—AND ELSEWHERE
I
Before port was reached two facts important to this history had been
established: the first that Jerome was to join the troupe—not, indeed, as
a member of the chorus (since he had satisfactorily demonstrated to the
impresario that his allusion to fog horns had not been in exaggeration)
but instead as a clerical assistant to Mr. Curry; and the second, that he
had fallen madly in love with Lili.
The first fact was simple enough; as for the second, no doubt the gods on
far Olympus smiled a little. But love spurns the orthodox, and after all
heeds few conventions.
Of course everybody knew about it, for the _Skipping Goone_ was poor soil
in which to cultivate secrets. So the clerk’s love affair was discussed,
just as any issue of general public interest would be anywhere.
That a clerk should fall in love with a girl who sang on the stage could
not possibly cause any surprise, though that Lili should likewise be
smitten with the clerk might seem a little less true to type. But somehow
Lili wasn’t quite a type. She rather baffled. Besides, she hadn’t exactly
fallen in love with Jerome the way he had fallen in love with her.
However, it was a most interesting case; Mr. Curry’s songbirds found it
so, and adapted themselves to its oddities in the easy manner of men and
women of the world. It wasn’t, for that matter, the first time they had
beheld the alluring little singer with a beau.
Any one who had known Jerome intimately during the slow-moving years in
San Francisco would have been astonished enough upon encountering him
in the flushed midst of this new phase of his career. One of the first
momentous changes was an entire absence of the classic tie clip, which
Lili, in playful mood, had snatched off one day and flung far out to sea.
Thus, in a flash, one of the most eloquent emblems of his whole former
life vanished away. It was really wonderful how much less obscure Jerome
looked without the clip. But that was only that. As for the rest—well,
Lili’s beaming eyes alone were a liberal education. And, though she often
enough shocked Jerome with brazenries for which he wasn’t yet altogether
prepared, and while she never seemed to take anything quite so seriously
as he did, her knowledge of the great world opened his mind to somewhat
wider horizons (despite her occasional deficiencies in grammar and
manners) than he had even remotely glimpsed during the epoch when he used
sometimes to think of “cutting quite a figure in the world some day.”
Well, he was cutting a figure now! No, he didn’t feel altogether at home
with himself any more. But it was broadening not to—there was such a
thing, he now began to realize, as feeling too much at home.
Gradually his entire viewpoint changed, so that it was with amazement
he perceived how he had been satisfied just to drudge along in San
Francisco, with nothing ever happening. He had definitely shaken the dust
of the past off his shoes. He was through with the old life forever.
A persisting lightness in Lili troubled him some. She had what at first
struck him as an unnecessarily vulgar way of shouting to her friends:
“I’ve got a man! I’ve got a man!” And he could never, for instance,
begin seriously talking about the way he felt, and about the future
but Lili would laugh it all away with some perfectly frivolous, or at
least irrelevant remark. Her tolerance of the incessantly interrupting
pleasantries of the comedian was distinctly a bore. Jerome’s incorrigibly
healthy ego assured him something was wrong, and that while the
mock-respect of earlier days had largely worn off, he still wasn’t
treated with that degree of honest respect which the majesty of his
ambitious manhood demanded. Jerome had buried his past with its mistakes
and its follies and humiliations, and he demanded of the world that it
treat him accordingly.
Sometimes the startling suddenness of everything would momentarily
overcome. And he didn’t know ... well, at any rate, he mustn’t permit
life to run away with him; to have life run away with him might not be
so bad as to have it crawl away with him; but it would be bad enough.
Sometimes when Lili laughed he had a feeling that life _was_ running away
with him. He had moments of feeling a trifle wobbly about life. Only one
thing seemed, through everything, perfectly clear: it was too late now to
think of turning back!