I
The next day they made Honolulu once more, with several hours to spare.
The Skipping Goone was all prepared, at a little before sundown, to sail away from the triumphant scene of Xenophon Curry’s first venture. Everything was ship-shape. The scenic effects, which had looked so tattered and shabby coming down through the dawn in trucks, were housed beneath their particular hatch in the umber cavern set apart for their stowage. The cargo was placed. The Custom House had pocketed its dues, issued a bill of health, and handed over the requisite clearance note, which Captain Bearman pinned to one of the leaves of the book in which he kept the log. An almost dense crowd was on the wharf to wave God-speed. It was a picturesque and really moving scene.
“You must remember,” Flora was saying, “that I always knew you could do it!” She spoke earnestly, and her fine eyes were unusually bright. She gestured a little.
Mr. Curry felt upon him a lingering sentimentality, and asked, his voice curiously afflicted with huskiness: “When do you suppose I’ll ever see you again?”
“Oh, perhaps much sooner than either of us dreams,” she replied, as cheerfully as she could considering the queer tug of emotion at her heart.
His look was wistful and solemn, though his wonderful smile broke through at last.
“Good-bye,” she said warmly. “I’ll be watching for your letters so eagerly, and you know I’ll be wishing you the very finest ‘success’ all the time, for there won’t be a day without its thought of where you are and what fortune is doing for you!”
She gave him her hand, and he held it just a moment with a lingering pressure. It was ever so much more intimate and understanding than the farewell in San Francisco. Then he sighed and went aboard his schooner. She smiled and nodded, her lips silently forming the word “good-bye” over and over again, long after the ship had sped beyond earshot; and he could see her handkerchief still hopefully fluttering when the Skipping Goone had passed the first bounds of the harbour and was beginning to settle to the heave of the outer sea.
II
Some weeks later the adventurers had proceeded as far as Tahiti, encountering little notable resistance from the elements, and were coming, one and all, to feel like thorough-going mariners.
On a day when the sun was bright and the shadows were long and cool, Jerome and Lili sat smoking cigarettes together in the lounging room of the hotel. She was sitting in the chair recently vacated by the Tahiti broker, who had done as well in the matter of cargo as mortal man could do, received his modest fees, and had been telling Jerome tales of Tahitian life and saying good-bye over some glasses of rum. The broker was gone now, and Lili had crept in. She had begged Jerome to sit down again, and had asked for a cigarette. Then, quite without warning, she had burst into tears—and this is where the curtain really rises.
Jerome looked at her in bewilderment. “Lili!” he cried. “What’s happened?”
Shutters were drawn to keep out the glare, and the whole town seemed sleeping.
“I can’t stand it any longer, Jerry!” she sobbed desperately, but in a very little, tear-drenched voice.
“Tell me what it is, Lili,” he begged, going round beside her and laying a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, Jerry!”
“Don’t cry any more, but just try to tell me what it is. I know I can help you, whatever the trouble is.” Yes, he was making progress!
She shook her head miserably. With a quick movement she drew his head down and whispered. He drew back with a little start, and from the look on his face it was very apparent they had come to a crisis in their relationship.
Slowly he sank down into his chair again, and sat facing her across the empty rum glasses. At first he seemed too dumbfounded for words, but presently muttered: “Why didn’t you tell me right off, Lili?” And then, as she merely continued to sob, he went on more forcefully: “Cheer up. It’s not too late, at that, is it? Nobody’s going to stop to figure up the time.” His conviction was considerable, though it did not rest upon experience.
“All I wish is I could just die and be out of the way!” she moaned.
Her eyes were very red, her hair was ruffled and hot-looking. It occurred to Jerome, almost critically, that she might have chosen a less frequented place than the lounge of the hotel for her upsetting confidence, although the room was, it is quite true, deserted and silent. Then it came to him that she had really set out just to be jolly with him in an effort to forget her troubles, and that suddenly her courage had failed.
“Don’t talk like that, Lili,” he begged, knocking the ash carefully off his cigarette. “It’s nothing anybody can help now, and I’m ready to marry you right off, whenever you say. Come on. Let’s go out now and see if we can’t manage to scare up a license and a parson. There must be a way here as well as in civilized places.”
“It won’t do any good,” she said wretchedly, elbows on the edge of the table, her chin in her hands, and her head shaking a slow, mournful negation.
“Come on, buck up, Lili! I hate to see you like this.”
She gazed across at him with rueful eyes, in which there was no beam at all now. Lili’s eyes never seemed to look quite natural unless they were beaming.
“I got along just fine until I met you,” she lamented, almost with an air of reproach, though no one could honestly reproach Jerome very heavily with having lured astray a girl of Lili’s qualities, experience, and temperament. As a matter of fact, her conscience troubled her a little about that wretched soldier....
