initial commit of ebook 1055HEADmain

1 files changed, 7580 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/1055-0.txt b/1055-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..59f0ed4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1055-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7580 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1055 ***
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                            ’TWIXT LAND & SEA
+                                  TALES
+
+
+                                    BY
+                              JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+                            A SMILE OF FORTUNE
+
+                            THE SECRET SHARER
+
+                            FREYA OF THE SEVEN
+                                  ISLES
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+    _Life is a tragic folly_
+    _Let us laugh and be jolly_
+    _Away with melancholy_
+    _Bring me a branch of holly_
+    _Life is a tragic folly_
+
+                                                                A. SYMONS.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                      LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
+                    ALDINE HOUSE, COVENT GARDEN · 1920
+
+FIRST EDITION     _October_ 1912
+REPRINTED         _November_ 1912; _January_ 1913; _November_ 1918;
+                  _December_ 1920
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                          _All rights reserved_
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    TO
+                           CAPTAIN C. M. MARRIS
+                          LATE MASTER AND OWNER
+                                  OF THE
+                      ARABY MAID: ARCHIPELAGO TRADER
+                            IN MEMORY OF THOSE
+                          OLD DAYS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                PAGE
+A Smile of Fortune                 1
+The Secret Sharer                 99
+Freya of the Seven Isles         161
+
+
+
+
+A SMILE OF FORTUNE
+HARBOUR STORY
+
+
+EVER since the sun rose I had been looking ahead.  The ship glided gently
+in smooth water.  After a sixty days’ passage I was anxious to make my
+landfall, a fertile and beautiful island of the tropics.  The more
+enthusiastic of its inhabitants delight in describing it as the “Pearl of
+the Ocean.”  Well, let us call it the “Pearl.”  It’s a good name.  A
+pearl distilling much sweetness upon the world.
+
+This is only a way of telling you that first-rate sugar-cane is grown
+there.  All the population of the Pearl lives for it and by it.  Sugar is
+their daily bread, as it were.  And I was coming to them for a cargo of
+sugar in the hope of the crop having been good and of the freights being
+high.
+
+Mr. Burns, my chief mate, made out the land first; and very soon I became
+entranced by this blue, pinnacled apparition, almost transparent against
+the light of the sky, a mere emanation, the astral body of an island
+risen to greet me from afar.  It is a rare phenomenon, such a sight of
+the Pearl at sixty miles off.  And I wondered half seriously whether it
+was a good omen, whether what would meet me in that island would be as
+luckily exceptional as this beautiful, dreamlike vision so very few
+seamen have been privileged to behold.
+
+But horrid thoughts of business interfered with my enjoyment of an
+accomplished passage.  I was anxious for success and I wished, too, to do
+justice to the flattering latitude of my owners’ instructions contained
+in one noble phrase: “We leave it to you to do the best you can with the
+ship.” . . . All the world being thus given me for a stage, my abilities
+appeared to me no bigger than a pinhead.
+
+Meantime the wind dropped, and Mr. Burns began to make disagreeable
+remarks about my usual bad luck.  I believe it was his devotion for me
+which made him critically outspoken on every occasion.  All the same, I
+would not have put up with his humours if it had not been my lot at one
+time to nurse him through a desperate illness at sea.  After snatching
+him out of the jaws of death, so to speak, it would have been absurd to
+throw away such an efficient officer.  But sometimes I wished he would
+dismiss himself.
+
+We were late in closing in with the land, and had to anchor outside the
+harbour till next day.  An unpleasant and unrestful night followed.  In
+this roadstead, strange to us both, Burns and I remained on deck almost
+all the time.  Clouds swirled down the porphyry crags under which we lay.
+The rising wind made a great bullying noise amongst the naked spars, with
+interludes of sad moaning.  I remarked that we had been in luck to fetch
+the anchorage before dark.  It would have been a nasty, anxious night to
+hang off a harbour under canvas.  But my chief mate was uncompromising in
+his attitude.
+
+“Luck, you call it, sir!  Ay—our usual luck.  The sort of luck to thank
+God it’s no worse!”
+
+And so he fretted through the dark hours, while I drew on my fund of
+philosophy.  Ah, but it was an exasperating, weary, endless night, to be
+lying at anchor close under that black coast!  The agitated water made
+snarling sounds all round the ship.  At times a wild gust of wind out of
+a gully high up on the cliffs struck on our rigging a harsh and plaintive
+note like the wail of a forsaken soul.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+By half-past seven in the morning, the ship being then inside the harbour
+at last and moored within a long stone’s-throw from the quay, my stock of
+philosophy was nearly exhausted.  I was dressing hurriedly in my cabin
+when the steward came tripping in with a morning suit over his arm.
+
+Hungry, tired, and depressed, with my head engaged inside a white shirt
+irritatingly stuck together by too much starch, I desired him peevishly
+to “heave round with that breakfast.”  I wanted to get ashore as soon as
+possible.
+
+“Yes, sir.  Ready at eight, sir.  There’s a gentleman from the shore
+waiting to speak to you, sir.”
+
+This statement was curiously slurred over.  I dragged the shirt violently
+over my head and emerged staring.
+
+“So early!” I cried.  “Who’s he?  What does he want?”
+
+On coming in from sea one has to pick up the conditions of an utterly
+unrelated existence.  Every little event at first has the peculiar
+emphasis of novelty.  I was greatly surprised by that early caller; but
+there was no reason for my steward to look so particularly foolish.
+
+“Didn’t you ask for the name?” I inquired in a stern tone.
+
+“His name’s Jacobus, I believe,” he mumbled shamefacedly.
+
+“Mr. Jacobus!” I exclaimed loudly, more surprised than ever, but with a
+total change of feeling.  “Why couldn’t you say so at once?”
+
+But the fellow had scuttled out of my room.  Through the momentarily
+opened door I had a glimpse of a tall, stout man standing in the cuddy by
+the table on which the cloth was already laid; a “harbour” table-cloth,
+stainless and dazzlingly white.  So far good.
+
+I shouted courteously through the closed door, that I was dressing and
+would be with him in a moment.  In return the assurance that there was no
+hurry reached me in the visitor’s deep, quiet undertone.  His time was my
+own.  He dared say I would give him a cup of coffee presently.
+
+“I am afraid you will have a poor breakfast,” I cried apologetically.
+“We have been sixty-one days at sea, you know.”
+
+A quiet little laugh, with a “That’ll be all right, Captain,” was his
+answer.  All this, words, intonation, the glimpsed attitude of the man in
+the cuddy, had an unexpected character, a something friendly in
+it—propitiatory.  And my surprise was not diminished thereby.  What did
+this call mean?  Was it the sign of some dark design against my
+commercial innocence?
+
+Ah!  These commercial interests—spoiling the finest life under the sun.
+Why must the sea be used for trade—and for war as well?  Why kill and
+traffic on it, pursuing selfish aims of no great importance after all?
+It would have been so much nicer just to sail about with here and there a
+port and a bit of land to stretch one’s legs on, buy a few books and get
+a change of cooking for a while.  But, living in a world more or less
+homicidal and desperately mercantile, it was plainly my duty to make the
+best of its opportunities.
+
+My owners’ letter had left it to me, as I have said before, to do my best
+for the ship, according to my own judgment.  But it contained also a
+postscript worded somewhat as follows:
+
+“Without meaning to interfere with your liberty of action we are writing
+by the outgoing mail to some of our business friends there who may be of
+assistance to you.  We desire you particularly to call on Mr. Jacobus, a
+prominent merchant and charterer.  Should you hit it off with him he may
+be able to put you in the way of profitable employment for the ship.”
