I
She was now Mrs. Ferdinand King, and had sailed away in Captain Utterbourne’s Star of Troy on a honeymoon full of mystery—one destined to carry her not even she knew whither or how far. But Jerome just remained a clerk immersed in the dust and antiquity of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s.
He told himself he must keep up a worldly front behind which he could hide his great unhappiness. This attempt found expression in a certain rather superficial cockiness, valiantly aided and abetted by the jaunty little pipe. But he had lost the one girl he ever really cared for, and felt the loss bitterly. With Stella seemed to go out, too, forever, that dream of hearth and kiddies to which he had clung so lovingly and so long. He could not show these things, however. And his ego, though not morbidly sensitive or in the least vindictive, was still squirming—it was all pretty complex.
During this unhappy period his defensive cheerfulness was made vaguely easier by a somewhat surprising friendship which had developed between himself and the picturesque impresario. After the visit to the schooner, and certainly after the dinner, the impresario might very logically have dropped from his horizon; nevertheless, Jerome went right on seeing him at odd times and places—and, most notably, had been permitted to attend several rehearsals. These were naturally dazzling experiences, which gave the clerk glimpses of a wholly new world and brought him into vivid if momentary contact with men and women who, in their blithe, impressively sophisticated manner, appeared to know about all there was to know about life.
Some of the songbirds, it is true, rather kidded the impresario for taking up with the young clerk; and one of the singers, the official comedian of the company, worked up a highly successful imitation, which became one of the best things he did. Yet of course when he appeared upon the scene, Mr. Curry’s new friend was treated with tremendous respect.
As for Jerome, he thought the members of the troupe without exception splendid; and, partly, no doubt, as a means of easing the distress in his heart, even began telling himself he was growing positively infatuated with a certain girl who did a few small rôles, but mostly sang in the chorus. Her name was Lili—an extraordinary creature, with great wide, bewitching, wicked light brown eyes which were always beaming; a mouth that existed only for eating and loving; a wealth of rich massed hair and—well, nobody ever did know how much there was underneath it—perhaps a very great deal, for Lili was deep, in her way, despite genuinely child-like qualities. She was a truly delightful person, impulsive and affectionate and a trifle flighty, with a healthy desire to be a prima donna.
Lili used to amuse herself, when Jerome came amongst them, by beaming on the poor clerk till he had to blink and would grow quite red. She had a way of gradually opening her eyes wider and wider as she beamed, which produced a really electric effect and would make any one’s pulse, pre-eminently the pulse of a clerk who had never been beamed on that way before, double and treble its accustomed beat. He didn’t dream it was she who laughed most heartily over the efforts of the comedian, and that she herself one day took round a petition, drawn up by the comedian, requesting signatures of all the male members of the troupe who would agree to adopt fashion’s latest mandate: a patent clip to hold down the ends of one’s tie and keep one’s shoulders from growing too haughty.
II
With everything vigorously under way, and the actual sailing day in sight, Xenophon Curry was calling on his friend and benefactress, Flora Utterbourne, to express for perhaps the hundredth time his overwhelming gratitude. He stirred his tea happily and looked about the little drawing room which Flora had made so much her own with the assistance of sales and auctions. Glancing about one understood Flora’s success.
The tea things stood between them on the very gate-legged table acquired at Crawl Hill, and in which the impresario insisted upon feeling a whimsical part interest. Flora had just returned from a luncheon party—they had met, as a matter of fact, on her threshold—and as they sipped and chatted she informally lifted off a hat of faun straw and figured silk, thrusting the pins back into it, with the veil still where it had been brushed up out of the way across the crown. She laid the hat aside and touched her hair comfortably. His response to the geniality of this hour of early twilight, with a small clock ticking somewhere, was very whole-hearted, though of course sentimental, because everything about the impresario was sentimental.
Some turn or other in the talk presently brought up the subject of his rings. “I’ve been noticing them,” she smiled. “It seems to me I’ve never seen so many—and some of the ‘stones’ seem quite wonderful!”
“I know,” he laughed, “there are a good many more than there ought to be, but I get so attached to each new one that drops into my hands, I couldn’t bear to give any of ’em up.”
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “Do they really come as easily as all that?”
