IV STRATAGEM

CHAPTER FOURTEEN UTTERBOURNE NARROWS HIS EYES

I

Jerome gradually learned the ways of the formidable box office, and took charge of the General Ledger. Thus his time was abundantly filled: during the day hustling around with brokers in the interest of cargo shipments, and at night helping check up with the house manager. As a matter of fact, the company treasurer, whose real and legitimate profession was selling life insurance, had been approached with an attractive offer by a local insurance branch and at the end of the present engagement the main brunt of the financial responsibility would rest with Jerome—a rather vaster contract than the stool-pigeon job at Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s.

He found being connected with a theatre very delightful—the contacts, the excitement, the sense of privilege he felt early in the evening standing out in the lobby between a glaring poster that announced the night’s attraction and a huge frame within which were arranged the pictures of all the principal songbirds. He would watch the people stream in, then would himself slip inside until the curtain had gone up, after which he would go behind and absorb more and more of the mysterious atmosphere which the audience was denied. Here he could chat in the wings with his new friends, and hold long, important tête-à-têtes with Lili during periods of idleness when she wasn’t “on.”

The first popular-priced Saturday night, with the Bohemian Girl in progress, these two young persons might have been discovered leaning up against a fragment of some palace or other, engaged in a more than usually earnest conversation.

“Don’t get so excited, old dear,” cautioned the girl, beaming upon him at the same time, however, and letting her eyes slowly open wider and wider.

“But why won’t you marry me?” he persisted. It was the old, old urge—and seemed, indeed, about the only aspect of his former self that hadn’t been outgrown.

“Hear him rave!” she giggled. “You don’t seem to realize, Jerry, what it means to get married!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied in an indefinite but lofty tone.

“Come on,” she coaxed, “let’s both be sensible. Aren’t we all right as we are?”

“What’s the idea?” he pressed on doggedly. “You admit you love me. Isn’t that enough?”

She looked at him in her simple yet unfathomable way, her smooth brow, so seldom fretted, showing faint furrows of honest perplexity, as upon the night her challenged little soul strove to appreciate the wonder of the lighted sky. And she said: “This is a time when I wish I had some one to tell me what to do!” It was a little mysterious, indeed, though her eyes twinkled just perceptibly.

He gazed at her. “I’m telling you what to do, Lili!”

“You don’t understand,” she smiled. “I mean some one....” It trailed off. On the stage a barytone was beginning that famous soliloquy, the Heart Bowed Down. Lili looked all at once a bit weary. She sighed and slumped against the scenery, resting her cheek on a convenient brace.

“Listen, Jerry,” she coaxed, half dreamily, “I love you an awful lot. You’re a nice boy. But let’s don’t talk about getting married—please let’s don’t.”

“If you love me,” he insisted, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t.”

She shook her head, yet in a vaguely undecided way which encouraged him to press his point. “I don’t see how it can be money that’s holding you back. Two can live cheaper than one—everybody says so who’s tried it.”

“You mean two can live together cheaper than single, don’t you?” she laughed.

“You know it’s true!” he cried. “And if it’s only because you don’t want to give up hopes of being a prima donna, why you don’t have to. You’d still have your job, and I’d have mine.”

“But just supposing,” she rambled perversely, “I’d want to leave the stage some day and have swell things and an auto? What then, mister?”

“By that time,” he assured her, “I’ll be making enough for two myself. I hope you don’t think I’m never going to do anything bigger than this!” He spoke magnificently.

“Rich man, poor man,”—the girl gently enumerated the buttons down the front of his coat, holding her head playfully first on one side and then on the other.

“I’m crazy about you, Lili!” he said, somewhat thickly, grasping her hands but not otherwise knowing exactly what to do with such very strong emotion as this.

“I’m crazy about you too, Jerry,” she giggled. “They all laugh at us for a couple of love-sick prunes, but that don’t bother me. When I’m crazy about a man I’m going to be, that’s all. Don’t you love the way he holds onto that last note? Yes, I knew he’d get a hand! It always gets a hand when you hold on that way.” And she sighed. “I wish I could ever draw a real song like that. Do you think I’m satisfied with the bits I do? I am not!”

