“You ought to be in San Juan by seven,” said Hurley, standing in the doorway. “That’s a good hour and a half before dark. The trail runs over there,” pointing to the west, “by that first blue cliff. You can’t miss it. And I guess I made a mistake in there,” he continued, a little awkwardly. “I meant no offense, sir.”
For more reasons than one the lieutenant commander made no reply. He started the pony as gently as possible out of respect for the broken arm, and nodded a farewell. As he met the trail under the cliff he turned and looked back. Hurley and Rita were standing together in the doorway.
Lieutenant Commander Reed was a man of decision. Whenever he met a problem he liked to face it squarely, analyze it thoroughly, and decide it quickly. This he had always done.
But the problem which was now before him defied analysis. It seemed somehow intangible, fleeting, un-graspable. He tried one after another of his cherished rules, and found that none of them fitted.
For the first three hours of the last stage of his journey to San Juan his mind was in an uncomfortable and entirely unique condition of flexibility. As might have been expected, the weight of habit preponderated and he decided in favor of duty.
Owing to the broken arm, the four hours’ ride was slow and painful, but he suffered no further mishap. As Hurley had predicted, exactly at seven o’clock he climbed from the naval station wharf at San Juan into the commandant’s gig.
On board the Helena all was confusion and despair. They had not expected their commanding officer for another four days, and they were having the time of their lives.
The first luff, who was an easygoing, good-natured fellow, who possessed a hearty dislike for his skipper, had taken advantage of his absence.
There had been no inspections or drills of any kind, the brasswork had not been touched, the decks had received merely a gentle flushing with the hose, and every classed man on the ship had been granted shore liberty.
You may imagine the effect of this state of affairs on Lieutenant Commander Reed. Within two hours after his arrival every man and officer on board was ready for insubordination or mutiny, or worse, and the first luff heard his skipper’s voice in his dreams.
At eleven o’clock the following morning Lieutenant Commander Reed sat in his cabin, holding a pen in his hand and gazing thoughtfully at a pad of official memorandum paper on the desk before him.
He had got his disordered ship and crew in something like a presentable and tractable condition, and was preparing to put into effect his decision of the afternoon before.
He frowned and sighed at intervals, and finally rose, walked over to a porthole and stood for some time gazing out on El Morro and the rocky coast.
Finally, with a gesture of decision, he returned to the desk, arranged the pad of paper, and wrote as follows:
Ensign G. J. Rowley, U.S.N.,
U.S.S. Helena.
Sir:
You will take four men and proceed at once to the village of Rio, twenty miles from San Juan on the Caguas road.
Two miles beyond Rio, in a cottage three hundred yards to the left of the trail, you will find James Moser, Chief Yeoman, a deserter from the U.S.S.
Helena.
He has assumed the name of Hurley. You will arrest him and deliver him on shipboard. You are advised to proceed with caution.
Respectfully,
Brinsley Reed,
Lt. Comd’r., U.S.N.,
Commanding.
He read the order through slowly, and pushed a button on the desk for his orderly. Then removing the order from the pad, he reread it more slowly still, while a deep frown gathered on his forehead.
The decision had been made.
Suddenly he opened a drawer at the side of his desk and took from it — a rose orchid!
I have no idea where he got it; possibly he had taken advantage of Rita’s absence while she had gone with Tota to fetch the pony.
But then that is scarcely possible, since the lieutenant commander was the last man in the world to be swayed by any weak sentiment.
“Did you ring, sir?”
The orderly’s voice sounded from the doorway, and his commanding officer actually blushed as he hastily slipped the orchid back into the drawer.
Then he turned to the orderly:
“Learn to stand at attention till you’re spoken to!” he roared. “No, I didn’t ring! Get out of here!”
It is little wonder that Ensign Rowley failed to carry out the order, since it was no part of his duty to go searching about in his skipper’s wastebasket for torn bits of paper.
The Inevitable Third
I have never been able to account for Jimmie’s success — in a particular way — except on the theory that a Divine Providence protects the weak. How many of us, after getting what we want, are able to hold onto it? It is not an unusual thing to see even a strong man knocked on the head by a detached chunk of what he had taken to be his astral glory, when his stars begin going sideways instead of pursuing their proper and natural courses.
Now and then we find an Avier or a Prometheus, able to stand unmoved and hurl defiance at Fate, but the best that most of us can do is to shut our eyes and dodge — quick.
That is what Jimmie did.
Jimmie was one of those disquieting creatures who are able to extract an astonishing amount of happiness out of a clerkship in Wall Street, a Harlem flat, and a wife. They make us wonder if we are not very silly indeed to worry about lost tribes and the ruins of Philæ and the value of post-impressionism.
Jimmie was abnormally happy. He took an immense pride in filling the flat with all sorts of horrible things known as modern furniture, for of course he was entirely without taste. He spent just a little more than he should on presents for his wife, and he fitted up the little room on the left of the kitchen as a den for himself.
Once, in a moment of unguarded optimism, he purchased a small white-enameled crib. It stood unused in a corner of the second bedroom, as a constant reminder to him of the only blank in Jimmie’s life.
Jimmie liked his job at the office, and it showed in his work, so that his salary was raised regularly every six months. He came to have a room of his own, with a rolltop desk and a stenographer.
Certainly, Jimmie thought, he was getting on, and he began to be a little proud of himself. This lasted three years.
Still the little white-enameled crib remained unoccupied; and this, if only Jimmie had known it, was dangerous. A vacuum is as abhorrent to a woman as it is to Nature. Jimmie should have taken care to fill it up himself — at least with sympathy — instead of leaving it to the first one who should perceive it.
But Jimmie was undeniably a fool. He was not aware of the peculiar shades imparted to a word by the flicker of an eyelash, the moistening of lips, the tremulous closing of a hand. He knew merely that he loved his wife, and saw no reason why she should be otherwise than perfectly happy, since he always came directly home from the office and found pleasure in nothing without her.
He did not perceive the necessity of finding a new interest to take the place of the natural one, which had been denied her. In short, he was not versed in the workings of a woman’s mind, as was the inevitable third.
The name of the inevitable third was Mason.
He came from somewhere across the Atlantic, and his chief business in life — though neither Jimmie nor Nell knew this — was picking up one or another of the Ten Commandments that had been shattered by somebody else, and amusing himself by fitting together the broken pieces in bizarre patterns of his own.
Nell met him at an afternoon recital in the tea-belt, and described him to Jimmie at the dinner table that evening as “the most interesting man she had ever met.” Jimmie nodded absently and helped himself to another piece of steak.