I The inhabitants of Sandakan are still talking about it. You can corner any one, native or trader, and get a first-hand account of the amazing spectacle which saluted the eyes of the awaking town on a certain morning late in March. If the drinks are on you, and all the circumstances of the hour conspire toward your informer’s temporal well-being, you will hear with the full vividness of which a Bornean is capable, when in the mood, how the slumbering sea delivered up a couple of over-crowded life-boats with “Skipping Goone” badly stencilled on the sides. You will hear also how a bald impresario, bewailing incoherently the loss of a certain black toupee, clad only in a night shirt and blanket, but hugging to his breast a huge leather wallet in which reposed all the receipts from the Manila engagement, led a bedraggled lot of songbirds up into the town. It was a visitation such as never before was heard of—at once so tragic and so screamingly funny. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Most of the women were in hysterics. The captain of the outfit, drenched but dressed like an admiral in honour of the flying moor which never came off, walked a little by himself with chin plunged despondently into the fiery midst of such splendid whiskers as the town had never seen till now. It became a matter of waterfront gossip that the captain of the vanished schooner was something of a pariah. But the town recovered from its amazement and opened its arms. Within twenty-four hours there wasn’t a single surviver of this the most picturesque disaster in the history of the China sea who couldn’t sit up and give a wholly original version of the affair. II Two days later, Jerome departed alone for a hike about the island. The catastrophe had temporarily upset his universe, just as it had upset everybody’s universe; but this was no longer the old Jerome, but one who rebounded with far more elasticity from upheavals. The Skipping Goone was gone, and with this untimely and sad demise had come an end to Mr. Curry’s erstwhile triumphant world tour. But Jerome still had his own life to grapple with. He tramped many miles, kept reliving in spite of himself the stark horror of those last moments aboard the schooner, and after all couldn’t see very clearly ahead. Then there was still the ache of grief in his heart over the loss of the little life in which his own had grown so lovingly bound up. He wandered without aim, alone, through the heavy tropical sweetness. Yes, he seemed older and more sombre. Domestic friction and tragedy and now this most recent experience at sea had combined to give him a new bearing of maturity. He did not walk like a naÏve automaton any more. His gait had altogether lost its effect of groping, juvenile stiff-jointedness. His face was sad, and his eyes were a little restless. But there were new lines of strength, just entering into the picture—dimly showing—like ghosts of qualities on the way.... Once a brown baby, sturdy and naked and adventurous, ran on before him shouting and sped out of sight round a bright epiphytous plant with its peculiarly graceful pendant bloom; and Jerome, no longer a proud father, saw again with a pang a small casket lowered into the sea. Returning toward town later in the afternoon, he found himself tramping wearily but with a subtly lighter heart along a winding road across whose sunny face patterns of tropical vegetation played, faintly breeze-touched and tremulous. Nothing had really occurred to change the drab look of things in his life, but he had grappled honestly, and the trouble in his heart seemed a little eased. On either side, as he walked, were fields of tea and tobacco, and off a little way stood a bamboo cottage flanked by irrigated patches of rice, and with a great clump of bananas at the doorstep. The sunlight made everything very still. He sat down presently on a heap of white stones by the roadside for a brief rest before tramping the remainder of the way. Just beside him was a tree half strangled by a growth of flaming orchids. Here he sat, for some little time, brooding half purposefully and half dreamily. It was one of those rather rare moments when he seemed to see himself with considerable detachment. Others had been remarking the alteration in him as it so strikingly developed. Suddenly he seemed conscious of alteration himself. Life, he thought, had been bumping him along at a terrific rate. It had all begun—well, hadn’t it?—almost immediately after the historic quarrel with Stella as they walked up Market Street together in the fog and seemed, neither of them, to know just which way to turn. After that, the curtain had gone up and the play had started. Jerome musingly reviewed the immense changes that had come into his life since the day Xenophon Curry entered Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s in quest of provender for his songbirds and a crew as yet non-existent. And he muttered to himself as he sat now on the heap of stones resting: “No wonder I feel different!” He rubbed his palms lightly and meditatively together and looked back along the road. From this point it dropped rather sharply into a valley, and then began a long gentle ascent, stretching far up and off among the foothills toward the legend-kissed heights of distant Kina Balu. Sometimes the road was invisible for a stretch, where a curve deflected its course; then it would slip back into view again, an ever narrowing line, but always gleaming in the white light of afternoon. The young man’s eyes idly pursued it to a far crest, and in that shimmer of distance he perceived a figure spinning along toward him on a bicycle. He watched it glide nearer and nearer, now slipping out of sight for a