“I feel just as bad over it as you do,” Jerome assured her. “But I can’t see the good of sitting here crying.”
“You can’t understand how a woman feels, Jerry.”
“Maybe not,” he admitted, at the same time realizing that at any rate he knew just how a man feels under the circumstances.
It wasn’t an agreeable feeling. It was a feeling, in fact, that would have knocked the bottom right out of his small universe a few months ago. But his universe was growing bigger, and he seemed to be growing along with it. In the old days Jerome would hardly have known what to do with obligations of any but the most rudimentary sort. But he had digested a perfectly marvellous fund of experience. The old unfledged Jerome, who used to eat his lunches on the step of the factory that made a leader of forty-nine cent chocolates, would no doubt have frozen with horror at the notion of sitting down opposite a girl and discussing such an issue as this. But now, while very far indeed from looking upon it as a pleasant situation, or one that could be handled with any degree of lightness, Jerome conceived it a natural enough thing to be a partner in the dilemma: the obligation was one he had helped to create. A man wasn’t a man who would allow himself to be scandalized by what had to be, no matter what.
He was at once so advanced and still so immature—knew life and didn’t yet know life, in a breath. But he argued with blunt assurance: “Don’t you see, Lili? All we have to do is get married. Everything will be all right.” He threw away his cigarette and, reaching over between the empty glasses, drew the girl’s hands gently down into his on the table. “I’ve tried hard enough to make you marry me; now, perhaps, you’ll listen to reason!” But he smiled a little sadly, for his ego told him there was something radically wrong about the way his romance was running.
“Jerry,” said the girl at length, looking at him seriously, “I guess the time’s come when I’ve got to tell you the truth about me. I can’t marry you, even now, because I’m married already.”
III
He stared at her, unable for ever so long to grasp the staggering new situation her words established.
Married! But how could she be? How could she? Who was her husband? Where was he? Questions that were the groping articulation of an ever deepening incredulity. And she answered them as well as she could, the answers, on her part, equally groping through the articulation of despair.
Well, she had married a man twice her age when she was seventeen. They had lived together only about a year. Then she left him. That was really about all. Her little story sounded so desperately hackneyed as she poured it out, with increasing enthusiasm, to Jerome.
She was singing in a cabaret when they met. Why she had married him could hardly be thought of as an essential question. Such marriages occur constantly, without rhyme or reason, and nothing on earth can prevent them or their often dismal consequences. She pleased him and he married her. He was without money and drank and had a heavy tendency toward sportiness. They tried to set up a little home in one bare room of a boarding house. It wasn’t very authentic. Her naturally happy and irresponsible nature drooped under a cloud of incompatibility. They fought. Things went from bad to worse. She began slipping back to her old life in the cabaret. Finally she disappeared entirely. She never saw her husband again. That was all there was to it.
Lili might consistently have had a totally different story, but she couldn’t possibly have a story that wasn’t reminiscent of thousands and thousands of other stories, not Lili. There was nothing very definite about it. She seemed always like some wayward, brazen child, with no faculty for doing justice to the serious facts of life. One could not listen without laughter, even though silent; nor could one listen quite without the sudden tightening of tears.
Jerome’s gaze never left her face, and she seemed glad of his sincere, almost passionate attention. It might be nothing could alter her present plight, but there was refreshment, like the long refreshment of an utterly spent emotion, in baring her heart completely to some one of whose comradely sympathy she was sure.
When she had told Jerome the whole story, she sat with her hands in her lap, leaning forward a little in a limp way.
“If it hadn’t been for this, Jerry, I’d have married you long ago. But I couldn’t bear to tell you about it—I haven’t told anybody at all, because I’ve wanted to be free. I’ve even tried to kid myself into forgetting. Sometimes it all seems so long ago. I nearly did tell you once, Jerry—that first night we sat out on the schooner and you were so sweet to me. But I couldn’t seem to, and after that every time it got harder. I used to think: maybe a letter will come saying he’s dead! It’s awful queer how far you can kid yourself. The day you made love to me so hard behind the scenes in Honolulu I almost told myself I’d just decide he’d gotten a divorce from me long ago, and go ahead and marry you, Jerry. But then I happened to remember about some people I used to know who were arrested for bigamy, and I got cold feet.”
Jerome sat staring. Here were shallows and depths he had not glimpsed before. He shuddered a little at the thought of the thin ice on which he had been plunging in pursuit of his unhappy little romance. The word bigamy, which fell so lightly from her lips, sent a vague shiver through him. It was as though, suddenly and for the first time, he realized that he and Lili moved on different planes....
He seemed dazed. “It doesn’t seem possible to think of you married, Lili!” Then, as though stimulated by the very sense of chaos which was just then so strong in his heart, Jerome asked her: “Why can’t you get a divorce from him?”