“Oh, well,” he confided, “it’s become a sort of custom that when one of my songbirds is offered a contract by one of the big managers and has to leave me—and I want to tell you I’ve discovered more than one now famous star and given the boost to begin with!—then I get a ring in remembrance. Sometimes it will be a great big stone—like this one, you see? Then again a more modest size, like this one. It depends,” he added confidentially, “a little on the contract; but I love every single ring on my fingers exactly the same, because each one stands for a songbird.”
“A songbird who has flown away,” she murmured, her fine eyes a little sad.
“Yes,” he sighed. “But it can’t be helped, and it doesn’t mean, you know, that they don’t go right on being loyal. We all have to make our way in the world. Lord, if it isn’t one thing it’s another! Money’s the main difficulty, and what can you hope to do if you never had any?”
Ah, what indeed? The impresario set down his cup thoughtfully; and a moment later she sympathetically brought out her own special phase of that curious irony they had spoken of at the auction. “No one would think, to see how ‘entrenched’ we look, that I’d be out of here, ‘bag and baggage,’ early in the morning!”
“What?” cried Mr. Curry, really quite shaken.
She nodded and smiled at him over a slice of caramel cake she was nibbling.
“Tomorrow!”
“It’s really heart-breaking,” she admitted slowly, “though when I’ve had time to grow a little interested in the new ‘apartment’ it won’t matter. But it did strike me as so irresistibly funny, sitting here with you ‘over the teacups,’ that at eight o’clock the men will be at the door for my trunks!”
Suddenly he leaned toward her with great earnestness. “Miss Utterbourne, I want to ask you a favour.”
“Yes?” Her brows were arched in cordial interrogation.
“It—it’s about this table—table we bought,” he said, quite steadily despite the brazen pronoun, and fixing her with his honest, eager gaze.
“Of course,” she laughed softly, and with a subtle note of warm joyousness, “I’ve always thought of it as ‘our’ table! I shall never think of it otherwise!”
“Well, I want to ask you,” he continued, earnestly thumping with one sparkling finger, “not to leave the table behind.” She coloured a little, and he pressed on: “I want you to take it with you to the new apartment for a kind of nucleus—to begin building around!”
“Ah,” she sighed lightly, but with a gently glowing graciousness, “you’re a diabolical tempter at my elbow, for I’m sure you know my weakness for ‘gate-legged’ tables!”
“I guess I have a weakness for them, too,” he admitted doggedly.
“Well,” she laughed, blushing still more happily, “then I’m afraid the table will have to go along, really, though I’m sure the people who are subletting will notice! What would sound most plausible, do you think?” She was growing quite excited. “For it would hardly do to tell quite the facts—would it?”
III
Meantime, the Skipping Goone was taking on a lively appearance indeed, as the great sailing day drew close. She had hugged her wharf so long in apathetic solitude that it had begun to look as though she might be destined just to settle down in the peaceful calm of the harbour for the remainder of her days. She seemed a little weary and careless of reputation. Small urchins of the wharf played familiarly all over her decks, while a shore cat, who would have raised her paws in horror at the thought of becoming a ship’s cat, had strayed aboard through pardonable misapprehension and become parent to a generous brood of kittens. The hawsers had taken on a staid and permanent look. But lo! a great change was come about, and the Skipping Goone strained at her moorings, ready to launch forth upon the most strenuous period of her career.
It was at length the very eve of departure. Jerome had been feeling very sad, with the hour of severance so nearly arrived; but as the night wore on he felt less and less sad in proportion to the augmenting glasses of claret poured out for him by the incomparable Lili, who, herself in a distinctly uplifted state, didn’t leave off beaming at all. His, just now, were sensations he could wish to prolong into an eternity; they eased his hurt at the same time that they encouraged in him a feeling that he might, if he would, cut a tremendous figure in life. Could Stella look in upon him now here in the dazzling midst of Girardin’s French table d’hôte, surrounded by gay opera singers making the most of their last night on shore, she would think there had been strides since the day they had quarrelled in the fog.
“Pass the bottle along down, dear old dear!” somebody shouted.
All things considered, it was a remarkably democratic aggregation of songbirds. Naturally when he boasted about its being one big family, the impresario exaggerated a little; for of course there was a perpetual swarm of petty jealousies and artistic differences—though what are most families like, anyhow? By and large, the troupe was an extraordinary model of ruined caste.