+
+Hit it off!  Here was the prominent creature absolutely on board asking
+for the favour of a cup of coffee!  And life not being a fairy-tale the
+improbability of the event almost shocked me.  Had I discovered an
+enchanted nook of the earth where wealthy merchants rush fasting on board
+ships before they are fairly moored?  Was this white magic or merely some
+black trick of trade?  I came in the end (while making the bow of my tie)
+to suspect that perhaps I did not get the name right.  I had been
+thinking of the prominent Mr. Jacobus pretty frequently during the
+passage and my hearing might have been deceived by some remote similarity
+of sound. . .  The steward might have said Antrobus—or maybe Jackson.
+
+But coming out of my stateroom with an interrogative “Mr. Jacobus?” I was
+met by a quiet “Yes,” uttered with a gentle smile.  The “yes” was rather
+perfunctory.  He did not seem to make much of the fact that he was Mr.
+Jacobus.  I took stock of a big, pale face, hair thin on the top,
+whiskers also thin, of a faded nondescript colour, heavy eyelids.  The
+thick, smooth lips in repose looked as if glued together.  The smile was
+faint.  A heavy, tranquil man.  I named my two officers, who just then
+came down to breakfast; but why Mr. Burns’s silent demeanour should
+suggest suppressed indignation I could not understand.
+
+While we were taking our seats round the table some disconnected words of
+an altercation going on in the companionway reached my ear.  A stranger
+apparently wanted to come down to interview me, and the steward was
+opposing him.
+
+“You can’t see him.”
+
+“Why can’t I?”
+
+“The Captain is at breakfast, I tell you.  He’ll be going on shore
+presently, and you can speak to him on deck.”
+
+“That’s not fair.  You let—”
+
+“I’ve had nothing to do with that.”
+
+“Oh, yes, you have.  Everybody ought to have the same chance.  You let
+that fellow—”
+
+The rest I lost.  The person having been repulsed successfully, the
+steward came down.  I can’t say he looked flushed—he was a mulatto—but he
+looked flustered.  After putting the dishes on the table he remained by
+the sideboard with that lackadaisical air of indifference he used to
+assume when he had done something too clever by half and was afraid of
+getting into a scrape over it.  The contemptuous expression of Mr.
+Burns’s face as he looked from him to me was really extraordinary.  I
+couldn’t imagine what new bee had stung the mate now.
+
+The Captain being silent, nobody else cared to speak, as is the way in
+ships.  And I was saying nothing simply because I had been made dumb by
+the splendour of the entertainment.  I had expected the usual
+sea-breakfast, whereas I beheld spread before us a veritable feast of
+shore provisions: eggs, sausages, butter which plainly did not come from
+a Danish tin, cutlets, and even a dish of potatoes.  It was three weeks
+since I had seen a real, live potato.  I contemplated them with interest,
+and Mr. Jacobus disclosed himself as a man of human, homely sympathies,
+and something of a thought-reader.
+
+“Try them, Captain,” he encouraged me in a friendly undertone.  “They are
+excellent.”
+
+“They look that,” I admitted.  “Grown on the island, I suppose.”
+
+“Oh, no, imported.  Those grown here would be more expensive.”
+
+I was grieved at the ineptitude of the conversation.  Were these the
+topics for a prominent and wealthy merchant to discuss?  I thought the
+simplicity with which he made himself at home rather attractive; but what
+is one to talk about to a man who comes on one suddenly, after sixty-one
+days at sea, out of a totally unknown little town in an island one has
+never seen before?  What were (besides sugar) the interests of that crumb
+of the earth, its gossip, its topics of conversation?  To draw him on
+business at once would have been almost indecent—or even worse:
+impolitic.  All I could do at the moment was to keep on in the old
+groove.
+
+“Are the provisions generally dear here?” I asked, fretting inwardly at
+my inanity.
+
+“I wouldn’t say that,” he answered placidly, with that appearance of
+saving his breath his restrained manner of speaking suggested.
+
+He would not be more explicit, yet he did not evade the subject.  Eyeing
+the table in a spirit of complete abstemiousness (he wouldn’t let me help
+him to any eatables) he went into details of supply.  The beef was for
+the most part imported from Madagascar; mutton of course was rare and
+somewhat expensive, but good goat’s flesh—
+
+“Are these goat’s cutlets?” I exclaimed hastily, pointing at one of the
+dishes.
+
+Posed sentimentally by the sideboard, the steward gave a start.
+
+“Lor’, no, sir!  It’s real mutton!”
+
+Mr. Burns got through his breakfast impatiently, as if exasperated by
+being made a party to some monstrous foolishness, muttered a curt excuse,
+and went on deck.  Shortly afterwards the second mate took his smooth red
+countenance out of the cabin.  With the appetite of a schoolboy, and
+after two months of sea-fare, he appreciated the generous spread.  But I
+did not.  It smacked of extravagance.  All the same, it was a remarkable
+feat to have produced it so quickly, and I congratulated the steward on
+his smartness in a somewhat ominous tone.  He gave me a deprecatory smile
+and, in a way I didn’t know what to make of, blinked his fine dark eyes
+in the direction of the guest.
+
+The latter asked under his breath for another cup of coffee, and nibbled
+ascetically at a piece of very hard ship’s biscuit.  I don’t think he
+consumed a square inch in the end; but meantime he gave me, casually as
+it were, a complete account of the sugar crop, of the local business
+houses, of the state of the freight market.  All that talk was
+interspersed with hints as to personalities, amounting to veiled
+warnings, but his pale, fleshy face remained equable, without a gleam, as
+if ignorant of his voice.  As you may imagine I opened my ears very wide.
+Every word was precious.  My ideas as to the value of business friendship
+were being favourably modified.  He gave me the names of all the
+disponible ships together with their tonnage and the names of their
+commanders.  From that, which was still commercial information, he
+condescended to mere harbour gossip.  The _Hilda_ had unaccountably lost
+her figurehead in the Bay of Bengal, and her captain was greatly affected
+by this.  He and the ship had been getting on in years together and the
+old gentleman imagined this strange event to be the forerunner of his own
+early dissolution.  The _Stella_ had experienced awful weather off the
+Cape—had her decks swept, and the chief officer washed overboard.  And
+only a few hours before reaching port the baby died.
+
+Poor Captain H— and his wife were terribly cut up.  If they had only been
+able to bring it into port alive it could have been probably saved; but
+the wind failed them for the last week or so, light breezes, and . . .
+the baby was going to be buried this afternoon.  He supposed I would
+attend—
+
+“Do you think I ought to?” I asked, shrinkingly.
+
+He thought so, decidedly.  It would be greatly appreciated.  All the
+captains in the harbour were going to attend.  Poor Mrs. H— was quite
+prostrated.  Pretty hard on H— altogether.
+
+“And you, Captain—you are not married I suppose?”
+
+“No, I am not married,” I said.  “Neither married nor even engaged.”
+
+Mentally I thanked my stars; and while he smiled in a musing, dreamy
+fashion, I expressed my acknowledgments for his visit and for the
+interesting business information he had been good enough to impart to me.
+But I said nothing of my wonder thereat.
+
+“Of course, I would have made a point of calling on you in a day or two,”
+I concluded.
+
+He raised his eyelids distinctly at me, and somehow managed to look
+rather more sleepy than before.
+
+“In accordance with my owners’ instructions,” I explained.  “You have had
+their letter, of course?”
+
+By that time he had raised his eyebrows too but without any particular
+emotion.  On the contrary he struck me then as absolutely imperturbable.
+
+“Oh!  You must be thinking of my brother.”
+
+It was for me, then, to say “Oh!”  But I hope that no more than civil
+surprise appeared in my voice when I asked him to what, then, I owed the
+pleasure. . . . He was reaching for an inside pocket leisurely.
+
+“My brother’s a very different person.  But I am well known in this part
+of the world.  You’ve probably heard—”
+
+I took a card he extended to me.  A thick business card, as I lived!
