She shrugged. “You never can tell what the Captain may take it into his head to do. I never dare go very far away from the ship for fear they’ll suddenly decide to haul up and move off. But as long as I stick around and look eager it’s just another case of the watched pot. I’m ready anytime he is,” she concluded, her eyes drooping.
“And you don’t know where you go from here, I suppose?”
“No.” She moved her head a little restlessly.
After a moment she said: “Well,” nodded informally, and went on. Jerome watched her till she disappeared from view—a trim, independent figure, with youthful stride.
III
A few more days passed. Early on the morrow all the stranded victims of shipwreck would be aboard a steamer bound for Yokohama—all, that is, except Miss Valentine, who by hook or by crook must reach Cape Town, and for whom a circuitous passage had been booked, after much dickering and consultation. Mr. Curry was taking his songbirds sadly back to San Francisco, where the little company would disband—not without tears, surely, when the time came. Indeed, already there had been tears. And, with the terrors of shipwreck still so fresh in their minds, the loyal songbirds had got together and drafted a declaration pledging themselves to stand by the impresario through all the arduous hardships of a slow reorganization, if he would but say the word. The comedian made a humorous speech. His voice broke in the midst of it, and then he hurried on more humorously than ever. Curry was deeply touched. He said he felt unworthy of such devotion. And then he told them that since he’d lost everything else, he couldn’t ask them to stand by any longer. It wouldn’t be fair to them. He must let them go, each his own way. It wrung his heart, but he must let his songbirds go. However, he would help them all he could; and if ever fortune smiled upon him again, he would call them back, even though they might be scattered to the very ends of the earth!
Jerome, on this last evening in Borneo, left the place where he was lodging and strolled along the waterfront, musing and trying to map his life. After an hour or so with his pipe as sole companion, and his thoughts roaming far, he turned back, deciding to go to bed early, since it would be necessary to rise at dawn. He still felt that vague loathness to begin the homeward voyage which had more or less bothered him ever since the disaster at sea. It would be sweet to see his own people once more; yet he dreaded lest returning to the haunts of his long obscurity might mean but the beginning of a slump which, however gradually, would thrust him back again into the same position whence he had so miraculously risen. Of course Jerome knew perfectly well that he was his own master, and that, in the highest sense, his future would be just exactly what he chose to make it. Nevertheless, as he had pointed out to Elsa in whimsical vein, Borneo was out in the world, whereas San Francisco wasn’t.
“That’s it,” he muttered, “it’s adventure and life and hustle and bustle and even danger I’ve come to require. I can’t get along without these things now I’ve had a real taste of them. I’ve simply got to go on and on!”
The germ of seeing things happen, and of being himself in the thick of heavy action, had penetrated into his corpuscles—kept racing through his arteries like possessed. He was in a state of intoxicated revolution, underneath his new exterior of worldly poise. Obscurity had been overthrown with violence; it had been assailed, cast down, trampled upon; it was extinct. But Jerome, for all his emancipation, was vaguely fearful of ghosts.
Ventures such as this of Xenophon Curry’s didn’t, he knew, bloom on every bush along one’s way. And rumination had drawn him into a mood sober and regretful by the time he reached the house where his bed was: a frame of mind tending wonderfully to augment the thrill of surprise which accompanied a sight of Captain Utterbourne’s Chinese boy awaiting his return with a note.