Life was different on board, owing to this new importation; busier too. This was an entirely new stunt, to Tommie, and just as she knew everything about an automobile, an aëroplane, and a horse, she seemed determined to know everything about the Wear Jack. Her capacity for assimilating detail was phenomenal; the use of everything from the main sheet buffer to the mast winch had to be explained, she had to learn how to steer, and, having learned, she insisted on taking her trick at the wheel. When she was not sitting with her nose in a book, she was helping or hindering in the running of the ship. Then there was the question of her clothes to keep them busy.
Drawing on to the tropics, it was more a question of shedding clothes, especially when it came to the matter of tweed coats and skirts. Bud, in his millionaire way, had come well provided; boxes and boxes had arrived from Hewson & Loder’s and had been received by Hank and stowed as “more of Bud’s truck.” White silk shirts, suits of white drill, they all rose up like a white cloud in George’s mind one blue and burning morning as he contemplated Tommie in her stuffy tweeds.
“Look here, T. C.,” said George, “you can’t get along in that toggery. I’ve half a dozen suits of white down below and I’ll get one of the Chinks to tailor a couple of them for you. Hank, roust out those boxes, will you?”
They tried a white drill coat on her.
They had never really recognised her size till they saw her in that coat, which would almost have done her for an overcoat. Then they recognised that perfect proportion had given her stature and that, if the gods had made her head an inch or so more in circumference, she would have been a dwarf.
Then Hank started forward to find a tailor amongst the Chinks and returned with a slit-eyed individual who contemplated his strange customer, standing like Mr. Hyde in the garment of Dr. Jekyll, took eye measurements of the length of her limbs and the circumference of her waist and retired to the foc’sle with two pairs of white drill trousers and two coats to work his works, also some white silk pajamas and shirts, producing by the next morning an outfit which fitted, more or less. She solved the question of shoes and stockings by discarding them on deck.
That was on the morning when, across the sea to port, Cape San Lazaro showed itself and the heat-hazy opening to Magdalena Bay.
The steady nor’westerly breeze that had held all night began to flicker out at dawn; when they came up from breakfast the world had gone to sleep. From the hazy coast to the hazy horizon nothing moved but the vast marching glassy swell coming up from a thousand miles away and unruffled by the faintest breeze.
Tommie, having come on deck and taken a sniff at the glacial condition of things, curled herself in one of the deck chairs with a book. The Wear Jack was well provided with deck chairs and Hank, having inspected the weather, dived below and brought one up; George followed suit. Then, having placed the chairs about under the awning which had been rigged, they sat and smoked and talked, Tommie, up to her eyes in her confounded book, taking no part in the conversation.