Dennison sat down.
"You'd better kill me somewhere along this voyage."
"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 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!