+Alfred Jacobus—the other was Ernest—dealer in every description of ship’s
+stores!  Provisions salt and fresh, oils, paints, rope, canvas, etc.,
+etc.  Ships in harbour victualled by contract on moderate terms—
+
+“I’ve never heard of you,” I said brusquely.
+
+His low-pitched assurance did not abandon him.
+
+“You will be very well satisfied,” he breathed out quietly.
+
+I was not placated.  I had the sense of having been circumvented somehow.
+Yet I had deceived myself—if there was any deception.  But the confounded
+cheek of inviting himself to breakfast was enough to deceive any one.
+And the thought struck me: Why!  The fellow had provided all these
+eatables himself in the way of business.  I said:
+
+“You must have got up mighty early this morning.”
+
+He admitted with simplicity that he was on the quay before six o’clock
+waiting for my ship to come in.  He gave me the impression that it would
+be impossible to get rid of him now.
+
+“If you think we are going to live on that scale,” I said, looking at the
+table with an irritated eye, “you are jolly well mistaken.”
+
+“You’ll find it all right, Captain.  I quite understand.”
+
+Nothing could disturb his equanimity.  I felt dissatisfied, but I could
+not very well fly out at him.  He had told me many useful things—and
+besides he was the brother of that wealthy merchant.  That seemed queer
+enough.
+
+I rose and told him curtly that I must now go ashore.  At once he offered
+the use of his boat for all the time of my stay in port.
+
+“I only make a nominal charge,” he continued equably.  “My man remains
+all day at the landing-steps.  You have only to blow a whistle when you
+want the boat.”
+
+And, standing aside at every doorway to let me go through first, he
+carried me off in his custody after all.  As we crossed the quarter-deck
+two shabby individuals stepped forward and in mournful silence offered me
+business cards which I took from them without a word under his heavy eye.
+It was a useless and gloomy ceremony.  They were the touts of the other
+ship-chandlers, and he placid at my back, ignored their existence.
+
+We parted on the quay, after he had expressed quietly the hope of seeing
+me often “at the store.”  He had a smoking-room for captains there, with
+newspapers and a box of “rather decent cigars.”  I left him very
+unceremoniously.
+
+My consignees received me with the usual business heartiness, but their
+account of the state of the freight-market was by no means so favourable
+as the talk of the wrong Jacobus had led me to expect.  Naturally I
+became inclined now to put my trust in his version, rather.  As I closed
+the door of the private office behind me I thought to myself: “H’m.  A
+lot of lies.  Commercial diplomacy.  That’s the sort of thing a man
+coming from sea has got to expect.  They would try to charter the ship
+under the market rate.”
+
+In the big, outer room, full of desks, the chief clerk, a tall, lean,
+shaved person in immaculate white clothes and with a shiny,
+closely-cropped black head on which silvery gleams came and went, rose
+from his place and detained me affably.  Anything they could do for me,
+they would be most happy.  Was I likely to call again in the afternoon?
+What?  Going to a funeral?  Oh, yes, poor Captain H—.
+
+He pulled a long, sympathetic face for a moment, then, dismissing from
+this workaday world the baby, which had got ill in a tempest and had died
+from too much calm at sea, he asked me with a dental, shark-like smile—if
+sharks had false teeth—whether I had yet made my little arrangements for
+the ship’s stay in port.
+
+“Yes, with Jacobus,” I answered carelessly.  “I understand he’s the
+brother of Mr. Ernest Jacobus to whom I have an introduction from my
+owners.”
+
+I was not sorry to let him know I was not altogether helpless in the
+hands of his firm.  He screwed his thin lips dubiously.
+
+“Why,” I cried, “isn’t he the brother?”
+
+“Oh, yes. . . . They haven’t spoken to each other for eighteen years,” he
+added impressively after a pause.
+
+“Indeed!  What’s the quarrel about?”
+
+“Oh, nothing!  Nothing that one would care to mention,” he protested
+primly.  “He’s got quite a large business.  The best ship-chandler here,
+without a doubt.  Business is all very well, but there is such a thing as
+personal character, too, isn’t there?  Good-morning, Captain.”
+
+He went away mincingly to his desk.  He amused me.  He resembled an old
+maid, a commercial old maid, shocked by some impropriety.  Was it a
+commercial impropriety?  Commercial impropriety is a serious matter, for
+it aims at one’s pocket.  Or was he only a purist in conduct who
+disapproved of Jacobus doing his own touting?  It was certainly
+undignified.  I wondered how the merchant brother liked it.  But then
+different countries, different customs.  In a community so isolated and
+so exclusively “trading” social standards have their own scale.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I WOULD have gladly dispensed with the mournful opportunity of becoming
+acquainted by sight with all my fellow-captains at once.  However I found
+my way to the cemetery.  We made a considerable group of bareheaded men
+in sombre garments.  I noticed that those of our company most approaching
+to the now obsolete sea-dog type were the most moved—perhaps because they
+had less “manner” than the new generation.  The old sea-dog, away from
+his natural element, was a simple and sentimental animal.  I noticed
+one—he was facing me across the grave—who was dropping tears.  They
+trickled down his weather-beaten face like drops of rain on an old rugged
+wall.  I learned afterwards that he was looked upon as the terror of
+sailors, a hard man; that he had never had wife or chick of his own, and
+that, engaged from his tenderest years in deep-sea voyages, he knew women
+and children merely by sight.
+
+Perhaps he was dropping those tears over his lost opportunities, from
+sheer envy of paternity and in strange jealousy of a sorrow which he
+could never know.  Man, and even the sea-man, is a capricious animal, the
+creature and the victim of lost opportunities.  But he made me feel
+ashamed of my callousness.  I had no tears.
+
+I listened with horribly critical detachment to that service I had had to
+read myself, once or twice, over childlike men who had died at sea.  The
+words of hope and defiance, the winged words so inspiring in the free
+immensity of water and sky, seemed to fall wearily into the little grave.
+What was the use of asking Death where her sting was, before that small,
+dark hole in the ground?  And then my thoughts escaped me altogether—away
+into matters of life—and no very high matters at that—ships, freights,
+business.  In the instability of his emotions man resembles deplorably a
+monkey.  I was disgusted with my thoughts—and I thought: Shall I be able
+to get a charter soon?  Time’s money. . . . Will that Jacobus really put
+good business in my way?  I must go and see him in a day or two.
+
+Don’t imagine that I pursued these thoughts with any precision.  They
+pursued me rather: vague, shadowy, restless, shamefaced.  Theirs was a
+callous, abominable, almost revolting, pertinacity.  And it was the
+presence of that pertinacious ship-chandler which had started them.  He
+stood mournfully amongst our little band of men from the sea, and I was
+angry at his presence, which, suggesting his brother the merchant, had
+caused me to become outrageous to myself.  For indeed I had preserved
+some decency of feeling.  It was only the mind which—
+
+It was over at last.  The poor father—a man of forty with black, bushy
+side-whiskers and a pathetic gash on his freshly-shaved chin—thanked us
+all, swallowing his tears.  But for some reason, either because I
+lingered at the gate of the cemetery being somewhat hazy as to my way
+back, or because I was the youngest, or ascribing my moodiness caused by
+remorse to some more worthy and appropriate sentiment, or simply because
+I was even more of a stranger to him than the others—he singled me out.
+Keeping at my side, he renewed his thanks, which I listened to in a
+gloomy, conscience-stricken silence.  Suddenly he slipped one hand under
+my arm and waved the other after a tall, stout figure walking away by
+itself down a street in a flutter of thin, grey garments:
+
+“That’s a good fellow—a real good fellow”—he swallowed down a belated
+sob—“this Jacobus.”
+
+And he told me in a low voice that Jacobus was the first man to board his
+ship on arrival, and, learning of their misfortune, had taken charge of
+everything, volunteered to attend to all routine business, carried off
+the ship’s papers on shore, arranged for the funeral—
+
+“A good fellow.  I was knocked over.  I had been looking at my wife for
+ten days.  And helpless.  Just you think of that!  The dear little chap
+died the very day we made the land.  How I managed to take the ship in
+God alone knows!  I couldn’t see anything; I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t.