time, then re-emerging. The figure was a woman. He would wait, he decided, until she had come up and passed him. Then he would go on his way back to town. She coasted down the long decline into the depression out of which rose the sharp little eminence on which Jerome was seated. Momentum carried the rider half way up the steep slope beyond. Then, instead of submitting herself to the fatiguing task of pumping the rest of the way, she dismounted and walked, wheeling her bicycle along beside her. He watched her idly as she strode toward him, his stare being the calculating, half conscious stare of the ever alert male—something altogether fundamental and which cannot be disturbed by even so impressive a creed as misogyny. Jerome assured himself that he had become a confirmed woman-hater; and yet this admission to no appreciable extent interfered with the casual interest of his gaze now. She saw him sitting there by the side of the road, made glancing note of the fact that the stare was perfectly intact, normal, and true to type, then came on with a rather bold, free, just slightly self-conscious swing. She was dressed all in white and wore on her head a tropical helmet lined with apple green and which kept her face deeply shadowed. When she came nearly abreast of the man on the heap of stones, she gave him the conventional glance calculated to set at rest any tremble of suspicion that she deliberately avoided his eyes. All these tactics are so simple and so fundamental, and facts of such everyday occurrence, that they almost never attract one’s notice. However, in the present case, the girl looked quickly back again, then stopped abruptly, gazing at Jerome in a cool, challenging fashion. “Haven’t we met somewhere?” she asked him bluntly. Jerome got up, a little too hastily, perhaps, to do full justice to the poise and new nonchalance which were coming to be an intrinsic part of his nature. “I don’t know,” he wobbled in surprise. “Have we?” Surely there was something about her he recognized. “Yes, I’m sure we have, but I’m sorry to say I can’t exactly place it.” “That’s my difficulty, too,” she laughed. And then something in her half satirical laugh, but especially in a certain unassailable bovine quality in her eyes, carried Jerome flashingly back across the waste of centuries to an all at once vividly remembered occasion. “Miss Utterbourne?” he said, fumbling a bit with his hat, which seemed uncertain which hand, if either, would acquire an ultimate undisputed possession. “Yes, I am,” she told him. “And it emphatically annoys me not to be able to place you more definitely. Wait—” He gave her a courteous lift. “Ah,” she exclaimed, though her expression scarcely changed, “that’s it. Now I remember perfectly. I dimly connected you in my mind with Stella Meade, but Borneo’s so far off, and you don’t look at all as I remember you.” III Both were privately busy for a moment with the circumstances of their one previous meeting. Things, she shrewdly decided, must have been happening to him. As for Elsa, she looked precisely the same as ever. She was still unmarried, and had just begun a little to take on the vigorous air of one who is on the verge of becoming really confirmed in her attitude toward life. “It’s very surprising we should have run into each other like this, ’way out here,” she said, taking off her rather mannish hat and thrusting back her hair with a firm brown hand. “Yes, it is,” he agreed, feeling more at his ease. When they met before she had really quite terrified him with her bold, sure, satirical front. Now he was much better equipped to combat it. He felt he was equipped to combat anything. “But where have you ever come from suddenly,” he asked, “riding a bicycle so coolly out of nowhere at all?” “I’m on a trip with dad,” she told him. “We brought Aunt Flora as far as Manila and dropped her there. But I’m going to stand by the ship all the way back to San Francisco again.” There was a hidden smile in her words which seemed to exult in a certain stability of will not shared by the romantic Aunt Flora. “I like it for a change,” she went on with a slight drawl. “I never dreamed in the first place the Captain would let me come.” And she laughed briefly. “He’s always such an old bear about business. But there wasn’t any difficulty. It only goes to prove,” she ended, shrugging humorously, “that you never can tell about the Captain until you try. I’m having a bully time, though the days at sea are usually pretty dull. As soon as it’s possible to establish shore connections anywhere, I make off at once with my bicycle.” “I’ve met your father—Captain Utterbourne,” said Jerome. “Have you? Yes—I don’t know why—I assumed you knew him. Dad seems to meet everybody sooner or later. He’s absurdly promiscuous—not meaning anything personal,” she laughed, without really qualifying her easy tactlessness. “And yet,” she added, in a drawl not so very unlike her parent’s, though it seemed a few shades brighter, “dad’s not what I’d call the mixing kind.” Jerome was silent, and in a moment she went on, drooping her eyes and smiling calmly: “But it hasn’t been explained what you’re doing in Borneo.” “I’m afraid I’m stranded here,” he smiled. She gazed at him blankly. And then, before going deeper into his plight, he asked: “But how did you get in without any one’s seeing you? I don’t understand, for I swear I know every ship in the harbour by this time, and the Star of Troy certainly wasn’t hereabouts this morning.” “Oh, but a great deal may happen since morning, you know.” “Yes, I realize that,” he admitted. And he vaguely hoped, and really believed, that his tone smacked somewhat of cynicism. “You should stick right to the waterfront in these exciting