Jerome, on this last evening in Borneo, left the place where he was lodging and strolled along the waterfront, musing and trying to map his life. After an hour or so with his pipe as sole companion, and his thoughts roaming far, he turned back, deciding to go to bed early, since it would be necessary to rise at dawn. He still felt that vague loathness to begin the homeward voyage which had more or less bothered him ever since the disaster at sea. It would be sweet to see his own people once more; yet he dreaded lest returning to the haunts of his long obscurity might mean but the beginning of a slump which, however gradually, would thrust him back again into the same position whence he had so miraculously risen. Of course Jerome knew perfectly well that he was his own master, and that, in the highest sense, his future would be just exactly what he chose to make it. Nevertheless, as he had pointed out to Elsa in whimsical vein, Borneo was out in the world, whereas San Francisco wasn’t.
“That’s it,” he muttered, “it’s adventure and life and hustle and bustle and even danger I’ve come to require. I can’t get along without these things now I’ve had a real taste of them. I’ve simply got to go on and on!”
The germ of seeing things happen, and of being himself in the thick of heavy action, had penetrated into his corpuscles—kept racing through his arteries like possessed. He was in a state of intoxicated revolution, underneath his new exterior of worldly poise. Obscurity had been overthrown with violence; it had been assailed, cast down, trampled upon; it was extinct. But Jerome, for all his emancipation, was vaguely fearful of ghosts.
Ventures such as this of Xenophon Curry’s didn’t, he knew, bloom on every bush along one’s way. And rumination had drawn him into a mood sober and regretful by the time he reached the house where his bed was: a frame of mind tending wonderfully to augment the thrill of surprise which accompanied a sight of Captain Utterbourne’s Chinese boy awaiting his return with a note.
Jerome took the note, opened it, read it through rapidly. He could feel his heart thumping. The communication bespoke his immediate presence aboard the _Star of Troy_ by way of answer. The boy smiled with all his white young teeth, and, in gentle sing-song English, admitted the matter must be urgent, since his instructions were to wait all night if necessary, and to bring back with him no answer but “Misser Stoot.”