Captain Bearman’s eyes went rapidly about; and he was harassed by a disagreeable sense of not having quite succeeded, after all, in defending his position. However, this was but a logical phase of his destiny, which always, in the end, must simply be bowed to.
“Lord, Lord!” exclaimed the impresario. “It seems incredible we should go through what we did and all live to tell the tale! But when I saw my scenery going,” he continued with a sigh, “I knew that was the end of the world tour. It takes the ground from under a man—everything wiped out in an hour....” He looked tired and seemed even to have aged; but nothing could ever rob that smile of its incorrigible strength and sweetness—a smile so full of confidence in the inherent good of an often enough unfathomable scheme of things. However, transcending everything else just now was the startling and ludicrous aspect of the impresario’s head without the toupee, which had been, for all who knew him, so essential a feature. Without the boyish bangs he had somehow a naked, lost look, which lured out smiles all round, though the situation was grave and sober. It was like the laughing twist of a comet’s tail through empyreans of stern and awful purpose. Or it was like the drunken porter’s soliloquy in Macbeth.
Elsa superintended the distribution of the drink she had been concocting, and they all sat sipping. Jerome’s eyes rested upon a map of the world covering one wall of the cabin. There was the whole world outspread; the route of his adventurous travels, with their complement of personal growth, could be traced league by league. He felt some one gazing at him curiously, and when he turned met Elsa’s eyes.
Talk broadened to consideration of other sea disasters, the theme seeming to hold a subtle fascination; and Utterbourne, discoursing about “runs of luck,” aired certain slightly nebulous theories about “rhythm” in such matters. And then they returned to the wreck of the Skipping Goone, and Jerome, conscious that Captain Utterbourne was following him with quizzical attention, told at some length of the tussles he was having over insurance and the cargo tangle generally.
“There’s been some rumpus about witnesses—it’s lucky I had presence of mind to grab the books before leaving the schooner.” He laughed shortly. “It’s worse than any mix-up I ever got into in the chandlery line!”
He drank the last of his cocktail; and the Captain, staring at him blankly, mused: “How the devil has a fellow of this type managed to change so utterly in one short year? How the devil?” There was a glow behind the sleeping quiet of his baffling eyes. Experience, the Captain concluded with a sly wink of relish, must have acted in the case of young Stewart—h’m?—like a sly milligram of radium. For the Captain was very fond of analysing people—considered himself extremely clever at it; and, while he sometimes made mistakes of which nobody knew anything, he was, on the whole, a pretty shrewd judge of human nature. And with him analysis always moved hand in hand with the musing query: Is this a man I can use somewhere? The process had become really subconscious. As he watched Jerome he narrowed his eyes a little.
“We seem to be a deadly poison—h’m?” observed Captain Utterbourne a little later in his lynx-like drawl, conversation having by this time turned upon one of his most cherished themes: the deleterious influence of civilization on the human race, and especially the havoc wrought by Christianity. It was perhaps a trifle vague; but the other captain, setting down his glass, nodded with that peculiar brand of admiring speechlessness one would expect to encounter in a satellite who seemed thus to convey: “Exactly what I’ve always insisted, but these fools won’t listen to reason—you can’t get ’em to!” And from time to time, as startling figures emerged concerning the decline of savage life under enlightened rule, Mr. Curry would cry: “Is it possible?”—almost as though, right on top of all his own troubles, he half recognized here a human challenge to do something.
“By the way, dad,” demanded Elsa, “speaking of savages in general and Borneo in particular, when do we sail on?”
For a moment Turk met Turk, with faces that defied each other in the matter of inscrutability.
“Anxious already—h’m?” her father parried—for he loved to pit query against query.