seas,” she advised him, “if you don’t want to miss what’s going on. We dropped anchor just at noon today. We came up from the Celebes, where dad did some business. Right after tiffin I rowed ashore and started off to see the sights. I’ve seen them,” she ended humorously, and with just a tinge of restlessness. “Now I’m ready to move on to some other place. The older I get the more insatiable I seem to grow.” “Then you didn’t linger about the waterfront long enough,” he thrust back, “to be quite posted yourself about what’s going on.” His sad eyes had a little sparkle in them. But of course her most effective weapon was always the unassailable gaze—not, however, that she used it quite consciously. And as she gazed, Jerome felt a trifle uneasy. He couldn’t help himself. “You had no chance,” he expanded, “to hear about the Skipping Goone.” She repeated the name after him with the inflection of one who half remembers or is not quite sure. “Wait a minute. It’s not a name one forgets in a hurry. Oh, I know! She’s the schooner Aunt Flora was always talking about. Sometimes she called her that, and sometimes she mixed the goone up with other birds, but I never corrected her because Aunt Flora’s so delicious when she gets things just a little wrong. I believe dad had something to do with that schooner in the first place, didn’t he? Some queer business of getting a skipper, or something of the sort?” “Yes, that was it.” “Aunt Flora told me some very amazing things about the man who’s taking an opera troupe around the world. There’s been a lot about it in the papers, and I remember dad’s shouting over it, too.” “I suppose so,” replied Jerome. “It must have seemed a thing to shout over at first. And yet we managed to make a go of it, in spite of everything, until—” “You!” For once she was surprised into a very slight change of expression. “But you aren’t one of them? You’re not a singer?” “No, not a singer. I tried to be,” he explained, the sadness in his face temporarily lightened by this unexpected little roadside duel, “but there seemed no opening for a fog horn.” “Do you mean that the Skipping Goone is lying right here in the harbour, and that we passed her by without a salute? It must never get to Aunt Flora!” “The Skipping Goone,” Jerome replied solemnly, “is out yonder, about ten miles, at the bottom of the sea.” And he told her the story briefly and simply. IV “Which way were you walking?” she asked him, obviously impressed by his adventure. “I’m on my way back to town. We’re merely camping here till we can get a boat out.” “Then let’s walk back together,” she suggested. “May I wheel your bicycle along?” he requested in a rather worldly way. And she surrendered it to him—not because she subscribed, of course, in even the faintest degree, to any of the old sex superstitions, but simply because Elsa was so splendidly emancipated that she could be unquestionably glad to rid herself of an encumbrance when possible, with no thought about it one way or another. Otherwise her surrendering it must have seemed a faint contradiction. So Jerome took charge of the bicycle, and she walked beside him with free, full stride, while he harked back into the realm of ancient history and told her, discreetly and with ever an effect of budding cynicism, the thrilling tale of the kidnapping—or rather, his accidental departure—in the first place, and something of his adventurous life after that. She appeared very much interested. And it seemed so good having some one entirely outside his now largely harrowing association to whom he could talk, that Jerome found himself looking upon Elsa Utterbourne as really an old friend. He did not mention Lili, and left uncommunicated the heartache connected with the loss of his tiny son at sea. It seemed almost incredible—almost like a strange illusion—that all this could have happened to him since the day in San Francisco when Elsa Utterbourne had come along to contemplate, without entirely knowing it, his sense of forlornness and pique. “Do you know where Stella is now, by the way?” he asked casually. Elsa looked at him in a somewhat sidewise fashion. “I rather thought you’d be able to give me a little news of her.” “No, I’ve not heard a word since she went away on her honeymoon.” “Neither have I, nor has any one else, so far as I know.” “Strange. You’d think the earth had swallowed them up!” “Yes, wouldn’t you?” “But your father took them off in the first place—he must have some idea, at least, where they are.” “Oh, the Captain knows exactly.” “But he won’t tell?” “No, he won’t tell. The only way would be to take a chance on his talking in his sleep. But the trouble is,” she smiled dryly. “he never even snores—he sleeps like the Sphynxes.” Jerome gave her a glance of amusement. “No doubt,” continued Elsa, “they’ll turn up one of these days with some unbelievable adventure to relate.” “I expect so.” As they walked Elsa shaded her eyes with an arm from time to time, and gazed coolly off across the panorama which kept spreading new pictures. Occasionally a native with empty baskets would pass them, trudging back from the coast where beeswax and tobacco had been traded. “If you’d like to come out this evening, you’ll find us at home,” the girl said as they approached the port. “You’re staying on board?” “We always do. It’s very comfortable. We have plenty of ice, and plenty of things to mix with it. You’d better come.” “Thanks. I believe I will.” She nodded, and, recovering her bicycle, rode off down to the wharf, where a small boat awaited her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE MAP OF THE WORLD AGAIN I Yes, the Star of Troy had slipped into the harbour of Sandakan, and rode there at anchor in a dreamy way, as