xenophon Curry and his aggregation of songbirds. But this endorsement was, in turn, entirely outdone by that heaped up by Australia, where the company left its “private yacht,” as they liked to call it, and went on tour.
This carried them through the winter, and even into the spring, for the tour was a little prolonged.
Lili dreaded the coming of her baby—dreaded it enormously. Lili didn’t want any children; she looked upon the ordeal with horror. Her mood was increasingly difficult to meet as the months dragged on; and the brunt of this meeting was borne by Jerome.
After the supreme night in Hawaii, his feeling for Lili had begun to grow complex. The scene in the hotel in Tahiti, again, had introduced new values into the picture. And then—well, his marriage was not proving altogether a bed of roses. No, it wasn’t. He could not deceive himself. Almost from the beginning he had felt that it wasn’t going to be a bed of roses. Yet how little he had foreseen such unhappy developments as these back in San Francisco, when, so callow and so lonely, he had first fallen under the fatal charm of her beaming eyes!
Just after leaving Tahiti, it is true, they passed a few almost happy weeks together, Lili being able so far to forget herself and her own troubles a part of the time at least as to accord Jerome all the affection even he could desire. On her side, of course, it was affection subtly touched with gratitude; but he responded to it eagerly, and made the most of this fleeting sense of married felicity—even tried to assure himself it was somehow a condition that might be brought to endurance, despite all the unfortunate circumstances.
But more and more surely, as the weeks went by, he knew that their marriage was but a word scrawled upon the sand when the tide was low. He wasn’t wedded to Lili in any lasting sense. He was, indeed, merely saving her from an unpleasant experience. At length Jerome came to look upon what he had done as a sheer act of duty—and an act which, despite his own abiding sense of responsibility, grew slyly irksome.
Lili revealed herself to him during these months at sea and in New Zealand, and especially in Australia, when she became wrapped up in her own mantle of brooding and petulance and terror, as a being almost entirely devoid of any real sympathy. Utterly shallow, he told himself. Utterly selfish.
Of course Jerome didn’t begin to appreciate the unhappiness of her condition. He didn’t know anything about such things, and only saw stark qualities. In spite of rallying efforts, his feeling for her cooled and cooled, till at length there was little sentiment of any sort left. He even developed latent subtleties in the way of avoiding her, and finally assured himself it was a matter of profound thanksgiving that their marriage wasn’t real, but only a word in the sand.
Yet he wondered, sometimes, too, whether they might have been happier together if there had been a license, and if he had bought the wedding ring.... For he had loved her once, very extravagantly, and it bewildered him when he asked himself where his love for her had gone—what had happened to it.
Well, here were more “supreme emotions” to grapple with, certainly.
Almost nothing notable had befallen him, he always felt, during his existence previous to this amazing year; but once the era of notable experiences set in, each seemed to make in him a permanent and reorganizing difference. Jerome did a lot of thinking these days. His adventures were coming more and more to stand for elemental phases of human relationship. He thought about Lili and his feeling for Lili; thought about his strange and fugitive dip into matrimony; saw his brief first happiness grow tarnished. When their baby was born, what then? Would they go on living together like this all the rest of their lives? A child would mean a new responsibility—another obligation that couldn’t be dodged....
“I guess I’m in for it,” he muttered, with real, disillusioned grimness. Yes—very darkly in for it. And this was what had come of his unshakable desire for—a hearth and kiddies.
Sometimes his consciousness of the dilemma attained rather acute poignancy, and seemed on occasions, often trifling enough, to dramatize itself—each repetition widening the gulf a little. One night they had quarrelled, and she had pouted and wept; then, all at once she had fallen asleep.
