I
Manila was reached without special incident.
As the Skipping Goone approached the harbour, a sailing skiff was sighted making straight out for the incoming schooner: a small pleasure craft with graceful lines, which had won races in its day. When the skiff came closer it was observed that some one aboard her was waving a handkerchief in very earnest welcome: a woman, nodding and smiling. With an abundant thrill, the impresario discovered her to be Flora Utterbourne!
After the first shock of joyous surprise, Mr. Curry had a curious feeling that it was somehow quite right and natural to find her here in Manila, and to have her come out in a skiff to meet him.
He wanted to climb right aboard the delightful skiff! He seriously—or rather a little hysterically—consulted, even, with Captain Bearman as to the practicability of such a manœuvre, but received such a look of withering scorn as to force him necessarily into a mood of resignation.
It seemed impossible to wait until the schooner came to anchor. Yet by hook or crook the thing had to be managed.
The little craft skimmed and tacked about, like a playful puppy barking at the heels of a charger, and often passed so close as to permit of the single passenger’s engaging in fragmentary talk with those aboard the larger vessel.
Curry went racing all over the Skipping Goone in a wholly undignified fashion, seeking constantly shifting new points of vantage from which interchanges would be most convenient. He puffed and perspired. He was enormously excited, and made no attempt to conceal the interesting emotion. And Flora was excited too, though even under this stress her speech, as it came to him across the dazzling water, possessed that flexible and gliding, that complex and ever smooth-flowing quality, which he knew so well, with its quaint sprinkling, too, of italicised and quoted words.
II
He wanted to sit right down with her on the edge of the wharf and talk.
“Do you realize it’s been the better part of a year since Honolulu?”
“I know, my dear man, but we simply can’t sit down here in all this ‘hubbub’!”
“There’s a carriage!” he cried; and he beckoned the driver wildly.
She laughed—a little humorous, cordial, helpless laugh—and he gave her his hand.
She entered the carriage and he climbed in after her with the spring and zest of a stripling. It made him feel immensely young to be with Flora again. He told her so, and she didn’t mind anything he said, because she was feeling the very same sensations herself. The impresario’s personal hand baggage was bundled in with them, and they were off. The driver wanted to know where to, but they said they didn’t care, so he clucked to the horse and set out to circle the island. Such opulent indefiniteness didn’t often befall.
It was an immortal ride. They talked themselves into almost a state of eager hoarseness; and if one happened to break in while the other was still speaking, the latter wouldn’t stop, but would keep right on till the sentence was finished—never stridently, yet with a vigour which refused to be downed. And then, sometimes, they sat quite silent for a little while; but somehow these pauses were just as thrilling as the talk itself.
The simplicity of what had at length developed into a real if somewhat unusual courtship was rather wonderful. There was, underneath everything, just a fine mutual recognition of compatibility. Flora wouldn’t have known how to be exactly coy, even had she desired. So there was nothing quite of suspense in their mellowing friendship. Both were so essentially open and enthusiastic. She appreciated him and he appreciated her. It had come about gradually and very simply, and they just frankly recognized it. They deserved each other—yes, that was it! And that was what kept humour so warmly alive. She deserved him and he deserved her.
Flora told him, as they rode along, all the things she had been doing since her last letter. There was a new apartment, of course, in San Francisco—“quite a little snug one, this time,” she said, “and not nearly so difficult to furnish, though it’s a charming little place, and I’m trying out some brand new ‘colour schemes’ in it!”
And he told her all about the baby, and what an unusually smart baby it was—really all but walking and talking, one would swear, to hear the excited man rave! Flora laughed till there were tears in her eyes; and she said she “certainly must see the remarkable baby, which you say has become your ‘mascot’, though I don’t really see how a baby quite so young could have teeth almost ready to break through!”
Then all at once it began to dawn on them that they didn’t know in the least where they were driving to. They looked at each other and laughed. And then they grew momentarily rather solemn over a freely acknowledged state of famishment. But scarcely had the wheels revolved a score of times when they beheld—it was just like a page out of some fairy tale!—a delightful house all overrun with crimson ramblers, and out near the road a neat sign which said:
MRS. GILFILLAN: PRIVATE BOARD.
“Whoa!” cried the driver, obedient to an exultant shout from the impresario.
“But do you think they would take us in, just for lunch?” asked Flora. “For you see it isn’t really a hotel.”
