“You’re a woman in a million! You read my thought perfectly. I like ready wit in a woman. I had to find out. You see, I had promised those beads to Cleigh, and when I humanly can I keep my promises. Sit down, captain!” For Dennison had risen to his feet. “Sit down! Don’t start anything you can’t finish.” To Jane there was in the tone a quality which made her compare it with the elder Cleigh’s eyes—agate-hard. “You are younger and stronger, and no doubt you could break me. But the moment my hand is withdrawn from this business—the moment I am off the board—I could not vouch for the crew. They are more or less decent chaps, or they were before this damned war stood humanity on its head. We wear the same clothes, use the same phrases; but we’ve been thrust back a thousand years. And Miss Norman is a woman. You understand?”
Dennison sat down.
“You’d better kill me somewhere along this voyage.” 131
“I may have to. Who knows? There’s no real demarcation between comedy and tragedy; it’s the angle of vision. It’s rough medicine, this; but your father has agreed to take it sensibly, because he knows me tolerably well. Still, it will not do him any good to plan bribery. Buy the crew, Cleigh, if you believe you can. You’ll waste your time. I do not pretend to hold them by loyalty. I hold them by fear. Act sensibly, all of you, and this will be a happy family. For after all, it’s a joke, a whale of a joke. And some day you’ll smile over it—even you, Cleigh.”
Cleigh pressed the steward’s button.
“The jam and the cheese, Togo,” he said to the Jap.
“Yess, sair!”
A hysterical laugh welled into Jane’s throat, but she did not permit it to escape her lips. She began to build up her hair clumsily, because her hands trembled.
Adventure! She thrilled! She had read somewhere that after seven thousand years of tortuous windings human beings had formed about themselves a thin shell which they called civilization. And always someone was breaking through and retracing those seven thousand years. Here was an example in Cunningham. Only a single step was necessary. It took seven thousand years to 132 build your shell, and only a minute to destroy it. There was something fascinating in the thought. A reckless spirit pervaded Jane, a longing to burst through this shell of hers and ride the thunderbolt. Monotony—that had been her portion, and only her dreams had kept her from withering. From the house to the hospital and back home again, days, weeks, years. She had begun to hate white; her soul thirsted for colour, movement, thrill. The call that had been walled in, suppressed, broke through. Piracy on high seas, and Jane Norman in the cast!
She was not in the least afraid of the whimsical rogue opposite. He was more like an uninvited dinner guest. Perhaps this lack of fear had its origin in the oily smoothness by which the yacht had changed hands. Beyond the subjugation of Dodge, there had not been a ripple of commotion. It was too early to touch the undercurrents. All this lulled and deceived her. Piracy? Where were the cutlasses, the fierce moustaches, the red bandannas, the rattle of dice, and the drunken songs?—the piracy of tradition? If she had any fear at all it was for the man at her left—Denny—who might run amuck on her account and spoil everything. All her life she would hear the father’s voice—“The jam and the cheese, Togo.” What men, all three of them! 133