He watched her as she lay, undried tears on her cheeks. Her eyelids were dropped like perfectly blank curtains, robbing the face of its most essential expression. There was a relaxed, earthy quality about the moulding of all the features, such as even the most spiritual faces sometimes show in sleep. As Jerome stood looking down at her, he was afflicted in a breath with compassion and disgust. Poor Lili looked so utterly and helplessly common: how had he ever deceived himself to the extent of fancying he really loved her? He remembered now with merely a feeling of cold repugnance how naÏvely he had begged her, in the old days, to marry him. He judged and condemned himself, it is true, from the standpoint of a subsequent development; but this was a nicety which didn’t now enter into his scope of vision. Jerome blamed Lili, but he also blamed himself; and it was with entire frankness he realized his feeling for this woman, nominally his wife, was a feeling of steadily entrenching distaste.
What a strange and tragic predicament to have wriggled into!
II
However, when the baby finally came, a new and very wonderful experience developed for Jerome.
He had spent little thought beforehand on what it would seem like to find himself a father. Now the fact rushed upon him and unexpectedly overwhelmed him with its grandeur.
Jerome was a father!
Yes, the great miracle had happened to him. He was a father. There was a baby boy, and the boy was his son. He hadn’t realized what it would be like to have a son. Now he knew, and the knowledge thrilled him—deeply. Jerome remembered how the clerk from the tackle store had exulted in his superb technique of casting, and how the fellow who sold typewriters had talked about his great dream, architecture; and he thought: “How very, very little all these things are compared with having a son!” These things, only because he happened to think of them, and all things like them on which men set their hearts. Even love. Yes, he thought, even love was not quite in a class with having a son. Love had come to him twice and failed. He was through with it now. He had loved Stella; she had thrown him down and married another man (how far away all that seemed!); then he had loved Lili, and had come gradually to love her no longer. But he was the father of Lili’s child.
He had a little son—and that, he told himself, was something that would last! He had given up so much; but having a son seemed to recompense for everything.
And indeed, for a time the child seemed to be drawing Jerome and Lili a little together again. Lili had hated her baby before it came; now she had it she responded to the appeal of the little new life also. She had her glimmerings: dim, errant aspirations toward something better in life than she had known. Being a mother awakened what was finest. When he saw the baby at her breast, Jerome looked down at Lili with hopeful eyes. She had failed to hold his love, but she was the baby’s mother; and love itself, he dimly felt, might steal back somehow as time went on....
All these mighty and often quite overpowering emotions transpired during the first two weeks of his august fatherhood. When Jerome had been a father two weeks, he, together with Lili and the baby and Xenophon Curry’s entire troupe of songbirds, bade farewell to Melbourne and travelled back to Sydney, the port where the first Australian engagement had been played, and from which they were to embark.
It really was a joy to see the dear old Skipping Goone once more. Some of the salutations of affection were perhaps just touched with satire; but upon the whole the troupers had settled into a state of romantic enthusiasm over this novel style of beating about the world. Even Captain Bearman, though he could scarcely be termed a popular favourite, was made the recipient of cherry smiles and waves and nods. The Skipping Goone’s master had voyaged to New Zealand and back twice with mixed cargoes. Now they were off to New Guinea (merely a cargo call); and then would come Manila.
III
Lili’s baby was the center of an enormous manifestation of interest. Xenophon Curry was simply wild, and wanted to do all sorts of reckless things with it from the very first. Indeed, the impresario took such a violent and paternal interest in the youngster that an outsider suddenly coming upon a characteristic tableau would decide at once that the man with the gay rings and the black toupee must be the baby’s father—or at the very least its grandfather. One would scarcely think, at first glance, of connecting Jerome with any phase of immediate ownership. It only showed in his eyes. If he took the baby up in his arms (which wasn’t very often) he held it so awkwardly as to make every one laugh.
The tiny boy became the company mascot. “They say a little baby often brings good luck,” observed the superstitious impresario, his honest black eyes very shiny and serious.
And naturally, if the baby was to be the company mascot, everybody in the company wanted to have a hand in the baby’s affairs. All the women who knew how to handle a needle at all began sewing every conceivable article of wardrobe which could possibly fit an infant’s needs. No mother was ever before so favoured!
Of course some of the garments turned out to be a little queer, because opera singers aren’t necessarily authorities on baby’s clothes. But a great deal of genuine affection and good will was sewed into them—even the queerest.
