“My brother, Captain Utterbourne,” she observed, “has all sorts of subtle theories about it, though I never can remember just how they go afterward, since, you see, he has a way of ‘conveying’ so much and yet really saying so little!”
There was a breath of musing silence between them, and then Mr. Curry’s eyes lighted suddenly. “You mean—a sea captain?”
“Yes,” she told him, “although I often feel it’s more a hobby with him than exactly a profession.” Her smile was full of humour and a kind of furtive family loyalty.
“I wonder,” ventured the impresario impulsively, “if your brother would be willing to help me—that is, give me a little advice....”
“Oh, I see!” she cried, quickly catching the drift behind his eagerness. “About the ‘world tour’! Of course,” she hesitated, “Christopher is sometimes a trifle set in his ‘ideas’ about how things ought to be managed: but he knows hundreds of ‘seafaring’ men—some of them really quite remarkable; and unless he should get swept away from us on one of his whims of ‘perversity’, I’m sure he could get your schooner equipped with something more than a coat!”
Curry’s delight was almost speechless. He ardently scribbled his San Francisco address on one of his cards, and she put it carefully away inside her bag—a large and complex bag, which the beholder could not but assume entered conspicuously into the manipulation of a complex existence.
IV
Flora, full of her new theme, went straight to her brother about it that very evening. “Oh, Chris—such an interesting impresario—clear around the world in a schooner: the Skimming Duckie, or something like that—quite daring and original”—it was just a little breathless and sketchy at first. But her brother bantered, in his freezing way: “You make it all crystal clear, Flora. A schooner?” And then he shouted. He did not laugh, he shouted. It was a little uncouth; but the Captain liked to be a little uncouth sometimes. It helped him with the sea captain atmosphere, which, after all, as has been suggested, wasn’t quite a native emanation. Utterbourne had perhaps out of sheer perversity taken to the sea, and made a success of it; yet he had a meditative, quizzical trend of mind, and leaned a little to hesitancies, a great deal to analysis. He was an enigma of the first water; yet to those who knew him best it sometimes seemed as though he possessed the heart of a mystic—almost of a poet.
“Oh, well,” was the upshot of the talk, “if you like. I’m busy—h’m? But tell him to phone in for an appointment.” The tone was one of cold generosity, which never failed more or less to frighten the listener—a stab of formality that not even his own sister could hope to escape.
But she didn’t mind in the least, even though she may have been a little frightened. She just arched her fine brows gratefully and said: “Thank you so much, Chris! You’ll never regret it, I know, and he’s really quite celebrated, in a way—though I presume the ‘world tour’ will add a great deal to his fame!” And her hand rested a moment upon her brother’s responseless arm.