Peter stared. He had two favorite words with which to describe the legitimately surprising. One of them was “rum.” But such an idea as this called for the other. It was—positively—“rococo.”
She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock, for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two and twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was to have a real mother.
“It wasn’t always Tahiti,” he heard her saying after a little. “We’ve tried everything south of the equator, I’ve sometimes thought. Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew? Spencer Martin——”
“Never even told me when you changed your continent.” He was blandly bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on.
“The climate,” Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other stages of their progress—all places, Peter reflected, that were in the geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative did not add to their reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of it except that it wasn’t what he should call a life at all. He didn’t even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon as anything in her story became coherent or comprehensible, she doubled on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the answers didn’t explain; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point where he didn’t even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was, to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly rambled; but it didn’t make much more sense than what he had learned in childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show you your way. Clearly, she hadn’t the gift of biography. He sat very still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it; but she merely succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure.
“And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away.”
“It must have been a strange life,” Peter mused.
“Strange? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt: so fitted for civilization—for your world.”
“You speak as if it weren’t yours.”
“Oh, mine,” she said simply; “he was mine. I don’t ask for more civilization than that—than my husband.”