“Come in, please,” he said in a quaint sing-song, his lips parting with a smile which might be called almost insolent were one not at the same time conflictingly sure that the emotion behind it was wholly amiable. “Have a chair. We’re not very sumptuous, since our business doesn’t call for much style.”
When one came into the presence of Captain Utterbourne one seemed coming into the presence of a man about whom strange currents eddied. He wasn’t wholly reassuring—in fact, no one standing before him could feel quite easy or as though his soul was his own. Still, this aura about him had a haunting and insidious attraction, too, so that even though it might prove fatal, one would not care altogether to escape.
King was a little startled to observe that the sheet of paper on which the other had been so diligently at work was covered merely with a lot of scrawled anchors, which the Captain had depicted in a variety of positions: now upright, as though in the act of being lowered, with the stock horizontal and the shank standing perpendicular; again in a position of repose, with the stock and one fluke resting, one assumed, on the bed to the sea. Whenever Utterbourne grew absorbed in anchors it was plain to those who knew him as well as it is ever possible to know a man with a poker face, that he was concentrating on some new enterprise.
The Captain, half sheepishly noticing that his handiwork had been detected, muttered: “No doubt every one has his own unconscious emblem—a stray out of the past, perhaps—h’m?” His lips moved with apparent reluctance, as though it annoyed him to think that nobody, even after all these centuries of progress, had been able to render speech possible without visible effort. He tilted back in his chair somewhat rigidly, his toes just touching the floor as he rocked, and hummed Macdowell’s To a Wild Rose a moment in a mood of vaguely pleasureable detachment. At length, however, there was a reviving “Well, now,” and King leaned a little toward him, prepared to hear unfolded the mysterious substance which had seemed hovering in the air last evening. What was going forward behind that card-player’s mask?
II
The Captain’s little eyes looked quite mild and affectionate, but they also held their tiny glint of fire. He gazed at Ferdinand King in an unwavering, disconcerting way, tapping with his pencil upon the wooden shelf he had pulled out of the desk to form an improvised table between them, and uttering an occasional dreamy “H’m?” But in a moment or so the pencil was laid aside, and he began speaking, his chin nestled cosily in his hands.
“King,” he said, “did you ever hear of Hagen’s Island?”
The other man shook his head, but seemed at the same time to recognize the curious little prelude about maps as hinging here. He waited almost breathlessly.
“Hagen’s Island,” resumed the Captain, “had governments quarreling over it in its time. I don’t doubt but it might once have been quite capable of bringing on a war somewhere. Oh, heaven! the laughter behind it all—behind all life, for that matter, King! H’m?—h’m? I spent a whole dreamy spring afternoon once, with crocuses just blooming outside, going through speeches about far off Hagen’s Island delivered in Parliament. That was in connection with the coaling station project which got under way and then was abandoned, with engineers right on the spot. Maybe it was all politics—I don’t know.” He shrugged.
“The island proved to be too remote. In short, it was a failure. Some newspaper wag dubbed it ‘the football of the Indian Ocean,’ and then the last ripple died out.” He seemed to lose himself a moment, as in a fog at sea; and King, mystified but much interested, waited for him to go on. The narrative was characteristically resumed from a rather startlingly new angle.