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.”