And then she had to hurry away, which really left them about where they had begun, so far as their curious little lagging love affair went.

II

But he made another determined effort under the romantic influence of Flora Utterbourne’s garden tea-party. The tea was strong and dreamy. He made Lili stroll off with him onto the beach, though she wanted to stay and enjoy every moment of what seemed to her a function of the highest social prestige. And he kissed her, behind a friendly palm tree, and begged her once more to marry him, but she wouldn’t be serious, and kept singing and making eyes in the most tempting yet at the same time exasperating way, and sometimes she said, “Boo-o-o!”

Try as he might, Jerome couldn’t seem to arrive anywhere with Lili, even though she did admit she was desperately in love with him: she always proclaimed the heartening fact loudly and brazenly—didn’t care at all who knew it—was candidness itself. Well, the combination was beyond Jerome, and it humiliated him; it made his ego squirm. There seemed to be a hoo-doo at work somewhere.

He brooded over his troubles of the heart. The same thing seemed happening that had happened before, though with the notable exception that whereas Stella had simply ceased to love him and had married another man, Lili went right on loving him—she admitted it! She was pretty deep.

And she seemed—yes, he glimpsed the fact indistinctly—she seemed to be having certain flirtations on the side, which darkened the issue considerably. There was a soldier he had seen her with one day—a mere little shrimp in khaki, on duty here in Honolulu. It troubled him greatly, and he reproached her with it afterward; and she beamed on him and evaded the point, even cried a little, and made him end by feeling abject and penitent. Upon the whole, Jerome appeared doomed.

However, all this made no particular stir in the great world. The tea-party went right ahead. The songbirds were all having a beautiful time, and the coloratura, Miss Valentine, thrilling still over her Honolulu notices, walked about haughtily, not seeing any one at all, and holding her teacup with a poise which would have thrown Galesburg (whence she had been rescued from a career of choir-singing nonentity) into a spasm of amazement and envy. She talked with a mysteriously acquired “eastern” accent, almost never forgetting that the letter r did not legitimately belong in the alphabet.

Small tables were set out under an awning: you could sit with your tea or stroll with your tea, just as you chose. The hostess poured the tea and smiled in her unflagging way, conversing steadily; the river flowed cordially on, its rhythm unflecked by churning millwheel or breaking rapids: a deep and gracious river, quiet and gliding, yet sunny, too, and always singularly fresh and aglow with enthusiasm.

There was one distinguished guest who hadn’t been invited, and whose calm, sauntering arrival upon the scene created a genuine little sensation. This was Captain Utterbourne, whose Star of Troy had slipped into the harbour like a clever grey mouse. He was on his way back from somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Attired in cool flannels, he sat taking in the mixed picture which kept constantly breaking into new composition against the plush of the lawn and the blue of the sea. His eyes were amused, yet otherwise inexpressive.

Flora was enthroned like a very queen behind a comfortable big yellow teapot, with her enigmatic brother on one side and the impresario on the other. Mr. Curry looked about him dreamily, while a sense of peace seemed creeping into his heart. It was amazing that a place like this should have so utterly settled an appearance. It had been a mere empty house, and she had come and waved a wand or something, and lo! you would say she had always lived here. In a little while she would be gone—vanished; there would be strangers. So it went with her.

“My dear man,” she said richly, “your tea must be stone cold! Let me give you a fresh cup, and you must try this cake, really, for I made it myself, to see whether I’d forgotten how—I don’t have time any more for such luxuries as ‘baking.’”

“Time,” murmured the Captain with a sleepy nod. “Time—and eternity....”

“Oh, now,” his sister countered, “you can’t eliminate my ‘responsibilities’ just by talking like a Buddhist!”

“Of course,” he admitted, “one may call things by whatever names one chooses—h’m? You choose to call them responsibilities.”

“You’ve always laughed at my apartments, Chris: but I can’t see that they’re any more uncertain than ships!” And there, in truth, she really had him.

