“I was forever laying plans,” he went on. “I kept planning to do all
sorts of things, and just went on selling shoes. I was always figuring. I
wanted to be rich and travel off over the world. I used to collect travel
guides and vacation pamphlets wherever I could find them, in railroads
and steamship offices and hotels. Sometimes you’d be surprised what
beauties I’d pick up in the way of travel booklets! I would take them
home and go through them, figuring and planning. I got after a while so
I knew all the favourite tourist stopping places about as well as though
I’d seen them.” He smiled with consummate satisfaction.
Stella caught her breath a little, and gazed at her husband with
eyes staring and amazed. “But—” she faltered, out of her morass of
disillusion. “But—Egypt—Monte Carlo—Waikiki...?”
King laughed gently. “Figures of speech, you might call them, I guess.”
“But Ferd—”
“I used to plan and figure about it all so much, sometimes I wasn’t quite
sure myself whether I’d really seen places or only imagined I had. It
got to be that way. But,” he went on with a new touch of eagerness in
his voice, “there was one genuine little joy ride. One year a Rochester
newspaper held a contest to decide who was the most popular clerk, and I
won it! Just imagine that! All the women voted for me, and I got a free
trip through Yellowstone Park and on out to the Coast. I always had that
to build on. The rest was what I hoped I’d do some day....”
“But,” she murmured, “you were picked up at sea—Captain Utterbourne....”
“Oh, yes,” King smiled. “I was just starting out to see some sights then.
Somehow or other I’d managed to save up two or three hundred dollars.
I don’t know how I ever managed to, with all the demands....” It was
dressing like a prince, he had in mind, and the financing of his endless
small flirtations. “I booked a passage on a rummy old freight steamer
that carried a few passengers. I happened to hear about it. The steamer
was going to some place in Europe—some little port I’d never even heard
of. But it was cheap, and I thought I’d start out and see what happened.
I thought it would be a grand thing to stop selling shoes and begin
living like a real millionaire. But—I don’t know. I never quite figured
out how it was. Almost as soon as I’d started I wished I hadn’t. I guess
maybe it was a little too late in life to try to change all my habits,
and I’d done so much planning and travelled around such a lot in my mind
that now I was really starting out to do it, it seemed a little stale and
tame. I really wished I hadn’t started. But by that time it was too late
to turn back.
“The boat wasn’t seaworthy, and somewhere out in the ocean we broke down.
That’s fate, I told myself. I guess we would have gone to the bottom if
Captain Utterbourne hadn’t happened to come along in his _Star of Troy_.”
“And then....” Stella just murmured. She saw how the astonishing tale was
approaching, pitilessly and inevitably, the epoch wherein she herself
began to figure; she felt the imminence, at last, of her own phase, and
could only sit there and listen, while the words fell about her.
And then—yes, then there had been Utterbourne, holding up before him a
glass in which stretched a perspective of strange new combinations.
“I’d begun to feel so uncertain,” he said, with the first shade of
weariness in his voice. “When I got out at sea, on my way to some little
port, I began to wonder if what I really wanted wasn’t to settle down
somewhere and get a few years of domestic life before my time came to
die. I guess something of that sort must have been what I wanted all
along, even if I never seemed to know what it was.... I thought I’d like
to go back to selling shoes again, maybe, and try to get married, if I
could, to somebody who’d know how to make a snug little home. I went on
planning and planning—always planning.” A faint note of bitterness seemed
creeping in. “When I came home from work, I figured, there would be a
smiling little wife waiting to welcome me with a kiss and supper. I even
figured on a Morris chair and slippers to put on in the evening, instead
of—well, I’ve told you the sort of life I’d always been used to.... And
I could still go on reading guide books and illustrated pamphlets. But
of course,” he ended with a sigh which grew a little sombre before he
relinquished it, “I couldn’t very well turn down an offer like Captain
Utterbourne’s....”
“Go on,” the girl said. She had heard so much. She knew she could hear
what remained without flinching.
“You can imagine the rest,” he said, his tone growing restless. “Most
of it you know already.” He told her, not without an increasing though
always muffled, groping bitterness, as the exaltation gradually failed,
how his romantic soul revived. Caesar was himself again. But that queer
little waif of simplicity, almost like homesickness, in his heart, didn’t
quite die of despair, even now. “It was about then,” he ended, “that I
met you, Stella.”