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.