“Can’t be done,” she returned listlessly. But she began eyeing Jerome just a little shrewdly.
“Why not?”
“Well,” she rambled, rubbing her hands together in a dreamy, irrational way, “I sometimes thought I’d find out how I could get one, but I never seemed to have time, and I’ve always heard it’s not so easy. I don’t know. I never knew how anybody went to work to get a divorce. And then,” she continued with a far-away look in her wide eyes, “you see I don’t know where he is, for another thing. Don’t you have to produce the evidence in a case like that? I don’t know how it is in divorces. We lived most of the time in two or three boarding houses in Chicago. I don’t know where he came from. We just met.”
Jerome looked across at her forlornly. The shabby pathos of her wretched little past gave him a feeling of stuffiness and depression. He seemed to see before him a quite new and more than ever perplexing Lili—felt himself almost a stranger in her life.
Not to offer to marry her hadn’t even occurred to Jerome—not so much because he was any sort of a moral giant as because it had become so natural a thing to want to marry Lili that impetus carried him along over the rough road of their new relationship. The facts in the case merely made simple and inevitable what he had all along desired. However, here was a new and startling complication. His mind was in a curiously mixed condition, and he asked himself in bewilderment what steps remained to be taken. He would willingly help some other way, if he could only decide what would help. They sat together over the empty rum glasses. The world had been so fair; now it seemed a very shabby and sordid place.
Lili dropped her head down onto her arms, folded before her on the table. Her shoulders trembled a little, and he knew she was crying again.
Jerome’s heart was deeply touched. Surely, he thought, there must be some way for him to put out his hand and help. He had forgotten all her lightness, all the torments he had endured for the sake of love. In the confusion of his heart there was something almost like exaltation. He spoke to her gently.
When she raised her head and took up the sorry theme again, it was at exactly the point where it had lapsed so miserably. “Divorce wouldn’t do any good, anyhow, about what I’ve got into now.”
“No,” he agreed thoughtfully, “I guess it wouldn’t.” He felt desperately remorseful.
But that vaguely cunning look in her eyes remained, behind the tears and behind the hopelessness of her position. After a moment, squeezing his hand a little, she murmured: “Jerry, there’s just one way out, if—if you’d be willing to do it—for my sake.”
He brightened. “What is it?”
“Well,” she hesitated, “nobody knows I’m married but you—nobody in this part of the world, anyhow, and I....” It was a little more difficult than she had realized, for she knew that Jerome sometimes had queer ideas about convention.
“Go on and tell me, Lili,” he encouraged.
“Well, then,” she continued, “what I thought of was why couldn’t we just tell them we’d run off all of a sudden and got married?”
“I—I never thought of that!” he stammered, blushing.
“Oh, Jerry,” cried the girl bursting into a fresh flood of rather easy tears, “I’m in such a fix I don’t know what to do, my Gawd, I don’t!”
“Well,” he soothed, “don’t cry any more. We’ll do that, then, Lili.” And after a little pause he added, with a note of resigned whimsy: “There won’t even be need of any license. It isn’t quite the way I always pictured myself getting married, but you can’t always have everything just the way you want it.”
Relief stole all the gloom out of eyes that were made for beaming. She ignored, or failed to sense, the finer phase of what he would be missing in the curious transaction.
“All you’ll need will be just a wedding ring, won’t it?”
“That’s all, Jerry.”
“Then I’ll buy that for you right away now, if they have any in Tahiti. I guess I’ve enough saved up. I’ll see.”
“No, no, Jerry,” she said, reviving rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. I still have my other wedding ring put away. I can use that one, and nobody will ever know any difference—will they?” And she added quite cheerfully: “It’s a lucky thing I kept it! I’d hate to have you going and spending all that money.” Her tone was almost magnanimous.
“All right,” he replied dully. “I’d sort of like to buy the ring at least, but of course it’s true no one would ever know the difference.”
He was tapping the ends of his fingers thoughtfully on the table. She wiped her eyes and smiled: “You know we may have need of all our money later on—when the time comes.”
She was actually beginning to beam on him again; and she asked, with a tremor of almost happy excitement in her voice: “How shall we work it, Jerry? Could we do it this afternoon, so I could flash my ring around tonight?”
“There isn’t much to do, is there?”
“No,” she laughed. “There isn’t much any one can do for this kind of a wedding!”
“You better get your ring and we’ll disappear for the rest of the afternoon. And when we come back you can be wearing it. We’ll fix up a story in the meantime.”
“Will you wait down here?” She was beaming extravagantly. Lili was herself again.
“Yes, I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Oh,” she tittered, jumping up, “it will be such a grand joke on everybody, if they only knew!” She laughed a little hysterically. Her problem was solved. “I won’t be gone a minute, Jerry!”