Two days later, Jerome departed alone for a hike about the island. The
catastrophe had temporarily upset his universe, just as it had upset
everybody’s universe; but this was no longer the old Jerome, but one who
rebounded with far more elasticity from upheavals. The _Skipping Goone_
was gone, and with this untimely and sad demise had come an end to Mr.
Curry’s erstwhile triumphant world tour. But Jerome still had his own
life to grapple with.
He tramped many miles, kept reliving in spite of himself the stark horror
of those last moments aboard the schooner, and after all couldn’t see
very clearly ahead. Then there was still the ache of grief in his heart
over the loss of the little life in which his own had grown so lovingly
bound up. He wandered without aim, alone, through the heavy tropical
sweetness. Yes, he seemed older and more sombre. Domestic friction
and tragedy and now this most recent experience at sea had combined
to give him a new bearing of maturity. He did not walk like a naïve
automaton any more. His gait had altogether lost its effect of groping,
juvenile stiff-jointedness. His face was sad, and his eyes were a little
restless. But there were new lines of strength, just entering into the
picture—dimly showing—like ghosts of qualities on the way....
Once a brown baby, sturdy and naked and adventurous, ran on before him
shouting and sped out of sight round a bright epiphytous plant with its
peculiarly graceful pendant bloom; and Jerome, no longer a proud father,
saw again with a pang a small casket lowered into the sea.
Returning toward town later in the afternoon, he found himself tramping
wearily but with a subtly lighter heart along a winding road across whose
sunny face patterns of tropical vegetation played, faintly breeze-touched
and tremulous. Nothing had really occurred to change the drab look of
things in his life, but he had grappled honestly, and the trouble in his
heart seemed a little eased. On either side, as he walked, were fields
of tea and tobacco, and off a little way stood a bamboo cottage flanked
by irrigated patches of rice, and with a great clump of bananas at the
doorstep. The sunlight made everything very still.
He sat down presently on a heap of white stones by the roadside for a
brief rest before tramping the remainder of the way. Just beside him was
a tree half strangled by a growth of flaming orchids.
Here he sat, for some little time, brooding half purposefully and half
dreamily. It was one of those rather rare moments when he seemed to see
himself with considerable detachment. Others had been remarking the
alteration in him as it so strikingly developed. Suddenly he seemed
conscious of alteration himself. Life, he thought, had been bumping
him along at a terrific rate. It had all begun—well, hadn’t it?—almost
immediately after the historic quarrel with Stella as they walked up
Market Street together in the fog and seemed, neither of them, to know
just which way to turn. After that, the curtain had gone up and the
play had started. Jerome musingly reviewed the immense changes that had
come into his life since the day Xenophon Curry entered Oaks, Ferguson
& Whitley’s in quest of provender for his songbirds and a crew as yet
non-existent. And he muttered to himself as he sat now on the heap of
stones resting: “No wonder I feel different!”
He rubbed his palms lightly and meditatively together and looked back
along the road. From this point it dropped rather sharply into a valley,
and then began a long gentle ascent, stretching far up and off among
the foothills toward the legend-kissed heights of distant Kina Balu.
Sometimes the road was invisible for a stretch, where a curve deflected
its course; then it would slip back into view again, an ever narrowing
line, but always gleaming in the white light of afternoon. The young
man’s eyes idly pursued it to a far crest, and in that shimmer of
distance he perceived a figure spinning along toward him on a bicycle.
He watched it glide nearer and nearer, now slipping out of sight for
a time, then re-emerging. The figure was a woman. He would wait, he
decided, until she had come up and passed him. Then he would go on his
way back to town.
She coasted down the long decline into the depression out of which rose
the sharp little eminence on which Jerome was seated. Momentum carried
the rider half way up the steep slope beyond. Then, instead of submitting
herself to the fatiguing task of pumping the rest of the way, she
dismounted and walked, wheeling her bicycle along beside her.
He watched her idly as she strode toward him, his stare being the
calculating, half conscious stare of the ever alert male—something
altogether fundamental and which cannot be disturbed by even so
impressive a creed as misogyny. Jerome assured himself that he had become
a confirmed woman-hater; and yet this admission to no appreciable extent
interfered with the casual interest of his gaze now.
She saw him sitting there by the side of the road, made glancing note of
the fact that the stare was perfectly intact, normal, and true to type,
then came on with a rather bold, free, just slightly self-conscious
swing. She was dressed all in white and wore on her head a tropical
helmet lined with apple green and which kept her face deeply shadowed.
When she came nearly abreast of the man on the heap of stones, she gave
him the conventional glance calculated to set at rest any tremble of
suspicion that she deliberately avoided his eyes. All these tactics are
so simple and so fundamental, and facts of such everyday occurrence, that
they almost never attract one’s notice. However, in the present case, the
girl looked quickly back again, then stopped abruptly, gazing at Jerome
in a cool, challenging fashion.
“Haven’t we met somewhere?” she asked him bluntly.
Jerome got up, a little too hastily, perhaps, to do full justice to the
poise and new nonchalance which were coming to be an intrinsic part of
his nature.
“I don’t know,” he wobbled in surprise. “Have we?” Surely there was
something about her he recognized. “Yes, I’m sure we have, but I’m sorry
to say I can’t exactly place it.”
“That’s my difficulty, too,” she laughed.
And then something in her half satirical laugh, but especially in
a certain unassailable bovine quality in her eyes, carried Jerome
flashingly back across the waste of centuries to an all at once vividly
remembered occasion.
“Miss Utterbourne?” he said, fumbling a bit with his hat, which seemed
uncertain which hand, if either, would acquire an ultimate undisputed
possession.
“Yes, I am,” she told him. “And it emphatically annoys me not to be able
to place you more definitely. Wait—”
He gave her a courteous lift.
“Ah,” she exclaimed, though her expression scarcely changed, “that’s it.
Now I remember perfectly. I dimly connected you in my mind with Stella
Meade, but Borneo’s so far off, and you don’t look at all as I remember
you.”