III

It was all very delightful. And before long the illustrious coloratura was prevailed upon to sing a few songs, though she said the usual things about being in wretched voice, without expecting that they should be taken too seriously.

The impresario excitedly seated himself at the piano and spread out some music and they conferred in earnest whispers. He sat looking up at her with such a look of loving and hopeful anticipation as must move any one not utterly barricaded against sentiment. It was really beautiful to see them together. He was so manifestly proud of the songbird he had rescued from the Galesburg choir, while she showed such touching confidence in him—even if, when the strain was all over and bouquets of praise poured in, she would forget to give the zealous maestro any particular credit.

The singer drew in deeply, lowered her head a little, focused the whole force of her being into the momentous first tone, and sang. It was an aria from that sublime and noble work, Linda di Chamounix, in which, of course, the heroine goes mad in the second act or so, for no entirely apparent reason, and lets her hair down her back, and sings cascades in competition with a long-suffering flute. The “business end” of Miss Valentine’s voice was the vital stretch between B and E; it was these impressive top notes that made her, in reality, a coloratura to be reckoned with—that kept the harassed impresario also in a state of perpetual alarm.

“It’s her range,” he confessed afterward to Flora. “It puts me so on pins and needles. Every time she opens her mouth I’m afraid of losing her to one of the big managers.” He was, indeed, forever finding pearls on ash-heaps, for ultimate confiscation higher up. “Lord, the singers I’ve lost because of a little special talent!” Curry dropped his hands from an expended gesture and wriggled the jewelled fingers helplessly. “They’ll get her—you’ll see. I can’t afford to keep a voice like that.” So life went. “From him who hath not....” Xenophon Curry was a born impresario, carrying in his heart a genuine sense of lift and grace which always touched his poor ragged performances with at least the virtue of lyrical buoyancy; but an impresario, alas, born to mediocrity and the provinces.

Presently Captain Utterbourne’s eyes became riveted upon a couple strolling back from the beach.

“Mr. Curry,” he drawled, his lips curling in mirth, “if I’m not mistaken, that’s the young man you had to dinner at the Pavillon d’Orient.”

“Yes,” laughed the impresario, “and thereby hangs a tale”—which he forthwith told, in his big, human way, omitting some of the more painfully satiric touches and stressing rather the new grip on life and the affairs of the world which the once obscure clerk seemed obtaining.

“Isn’t it simply gorgeous,” murmured the Captain in a tone of softly contemplative ecstasy, “the multiplicity of ever fresh reactions one discovers in the human organism! Here one sees a perfectly ordinary and unimaginative young man—h’m?—going along year after year. Then suddenly he’s carried off by a caprice of fortune and placed in a wholly new environment—h’m? And immediately the mechanism of consciousness begins to act along unpremeditated lines—throws up defences—digs trenches of new affirmation—h’m? h’m? It’s extraordinary—that alertness, that look of vigorous ‘becoming’....”

And the Captain sat there watching Jerome and watching, his eyes half closed in a quizzical, poising way.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE ANCIENT URGE

I

Jerome had failed with Stella; she had thrown him over for another man; now he had found Lili—had almost desperately, without quite realizing it, seized upon her. He needed her—that is, his ego needed her. It wasn’t an aggressive or egregious ego; certainly there was nothing of a Don Juan about it! But it was a decently masculine ego, and stood possessed of a salient sense of dignity. Under the circumstances, even had Lili’s spell been less rare and beautiful, it could have required no prodigious effort to convince himself that he loved her. As time went on and his brave new life unfolded, what elements of sheer convenience in it all there might be obtruded less and less.

Her wonderful eyes, her gay manners, never failed. He couldn’t help himself—didn’t want to—idealized her lavishly because he really loved her, though behind that, subtly, because his ego loved her. Had he pried down deep into his heart—ah, but this was no time for prying; it was a time for living! He loved, and laid long plans into the future, and more or less realised, underneath all his reverses, that it was proving the happiest and most consistently advancing period of his life—even if Lili did keep holding off.