though, despite her grim and business-like appearance, it had suddenly become her destiny to drift idly at her ease forever upon an idle tropic sea. A little dry-looking smoke dribbled off her stack. There appeared no signs of life aboard. Visitors were usually received in Captain Utterbourne’s snug little white cabin—or his “shop,” as he preferred calling it: a delightful place, walls and beamed ceiling scrupulously painted, floor dark and highly polished. There were a couple of good brass ships’ lamps, always perfectly spotless and shining. A faint aroma of metal polish merged with that thrilling, indefinable scent which belongs in greater or less degree to the cabins of all ships. Elsa, looking very cool and wise, was mixing something in a shaker, assisted by a young Chinese boy whom Captain Utterbourne had picked up in Hong Kong, and who was supremely devoted. The girl spoke to him now and then in low tones, and he smiled at her with affectionate understanding. Captain Utterbourne, turning a fresh cigar about with slightly mincing appreciation, was receiving accounts of the wreck of the Skipping Goone as they fell indiscriminately from the lips of Captain Bearman, Xenophon Curry, and a certain young man with a very sophisticated face and troubled eyes whom Elsa had encountered by the roadside during the afternoon. The master of the Star of Troy seemed rather to have an eye on Jerome, and there was something like amazement lurking behind the efficient poker mask. “I never had such a run of bad luck in my life,” Captain Bearman whined, his embittered lips seeming rather to steal over and fold in the words than cleanly to emit them. “I simply go below for a wink of sleep, and before I can get back again that ass of a mate....” His manner was an odd blend of self-conscious indignation and uneasy dignity. “First the rudder—then he lets her jibe—and I’m knocked off my ship into the sea! I can’t tell you, Captain, what I went through out there in the water—that mate....” His face gleamed white with the rage that was in him. “He ought to be brought to trial—I mean to see about it. It amounts to mutiny, I say!” Captain Bearman’s eyes went rapidly about; and he was harassed by a disagreeable sense of not having quite succeeded, after all, in defending his position. However, this was but a logical phase of his destiny, which always, in the end, must simply be bowed to. “Lord, Lord!” exclaimed the impresario. “It seems incredible we should go through what we did and all live to tell the tale! But when I saw my scenery going,” he continued with a sigh, “I knew that was the end of the world tour. It takes the ground from under a man—everything wiped out in an hour....” He looked tired and seemed even to have aged; but nothing could ever rob that smile of its incorrigible strength and sweetness—a smile so full of confidence in the inherent good of an often enough unfathomable scheme of things. However, transcending everything else just now was the startling and ludicrous aspect of the impresario’s head without the toupee, which had been, for all who knew him, so essential a feature. Without the boyish bangs he had somehow a naked, lost look, which lured out smiles all round, though the situation was grave and sober. It was like the laughing twist of a comet’s tail through empyreans of stern and awful purpose. Or it was like the drunken porter’s soliloquy in Macbeth. Elsa superintended the distribution of the drink she had been concocting, and they all sat sipping. Jerome’s eyes rested upon a map of the world covering one wall of the cabin. There was the whole world outspread; the route of his adventurous travels, with their complement of personal growth, could be traced league by league. He felt some one gazing at him curiously, and when he turned met Elsa’s eyes. Talk broadened to consideration of other sea disasters, the theme seeming to hold a subtle fascination; and Utterbourne, discoursing about “runs of luck,” aired certain slightly nebulous theories about “rhythm” in such matters. And then they returned to the wreck of the Skipping Goone, and Jerome, conscious that Captain Utterbourne was following him with quizzical attention, told at some length of the tussles he was having over insurance and the cargo tangle generally. “There’s been some rumpus about witnesses—it’s lucky I had presence of mind to grab the books before leaving the schooner.” He laughed shortly. “It’s worse than any mix-up I ever got into in the chandlery line!” He drank the last of his cocktail; and the Captain, staring at him blankly, mused: “How the devil has a fellow of this type managed to change so utterly in one short year? How the devil?” There was a glow behind the sleeping quiet of his baffling eyes. Experience, the Captain concluded with a sly wink of relish, must have acted in the case of young Stewart—h’m?—like a sly milligram of radium. For the Captain was very fond of analysing people—considered himself extremely clever at it; and, while he sometimes made mistakes of which nobody knew anything, he was, on the whole, a pretty shrewd judge of human nature. And with him analysis always moved hand in hand with the musing query: Is this a man I can use somewhere? The process had become really subconscious. As he watched Jerome he narrowed his eyes a little. “We seem to be a deadly poison—h’m?” observed Captain Utterbourne a little later in his lynx-like drawl, conversation having by this time turned upon one of his most cherished themes: the deleterious influence of civilization on the human race, and especially the havoc wrought by Christianity. It was perhaps a trifle vague; but the other captain, setting down his glass, nodded with that peculiar brand of admiring speechlessness one would expect to encounter in a satellite who seemed thus to convey: “Exactly what I’ve always insisted, but these fools won’t listen to reason—you can’t get ’em to!” And from time to time, as startling figures emerged concerning the decline of savage life under enlightened rule, Mr. Curry would cry: “Is it possible?”