The mascot was petted and pampered like a poodle. Its host of admirers took turns holding it and walking with it and talking baby-talk to it. In short, the mascot was treated like a little king.
Naturally the parents were very proud. As for Lili, she could never get over this most prodigious novelty. “I just can’t believe it’s mine!” she would exclaim. Jerome felt much the same way; yet when he voiced the sentiment, Lili, remembering that wretched little soldier in Honolulu, would always look vaguely guilty. How did she know, after all, whether the baby did belong to Jerome too?
However, of course no such dark uncertainties bothered Jerome. His marriage could hardly be called better than a failure. But at least, to him, this little son was a success.
He liked to drop down beside the cradle, his hands pressed together between his knees, and just look. He couldn’t get enough of just gazing, without saying anything at all. Sometimes Lili would make fun of his silent devotion; she took the baby a great deal more sensibly than Jerome did.
And yet, however sensibly, it was rather a fortunate thing that there were so many eager and competing hands always ready to relieve her of the burden of care; otherwise, it is to be feared, the happy and beaming mother would too often have felt bored and miserable, being so much tied down. Dear Lili, though she really loved the baby, in her own happy-go-lucky way, was never cut out to be a mother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MERRY-GO-ROUND
I
Manila was reached without special incident.
As the Skipping Goone approached the harbour, a sailing skiff was sighted making straight out for the incoming schooner: a small pleasure craft with graceful lines, which had won races in its day. When the skiff came closer it was observed that some one aboard her was waving a handkerchief in very earnest welcome: a woman, nodding and smiling. With an abundant thrill, the impresario discovered her to be Flora Utterbourne!
After the first shock of joyous surprise, Mr. Curry had a curious feeling that it was somehow quite right and natural to find her here in Manila, and to have her come out in a skiff to meet him.
He wanted to climb right aboard the delightful skiff! He seriously—or rather a little hysterically—consulted, even, with Captain Bearman as to the practicability of such a manoeuvre, but received such a look of withering scorn as to force him necessarily into a mood of resignation.
It seemed impossible to wait until the schooner came to anchor. Yet by hook or crook the thing had to be managed.
The little craft skimmed and tacked about, like a playful puppy barking at the heels of a charger, and often passed so close as to permit of the single passenger’s engaging in fragmentary talk with those aboard the larger vessel.
Curry went racing all over the Skipping Goone in a wholly undignified fashion, seeking constantly shifting new points of vantage from which interchanges would be most convenient. He puffed and perspired. He was enormously excited, and made no attempt to conceal the interesting emotion. And Flora was excited too, though even under this stress her speech, as it came to him across the dazzling water, possessed that flexible and gliding, that complex and ever smooth-flowing quality, which he knew so well, with its quaint sprinkling, too, of italicised and quoted words.
II
He wanted to sit right down with her on the edge of the wharf and talk.
“Do you realize it’s been the better part of a year since Honolulu?”
“I know, my dear man, but we simply can’t sit down here in all this ‘hubbub’!”
“There’s a carriage!” he cried; and he beckoned the driver wildly.
She laughed—a little humorous, cordial, helpless laugh—and he gave her his hand.
She entered the carriage and he climbed in after her with the spring and zest of a stripling. It made him feel immensely young to be with Flora again. He told her so, and she didn’t mind anything he said, because she was feeling the very same sensations herself. The impresario’s personal hand baggage was bundled in with them, and they were off. The driver wanted to know where to, but they said they didn’t care, so he clucked to the horse and set out to circle the island. Such opulent indefiniteness didn’t often befall.
It was an immortal ride. They talked themselves into almost a state of eager hoarseness; and if one happened to break in while the other was still speaking, the latter wouldn’t stop, but would keep right on till the sentence was finished—never stridently, yet with a vigour which refused to be downed. And then, sometimes, they sat quite silent for a little while; but somehow these pauses were just as thrilling as the talk itself.