And indeed he didn’t, after all, have time to sit down much and brood over his troubles; for entirely aside from matters of heart interest he was a full fledged business man, now, with problems to work out, increasing responsibility, tricky accounts to keep straight. Jerome was proving to Mr. Curry that much of the business of contracting for cargo could be entrusted to him. He was getting first-hand information about everything connected with shipping and insurance; worked right along with the broker—who might be a little inclined to chuckle over occasional evidence of a rather unusual naïveté, but who soon perceived he was dealing with nobody’s fool when it came to figures.

The impresario looked on with a glow of thanksgiving and relief, and was very glad indeed, as things had turned out, that Tony and Alfredo had put the clerk in the supply closet. “Lord, Lord! It’s wonderful the progress that boy is making!”

Yes, Jerome found the world a great place. And the most valuable lessons of all were lessons of contact with men—of all sorts, yet nearly all prepared to get the better of their fellows if possible.

II

But through everything ran the thread of his queer courtship. Lili baffled him, yet lured him on and on. And he wanted to be lured. He couldn’t understand her, but he certainly couldn’t give her up, either; did a man ever give a woman up because he couldn’t understand her?

Perhaps the worst of it was that Lili kept going places with that same wretched soldier. Where had she ever picked him up, and who did he think he was, anyhow? Jerome brooded murder. He brooded almost everything conceivable, between sessions with the broker, and when he wasn’t checking up with the house manager. Sometimes he would stoutly decide never to speak to her again. But the next day she would so overwhelm him with her beaming and her loud, determined sweetness that contrary impulse would melt away. Jerome was simply a lump of putty in her hands.

But of course Lili didn’t by any means always treat him so badly. Sometimes for long stretches she would be quite lovely. On Sundays—all but one, when she disappeared in company with the miserable meddling soldier—Lili and Jerome took excursions about the island, sometimes alone and sometimes with a gay party of their friends. Oh, the skies were not by any means altogether leaden.

The prosperous season in Honolulu closed on a Saturday night, and the Skipping Goone was scheduled for departure the following Monday. Jerome and Lili went on a final jaunt, this time a bit more ambitious than any of the others. They found they could take an early morning boat over to Hilo and return late at night.

It was a very joyous occasion. Both were in good spirits, and the weather was gracious. They saw as much of the larger island of Hawaii as they could, and had faced back toward town when Lili conceived a sudden desire to pause at a charming little roadside tavern for a supper of lobster and wine—lobster being a specialty, as they learned from a sign stretching out from the door. Lili grew very much excited.

“My mouth is just all set for it,” she said, speaking succulently, as though already beginning to delight her palate with the proposed feast.

And her companion admitted he was as hungry as a bear. “We’ll stop,” he agreed, glad enough to prolong the enjoyment of this last trip.

“How much money have we got between us, Jerry? You have my purse in your pocket.”

“Oh, I have plenty,” he replied, with a firmness that set her pleasantly humming. Lili loved firmness in the male—especially when it concerned finances.

III

Over the lobster she flashed her pretty teeth at him in a mood of increasing jollity. Lili’s hair was somewhat wind-blown, and she had a high glow—touches which added a deeper poignancy to the perennial charm of her beaming. And as they sipped their white wine and nibbled their lobster in cosy intimacy, Jerome felt himself more and more falling under the spell.

It was the old spell of Lili herself, but it was also the spell of the hour and the place. Their being out together like this had a fine adventurous tang. He reached across the table and gave her hand a quick, fervent squeeze. He was so excited he could hardly eat.

Lili was certainly in a wonderful mood. He had never before seen her so utterly enjoying herself. And the more of the friendly wine they drank, the more completely did their respective moods take possession of them—also the less did they think about the growing lateness. When at last it occurred to them there was a boat to catch in Hilo, they found, by consulting their watches and the proprietor of the tavern, it would be quite impossible for them to reach Hilo in time. At first the inn-keeper thought there was a special later boat on Sunday, but it developed, when he consulted a much-thumbed time-table, that it was out of season. And then they were in a good deal of a panic, until the man told them of a boat that left quite early in the morning; a stage made connections somewhere—it was a little vague, but the inn-keeper agreed to get them up in plenty of time.