—almost as though, right on top of all his own troubles, he half recognized here a human challenge to do something. “By the way, dad,” demanded Elsa, “speaking of savages in general and Borneo in particular, when do we sail on?” For a moment Turk met Turk, with faces that defied each other in the matter of inscrutability. “Anxious already—h’m?” her father parried—for he loved to pit query against query. “Not especially,” she replied with a restless toss of her head, yet without accentuating, as she so often did at such times, the drooping of her cow-brown eyes. “I find these places a bit dull, Captain,” she added, drawling. “I suppose it’s the effect of civilization.” Her dry thrust went home, and his eyes subtly twinkled. At such times he looked ever so human and guileless. “Well,” capitulated Captain Utterbourne, his words lethargically purring, “I’m liable to be held up here some little time by fellows who are bringing down some tobacco from the interior. I didn’t know,” he suggested with icy, tempting hesitation, giving his daughter a playful yet challenging look, “but we might slip off together some day down toward Sarawak to see if we couldn’t capture a few ourangs, or perhaps a rhinoceros or two. Maybe you’d find that more exciting. I understand there’s still a little wild life left in the remoter realm of the raja.” II A day or so later Jerome, emerging from the office of a ships’ broker, met Elsa again. She was swinging along in her independent way, and he thought she had not even seen him, till abruptly she paused, her gaze just lighted, incidentally, by a smile of greeting. “Have you found a ship yet?” she asked. “Yes, there’s a sailing for Yokohama in a few days. We’re going on there and take a Pacific Mail boat back to San Francisco.” “I suppose you’re anxious to start.” “No, I’m not.” “No?” Her blankness was disturbed by the merest flicker. “Borneo’s out in the world, and San Francisco isn’t,” he explained, smiling a little, but obviously serious, too. “I see what you mean,” she said after a pause. “It’s quite interesting. It even makes Borneo almost tolerable.” “Well,” he qualified, “of course I don’t necessarily mean Borneo in particular.” “I understand. Why do you go back, then?” It was almost the very thing Lili had asked him when the proposition of his returning ignominiously from Honolulu held the boards. However, it was with by no means the old air of helplessness and groping that he put squarely up to Elsa the question: “What else can I do?” Openings in Borneo were not conspicuously numerous—that was certain. She gazed at him intently. And then she murmured in even tones: “True, what else could you do?” He looked off toward the harbour a little dreamily. “Perhaps,” he said, “something will turn up in Yokohama. We have nearly a week there, and I mean to pry around.” “Yes, I would.” But somehow her look seemed not precisely to fit the words. And after a moment she asked him: “Is there anything you have in mind that you’d like to do?” “Oh, no,” he replied with quite worldly carelessness. “Anything that would keep me busy and not let me drop back into a slump again.” “You think there might be danger?” she calmly laughed. “I don’t know,” he smiled. “I don’t want to try!” And then he asked her: “How much longer are you staying on, Miss Utterbourne?” She shrugged. “You never can tell what the Captain may take it into his head to do. I never dare go very far away from the ship for fear they’ll suddenly decide to haul up and move off. But as long as I stick around and look eager it’s just another case of the watched pot. I’m ready anytime he is,” she concluded, her eyes drooping. “And you don’t know where you go from here, I suppose?” “No.” She moved her head a little restlessly. After a moment she said: “Well,” nodded informally, and went on. Jerome watched her till she disappeared from view—a trim, independent figure, with youthful stride. III A few more days passed. Early on the morrow all the stranded victims of shipwreck would be aboard a steamer bound for Yokohama—all, that is, except Miss Valentine, who by hook or by crook must reach Cape Town, and for whom a circuitous passage had been booked, after much dickering and consultation. Mr. Curry was taking his songbirds sadly back to San Francisco, where the little company would disband—not without tears, surely, when the time came. Indeed, already there had been tears. And, with the terrors of shipwreck still so fresh in their minds, the loyal songbirds had got together and drafted a declaration pledging themselves to stand by the impresario through all the arduous hardships of a slow reorganization, if he would but say the word. The comedian made a humorous speech. His voice broke in the midst of it, and then he hurried on more humorously than ever. Curry was deeply touched. He said he felt unworthy of such devotion. And then he told them that since he’d lost everything else, he couldn’t ask them to stand by any longer. It wouldn’t be fair to them. He must let them go, each his own way. It wrung his heart, but he must let his songbirds go. However, he would help them all he could; and if ever fortune smiled upon him again, he would call them back, even though they might be scattered to the very ends of the earth! Jerome, on this last evening in Borneo, left the place where he was lodging and strolled along the waterfront, musing and