He lighted his pipe deliberately and stared into the grate a moment. Gorham is noted in many ports for his mumness, his almost savage insistence on plain facts, his steady judgment. And here he was talking of a mystery. I felt the note of unsureness in his voice.
“In a case like this,” he began, “I want to go back a little and fix the facts we both know, as a sort of starting point. In the first place, Harry Owen was what we call a gentleman, well bred, pretty well educated, sent to sea as a stripling to make a man out of him, as the phrase runs. But one always saw him sooner or later in the old crowd. The nice crowd you and I knew when we were younger. He got his papers easily enough and gossip ran that he was going to stop ashore and be something in the broking line. He spoke to me about it one trip I made on the old City of Peking. He thought it would be pretty splendid to be a broker. He was tired of the sea—it was no place for an ambitious man—a dog’s life.
“Well, he came home here to San Francisco and played about for a couple of months. Then old Ben Harris offered him a good place in his business. I thought it was settled. Harry was oddly serious-minded about it. Then he suddenly vanished—went off to sea as chief officer of a freighter. You understand me? He fell in love with Kitty Melrose and she refused him. Instead of staying and sticking it out, Harry threw up Ben Harris’ offer and went off. That’s the time some of us remarked that Owen wasn’t the man we thought him. We didn’t know he was in love with Kitty Melrose.”
“And he came back and married Sheila McTodd. That was the end of him socially,” I remarked. “And you ask me to believe the unbelievable—that a man in love with Kitty would marry anybody else. You remember her? I recall one evening I saw her standing in the doorway of her father’s house. I came to the foot of the steps and looked up. And with a perfectly simple and unpremeditated motion she stretched out both her arms, barring the doorway, her firm hands resting on the lintels. I tell you that that unconscious attitude made me feel for an instant a chill, as if the guardian of paradise were barring it to me.”
Gorham nodded.
“Exactly. We can both understand Harry Owen’s frame of mind. That he was an ass is not to the point. Life wasn’t worth living without Kitty—so he went to sea.”
“And married,” I murmured.
“Instead of getting properly drunk!” was the brutal response.
I was scandalized, but my companion would have none of my pleas for decency.
“The young fellow was half crazed,” he repeated, “so he went and married Sheila McTodd. He went to sea the day after the wedding. Some time later I met him in Panama, and he was barely civil. That same night I saw him sitting at a greasy cafe table staring into nothing, an empty glass in his fist. The next day a skipper more than half insinuated that Harry Owen was going to the devil. So he did, for a year. Then something bred in his bone drew him back from the edge and began to remold him. But, as a matter of fact, no career was open to him, except to con freighters back and forth on the Pacific. He had had his chance and lost it.”