There remained a remote and much less gripping panic over the thought of possibly not reaching Honolulu in time to get aboard the Skipping Goone, but Lili pointed out: “I know Mr. Curry wouldn’t have the heart to go without us!” And anyway, there was no use trying to cross more than one bridge at a time. She giggled a little. There was nothing they could do but remain and make the best of it. After reaching this decision their spirits rose again very rapidly.

They wandered out of the tavern arm in arm for a little stroll. There was a gorgeous moon, spreading all about them a realm of intoxicating tropical splendour. Lili drew closer to him and sighed: “It’s grand, isn’t it Jerry?” Her tone was a little reverent, as it generally was when she felt herself overcome by the beauty of the night.

They wandered together a little way down the still, white road. Jerome felt the girl gently relaxing against him. There was a thrilling softness and deliciousness in the contact. He slipped an arm about her. Impulsively they paused and kissed. It was a wonderful, lingering kiss, and Jerome found his hands tremblingly in her hair.

The night was lustrous and so unutterably sweet. They turned at last and slowly walked back to the tavern. And the spell endured.... He held her hand hotly. In the shadow of some feathery trees he pressed his cheek against hers, and they kissed again.

“Oh, Jerry!” she whispered.

“I love you!” he said.

Their hearts beat rapidly and their voices trembled when they spoke to each other. They felt themselves irresistibly drawn together.

The urge was strong and sweet. They gave themselves up to it, and the night was theirs. Yes, theirs. All the lustrous beauty and mystery of it, long and golden, with cares put aside until the morrow, and only in their hearts the strange, rich, poignant thrill which held them so breathless and made their kisses seem immortal....

CHAPTER SIXTEEN AFTER A FASHION—AND NO LICENSE REQUIRED

I

The next day they made Honolulu once more, with several hours to spare.

The Skipping Goone was all prepared, at a little before sundown, to sail away from the triumphant scene of Xenophon Curry’s first venture. Everything was ship-shape. The scenic effects, which had looked so tattered and shabby coming down through the dawn in trucks, were housed beneath their particular hatch in the umber cavern set apart for their stowage. The cargo was placed. The Custom House had pocketed its dues, issued a bill of health, and handed over the requisite clearance note, which Captain Bearman pinned to one of the leaves of the book in which he kept the log. An almost dense crowd was on the wharf to wave God-speed. It was a picturesque and really moving scene.

“You must remember,” Flora was saying, “that I always knew you could do it!” She spoke earnestly, and her fine eyes were unusually bright. She gestured a little.

Mr. Curry felt upon him a lingering sentimentality, and asked, his voice curiously afflicted with huskiness: “When do you suppose I’ll ever see you again?”

“Oh, perhaps much sooner than either of us dreams,” she replied, as cheerfully as she could considering the queer tug of emotion at her heart.

His look was wistful and solemn, though his wonderful smile broke through at last.

“Good-bye,” she said warmly. “I’ll be watching for your letters so eagerly, and you know I’ll be wishing you the very finest ‘success’ all the time, for there won’t be a day without its thought of where you are and what fortune is doing for you!”

She gave him her hand, and he held it just a moment with a lingering pressure. It was ever so much more intimate and understanding than the farewell in San Francisco. Then he sighed and went aboard his schooner. She smiled and nodded, her lips silently forming the word “good-bye” over and over again, long after the ship had sped beyond earshot; and he could see her handkerchief still hopefully fluttering when the Skipping Goone had passed the first bounds of the harbour and was beginning to settle to the heave of the outer sea.

II

Some weeks later the adventurers had proceeded as far as Tahiti, encountering little notable resistance from the elements, and were coming, one and all, to feel like thorough-going mariners.