The simplicity of what had at length developed into a real if somewhat unusual courtship was rather wonderful. There was, underneath everything, just a fine mutual recognition of compatibility. Flora wouldn’t have known how to be exactly coy, even had she desired. So there was nothing quite of suspense in their mellowing friendship. Both were so essentially open and enthusiastic. She appreciated him and he appreciated her. It had come about gradually and very simply, and they just frankly recognized it. They deserved each other—yes, that was it! And that was what kept humour so warmly alive. She deserved him and he deserved her.
Flora told him, as they rode along, all the things she had been doing since her last letter. There was a new apartment, of course, in San Francisco—“quite a little snug one, this time,” she said, “and not nearly so difficult to furnish, though it’s a charming little place, and I’m trying out some brand new ‘colour schemes’ in it!”
And he told her all about the baby, and what an unusually smart baby it was—really all but walking and talking, one would swear, to hear the excited man rave! Flora laughed till there were tears in her eyes; and she said she “certainly must see the remarkable baby, which you say has become your ‘mascot’, though I don’t really see how a baby quite so young could have teeth almost ready to break through!”
Then all at once it began to dawn on them that they didn’t know in the least where they were driving to. They looked at each other and laughed. And then they grew momentarily rather solemn over a freely acknowledged state of famishment. But scarcely had the wheels revolved a score of times when they beheld—it was just like a page out of some fairy tale!—a delightful house all overrun with crimson ramblers, and out near the road a neat sign which said:
MRS. GILFILLAN: PRIVATE BOARD.
“Whoa!” cried the driver, obedient to an exultant shout from the impresario.
“But do you think they would take us in, just for lunch?” asked Flora. “For you see it isn’t really a hotel.”
“I know,” replied Mr. Curry confidently, “but it’s a canny Scotch name, and I don’t think she’ll send us starving from her door.”
And sure enough, she didn’t. Mrs. Gilfillan turned out to be very corpulent, very Victorian, and very canny. She took them right in, and they sat together at one end of a long table, with all the fortunate private boarders; and there was a genuine revolving pepper, salt, vinegar, and oil “caster” in the centre of the table; and they ate preserves out of tiny saucers of red glass with white scroll-work etched around the rims.
Mr. Curry leaned over and said in a low voice: “Did you ever dream of finding a place like this in the Philippines?” And Flora leaned over and replied, in her rich way: “Isn’t it the most absurd and delightful place you ever heard of?”
The driver had his luncheon too, elsewhere on the premises, and when the romantic couple emerged on to the porch they found that he had piled Mr. Curry’s bags beside the front door.
“Oh do look!” cried Flora.
“Good Lord! The fellow thought we’d decided to stop here for good!”
“It’s really nice enough to ‘stop at’ for good, isn’t it?” asked Flora, laughing a little, but showing by her tone, as well as by a kind of wishing look in her eyes that she honestly meant it.
III
They stood humorously staring down at his things on the doorstep.
“Yes,” he agreed with a sigh, “it is nice. Lord, what wouldn’t I give if there was nothing in the world left to do but just settle down for good!”
Her brows were drawn quite earnestly. “How often lately I’ve thought that too, though of course it’s hardly more than a ‘snatch’ of impractical dreaming—isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he admitted, almost reluctantly. “It’s only once in a while when you bump up against a place like this, with roses climbing all over everything, and then—those bags at the door.... Lord, doesn’t one get tired, sometimes, of everlastingly hustling?”
“And yet,” she reminded him with a smile, “it’s the very thing we have to do, isn’t it—both of us?”
“Yes, the very thing.”
“It—it’s our obstacle!” Her eyes sparkled.
Then he asked, his voice grown warm and ardent: “Are we going to let it be an obstacle always?”
“No, not always,” she replied, her own voice cordial and eager and reassuring.
“How are we ever going to make the merry-go-round stop?”
“Oh, some way will open up, I know!”
They strolled out on to the lawn and sat down in a bona-fide, old-fashioned, creaky garden swing.
“I don’t suppose,” he suggested wistfully, giving her a most enticing smile, “you ever take little flying trips into Africa?”