trying to map his life. After an hour or so with his pipe as sole companion, and his thoughts roaming far, he turned back, deciding to go to bed early, since it would be necessary to rise at dawn. He still felt that vague loathness to begin the homeward voyage which had more or less bothered him ever since the disaster at sea. It would be sweet to see his own people once more; yet he dreaded lest returning to the haunts of his long obscurity might mean but the beginning of a slump which, however gradually, would thrust him back again into the same position whence he had so miraculously risen. Of course Jerome knew perfectly well that he was his own master, and that, in the highest sense, his future would be just exactly what he chose to make it. Nevertheless, as he had pointed out to Elsa in whimsical vein, Borneo was out in the world, whereas San Francisco wasn’t. “That’s it,” he muttered, “it’s adventure and life and hustle and bustle and even danger I’ve come to require. I can’t get along without these things now I’ve had a real taste of them. I’ve simply got to go on and on!” The germ of seeing things happen, and of being himself in the thick of heavy action, had penetrated into his corpuscles—kept racing through his arteries like possessed. He was in a state of intoxicated revolution, underneath his new exterior of worldly poise. Obscurity had been overthrown with violence; it had been assailed, cast down, trampled upon; it was extinct. But Jerome, for all his emancipation, was vaguely fearful of ghosts. Ventures such as this of Xenophon Curry’s didn’t, he knew, bloom on every bush along one’s way. And rumination had drawn him into a mood sober and regretful by the time he reached the house where his bed was: a frame of mind tending wonderfully to augment the thrill of surprise which accompanied a sight of Captain Utterbourne’s Chinese boy awaiting his return with a note. Jerome took the note, opened it, read it through rapidly. He could feel his heart thumping. The communication bespoke his immediate presence aboard the Star of Troy by way of answer. The boy smiled with all his white young teeth, and, in gentle sing-song English, admitted the matter must be urgent, since his instructions were to wait all night if necessary, and to bring back with him no answer but “Misser Stoot.” What could it mean? Somehow Jerome kept remembering how peculiarly Elsa had gazed at him when she said: “True, what else could you do?” As a matter of fact, he had once thought of speaking to Captain Utterbourne about an opening of some sort; but the opportunity hadn’t just seemed to develop. Here, as though determined he should be kept vividly in the swim, fate submitted an eleventh hour opportunity. Did it amount to that? He followed his oriental guide eagerly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
NEWS I “Did you ever hear of Daedalus?” asked Captain Utterbourne dreamily when his caller had been shown into the little white cabin he called his shop. “I’ve just come across a fascinating account of him in a book of myths. Daedalus, it seems, was the man who invented sails. Like all advanced spirits from the beginning of time, he was looked upon as mad—just because he was always experimenting—trying to fasten sails on to his own body, and similar devices—h’m? Isn’t it funny how little it takes to make the world think you mad?” It wasn’t, perhaps, quite tangible—almost, in fact, as though the master of this romantic freighter were himself, after all, part of a myth. “And anyhow,” puzzled Jerome, “tangible or not, what has Daedalus, even if he did invent sails, to do with this hurry-up call on my last night in Borneo?” His glance discovered upon the table a sheet of paper scrawled over with anchors in many positions. The Captain had evidently been busy on them prior to his arrival. Then his glance strayed to the map of the world, and again, in a parenthetical flash, he felt its peculiar thrill—almost as though it were a special or enchanted map. Jerome had always more or less responded to the thrill of maps—a little, even, in the funny old school geographies. Now that he was himself abroad upon it, the spell was brightly multiplied. What a pace he had gone! At length he was aboard a ship in the harbour of Sandakan, listening to a story about the man who invented sails.... And back of the story there was something—something.... The suspense was terrific; yet “I must be patient,” he told himself; for he guessed that the Captain was a man who, like certain horses, would only proceed the more slowly if urged. Finally Utterbourne, perceiving with a quick glance of his little grey eyes that his visitor seemed momentarily absorbed in the map on the wall, swung slowly round in his swivel chair. Appearing to forget Daedalus entirely, he rocked back and forth, his hands spread loosely on his knees. A light of quizzical and devious affection flickered into his face, and, gazing at the young man before him he murmured: “Stewart, did you ever sit down before a map of the world and just let yourself go? H’m? It’s a gorgeous piece of adventure!” After that the Captain sat for a time without saying anything at all—only drumming idly with a pencil. There was something fiendish about these silences; yet out of them, one could be sure, great things were wont to grow. “I’ve been wondering—h’m?” And still he drummed, his upsetting gaze never quite leaving the other’s face, though it wavered a bit at intervals to a point just beyond, only to return at once. The substantial ticking of a brass clock set into the wall above the Captain’s desk added an effect of overtone to the silence which had fallen between them. Jerome, breathless with impatience and excitement, cleared his throat, and Utterbourne said: “H’m?” in a murmur of unbroken meditation. But at last the Captain stirred, laid aside his pencil—which seemed a sign they were making progress—clasped his hands loosely on the table and said: “I sent for you, Stewart, because I thought—h’m?