+. . . You’ve heard, perhaps, that we lost our mate overboard on the
+passage?  There was no one to do it for me.  And the poor woman nearly
+crazy down below there all alone with the . . . By the Lord!  It isn’t
+fair.”
+
+We walked in silence together.  I did not know how to part from him.  On
+the quay he let go my arm and struck fiercely his fist into the palm of
+his other hand.
+
+“By God, it isn’t fair!” he cried again.  “Don’t you ever marry unless
+you can chuck the sea first. . . . It isn’t fair.”
+
+I had no intention to “chuck the sea,” and when he left me to go aboard
+his ship I felt convinced that I would never marry.  While I was waiting
+at the steps for Jacobus’s boatman, who had gone off somewhere, the
+captain of the _Hilda_ joined me, a slender silk umbrella in his hand and
+the sharp points of his archaic, Gladstonian shirt-collar framing a
+small, clean-shaved, ruddy face.  It was wonderfully fresh for his age,
+beautifully modelled and lit up by remarkably clear blue eyes.  A lot of
+white hair, glossy like spun glass, curled upwards slightly under the
+brim of his valuable, ancient, panama hat with a broad black ribbon.  In
+the aspect of that vivacious, neat, little old man there was something
+quaintly angelic and also boyish.
+
+He accosted me, as though he had been in the habit of seeing me every day
+of his life from my earliest childhood, with a whimsical remark on the
+appearance of a stout negro woman who was sitting upon a stool near the
+edge of the quay.  Presently he observed amiably that I had a very pretty
+little barque.
+
+I returned this civil speech by saying readily:
+
+“Not so pretty as the _Hilda_.”
+
+At once the corners of his clear-cut, sensitive mouth dropped dismally.
+
+“Oh, dear!  I can hardly bear to look at her now.”
+
+Did I know, he asked anxiously, that he had lost the figurehead of his
+ship; a woman in a blue tunic edged with gold, the face perhaps not so
+very, very pretty, but her bare white arms beautifully shaped and
+extended as if she were swimming?  Did I?  Who would have expected such a
+things . . . After twenty years too!
+
+Nobody could have guessed from his tone that the woman was made of wood;
+his trembling voice, his agitated manner gave to his lamentations a
+ludicrously scandalous flavour. . . . Disappeared at night—a clear fine
+night with just a slight swell—in the gulf of Bengal.  Went off without a
+splash; no one in the ship could tell why, how, at what hour—after twenty
+years last October. . . . Did I ever hear! . . .
+
+I assured him sympathetically that I had never heard—and he became very
+doleful.  This meant no good he was sure.  There was something in it
+which looked like a warning.  But when I remarked that surely another
+figure of a woman could be procured I found myself being soundly rated
+for my levity.  The old boy flushed pink under his clear tan as if I had
+proposed something improper.  One could replace masts, I was told, or a
+lost rudder—any working part of a ship; but where was the use of sticking
+up a new figurehead?  What satisfaction?  How could one care for it?  It
+was easy to see that I had never been shipmates with a figurehead for
+over twenty years.
+
+“A new figurehead!” he scolded in unquenchable indignation.  “Why!  I’ve
+been a widower now for eight-and-twenty years come next May and I would
+just as soon think of getting a new wife.  You’re as bad as that fellow
+Jacobus.”
+
+I was highly amused.
+
+“What has Jacobus done?  Did he want you to marry again, Captain?” I
+inquired in a deferential tone.  But he was launched now and only grinned
+fiercely.
+
+“Procure—indeed!  He’s the sort of chap to procure you anything you like
+for a price.  I hadn’t been moored here for an hour when he got on board
+and at once offered to sell me a figurehead he happens to have in his
+yard somewhere.  He got Smith, my mate, to talk to me about it.  ‘Mr.
+Smith,’ says I, ‘don’t you know me better than that?  Am I the sort that
+would pick up with another man’s cast-off figurehead?’  And after all
+these years too!  The way some of you young fellows talk—”
+
+I affected great compunction, and as I stepped into the boat I said
+soberly:
+
+“Then I see nothing for it but to fit in a neat fiddlehead—perhaps.  You
+know, carved scrollwork, nicely gilt.”
+
+He became very dejected after his outburst.
+
+“Yes.  Scrollwork.  Maybe.  Jacobus hinted at that too.  He’s never at a
+loss when there’s any money to be extracted from a sailorman.  He would
+make me pay through the nose for that carving.  A gilt fiddlehead did you
+say—eh?  I dare say it would do for you.  You young fellows don’t seem to
+have any feeling for what’s proper.”
+
+He made a convulsive gesture with his right arm.
+
+“Never mind.  Nothing can make much difference.  I would just as soon let
+the old thing go about the world with a bare cutwater,” he cried sadly.
+Then as the boat got away from the steps he raised his voice on the edge
+of the quay with comical animosity:
+
+“I would!  If only to spite that figurehead-procuring bloodsucker.  I am
+an old bird here and don’t you forget it.  Come and see me on board some
+day!”
+
+I spent my first evening in port quietly in my ship’s cuddy; and glad
+enough was I to think that the shore life which strikes one as so pettily
+complex, discordant, and so full of new faces on first coming from sea,
+could be kept off for a few hours longer.  I was however fated to hear
+the Jacobus note once more before I slept.
+
+Mr. Burns had gone ashore after the evening meal to have, as he said, “a
+look round.”  As it was quite dark when he announced his intention I
+didn’t ask him what it was he expected to see.  Some time about midnight,
+while sitting with a book in the saloon, I heard cautious movements in
+the lobby and hailed him by name.
+
+Burns came in, stick and hat in hand, incredibly vulgarised by his smart
+shore togs, with a jaunty air and an odious twinkle in his eye.  Being
+asked to sit down he laid his hat and stick on the table and after we had
+talked of ship affairs for a little while:
+
+“I’ve been hearing pretty tales on shore about that ship-chandler fellow
+who snatched the job from you so neatly, sir.”
+
+I remonstrated with my late patient for his manner of expressing himself.
+But he only tossed his head disdainfully.  A pretty dodge indeed:
+boarding a strange ship with breakfast in two baskets for all hands and
+calmly inviting himself to the captain’s table!  Never heard of anything
+so crafty and so impudent in his life.
+
+I found myself defending Jacobus’s unusual methods.
+
+“He’s the brother of one of the wealthiest merchants in the port.”  The
+mate’s eyes fairly snapped green sparks.
+
+“His grand brother hasn’t spoken to him for eighteen or twenty years,” he
+declared triumphantly.  “So there!”
+
+“I know all about that,” I interrupted loftily.
+
+“Do you sir?  H’m!”  His mind was still running on the ethics of
+commercial competition.  “I don’t like to see your good nature taken
+advantage of.  He’s bribed that steward of ours with a five-rupee note to
+let him come down—or ten for that matter.  He don’t care.  He will shove
+that and more into the bill presently.”
+
+“Is that one of the tales you have heard ashore?” I asked.
+
+He assured me that his own sense could tell him that much.  No; what he
+had heard on shore was that no respectable person in the whole town would
+come near Jacobus.  He lived in a large old-fashioned house in one of the
+quiet streets with a big garden.  After telling me this Burns put on a
+mysterious air.  “He keeps a girl shut up there who, they say—”
+
+“I suppose you’ve heard all this gossip in some eminently respectable
+place?” I snapped at him in a most sarcastic tone.
+
+The shaft told, because Mr. Burns, like many other disagreeable people,
+was very sensitive himself.  He remained as if thunderstruck, with his
+mouth open for some further communication, but I did not give him the
+chance.  “And, anyhow, what the deuce do I care?” I added, retiring into
+my room.
