CHAPTER THIRTYCYNICS
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 singlesurviver 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.
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. TheSkipping Goonewas 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 thingsin 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 spinningalong 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.”
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 broughtAunt 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 theStar of Troycertainly 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 theSkipping 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 slightchange 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 theSkipping Gooneis lying right here in the harbour, and that we passed her by without a salute? It must never get to Aunt Flora!”
“TheSkipping 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.
“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 Utterbourneas 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 givemea 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 ofice, 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.