Lili didn’t appear at breakfast. Jerome hated to ask about her, but
at length did; and they told him, without quite the old satirical
respect, that she was lying low. It even got to Lili that her friend had
been enquiring after her; and she sat up in her bunk and romantically
scribbled him a few lines on a bit of wrapping paper torn off a package
containing a new eleventh hour corset.
“Hello, old dear!” she scrawled. “How’s every little thing? It’s a gay
life if you don’t weaken! I haven’t—I’m only taking a long beauty sleep,
and if it gets calmer I’ll meet you on deck tonight.”
Jerome was quite excited over the note. He had never received a note
like this before. While they were still engaged, Stella had written him
three or four letters from Los Gatos, where she had gone on a trip in
the summer; but these letters had differed acutely from the note just
received from Lili. There was something about Lili’s note, with its vague
department store aroma, that made Jerome tingle excitedly. He was very
sure none of the clerks he knew in Market street had ever received such a
note.
There was no moon, but the stars were rich and wonderful. She had dragged
up blankets from her bunk, and sat snug in them on deck—a trifle subdued,
perhaps, by the mighty sway of the sea, though she beamed almost as
dazzlingly as ever, her eyes opening wider and wider in the starlight
till the poor clerk was nearly beside himself.
She asked him if he didn’t want part of her blankets, and he said, very
earnestly, oh no, he wasn’t cold. “But you haven’t any overcoat.” No,
that was true—because he hadn’t worn one to Girardin’s. Everything seemed
to date back to Girardin’s. “Say,” he demanded, “has it seemed long since
that night?”
“Has it seemed _long_!” she exclaimed. “My Gawd!”
“A lot can happen in a little while sometimes,” he mused. “It seems as
though more has happened since that night than altogether in my whole
life!”
She grabbed the clerk frantically. “I thought we were going clear over
that time! Don’t it seem so to you when we tip so far?”
Sensations rather similar had not been stranger to his own brain;
indeed, furtively, once or twice earlier in the day he had thought:
“I’m a goner!” and tried to recall a very concise prayer, and had seen
his whole life drawn into a swift, convenient synthesis; but the loyal
old craft, somehow or other, always managed to come creaking back, and
went right on about her business. “It’s perfectly safe,” he assured her.
The calm may have been egregious, but there was a genuine throb back of
his suggestion: “Would you like me to hold onto you so you’d feel more
steady?”
“Listen to him!” she tittered, snuggling down into her nest and gazing
over at him enticingly. She half closed her eyes and gave him a vampire
look.
Jerome, just then, felt as though he would be willing to do anything in
the world for Lili. Anything she might ask. He had reached an abject
phase in his romantic feeling for her. Lili charmed and hypnotized him,
made the blood go racing. No girl had ever affected him just this way
before.
“Aren’t the stars grand tonight?” she cried, wrinkling her smooth
forehead a little, as though making a real and quite taxing effort to
appreciate God’s celestial accomplishment. “Did you ever see ’em so big?”
Jerome never had.
“I just love to be out on the ocean,” she sighed, “but
ain’t-it-awful-Mabel to think where we’d go to if the boat _would_ go all
the way over?”
The _Skipping Goone_ plowed steadily along through a warm sea under the
stars.
“I’m crazy to get to Honolulu,” the girl observed.
So was Jerome.
“Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
“I hear there’s a wonderful beach where it’s always moonlight, and
everybody plays on those things—”
“Ukuleles?”
“That’s it!”
“I used to have one.”
“You did? What a pity you didn’t bring it along—to Girardin’s,” she added
with a little humorous smile. “It would sound sweet a night like this on
the water, wouldn’t it?”
He agreed. There was a warm silence. Then she began singing, in a dreamy
voice:
“_I want to be the leading lady,_
_I want to have the all-star part...._”
She yawned, in a pleasantly relaxed way, and snuggled. “I hate to go to
bed a night like this,” she sighed.
Jerome suggested daringly: “Let’s stay up all night!”
Then she tittered again and narrowed her eyes. But for all her lightness,
it was becoming obvious that Lili’s attitude toward Jerome had altered
somewhat since the day she had gone around with the petition about tie
clips. She still beamed on him, of course, because Lili wouldn’t know how
to look at any man without more or less beaming. But she also looked at
him not a little seriously. He didn’t, somehow, seem quite so funny to
look at as he had at first, and he didn’t talk so stiffly.
After a little she asked: “What are you going to do when we get there?”
Jerome didn’t know.
“Haven’t you any idea?”
He shrugged and lamented: “I’ve only got forty cents to my name!”
She poised it with a faint but very friendly smile.
“I know one thing,” he declared stoutly. “I don’t like the idea of going
back—honest I don’t!”
“Then why do you go back?”
“What _can_ I do?”
“If you could only sing, you might join us in the chorus!”
(Stella, it vaguely occurred to him, would have replied: “Can’t you think
of anything yourself?”)
“I wish I could sing,” he said.
“Ever try?”
“Yes. I sound like one of the fog horns on Yerba Buena during a tule fog!”
She laughed. “It’s a pity, because you could stick around.”
“I’ve often thought I’d like to go on the stage if I ever got a
chance....”
“Why don’t you speak about it to Mr. Curry?”
“Do you think he’d take me on?”
“He’s awful good-hearted,” she evaded, adding: “Are you sure it’s as bad
as a fog horn?”
“I suppose I could learn how. Is it very hard to follow those highbrow
tunes?”
“N-no,” she replied.
“Do you think I ought not to go back?”
“I’m not much at handing out advice,” she replied, quite seriously,
the stars making her big eyes strangely bright, “but if I was you I’d
certainly keep on going, now you got started.”
“Yes,” he said, a new determination in his voice. “I guess you’re right.
Great Scott! It certainly does seem years since Girardin’s!”