On a day when the sun was bright and the shadows were long and cool, Jerome and Lili sat smoking cigarettes together in the lounging room of the hotel. She was sitting in the chair recently vacated by the Tahiti broker, who had done as well in the matter of cargo as mortal man could do, received his modest fees, and had been telling Jerome tales of Tahitian life and saying good-bye over some glasses of rum. The broker was gone now, and Lili had crept in. She had begged Jerome to sit down again, and had asked for a cigarette. Then, quite without warning, she had burst into tears—and this is where the curtain really rises.

Jerome looked at her in bewilderment. “Lili!” he cried. “What’s happened?”

Shutters were drawn to keep out the glare, and the whole town seemed sleeping.

“I can’t stand it any longer, Jerry!” she sobbed desperately, but in a very little, tear-drenched voice.

“Tell me what it is, Lili,” he begged, going round beside her and laying a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Oh, Jerry!”

“Don’t cry any more, but just try to tell me what it is. I know I can help you, whatever the trouble is.” Yes, he was making progress!

She shook her head miserably. With a quick movement she drew his head down and whispered. He drew back with a little start, and from the look on his face it was very apparent they had come to a crisis in their relationship.

Slowly he sank down into his chair again, and sat facing her across the empty rum glasses. At first he seemed too dumbfounded for words, but presently muttered: “Why didn’t you tell me right off, Lili?” And then, as she merely continued to sob, he went on more forcefully: “Cheer up. It’s not too late, at that, is it? Nobody’s going to stop to figure up the time.” His conviction was considerable, though it did not rest upon experience.

“All I wish is I could just die and be out of the way!” she moaned.

Her eyes were very red, her hair was ruffled and hot-looking. It occurred to Jerome, almost critically, that she might have chosen a less frequented place than the lounge of the hotel for her upsetting confidence, although the room was, it is quite true, deserted and silent. Then it came to him that she had really set out just to be jolly with him in an effort to forget her troubles, and that suddenly her courage had failed.

“Don’t talk like that, Lili,” he begged, knocking the ash carefully off his cigarette. “It’s nothing anybody can help now, and I’m ready to marry you right off, whenever you say. Come on. Let’s go out now and see if we can’t manage to scare up a license and a parson. There must be a way here as well as in civilized places.”

“It won’t do any good,” she said wretchedly, elbows on the edge of the table, her chin in her hands, and her head shaking a slow, mournful negation.

“Come on, buck up, Lili! I hate to see you like this.”

She gazed across at him with rueful eyes, in which there was no beam at all now. Lili’s eyes never seemed to look quite natural unless they were beaming.

“I got along just fine until I met you,” she lamented, almost with an air of reproach, though no one could honestly reproach Jerome very heavily with having lured astray a girl of Lili’s qualities, experience, and temperament. As a matter of fact, her conscience troubled her a little about that wretched soldier....

“I feel just as bad over it as you do,” Jerome assured her. “But I can’t see the good of sitting here crying.”

“You can’t understand how a woman feels, Jerry.”

“Maybe not,” he admitted, at the same time realizing that at any rate he knew just how a man feels under the circumstances.

It wasn’t an agreeable feeling. It was a feeling, in fact, that would have knocked the bottom right out of his small universe a few months ago. But his universe was growing bigger, and he seemed to be growing along with it. In the old days Jerome would hardly have known what to do with obligations of any but the most rudimentary sort. But he had digested a perfectly marvellous fund of experience. The old unfledged Jerome, who used to eat his lunches on the step of the factory that made a leader of forty-nine cent chocolates, would no doubt have frozen with horror at the notion of sitting down opposite a girl and discussing such an issue as this. But now, while very far indeed from looking upon it as a pleasant situation, or one that could be handled with any degree of lightness, Jerome conceived it a natural enough thing to be a partner in the dilemma: the obligation was one he had helped to create. A man wasn’t a man who would allow himself to be scandalized by what had to be, no matter what.

He was at once so advanced and still so immature—knew life and didn’t yet know life, in a breath. But he argued with blunt assurance: “Don’t you see, Lili? All we have to do is get married. Everything will be all right.” He threw away his cigarette and, reaching over between the empty glasses, drew the girl’s hands gently down into his on the table. “I’ve tried hard enough to make you marry me; now, perhaps, you’ll listen to reason!” But he smiled a little sadly, for his ego told him there was something radically wrong about the way his romance was running.

