Both were privately busy for a moment with the circumstances of their one
previous meeting. Things, she shrewdly decided, must have been happening
to him. As for Elsa, she looked precisely the same as ever. She was still
unmarried, and had just begun a little to take on the vigorous air of one
who is on the verge of becoming really confirmed in her attitude toward
life.
“It’s very surprising we should have run into each other like this, ’way
out here,” she said, taking off her rather mannish hat and thrusting back
her hair with a firm brown hand.
“Yes, it is,” he agreed, feeling more at his ease. When they met before
she had really quite terrified him with her bold, sure, satirical front.
Now he was much better equipped to combat it. He felt he was equipped to
combat anything. “But where have you ever come from suddenly,” he asked,
“riding a bicycle so coolly out of nowhere at all?”
“I’m on a trip with dad,” she told him. “We brought Aunt Flora as far
as Manila and dropped her there. But I’m going to stand by the ship all
the way back to San Francisco again.” There was a hidden smile in her
words which seemed to exult in a certain stability of will not shared
by the romantic Aunt Flora. “I like it for a change,” she went on with
a slight drawl. “I never dreamed in the first place the Captain would
let me come.” And she laughed briefly. “He’s always such an old bear
about business. But there wasn’t any difficulty. It only goes to prove,”
she ended, shrugging humorously, “that you never can tell about the
Captain until you try. I’m having a bully time, though the days at sea
are usually pretty dull. As soon as it’s possible to establish shore
connections anywhere, I make off at once with my bicycle.”
“I’ve met your father—Captain Utterbourne,” said Jerome.
“Have you? Yes—I don’t know why—I assumed you knew him. Dad seems to meet
everybody sooner or later. He’s absurdly promiscuous—not meaning anything
personal,” she laughed, without really qualifying her easy tactlessness.
“And yet,” she added, in a drawl not so very unlike her parent’s, though
it seemed a few shades brighter, “dad’s not what I’d call the mixing
kind.”
Jerome was silent, and in a moment she went on, drooping her eyes and
smiling calmly: “But it hasn’t been explained what you’re doing in
Borneo.”
“I’m afraid I’m stranded here,” he smiled.
She gazed at him blankly.
And then, before going deeper into his plight, he asked: “But how did
you get in without any one’s seeing you? I don’t understand, for I swear
I know every ship in the harbour by this time, and the _Star of Troy_
certainly wasn’t hereabouts this morning.”
“Oh, but a great deal may happen since morning, you know.”
“Yes, I realize that,” he admitted. And he vaguely hoped, and really
believed, that his tone smacked somewhat of cynicism.
“You should stick right to the waterfront in these exciting seas,” she
advised him, “if you don’t want to miss what’s going on. We dropped
anchor just at noon today. We came up from the Celebes, where dad did
some business. Right after tiffin I rowed ashore and started off to see
the sights. I’ve seen them,” she ended humorously, and with just a tinge
of restlessness. “Now I’m ready to move on to some other place. The older
I get the more insatiable I seem to grow.”
“Then you didn’t linger about the waterfront long enough,” he thrust
back, “to be quite posted yourself about what’s going on.” His sad eyes
had a little sparkle in them.
But of course her most effective weapon was always the unassailable
gaze—not, however, that she used it quite consciously. And as she gazed,
Jerome felt a trifle uneasy. He couldn’t help himself.
“You had no chance,” he expanded, “to hear about the _Skipping Goone_.”
She repeated the name after him with the inflection of one who half
remembers or is not quite sure. “Wait a minute. It’s not a name one
forgets in a hurry. Oh, I know! She’s the schooner Aunt Flora was always
talking about. Sometimes she called her that, and sometimes she mixed the
goone up with other birds, but I never corrected her because Aunt Flora’s
so delicious when she gets things just a little wrong. I believe dad had
something to do with that schooner in the first place, didn’t he? Some
queer business of getting a skipper, or something of the sort?”
“Yes, that was it.”
“Aunt Flora told me some very amazing things about the man who’s taking
an opera troupe around the world. There’s been a lot about it in the
papers, and I remember dad’s shouting over it, too.”
“I suppose so,” replied Jerome. “It must have seemed a thing to shout
over at first. And yet we managed to make a go of it, in spite of
everything, until—”
“You!” For once she was surprised into a very slight change of
expression. “But you aren’t one of them? You’re not a singer?”
“No, not a singer. I tried to be,” he explained, the sadness in his face
temporarily lightened by this unexpected little roadside duel, “but there
seemed no opening for a fog horn.”
“Do you mean that the _Skipping Goone_ is lying right here in the
harbour, and that we passed her by without a salute? It must never get to
Aunt Flora!”
“The _Skipping Goone_,” Jerome replied solemnly, “is out yonder, about
ten miles, at the bottom of the sea.”
And he told her the story briefly and simply.