She dressed hurriedly and warmly, bundling her hair under a velours hat
and ramming a pin through both.
"Denny?" she called.
There was no answer. He was on deck, probably.
An odd scene awaited her in the main salon. Cleigh, senior, stood before
the phonograph listening to Caruso. The roll of the yacht in nowise
disturbed the mechanism of the instrument. There was no sudden sluing of
the needle, due to an amateurish device which Cleigh himself had
constructed. The son, stooping, was searching the titles of a row of new
novels. The width of the salon stretched between the two.
"Good morning, everybody!"
There was a joyousness in her voice she made not the least attempt to
conceal. She was joyous, alive, and she did not care who knew it.
Dennison acknowledged her greeting with a smile, a smile which was a
mixture of wonder and admiration. How in the world was she to be made to
understand that they were riding a deep-sea volcano?
"Nothing disturbed you through the night?" asked Cleigh, lifting the pin
from the record.
"Nothing. I lay awake for an hour or two, but after that I slept like a
log. Have I kept you waiting?"
"No. Breakfast isn't quite ready," answered Cleigh.
"What makes the sea so yellow?"
"All the big Chinese rivers are mud-banked and mud-bottomed. They pour
millions of tons of yellow mud into these waters. By this afternoon,
however, I imagine we'll be nosing into the blue. Ah!"
"Breakfast iss served," announced Togo the Jap.
The trio entered the dining salon in single file, and once more Jane found
herself seated between the two men. One moment she was carrying on a
conversation with the father, the next moment with the son. The two
ignored each other perfectly. Under ordinary circumstances it would have
been strange enough; but in this hour, when no one knew where or how this
voyage would end! A real tragedy or some absurd trifle? Probably a trifle;
trifles dug more pits than tragedies. Perhaps tragedy was mis-named. What
humans called tragedy was epic, and trifles were real tragedies. And then
there were certain natures to whom the trifle was epical; to whom the
inconsequent was invariably magnified nine diameters; and having made a
mistake, would die rather than admit it.
To bring these two together, to lure them from behind their ramparts of
stubbornness, to see them eventually shake hands and grin as men will who
recognize that they have been playing the fool! She became fired with the
idea. Only she must not move prematurely; there must arrive some
psychological moment.