+
+And this was a natural thing to say.  Yet somehow I was not indifferent.
+I admit it is absurd to be concerned with the morals of one’s
+ship-chandler, if ever so well connected; but his personality had stamped
+itself upon my first day in harbour, in the way you know.
+
+After this initial exploit Jacobus showed himself anything but intrusive.
+He was out in a boat early every morning going round the ships he served,
+and occasionally remaining on board one of them for breakfast with the
+captain.
+
+As I discovered that this practice was generally accepted, I just nodded
+to him familiarly when one morning, on coming out of my room, I found him
+in the cabin.  Glancing over the table I saw that his place was already
+laid.  He stood awaiting my appearance, very bulky and placid, holding a
+beautiful bunch of flowers in his thick hand.  He offered them to my
+notice with a faint, sleepy smile.  From his own garden; had a very fine
+old garden; picked them himself that morning before going out to
+business; thought I would like. . . . He turned away.  “Steward, can you
+oblige me with some water in a large jar, please.”
+
+I assured him jocularly, as I took my place at the table, that he made me
+feel as if I were a pretty girl, and that he mustn’t be surprised if I
+blushed.  But he was busy arranging his floral tribute at the sideboard.
+“Stand it before the Captain’s plate, steward, please.”  He made this
+request in his usual undertone.
+
+The offering was so pointed that I could do no less than to raise it to
+my nose, and as he sat down noiselessly he breathed out the opinion that
+a few flowers improved notably the appearance of a ship’s saloon.  He
+wondered why I did not have a shelf fitted all round the skylight for
+flowers in pots to take with me to sea.  He had a skilled workman able to
+fit up shelves in a day, and he could procure me two or three dozen good
+plants—
+
+The tips of his thick, round fingers rested composedly on the edge of the
+table on each side of his cup of coffee.  His face remained immovable.
+Mr. Burns was smiling maliciously to himself.  I declared that I hadn’t
+the slightest intention of turning my skylight into a conservatory only
+to keep the cabin-table in a perpetual mess of mould and dead vegetable
+matter.
+
+“Rear most beautiful flowers,” he insisted with an upward glance.  “It’s
+no trouble really.”
+
+“Oh, yes, it is.  Lots of trouble,” I contradicted.  “And in the end some
+fool leaves the skylight open in a fresh breeze, a flick of salt water
+gets at them and the whole lot is dead in a week.”
+
+Mr. Burns snorted a contemptuous approval.  Jacobus gave up the subject
+passively.  After a time he unglued his thick lips to ask me if I had
+seen his brother yet.  I was very curt in my answer.
+
+“No, not yet.”
+
+“A very different person,” he remarked dreamily and got up.  His
+movements were particularly noiseless.  “Well—thank you, Captain.  If
+anything is not to your liking please mention it to your steward.  I
+suppose you will be giving a dinner to the office-clerks presently.”
+
+“What for?” I cried with some warmth.  “If I were a steady trader to the
+port I could understand it.  But a complete stranger! . . . I may not
+turn up again here for years.  I don’t see why! . . . Do you mean to say
+it is customary?”
+
+“It will be expected from a man like you,” he breathed out placidly.
+“Eight of the principal clerks, the manager, that’s nine, you three
+gentlemen, that’s twelve.  It needn’t be very expensive.  If you tell
+your steward to give me a day’s notice—”
+
+“It will be expected of me!  Why should it be expected of me?  Is it
+because I look particularly soft—or what?”
+
+His immobility struck me as dignified suddenly, his imperturbable quality
+as dangerous.  “There’s plenty of time to think about that,” I concluded
+weakly with a gesture that tried to wave him away.  But before he
+departed he took time to mention regretfully that he had not yet had the
+pleasure of seeing me at his “store” to sample those cigars.  He had a
+parcel of six thousand to dispose of, very cheap.
+
+“I think it would be worth your while to secure some,” he added with a
+fat, melancholy smile and left the cabin.
+
+Mr. Burns struck his fist on the table excitedly.
+
+“Did you ever see such impudence!  He’s made up his mind to get something
+out of you one way or another, sir.”
+
+At once feeling inclined to defend Jacobus, I observed philosophically
+that all this was business, I supposed.  But my absurd mate, muttering
+broken disjointed sentences, such as: “I cannot bear! . . . Mark my
+words! . . .” and so on, flung out of the cabin.  If I hadn’t nursed him
+through that deadly fever I wouldn’t have suffered such manners for a
+single day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JACOBUS having put me in mind of his wealthy brother I concluded I would
+pay that business call at once.  I had by that time heard a little more
+of him.  He was a member of the Council, where he made himself
+objectionable to the authorities.  He exercised a considerable influence
+on public opinion.  Lots of people owed him money.  He was an importer on
+a great scale of all sorts of goods.  For instance, the whole supply of
+bags for sugar was practically in his hands.  This last fact I did not
+learn till afterwards.  The general impression conveyed to me was that of
+a local personage.  He was a bachelor and gave weekly card-parties in his
+house out of town, which were attended by the best people in the colony.
+
+The greater, then, was my surprise to discover his office in shabby
+surroundings, quite away from the business quarter, amongst a lot of
+hovels.  Guided by a black board with white lettering, I climbed a narrow
+wooden staircase and entered a room with a bare floor of planks littered
+with bits of brown paper and wisps of packing straw.  A great number of
+what looked like wine-cases were piled up against one of the walls.  A
+lanky, inky, light-yellow, mulatto youth, miserably long-necked and
+generally recalling a sick chicken, got off a three-legged stool behind a
+cheap deal desk and faced me as if gone dumb with fright.  I had some
+difficulty in persuading him to take in my name, though I could not get
+from him the nature of his objection.  He did it at last with an almost
+agonised reluctance which ceased to be mysterious to me when I heard him
+being sworn at menacingly with savage, suppressed growls, then audibly
+cuffed and finally kicked out without any concealment whatever; because
+he came back flying head foremost through the door with a stifled shriek.
+
+To say I was startled would not express it.  I remained still, like a man
+lost in a dream.  Clapping both his hands to that part of his frail
+anatomy which had received the shock, the poor wretch said to me simply:
+
+“Will you go in, please.”  His lamentable self-possession was wonderful;
+but it did not do away with the incredibility of the experience.  A
+preposterous notion that I had seen this boy somewhere before, a thing
+obviously impossible, was like a delicate finishing touch of weirdness
+added to a scene fit to raise doubts as to one’s sanity.  I stared
+anxiously about me like an awakened somnambulist.
+
+“I say,” I cried loudly, “there isn’t a mistake, is there?  This is Mr.
+Jacobus’s office.”
+
+The boy gazed at me with a pained expression—and somehow so familiar!  A
+voice within growled offensively:
+
+“Come in, come in, since you are there. . . . I didn’t know.”
+
+I crossed the outer room as one approaches the den of some unknown wild
+beast; with intrepidity but in some excitement.  Only no wild beast that
+ever lived would rouse one’s indignation; the power to do that belongs to
+the odiousness of the human brute.  And I was very indignant, which did
+not prevent me from being at once struck by the extraordinary resemblance
+of the two brothers.
+
+This one was dark instead of being fair like the other; but he was as
+big.  He was without his coat and waistcoat; he had been doubtless
+snoozing in the rocking-chair which stood in a corner furthest from the
+window.  Above the great bulk of his crumpled white shirt, buttoned with
+three diamond studs, his round face looked swarthy.  It was moist; his
+brown moustache hung limp and ragged.  He pushed a common, cane-bottomed
+chair towards me with his foot.
+
+“Sit down.”
+
+I glanced at it casually, then, turning my indignant eyes full upon him,
+I declared in precise and incisive tones that I had called in obedience
+to my owners’ instructions.
+
+“Oh!  Yes.  H’m!  I didn’t understand what that fool was saying. . . .