—I thought you might be able to help us out.” He hesitated, still quizzical. “You’ve been on my mind, rather, ever since I began hearing about your extraordinary exploits this year. To be perfectly frank”—he smiled, and Jerome, guessing what the Captain would say, smiled back easily—“I shouldn’t have quite picked you out—well, say that night in the Pavillon d’Orient—as a man I’d ever be likely to see my way clear to using. But,” he went on, his voice subtle with congratulation, “a man—h’m?—a man can’t have the experiences you seem to have had without developing a kind of feeling”—he held the thought a little sensuously suspended a moment—“a feeling for the finer grain in adventure—h’m? It’s pretty hard to phrase; it’s a thing to be sensed.” Jerome would have spoken, his eyes, now, quite aflame with delighted excitement; but the Captain lifted one hand in a faint gesture and went on speaking: “Stewart, I’ve been thinking you may be one of the men I’ll have need of when we launch a project we have in mind—h’m?—a sort of office and clearing house for our Mediterranean trade—maybe at Naples, or perhaps Tripoli—the plans are still very much in the air. I knew you were sailing in the morning, and I wanted to sound you a little—in fact, I didn’t know but you might be induced to come along with us instead—h’m?” Again Jerome was eager to voice his sentiments in this connection, and again the Captain, perceiving his eagerness, chose to hold him in a torment of unreleased speech. “I presume,” he drawled, “you’re anxious to get home after your life-and-death struggle with the Dark Angel—h’m?” There was a smile on Utterbourne’s lips, a smile of chilly, faint derision, since, so far as he was concerned, the Dark Angel was at liberty to pause on his threshold whenever the impulse prompted; he would be ready, without question or prayer. “But, as a matter of fact,” he resumed, “I expect to reach San Francisco myself maybe sooner than Curry and his songbirds—or at any rate not very much later. If you care to consider the Mediterranean business at all, but feel you’d rather not run the risk of reaching home a week, a day, or even an hour later, then go on tomorrow with Curry, and I’ll get in touch with you afterward. H’m? If, on the other hand, you’d like to come along with us now, I could perhaps lay a sort of ground-work in your mind between here and San Francisco, which might facilitate matters in case it developed that we wanted to get things under way rather quickly.” “I think,” said Jerome (permitted at last to speak) with a voice he tried hard to keep perfectly steady, “that I’ll run the risk!” His eyes sparkled a little. “Would you like me to sleep on board tonight? I’d hate like the devil to wake up somewhere else and find all this was only a dream!” Then Utterbourne laughed. That is to say, he shouted. And when Jerome was gone, he sat in the dark on deck a long time, smoking one cigarette after another, and gently humming To a Wild Rose at intervals. II Jerome couldn’t wait till morning to break the news to Curry, but got the impresario out of bed. There were new lines of worry and care in the good man’s face, but his enthusiasm over the offer which had been made his erstwhile business manager was wholly unfettered. At first he blinked sleepily, and said: “Well—well....” in a somewhat solemn, deliberating way. But when he woke up sufficiently to realize that it wasn’t for advice but for congratulation that the business manager had roused him, then Curry became satisfactorily boisterous. In fact, they both became a little boisterous, for Jerome had smuggled in sandwiches and a bottle of something, and insisted upon an impromptu celebration right on the spot. It was well along toward morning before the weary maestro was left to a little snatch of needed slumber. As for Jerome, he didn’t go to bed at all. He felt it would be out of the question even to think of bed. And he wanted to be on hand early to corner Lili with the facts and give her, he told himself, some general instructions. He whistled along the waterfront, deserted and very full of echoes at this hour, and finally settled down on a barrel of tar to wait for sun-up. Jerome had scarcely seen Lili since the arrival in Borneo—and had, indeed, given her deliberately a wide berth. It was essential, he felt, to begin making it plain to all the world that they weren’t living together any more. Now he began wondering how she was making out, and what she had been up to. Poor Lili, he thought. She seemed so helpless, so little able to look out for herself. He must see what could be done. Perhaps he could arrange to send her part of his salary for awhile. He would see how reasonably she took the news of his desertion. The songbirds began to appear, clad in outlandish togs which had been acquired helter-skelter in a mart where there was little in the way of choice. They were all in good spirits, however. “On to Yokohama!” had been adopted as the company slogan. After that—well, no one seemed to care to bother very much yet about the future. Things would turn up, as they always did, somehow or other. Jerome was just deciding that happy-go-lucky Lili had overslept, as she so frequently did, and debated ascertaining her lodgings and going off to hunt her up, when suddenly he beheld her coming along, garbed in a queer pink dress and wearing an enormous hat trimmed with blue roses and fur. She had a little white dog on a leash, and it