“Are you determined to go so far then?” she demanded, with a playful, deprecating contraction of her brow.
“Ah, but I have to!” he told her, looking almost alarmed, as though she were spreading for him a delicious snare which he might find it impossible to resist. “We’re all advertised! We open in Cape Town, and after that—Johannesburg.”
“Of course it would never do to leave out Africa,” she assured him comfortingly. “And after all, you’ve only begun, haven’t you, if it’s to be a real ‘world tour’?”
He held up a pleading hand and smiled. “It makes me a little tired to look ahead so far!”
“But don’t you remember how you couldn’t wait to start out in the beginning?”
The impresario bit off the end of a cigar and mused, his words punctuated with spaces of lighting and taking the first rapid puffs: “That was a long while ago, wasn’t it? I thought nothing of such details as world tours then! Yet I truly believe the first feeling of the vastness of our terrestrial ball came upon me—no, you’d laugh!”
“But you know I never laugh!” she reproached him, laughing, her heart beating a little faster as she sensed the trend of the talk.
“Well, then—the very day of the Hoadley auction!”
“Really? Yet you never knew how impressed I was with it all, and what a great thing it seemed to do, though it did go through my head, too, that ‘Singapore’ is—well, a pretty long way off!”
“The place that really began giving me shivers of homesickness,” he confessed, “was Cape Horn!”
There was a silence, and he was musing over her phrase: “A way will open up.” A little later they drove back through the quiet radiance of a tropical afternoon.
“I’m afraid,” she laughed deliciously, “your ‘songbirds’ will make up their minds I’ve carried you right off the island!”
“You have,” he replied dreamily. “Off the island, and all the way back to that snug apartment with the new colour scheme, and we’re sitting together over our Sunday night bowls of bread and milk, with the gate-legged table between us....”
She lowered her eyes and slipped him one of her hands. So one sees that the songbirds, when it came to that, would really be not unjustified in their decision!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AT DAWN IN THE CHINA SEA
His small son had really begun to usurp his entire horizon. Jerome was about the proudest father ever seen. But the estrangement of Jerome and Lili came to be a more or less openly recognized fact—which added a sombre note.
Lili went about beaming in just the old, untroubled way. Except when the baby was at her breast, one would never dream of associating her with the supreme experience of motherhood. Whatever might happen to her—and so much, in her short life, had happened already—Lili would never be any different.
With Jerome, however, the case stood otherwise. He seemed slowly pulling ahead; but those great facts of life, which made on him so enormous an impression, appealed to Lili rather as episodes—objects to arrest a moment as one flitted along through the vast lark of living.
As for the baby, it seemed to have fallen down very badly indeed in the role of mediator; instead of feeling himself drawn back to Lili again, Jerome appeared to have transferred bodily all the love he had once known for her over to the little new life that bore his name. How strangely things moved! He tried to understand it, and felt that he really understood so little.
It was delightful to see them together, Jerome and the baby. He was still content, for the most part, just to gaze down at the tiny fellow as he lay in the cheap little cradle they had purchased in Australia. So entirely and even ludicrously undemonstrative was this attitude that the troupers accused the proud father of being secretly afraid of his offspring. Much more convincing, beams and all, was the attitude of Lili, who, in her impetuous way, knew how to make a fuss over a little bundle of flannel and lace as successfully as over a man; so that the more conventional picture of mother and child never failed to evoke an abundance of enthusiastic appreciation.
“Look there—isn’t that sweet?” the touched impresario would exclaim.
And everybody else thought so too. Even the comedian was awed by the picture.
Everybody thought her a delightful mother. However, the subtler picture was Jerome, a now responsible and experienced man, sitting beside his baby’s cradle, looking down into the tiny face as though he could never look enough, and when no one was around, letting the fingers of a tiny hand close about one of his fingers, thrust down so gently. And once he cautiously stooped and kissed the baby, and felt a thrill the like of which he had never known before in all his life.