When the fun was at its height, Curry waved a gem-encrusted hand, gave his songbirds a departing smile, and removed himself to a distant corner of the restaurant where he could spread out all those “dreadful lists and things” which Captain Bearman insisted must be checked up. His retreat was deplored by a prodigious groan, and impulsively covered by Lili, who chased after him with a slopping goblet of wine and a depleted plate of sandwiches. “So you won’t starve to death, old dear!” And she flung her arms spontaneously round his neck before returning to beam upon her clerk.
“You’d think it ought to be an easy thing to run a schooner,” Curry smiled up wanly at M. Girardin, who had strolled over from his little cash booth in a relaxed mood. “But Lord! there’s been nothing but trouble from the word go!” Captain Bearman was turning out to be a master full of whines and unforeseen exactions. There had been endless fault to find with the Shipping Goone. “What a vessel! Sails rotten, hull rotten! Rudder in the last stages!” Apparently there was nothing quite right about the poor old Skipping Goone, of which the impresario had been so proud, except perhaps the new coat of paint—and even the colour of that had been grumblingly objected to as unnautical. “And then,” Girardin was told, “the cargo!”
“But mon dieu, do you intend to handle it all yourself? Have you no business manager, par example?”
“Well, perhaps not in the strict sense,” admitted Mr. Curry in his petitioning, confidential way. “There’s a sort of treasurer—you see that man just waving the bottle? But he just handles the box office receipts. Then I’ve got a kind of assistant, too, who’s supposed to do things; but he’s been so crazy to go on the stage that I’ve had to let him sing in the chorus, and that seems to make him not much good for anything else.”
An unusual amount of commotion on the other side of the restaurant made them look across. Most of the troupers had had sense, but a few were in a very mellow condition—notably Jerome, who wasn’t used to stimulants and so reacted to them with awful completeness. The songbirds were grouped in a crowding and boisterous circle. One of the men was whistling a jig tune, and several were clapping their hands in syncopated time, while in the centre, very much flushed and largely unable to keep his balance, was Jerome, doing the sailor’s hornpipe.
IV
In the cold grey dawn of the great sailing day, shadowy figures began going aboard the Skipping Goone. The city delivered them up. Then gradually the city awoke, and the waterfront went about its usual occupations.
As morning advanced, the Skipping Goone became a setting for some of the wildest scenes in the history of opera in America. Red-eyed sopranos were bumped by stevedores; a stout lady whose forte was contralto matrons, went madly about in search of a trunk. Sailors were puttering, while Captain Bearman croaked out sullen orders through his beautiful flaming whiskers. Finally, the lord of all commotion, Xenophon Curry, who was sure, yes desperately and perspiringly sure, half the important things had been forgotten.
And of course Flora Utterbourne was on hand to see them off. She walked right aboard the Skipping Goone, her face smilingly full of every good wish for the impresario as she stood beside him on deck conversing with unbroken animation, yet always in that fluid, gliding manner which he knew so well now. Yes, Flora in her speech flowed on like a gracious river. And there was just a faint sadness behind her frank gaze, which meant that this departure was going to leave an unexpected emptiness. However, if there was sadness in her gaze, there was sadness also in the impresario’s. Xenophon Curry, though borne up by unquenchable optimism, realized that it was going to be surprisingly hard to say good-bye—maybe for years or a lifetime—to the lady who had asked him the way to Crawl Hill.
The Skipping Goone looked small and a little pathetic this morning. What was in store for them in the wide, wild ocean?
A crowd was waving on the wharf. The last perfervid farewells had been said, and the singers went about nibbling bon voyage chocolates, defiant of mal de mer. There were flowers, there was even confetti. The drab old schooner had taken on a very festive look indeed—almost like the barque of Cleopatra!
Every hand clutched a handkerchief, every handkerchief sought its niche in the vibrating atmosphere. A tenor tried his voice behind the deckhouse and emerged singing Auld Lang Syne. The last hawser was cast off. A tug hooted.
And so it was that the Skipping Goone in her brave new paint, bearing a mixed cargo of merchandise and songbirds, gay with flutter and bloom, was trundled off down the bay and out upon the heaving vast, bound for parts remote and adventures cloaked in an impenetrable veil.