“Jerry,” said the girl at length, looking at him seriously, “I guess the time’s come when I’ve got to tell you the truth about me. I can’t marry you, even now, because I’m married already.”

III

He stared at her, unable for ever so long to grasp the staggering new situation her words established.

Married! But how could she be? How could she? Who was her husband? Where was he? Questions that were the groping articulation of an ever deepening incredulity. And she answered them as well as she could, the answers, on her part, equally groping through the articulation of despair.

Well, she had married a man twice her age when she was seventeen. They had lived together only about a year. Then she left him. That was really about all. Her little story sounded so desperately hackneyed as she poured it out, with increasing enthusiasm, to Jerome.

She was singing in a cabaret when they met. Why she had married him could hardly be thought of as an essential question. Such marriages occur constantly, without rhyme or reason, and nothing on earth can prevent them or their often dismal consequences. She pleased him and he married her. He was without money and drank and had a heavy tendency toward sportiness. They tried to set up a little home in one bare room of a boarding house. It wasn’t very authentic. Her naturally happy and irresponsible nature drooped under a cloud of incompatibility. They fought. Things went from bad to worse. She began slipping back to her old life in the cabaret. Finally she disappeared entirely. She never saw her husband again. That was all there was to it.

Lili might consistently have had a totally different story, but she couldn’t possibly have a story that wasn’t reminiscent of thousands and thousands of other stories, not Lili. There was nothing very definite about it. She seemed always like some wayward, brazen child, with no faculty for doing justice to the serious facts of life. One could not listen without laughter, even though silent; nor could one listen quite without the sudden tightening of tears.

Jerome’s gaze never left her face, and she seemed glad of his sincere, almost passionate attention. It might be nothing could alter her present plight, but there was refreshment, like the long refreshment of an utterly spent emotion, in baring her heart completely to some one of whose comradely sympathy she was sure.

When she had told Jerome the whole story, she sat with her hands in her lap, leaning forward a little in a limp way.

“If it hadn’t been for this, Jerry, I’d have married you long ago. But I couldn’t bear to tell you about it—I haven’t told anybody at all, because I’ve wanted to be free. I’ve even tried to kid myself into forgetting. Sometimes it all seems so long ago. I nearly did tell you once, Jerry—that first night we sat out on the schooner and you were so sweet to me. But I couldn’t seem to, and after that every time it got harder. I used to think: maybe a letter will come saying he’s dead! It’s awful queer how far you can kid yourself. The day you made love to me so hard behind the scenes in Honolulu I almost told myself I’d just decide he’d gotten a divorce from me long ago, and go ahead and marry you, Jerry. But then I happened to remember about some people I used to know who were arrested for bigamy, and I got cold feet.”

Jerome sat staring. Here were shallows and depths he had not glimpsed before. He shuddered a little at the thought of the thin ice on which he had been plunging in pursuit of his unhappy little romance. The word bigamy, which fell so lightly from her lips, sent a vague shiver through him. It was as though, suddenly and for the first time, he realized that he and Lili moved on different planes....

He seemed dazed. “It doesn’t seem possible to think of you married, Lili!” Then, as though stimulated by the very sense of chaos which was just then so strong in his heart, Jerome asked her: “Why can’t you get a divorce from him?”

“Can’t be done,” she returned listlessly. But she began eyeing Jerome just a little shrewdly.

“Why not?”

“Well,” she rambled, rubbing her hands together in a dreamy, irrational way, “I sometimes thought I’d find out how I could get one, but I never seemed to have time, and I’ve always heard it’s not so easy. I don’t know. I never knew how anybody went to work to get a divorce. And then,” she continued with a far-away look in her wide eyes, “you see I don’t know where he is, for another thing. Don’t you have to produce the evidence in a case like that? I don’t know how it is in divorces. We lived most of the time in two or three boarding houses in Chicago. I don’t know where he came from. We just met.”