strained sniffingly ahead, running in a spindle-legged, sidling manner. She was right upon Jerome before she discovered him. “Oh, Jerry!” she cried. And at first her eyes beamed with the sheer pleasure of encountering him; but almost at once they took on a hurt, reproachful look, and all the beam was gone out of them. Her lips went into a disappointed little pout. He wasted no words, but acquainted her simply and frankly with the facts in the case. Their ways were to sever. Tomorrow at this hour they would be hundreds of miles apart. It was unlikely they would ever meet again. “Oh, but Jerry....” she faltered. “It’s up to you,” he concluded, “to do the rest. They know we’ve not been getting on. Now it will be very easy. You may tell them anything you like. I don’t care how strong you make your case—I guess I can stand up under the strain. But I should think that simple desertion would be about as good as anything. Just one request: Please don’t tell them I was in the habit of hitting you with clubs. I’d hate any one to think that of me. But I know you’ll work it out. And if you want to say I fell in love with some one else—if that would help—why, go ahead, only please have a heart and don’t make her some little painted fool. I’ve written my address on this piece of paper”—he handed it over—“and if you have trouble financing things for awhile, just get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do, though as you know, I’m not by any means a pluto yet!” She seemed a little bewildered by it all. As a matter of fact, it was a rather bewildering speech. And before she had quite found her bearings, Lili murmured, with tears threatening: “We were so happy together once, Jerry—oh, I could cry my eyes out at the way you’re treating me!” “But,” he reminded her, “you know it was already agreed we were going to separate. There’s no use going into all that again. And I don’t think we better be too thick together this morning, either. What you tell ’em must be convincing.” But she had had time to get over the first shock, and her manner now grew assertive. “Oh,” she cried, “that’s all very well, my fine fellow, but you don’t seem to be considering my feelings in the matter. You just skip out and leave the hard part for me. If that isn’t just like a man!” III The blue roses on her hat were shaking, and the absurd dog kept jerking at his leash, sometimes even forcing her to take a step and regain her balance. Jerome was beginning to feel slightly upset. “Everybody thinks we’re married,” she babbled, rather disconnectedly, “and that makes it just about the same as if we were. All you do is light out, but what about me? That’s what I want to know!” “We talked everything over,” he repeated glumly. “I don’t care to argue about it any more. It’s only fair I have my chance now.” But she was piqued, and her lips still pouted; and then, out of the muddled wretchedness of her heart, she cast up at Jerome the reminder that if she hadn’t been so honest in the first place he’d be her husband now, this minute—he couldn’t help himself. “And then,” she ended, in truly flaming, if somewhat confused triumph, “I guess you’d be a little more cut up about this divorce business—it wouldn’t look quite so easy to you, anyhow, as it does this way!” “But you had to, Lili!” cried Jerome, not a little horrified, for a moment, despite his worldly poise, at the vista her sordid dreg of self-revelation opened up. “You had to tell about your marriage....” They looked at each other rather helplessly, till, her mood softening, she faltered: “You never used to be so high and mighty with me, Jerry!” “But great heavens, Lili, you don’t seem to realize what it means to have two husbands at the same time!” “How do I know if I’d be having two? How could I be sure? How do I know where I stand anyhow? How do I know where my husband is, or if I have any husband by this time any more at all—even one?” Lili in her pink dress and overloaded hat, with the little dog straining and pouncing at the end of its leash, seemed really an almost tragic figure. There was something so petitioning, so frankly primitive about her outburst. “You’re just as cosy as an iceburg, Jerry,” she said, even simulating a small shiver. “You seem to forget all about that night—you know—about us being together at Hilo, and how you loved me then. Oh, my Gawd!” she ended in a lamentation of moist bitterness. “It shows you can’t believe a word a man says to you, and I just think I’ll go and commit suicide!” After which she seemed to feel almost cheerful. And then—then something most unexpected happened! Just as she was saying, with a weak little resigned sigh, that she’d have to be getting aboard, a dapper man in a check suit came up and tipped his hat. Lili brightened amazingly. Her manner grew excited and gracious. She began beaming. “Oh, here you are now!” she laughed. “I was looking for you, and waiting till I didn’t dare wait any longer for fear of missing the boat. I want to introduce you to Mr. Stewart, an old friend of mine,” she went on cordially. And now she was beaming on them both. It was a situation! The newcomer, whose name Jerome didn’t get exactly, shook hands, with some slight asperity, and began edging up toward Lili in a faintly proprietary way. All at once Jerome noticed that Lili’s wedding ring had mysteriously disappeared; and from that time on he grinned without ceasing until Lili and the new friend she’d picked up and the little prancing dog had moved off out of sight round the corner. Her friend was going on to Yokohama too. “On to Yokohama!” “Can you beat it?” muttered Jerome. And then, with just one brief sigh, he went about his own affairs.
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