+But never mind!  It will teach the scoundrel to disturb me at this time
+of the day,” he added, grinning at me with savage cynicism.
+
+I looked at my watch.  It was past three o’clock—quite the full swing of
+afternoon office work in the port.  He snarled imperiously: “Sit down,
+Captain.”
+
+I acknowledged the gracious invitation by saying deliberately:
+
+“I can listen to all you may have to say without sitting down.”
+
+Emitting a loud and vehement “Pshaw!” he glared for a moment, very
+round-eyed and fierce.  It was like a gigantic tomcat spitting at one
+suddenly.  “Look at him! . . . What do you fancy yourself to be?  What
+did you come here for?  If you won’t sit down and talk business you had
+better go to the devil.”
+
+“I don’t know him personally,” I said.  “But after this I wouldn’t mind
+calling on him.  It would be refreshing to meet a gentleman.”
+
+He followed me, growling behind my back:
+
+“The impudence!  I’ve a good mind to write to your owners what I think of
+you.”
+
+I turned on him for a moment:
+
+“As it happens I don’t care.  For my part I assure you I won’t even take
+the trouble to mention you to them.”
+
+He stopped at the door of his office while I traversed the littered
+anteroom.  I think he was somewhat taken aback.
+
+“I will break every bone in your body,” he roared suddenly at the
+miserable mulatto lad, “if you ever dare to disturb me before half-past
+three for anybody.  D’ye hear?  For anybody! . . . Let alone any damned
+skipper,” he added, in a lower growl.
+
+The frail youngster, swaying like a reed, made a low moaning sound.  I
+stopped short and addressed this sufferer with advice.  It was prompted
+by the sight of a hammer (used for opening the wine-cases, I suppose)
+which was lying on the floor.
+
+“If I were you, my boy, I would have that thing up my sleeve when I went
+in next and at the first occasion I would—”
+
+What was there so familiar in that lad’s yellow face?  Entrenched and
+quaking behind the flimsy desk, he never looked up.  His heavy, lowered
+eyelids gave me suddenly the clue of the puzzle.  He resembled—yes, those
+thick glued lips—he resembled the brothers Jacobus.  He resembled both,
+the wealthy merchant and the pushing shopkeeper (who resembled each
+other); he resembled them as much as a thin, light-yellow mulatto lad may
+resemble a big, stout, middle-aged white man.  It was the exotic
+complexion and the slightness of his build which had put me off so
+completely.  Now I saw in him unmistakably the Jacobus strain, weakened,
+attenuated, diluted as it were in a bucket of water—and I refrained from
+finishing my speech.  I had intended to say: “Crack this brute’s head for
+him.”  I still felt the conclusion to be sound.  But it is no trifling
+responsibility to counsel parricide to any one, however deeply injured.
+
+“Beggarly—cheeky—skippers.”
+
+I despised the emphatic growl at my back; only, being much vexed and
+upset, I regret to say that I slammed the door behind me in a most
+undignified manner.
+
+It may not appear altogether absurd if I say that I brought out from that
+interview a kindlier view of the other Jacobus.  It was with a feeling
+resembling partisanship that, a few days later, I called at his “store.”
+That long, cavern-like place of business, very dim at the back and
+stuffed full of all sorts of goods, was entered from the street by a
+lofty archway.  At the far end I saw my Jacobus exerting himself in his
+shirt-sleeves among his assistants.  The captains’ room was a small,
+vaulted apartment with a stone floor and heavy iron bars in its windows
+like a dungeon converted to hospitable purposes.  A couple of cheerful
+bottles and several gleaming glasses made a brilliant cluster round a
+tall, cool red earthenware pitcher on the centre table which was littered
+with newspapers from all parts of the world.  A well-groomed stranger in
+a smart grey check suit, sitting with one leg flung over his knee, put
+down one of these sheets briskly and nodded to me.
+
+I guessed him to be a steamer-captain.  It was impossible to get to know
+these men.  They came and went too quickly and their ships lay moored far
+out, at the very entrance of the harbour.  Theirs was another life
+altogether.  He yawned slightly.
+
+“Dull hole, isn’t it?”
+
+I understood this to allude to the town.
+
+“Do you find it so?” I murmured.
+
+“Don’t you?  But I’m off to-morrow, thank goodness.”
+
+He was a very gentlemanly person, good-natured and superior.  I watched
+him draw the open box of cigars to his side of the table, take a big
+cigar-case out of his pocket and begin to fill it very methodically.
+Presently, on our eyes meeting, he winked like a common mortal and
+invited me to follow his example.  “They are really decent smokes.”  I
+shook my head.
+
+“I am not off to-morrow.”
+
+“What of that?  Think I am abusing old Jacobus’s hospitality?  Heavens!
+It goes into the bill, of course.  He spreads such little matters all
+over his account.  He can take care of himself!  Why, it’s business—”
+
+I noted a shadow fall over his well-satisfied expression, a momentary
+hesitation in closing his cigar-case.  But he ended by putting it in his
+pocket jauntily.  A placid voice uttered in the doorway: “That’s quite
+correct, Captain.”
+
+The large noiseless Jacobus advanced into the room.  His quietness, in
+the circumstances, amounted to cordiality.  He had put on his jacket
+before joining us, and he sat down in the chair vacated by the
+steamer-man, who nodded again to me and went out with a short, jarring
+laugh.  A profound silence reigned.  With his drowsy stare Jacobus seemed
+to be slumbering open-eyed.  Yet, somehow, I was aware of being
+profoundly scrutinised by those heavy eyes.  In the enormous cavern of
+the store somebody began to nail down a case, expertly: tap-tap . . .
+tap-tap-tap.
+
+Two other experts, one slow and nasal, the other shrill and snappy,
+started checking an invoice.
+
+“A half-coil of three-inch manilla rope.”
+
+“Right!”
+
+“Six assorted shackles.”
+
+“Right!”
+
+“Six tins assorted soups, three of paté, two asparagus, fourteen pounds
+tobacco, cabin.”
+
+“Right!”
+
+“It’s for the captain who was here just now,” breathed out the immovable
+Jacobus.  “These steamer orders are very small.  They pick up what they
+want as they go along.  That man will be in Samarang in less than a
+fortnight.  Very small orders indeed.”
+
+The calling over of the items went on in the shop; an extraordinary
+jumble of varied articles, paint-brushes, Yorkshire Relish, etc., etc. . . .
+“Three sacks of best potatoes,” read out the nasal voice.
+
+At this Jacobus blinked like a sleeping man roused by a shake, and
+displayed some animation.  At his order, shouted into the shop, a
+smirking half-caste clerk with his ringlets much oiled and with a pen
+stuck behind his ear, brought in a sample of six potatoes which he
+paraded in a row on the table.
+
+Being urged to look at their beauty I gave them a cold and hostile
+glance.  Calmly, Jacobus proposed that I should order ten or fifteen
+tons—tons!  I couldn’t believe my ears.  My crew could not have eaten
+such a lot in a year; and potatoes (excuse these practical remarks) are a
+highly perishable commodity.  I thought he was joking—or else trying to
+find out whether I was an unutterable idiot.  But his purpose was not so
+simple.  I discovered that he meant me to buy them on my own account.
+
+“I am proposing you a bit of business, Captain.  I wouldn’t charge you a
+great price.”
+
+I told him that I did not go in for trade.  I even added grimly that I
+knew only too well how that sort of spec. generally ended.
+
+He sighed and clasped his hands on his stomach with exemplary
+resignation.  I admired the placidity of his impudence.  Then waking up
+somewhat:
+
+“Won’t you try a cigar, Captain?”
+
+“No, thanks.  I don’t smoke cigars.”
+
+“For once!” he exclaimed, in a patient whisper.  A melancholy silence
+ensued.  You know how sometimes a person discloses a certain unsuspected
+depth and acuteness of thought; that is, in other words, utters something
+unexpected.  It was unexpected enough to hear Jacobus say:
+
+“The man who just went out was right enough.  You might take one,
+Captain.  Here everything is bound to be in the way of business.”