As a matter of fact, it was he who had brought Flora down and deposited her—with express understanding, however, that she was to take a regular steamer home. “One could hardly expect me to go into tourist traffic this late in life, could one?” he asked sweetly, his cold lips moving with dry mirth. And he delicately refrained from guessing the romantic complexion of her sudden longing to visit Manila.
Manila was kind indeed to Mr. Curry and his songbirds, and the engagement was by no means unprosperous. Then they were under way once more, bound now for Borneo. However, though brief, it was to prove a voyage more packed with incident than any thus far.
The winds were mostly head winds, extremely variable, and much time was lost. During one whole day the wind dropped almost entirely, and rain poured down. The glass ran low. The air was damp and unseasonably chilly, with restless little gusts down the murk of the China sea. In the midst of all this the baby managed to contract a cold.
It wasn’t a very bad cold, but since there was only one baby, to say nothing of its being a mascot, instant alarm ran through the schooner. Everybody was ready, quite naturally and humanly, with every sort of suggested remedy. Mr. Curry contributed a bottle of pine balsam; some one else recommended camphor dropped on to a lump of sugar; even smelling salts were advised. The principal topic of conversation became the baby’s cold.
“I guess it’s nothing much,” said Lili. “He just snivels a little.”
But Jerome was in a state of terrible anxiety. He, of them all, had nothing to suggest by way of remedy; and yet it seemed to him as though his very life depended upon the baby’s recovery. They told him it was absurd to get into such a state over a baby’s cold. “Just wait till the child has measles and whooping cough before you begin to look so solemn!” exclaimed the contralto, who knew what she was talking about.
As the baby improved, Jerome was willing to listen to reason. He had scarcely slept at night, though Lili had taken it a great deal more sensibly. The baby’s cold was, indeed, no great matter; but just as it was felt that there was no longer even a remote danger, a mysterious new combination set in. Nobody seemed to be able to make it out. Breathing grew laboured, and the pulse was so feeble that they could barely find it.
Alarm returned. Jerome’s heart was again in a state of panic, while Mr. Curry, in the privacy of his own little cabin, spent a long time on his knees. “We couldn’t bear it!” he murmured brokenly. “We just couldn’t bear it!”
Efforts were redoubled. They kept the baby wrapped up in flannel. Then abruptly the cold disappeared entirely, and the little creature grew so hot it seemed to burn one’s arms. Each breath meant a sharp brief struggle. The day before every one had felt so confident; today every one chilled to a sense of hopelessness charged with foreboding.
The small sufferer struggled through a night and at dawn ceased his convulsions. Jerome and Lili knew their baby was dead even while last frantic efforts toward restoration were being made.
The baby was dead, and the whole ship went into profound mourning.
Lili cried like a little bewildered child. So her heart was eased. But Jerome, at first, could do nothing but stare down, stunned with misery, at the small lifeless form. When Curry came upon him standing by the cradle, he drew an impulsive arm about him; for the impresario seemed to understand about these things better than anybody else.
“Courage, lad,” he said, tears splashing down, and his great chest heaving. And Jerome could only falter, “Yes,” in a groping way.
Jerome had loved the tiny boy with all his being. He had laid long, silent plans; had seen the boy grow up; saw himself even standing by Lili for the sake of the child. He would love him more and more as the years went on. The sense of warm devotion in Jerome’s heart had been almost overpowering at times. But now the baby was gone, and the dreams—they were gone too. It seemed almost like the end of everything.
The baby was buried at sea. One of the seamen, who was clever with tools, made a smooth little casket, and the small form was laid out in it, dressed in such finery as it had acquired during the brief earthly sojourn. The contralto who had had babies herself, in her time, offered some very life-like artificial roses which she was accustomed to wear in the Chimes of Normandy. The roses were pinned at the waist of the little dress. Somebody muttered a fragment of prayer, and the cover was fitted on.
Lili was sobbing hysterically, and Jerome stood near her, his hands over his face.
It was a quiet night, with a few stars. The casket was lowered gently in the dark. And the little mascot was gone from them forever.
