“You don’t mean to say that’s her, deah bhoy? Damn it all!”
Then he told me how he had met a girl, several days before, resting on the rocks near Rewa town. Struck by the singular beauty of her face, he had taken a snapshot of her.
“Did you speak to her? Did you ask her if she was going to the Pinks’?” I almost yelled. For a moment he looked at me as though he thought I had gone mad, then said: “Who the devil are the Pinks, deah bhoy?”
For a moment I glared at him; then the absurdity of it all came to me, and we both smiled.
I explained to him as much as I thought necessary.
“Quite romantic, old bhoy,” he said, as I told him about Waylao stowing away on the Sea Swallow, and how she had been kicked out of the pious Pinks’ establishment.
He was a good-hearted fellow, for though he chaffed me a bit about it, I saw that he would have gone a deal out of his way to help me to find the castaway girl. I will not tell how deeply I dreamed of that girl. In imagination I saw her tramping along those wild tracks, homeless, friendless, and full of misery. All thought of securing a berth on a ship, or doing anything whatsoever for myself, vanished. One resolve remained, and that was to scour the Pacific till I met Waylao.
She was no longer Waylao the stowaway to me. She had become something wonderfully beautiful and mysterious, the poetry, the romance of existence. It was a strange madness: the very memory of her eyes seemed to be photographed on the retina of my own eyes, and to send a poetic light over the wild landscape that I tramped across. I heard her voice in the music of the birds that sang around us. The sorrow that reigned in the heart of that homeless girl was mine also.
I was not what the world calls in love. It was a wild, romantic passion that came to me. I became a child again. I heard the robin singing to God high up in the poplar-trees just outside the little bedroom window—the room wherein I slept, a child. Romance existed after all. It was as real as the starving crows that faded across the snow-covered hills into the sunset, as real as the tiny, secret candle gleam on the magic page of the old torn novel by my bedside. The glorious poetry of childhood was true.
But away mad dreams!