+
+I felt a little ashamed of myself.  The remembrance of his horrid brother
+made him appear quite a decent sort of fellow.  It was with some
+compunction that I said a few words to the effect that I could have no
+possible objection to his hospitality.
+
+Before I was a minute older I saw where this admission was leading me.
+As if changing the subject, Jacobus mentioned that his private house was
+about ten minutes’ walk away.  It had a beautiful old walled garden.
+Something really remarkable.  I ought to come round some day and have a
+look at it.
+
+He seemed to be a lover of gardens.  I too take extreme delight in them;
+but I did not mean my compunction to carry me as far as Jacobus’s
+flower-beds, however beautiful and old.  He added, with a certain
+homeliness of tone:
+
+“There’s only my girl there.”
+
+It is difficult to set everything down in due order; so I must revert
+here to what happened a week or two before.  The medical officer of the
+port had come on board my ship to have a look at one of my crew who was
+ailing, and naturally enough he was asked to step into the cabin.  A
+fellow-shipmaster of mine was there too; and in the conversation, somehow
+or other, the name of Jacobus came to be mentioned.  It was pronounced
+with no particular reverence by the other man, I believe.  I don’t
+remember now what I was going to say.  The doctor—a pleasant, cultivated
+fellow, with an assured manner—prevented me by striking in, in a sour
+tone:
+
+“Ah!  You’re talking about my respected papa-in-law.”
+
+Of course, that sally silenced us at the time.  But I remembered the
+episode, and at this juncture, pushed for something noncommittal to say,
+I inquired with polite surprise:
+
+“You have your married daughter living with you, Mr. Jacobus?”
+
+He moved his big hand from right to left quietly.  No!  That was another
+of his girls, he stated, ponderously and under his breath as usual.  She
+. . . He seemed in a pause to be ransacking his mind for some kind of
+descriptive phrase.  But my hopes were disappointed.  He merely produced
+his stereotyped definition.
+
+“She’s a very different sort of person.”
+
+“Indeed. . . . And by the by, Jacobus, I called on your brother the other
+day.  It’s no great compliment if I say that I found him a very different
+sort of person from you.”
+
+He had an air of profound reflection, then remarked quaintly:
+
+“He’s a man of regular habits.”
+
+He might have been alluding to the habit of late siesta; but I mumbled
+something about “beastly habits anyhow”—and left the store abruptly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+MY little passage with Jacobus the merchant became known generally.  One
+or two of my acquaintances made distant allusions to it.  Perhaps the
+mulatto boy had talked.  I must confess that people appeared rather
+scandalised, but not with Jacobus’s brutality.  A man I knew remonstrated
+with me for my hastiness.
+
+I gave him the whole story of my visit, not forgetting the tell-tale
+resemblance of the wretched mulatto boy to his tormentor.  He was not
+surprised.  No doubt, no doubt.  What of that?  In a jovial tone he
+assured me that there must be many of that sort.  The elder Jacobus had
+been a bachelor all his life.  A highly respectable bachelor.  But there
+had never been open scandal in that connection.  His life had been quite
+regular.  It could cause no offence to any one.
+
+I said that I had been offended considerably.  My interlocutor opened
+very wide eyes.  Why?  Because a mulatto lad got a few knocks?  That was
+not a great affair, surely.  I had no idea how insolent and untruthful
+these half-castes were.  In fact he seemed to think Mr. Jacobus rather
+kind than otherwise to employ that youth at all; a sort of amiable
+weakness which could be forgiven.
+
+This acquaintance of mine belonged to one of the old French families,
+descendants of the old colonists; all noble, all impoverished, and living
+a narrow domestic life in dull, dignified decay.  The men, as a rule,
+occupy inferior posts in Government offices or in business houses.  The
+girls are almost always pretty, ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable
+and generally bilingual; they prattle innocently both in French and
+English.  The emptiness of their existence passes belief.
+
+I obtained my entry into a couple of such households because some years
+before, in Bombay, I had occasion to be of use to a pleasant, ineffectual
+young man who was rather stranded there, not knowing what to do with
+himself or even how to get home to his island again.  It was a matter of
+two hundred rupees or so, but, when I turned up, the family made a point
+of showing their gratitude by admitting me to their intimacy.  My
+knowledge of the French language made me specially acceptable.  They had
+meantime managed to marry the fellow to a woman nearly twice his age,
+comparatively well off: the only profession he was really fit for.  But
+it was not all cakes and ale.  The first time I called on the couple she
+spied a little spot of grease on the poor devil’s pantaloons and made him
+a screaming scene of reproaches so full of sincere passion that I sat
+terrified as at a tragedy of Racine.
+
+Of course there was never question of the money I had advanced him; but
+his sisters, Miss Angele and Miss Mary, and the aunts of both families,
+who spoke quaint archaic French of pre-Revolution period, and a host of
+distant relations adopted me for a friend outright in a manner which was
+almost embarrassing.
+
+It was with the eldest brother (he was employed at a desk in my
+consignee’s office) that I was having this talk about the merchant
+Jacobus.  He regretted my attitude and nodded his head sagely.  An
+influential man.  One never knew when one would need him.  I expressed my
+immense preference for the shopkeeper of the two.  At that my friend
+looked grave.
+
+“What on earth are you pulling that long face about?” I cried
+impatiently.  “He asked me to see his garden and I have a good mind to go
+some day.”
+
+“Don’t do that,” he said, so earnestly that I burst into a fit of
+laughter; but he looked at me without a smile.
+
+This was another matter altogether.  At one time the public conscience of
+the island had been mightily troubled by my Jacobus.  The two brothers
+had been partners for years in great harmony, when a wandering circus
+came to the island and my Jacobus became suddenly infatuated with one of
+the lady-riders.  What made it worse was that he was married.  He had not
+even the grace to conceal his passion.  It must have been strong indeed
+to carry away such a large placid creature.  His behaviour was perfectly
+scandalous.  He followed that woman to the Cape, and apparently travelled
+at the tail of that beastly circus to other parts of the world, in a most
+degrading position.  The woman soon ceased to care for him, and treated
+him worse than a dog.  Most extraordinary stories of moral degradation
+were reaching the island at that time.  He had not the strength of mind
+to shake himself free. . . .
+
+The grotesque image of a fat, pushing ship-chandler, enslaved by an
+unholy love-spell, fascinated me; and I listened rather open-mouthed to
+the tale as old as the world, a tale which had been the subject of
+legend, of moral fables, of poems, but which so ludicrously failed to fit
+the personality.  What a strange victim for the gods!
+
+Meantime his deserted wife had died.  His daughter was taken care of by
+his brother, who married her as advantageously as was possible in the
+circumstances.
+
+“Oh!  The Mrs. Doctor!” I exclaimed.
+
+“You know that?  Yes.  A very able man.  He wanted a lift in the world,
+and there was a good bit of money from her mother, besides the
+expectations. . . Of course, they don’t know him,” he added.  “The doctor
+nods in the street, I believe, but he avoids speaking to him when they
+meet on board a ship, as must happen sometimes.”
+
+I remarked that this surely was an old story by now.
+
+My friend assented.  But it was Jacobus’s own fault that it was neither
+forgiven nor forgotten.  He came back ultimately.  But how?  Not in a
+spirit of contrition, in a way to propitiate his scandalised
+fellow-citizens.  He must needs drag along with him a child—a girl. . . .
+
+“He spoke to me of a daughter who lives with him,” I observed, very much
+interested.
+
+“She’s certainly the daughter of the circus-woman,” said my friend.  “She
+may be his daughter too; I am willing to admit that she is.  In fact I
+have no doubt—”
+
+But he did not see why she should have been brought into a respectable
+community to perpetuate the memory of the scandal.  And that was not the
+worst.  Presently something much more distressing happened.  That
+abandoned woman turned up.  Landed from a mail-boat. . . .
