CHAPTER TWENTY
A FEW UPS AND A LOT OF DOWNS
I
The marriage of Jerome and Lili naturally caused quite a bit of romantic stir among the members of Xenophon Curry’s little troupe. A very hilarious party was given to celebrate the event, at which the happy bride and bridegroom were toasted, and after which (for all this occurred just on the eve of departure from Tahiti) they were sent down to the Skipping Goone in a species of hack, much festooned with ribbon and old shoes, and spattered with rice.
Jerome felt the confusion of his curious position rather keenly; but Lili appeared to fall in with the whole idea easily enough. She enjoyed the send-off almost as much as though it had been legitimate. Indeed, she had nearly all the sensations of a legitimate bride. It was wonderful to be able to find so agreeable and so entire a solution for her problem!
From Tahiti the course of the Skipping Goone lay southwest, and the next stopping point in the world tour was New Zealand, where, in the words of the comedian, a prosperous fall season was “had by all.” New Zealand became ardent in its endorsement of Xenophon Curry and his aggregation of songbirds. But this endorsement was, in turn, entirely outdone by that heaped up by Australia, where the company left its “private yacht,” as they liked to call it, and went on tour.
This carried them through the winter, and even into the spring, for the tour was a little prolonged.
Lili dreaded the coming of her baby—dreaded it enormously. Lili didn’t want any children; she looked upon the ordeal with horror. Her mood was increasingly difficult to meet as the months dragged on; and the brunt of this meeting was borne by Jerome.
After the supreme night in Hawaii, his feeling for Lili had begun to grow complex. The scene in the hotel in Tahiti, again, had introduced new values into the picture. And then—well, his marriage was not proving altogether a bed of roses. No, it wasn’t. He could not deceive himself. Almost from the beginning he had felt that it wasn’t going to be a bed of roses. Yet how little he had foreseen such unhappy developments as these back in San Francisco, when, so callow and so lonely, he had first fallen under the fatal charm of her beaming eyes!
Just after leaving Tahiti, it is true, they passed a few almost happy weeks together, Lili being able so far to forget herself and her own troubles a part of the time at least as to accord Jerome all the affection even he could desire. On her side, of course, it was affection subtly touched with gratitude; but he responded to it eagerly, and made the most of this fleeting sense of married felicity—even tried to assure himself it was somehow a condition that might be brought to endurance, despite all the unfortunate circumstances.
But more and more surely, as the weeks went by, he knew that their marriage was but a word scrawled upon the sand when the tide was low. He wasn’t wedded to Lili in any lasting sense. He was, indeed, merely saving her from an unpleasant experience. At length Jerome came to look upon what he had done as a sheer act of duty—and an act which, despite his own abiding sense of responsibility, grew slyly irksome.