“No. There’s an embargo on oil, and the natives have never heard of electricity. Mr. Rutherford, I’d cut down a little more. We can afford to creep here. There’s a legend about reefs, and you know,” he added, with a graceful gesture in the direction of the cabin where he kept his library of sailing directions, “even the best of our charts weren’t drawn by God Almighty.”
Though the restriction passed no further, and though he was secretly prodded with curiosity to see what sort of place this was to which Stella had come with her fabulous husband, Jerome announced to Elsa that he, too, would wait until morning to go ashore. He would stay and keep her company—unless she really preferred her book.
This pleased her, though she didn’t, of course, show it. It was interesting to come across a young man apparently quite as disillusioned as herself, and one who never attempted even abstractly, to make love to her. That, indeed, was the beauty of the whole arrangement, on both sides. Each felt as the other did about life, and especially about the opposite sex and romance and moonlight and all that sort of thing.
Jerome smiled easily as he suggested she might prefer her book, and Elsa—well. Elsa would very greatly have preferred him to her book; but she felt, too, just the way he did: that is, had penetrated beyond the tiresome realm of feeling altogether; so that; after all, at the last moment she made him go along. There was, to tell the truth, a tiny and very complex tremor of alarm in her enigmatic heart, and she knew she must remain indifferent at all costs. Besides, since a restriction had been laid down, she found it irksome to face the ordeal of waiting until morning for news of their mutual friend. There were times when the Captain was a little tedious.
Jerome, also, was very anxious to keep his new and hard-won indifference intact; but since whether he went or waited was a matter of very small consequence, he decided, on Elsa’s request, to go. Captain Utterbourne and two or three officers were about to embark in the little launch. Jerome ran and joined the shore party. The whole of the way in the Captain talked dreamily about the relative excellence of Cuban and Haitian rum.
III
It was quite dark when the launch crept up to the dock. There seemed to be no lights on the island. A queer sort of a place. And what was that spectral object that resembled a crazy derrick? Rutherford turned an electric flash upon it.
Suddenly a figure darted forward out of the dark and fell at the Captain’s feet. It was Tsuda. He uttered at first a high-pitched oriental lamentation. But a sharp word brought him to his feet, and he stood there before them with bowed head. Clearly it was not a joyous welcoming.
“What’s the matter?” asked the Captain, his voice low and commanding. The poet and dreamer were now wholly merged in the dynamic man of action.
“Evil come upon us!” Tsuda cried, his nervous brown hands writhing.