“I know,” replied Mr. Curry confidently, “but it’s a canny Scotch name, and I don’t think she’ll send us starving from her door.”
And sure enough, she didn’t. Mrs. Gilfillan turned out to be very corpulent, very Victorian, and very canny. She took them right in, and they sat together at one end of a long table, with all the fortunate private boarders; and there was a genuine revolving pepper, salt, vinegar, and oil “caster” in the centre of the table; and they ate preserves out of tiny saucers of red glass with white scroll-work etched around the rims.
Mr. Curry leaned over and said in a low voice: “Did you ever dream of finding a place like this in the Philippines?” And Flora leaned over and replied, in her rich way: “Isn’t it the most absurd and delightful place you ever heard of?”
The driver had his luncheon too, elsewhere on the premises, and when the romantic couple emerged on to the porch they found that he had piled Mr. Curry’s bags beside the front door.
“Oh do look!” cried Flora.
“Good Lord! The fellow thought we’d decided to stop here for good!”
“It’s really nice enough to ‘stop at’ for good, isn’t it?” asked Flora, laughing a little, but showing by her tone, as well as by a kind of wishing look in her eyes that she honestly meant it.
III
They stood humorously staring down at his things on the doorstep.
“Yes,” he agreed with a sigh, “it is nice. Lord, what wouldn’t I give if there was nothing in the world left to do but just settle down for good!”
Her brows were drawn quite earnestly. “How often lately I’ve thought that too, though of course it’s hardly more than a ‘snatch’ of impractical dreaming—isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” he admitted, almost reluctantly. “It’s only once in a while when you bump up against a place like this, with roses climbing all over everything, and then—those bags at the door.... Lord, doesn’t one get tired, sometimes, of everlastingly hustling?”
“And yet,” she reminded him with a smile, “it’s the very thing we have to do, isn’t it—both of us?”
“Yes, the very thing.”
“It—it’s our obstacle!” Her eyes sparkled.
Then he asked, his voice grown warm and ardent: “Are we going to let it be an obstacle always?”
“No, not always,” she replied, her own voice cordial and eager and reassuring.
“How are we ever going to make the merry-go-round stop?”
“Oh, some way will open up, I know!”
They strolled out on to the lawn and sat down in a bona-fide, old-fashioned, creaky garden swing.
“I don’t suppose,” he suggested wistfully, giving her a most enticing smile, “you ever take little flying trips into Africa?”
“Are you determined to go so far then?” she demanded, with a playful, deprecating contraction of her brow.
“Ah, but I have to!” he told her, looking almost alarmed, as though she were spreading for him a delicious snare which he might find it impossible to resist. “We’re all advertised! We open in Cape Town, and after that—Johannesburg.”
“Of course it would never do to leave out Africa,” she assured him comfortingly. “And after all, you’ve only begun, haven’t you, if it’s to be a real ‘world tour’?”
He held up a pleading hand and smiled. “It makes me a little tired to look ahead so far!”
“But don’t you remember how you couldn’t wait to start out in the beginning?”
The impresario bit off the end of a cigar and mused, his words punctuated with spaces of lighting and taking the first rapid puffs: “That was a long while ago, wasn’t it? I thought nothing of such details as world tours then! Yet I truly believe the first feeling of the vastness of our terrestrial ball came upon me—no, you’d laugh!”
“But you know I never laugh!” she reproached him, laughing, her heart beating a little faster as she sensed the trend of the talk.
“Well, then—the very day of the Hoadley auction!”
“Really? Yet you never knew how impressed I was with it all, and what a great thing it seemed to do, though it did go through my head, too, that ‘Singapore’ is—well, a pretty long way off!”
“The place that really began giving me shivers of homesickness,” he confessed, “was Cape Horn!”
There was a silence, and he was musing over her phrase: “A way will open up.” A little later they drove back through the quiet radiance of a tropical afternoon.
“I’m afraid,” she laughed deliciously, “your ‘songbirds’ will make up their minds I’ve carried you right off the island!”
“You have,” he replied dreamily. “Off the island, and all the way back to that snug apartment with the new colour scheme, and we’re sitting together over our Sunday night bowls of bread and milk, with the gate-legged table between us....”
She lowered her eyes and slipped him one of her hands. So one sees that the songbirds, when it came to that, would really be not unjustified in their decision!