Jerome looked across at her forlornly. The shabby pathos of her wretched little past gave him a feeling of stuffiness and depression. He seemed to see before him a quite new and more than ever perplexing Lili—felt himself almost a stranger in her life.

Not to offer to marry her hadn’t even occurred to Jerome—not so much because he was any sort of a moral giant as because it had become so natural a thing to want to marry Lili that impetus carried him along over the rough road of their new relationship. The facts in the case merely made simple and inevitable what he had all along desired. However, here was a new and startling complication. His mind was in a curiously mixed condition, and he asked himself in bewilderment what steps remained to be taken. He would willingly help some other way, if he could only decide what would help. They sat together over the empty rum glasses. The world had been so fair; now it seemed a very shabby and sordid place.

Lili dropped her head down onto her arms, folded before her on the table. Her shoulders trembled a little, and he knew she was crying again.

Jerome’s heart was deeply touched. Surely, he thought, there must be some way for him to put out his hand and help. He had forgotten all her lightness, all the torments he had endured for the sake of love. In the confusion of his heart there was something almost like exaltation. He spoke to her gently.

When she raised her head and took up the sorry theme again, it was at exactly the point where it had lapsed so miserably. “Divorce wouldn’t do any good, anyhow, about what I’ve got into now.”

“No,” he agreed thoughtfully, “I guess it wouldn’t.” He felt desperately remorseful.

But that vaguely cunning look in her eyes remained, behind the tears and behind the hopelessness of her position. After a moment, squeezing his hand a little, she murmured: “Jerry, there’s just one way out, if—if you’d be willing to do it—for my sake.”

He brightened. “What is it?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “nobody knows I’m married but you—nobody in this part of the world, anyhow, and I....” It was a little more difficult than she had realized, for she knew that Jerome sometimes had queer ideas about convention.

“Go on and tell me, Lili,” he encouraged.

“Well, then,” she continued, “what I thought of was why couldn’t we just tell them we’d run off all of a sudden and got married?”

“I—I never thought of that!” he stammered, blushing.

“Oh, Jerry,” cried the girl bursting into a fresh flood of rather easy tears, “I’m in such a fix I don’t know what to do, my Gawd, I don’t!”

“Well,” he soothed, “don’t cry any more. We’ll do that, then, Lili.” And after a little pause he added, with a note of resigned whimsy: “There won’t even be need of any license. It isn’t quite the way I always pictured myself getting married, but you can’t always have everything just the way you want it.”

Relief stole all the gloom out of eyes that were made for beaming. She ignored, or failed to sense, the finer phase of what he would be missing in the curious transaction.

“All you’ll need will be just a wedding ring, won’t it?”

“That’s all, Jerry.”

“Then I’ll buy that for you right away now, if they have any in Tahiti. I guess I’ve enough saved up. I’ll see.”

“No, no, Jerry,” she said, reviving rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. I still have my other wedding ring put away. I can use that one, and nobody will ever know any difference—will they?” And she added quite cheerfully: “It’s a lucky thing I kept it! I’d hate to have you going and spending all that money.” Her tone was almost magnanimous.

“All right,” he replied dully. “I’d sort of like to buy the ring at least, but of course it’s true no one would ever know the difference.”

He was tapping the ends of his fingers thoughtfully on the table. She wiped her eyes and smiled: “You know we may have need of all our money later on—when the time comes.”

She was actually beginning to beam on him again; and she asked, with a tremor of almost happy excitement in her voice: “How shall we work it, Jerry? Could we do it this afternoon, so I could flash my ring around tonight?”

“There isn’t much to do, is there?”

“No,” she laughed. “There isn’t much any one can do for this kind of a wedding!”

“You better get your ring and we’ll disappear for the rest of the afternoon. And when we come back you can be wearing it. We’ll fix up a story in the meantime.”

“Will you wait down here?” She was beaming extravagantly. Lili was herself again.

“Yes, I’ll wait here,” he said.

“Oh,” she tittered, jumping up, “it will be such a grand joke on everybody, if they only knew!” She laughed a little hysterically. Her problem was solved. “I won’t be gone a minute, Jerry!”