+
+“What!  Here?  To claim the child perhaps,” I suggested.
+
+“Not she!”  My friendly informant was very scornful.  “Imagine a painted,
+haggard, agitated, desperate hag.  Been cast off in Mozambique by
+somebody who paid her passage here.  She had been injured internally by a
+kick from a horse; she hadn’t a cent on her when she got ashore; I don’t
+think she even asked to see the child.  At any rate, not till the last
+day of her life.  Jacobus hired for her a bungalow to die in.  He got a
+couple of Sisters from the hospital to nurse her through these few
+months.  If he didn’t marry her _in extremis_ as the good Sisters tried
+to bring about, it’s because she wouldn’t even hear of it.  As the nuns
+said: ‘The woman died impenitent.’  It was reported that she ordered
+Jacobus out of the room with her last breath.  This may be the real
+reason why he didn’t go into mourning himself; he only put the child into
+black.  While she was little she was to be seen sometimes about the
+streets attended by a negro woman, but since she became of age to put her
+hair up I don’t think she has set foot outside that garden once.  She
+must be over eighteen now.”
+
+Thus my friend, with some added details; such as, that he didn’t think
+the girl had spoken to three people of any position in the island; that
+an elderly female relative of the brothers Jacobus had been induced by
+extreme poverty to accept the position of gouvernante to the girl.  As to
+Jacobus’s business (which certainly annoyed his brother) it was a wise
+choice on his part.  It brought him in contact only with strangers of
+passage; whereas any other would have given rise to all sorts of
+awkwardness with his social equals.  The man was not wanting in a certain
+tact—only he was naturally shameless.  For why did he want to keep that
+girl with him?  It was most painful for everybody.
+
+I thought suddenly (and with profound disgust) of the other Jacobus, and
+I could not refrain from saying slily:
+
+“I suppose if he employed her, say, as a scullion in his household and
+occasionally pulled her hair or boxed her ears, the position would have
+been more regular—less shocking to the respectable class to which he
+belongs.”
+
+He was not so stupid as to miss my intention, and shrugged his shoulders
+impatiently.
+
+“You don’t understand.  To begin with, she’s not a mulatto.  And a
+scandal is a scandal.  People should be given a chance to forget.  I dare
+say it would have been better for her if she had been turned into a
+scullion or something of that kind.  Of course he’s trying to make money
+in every sort of petty way, but in such a business there’ll never be
+enough for anybody to come forward.”
+
+When my friend left me I had a conception of Jacobus and his daughter
+existing, a lonely pair of castaways, on a desert island; the girl
+sheltering in the house as if it were a cavern in a cliff, and Jacobus
+going out to pick up a living for both on the beach—exactly like two
+shipwrecked people who always hope for some rescuer to bring them back at
+last into touch with the rest of mankind.
+
+But Jacobus’s bodily reality did not fit in with this romantic view.
+When he turned up on board in the usual course, he sipped the cup of
+coffee placidly, asked me if I was satisfied—and I hardly listened to the
+harbour gossip he dropped slowly in his low, voice-saving enunciation.  I
+had then troubles of my own.  My ship chartered, my thoughts dwelling on
+the success of a quick round voyage, I had been suddenly confronted by a
+shortage of bags.  A catastrophe!  The stock of one especial kind, called
+pockets, seemed to be totally exhausted.  A consignment was shortly
+expected—it was afloat, on its way, but, meantime, the loading of my ship
+dead stopped, I had enough to worry about.  My consignees, who had
+received me with such heartiness on my arrival, now, in the character of
+my charterers, listened to my complaints with polite helplessness.  Their
+manager, the old-maidish, thin man, who so prudishly didn’t even like to
+speak about the impure Jacobus, gave me the correct commercial view of
+the position.
+
+“My dear Captain”—he was retracting his leathery cheeks into a
+condescending, shark-like smile—“we were not morally obliged to tell you
+of a possible shortage before you signed the charter-party.  It was for
+you to guard against the contingency of a delay—strictly speaking.  But
+of course we shouldn’t have taken any advantage.  This is no one’s fault
+really.  We ourselves have been taken unawares,” he concluded primly,
+with an obvious lie.
+
+This lecture I confess had made me thirsty.  Suppressed rage generally
+produces that effect; and as I strolled on aimlessly I bethought myself
+of the tall earthenware pitcher in the captains’ room of the Jacobus
+“store.”
+
+With no more than a nod to the men I found assembled there, I poured down
+a deep, cool draught on my indignation, then another, and then, becoming
+dejected, I sat plunged in cheerless reflections.  The others read,
+talked, smoked, bandied over my head some unsubtle chaff.  But my
+abstraction was respected.  And it was without a word to any one that I
+rose and went out, only to be quite unexpectedly accosted in the bustle
+of the store by Jacobus the outcast.
+
+“Glad to see you, Captain.  What?  Going away?  You haven’t been looking
+so well these last few days, I notice.  Run down, eh?”
+
+He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his words were in the usual course of
+business, but they had a human note.  It was commercial amenity, but I
+had been a stranger to amenity in that connection.  I do verily believe
+(from the direction of his heavy glance towards a certain shelf) that he
+was going to suggest the purchase of Clarkson’s Nerve Tonic, which he
+kept in stock, when I said impulsively:
+
+“I am rather in trouble with my loading.”
+
+Wide awake under his sleepy, broad mask with glued lips, he understood at
+once, had a movement of the head so appreciative that I relieved my
+exasperation by exclaiming:
+
+“Surely there must be eleven hundred quarter-bags to be found in the
+colony.  It’s only a matter of looking for them.”
+
+Again that slight movement of the big head, and in the noise and activity
+of the store that tranquil murmur:
+
+“To be sure.  But then people likely to have a reserve of quarter-bags
+wouldn’t want to sell.  They’d need that size themselves.”
+
+“That’s exactly what my consignees are telling me.  Impossible to buy.
+Bosh!  They don’t want to.  It suits them to have the ship hung up.  But
+if I were to discover the lot they would have to—Look here, Jacobus!  You
+are the man to have such a thing up your sleeve.”
+
+He protested with a ponderous swing of his big head.  I stood before him
+helplessly, being looked at by those heavy eyes with a veiled expression
+as of a man after some soul-shaking crisis.  Then, suddenly:
+
+“It’s impossible to talk quietly here,” he whispered.  “I am very busy.
+But if you could go and wait for me in my house.  It’s less than ten
+minutes’ walk.  Oh, yes, you don’t know the way.”
+
+He called for his coat and offered to take me there himself.  He would
+have to return to the store at once for an hour or so to finish his
+business, and then he would be at liberty to talk over with me that
+matter of quarter-bags.  This programme was breathed out at me through
+slightly parted, still lips; his heavy, motionless glance rested upon me,
+placid as ever, the glance of a tired man—but I felt that it was
+searching, too.  I could not imagine what he was looking for in me and
+kept silent, wondering.
+
+“I am asking you to wait for me in my house till I am at liberty to talk
+this matter over.  You will?”
+
+“Why, of course!” I cried.
+
+“But I cannot promise—”
+
+“I dare say not,” I said.  “I don’t expect a promise.”
+
+“I mean I can’t even promise to try the move I’ve in my mind.  One must
+see first . . . h’m!”
+
+“All right.  I’ll take the chance.  I’ll wait for you as long as you
+like.  What else have I to do in this infernal hole of a port!”
+
+Before I had uttered my last words we had set off at a swinging pace.  We
+turned a couple of corners and entered a street completely empty of
+traffic, of semi-rural aspect, paved with cobblestones nestling in grass
+tufts.  The house came to the line of the roadway; a single story on an
+elevated basement of rough-stones, so that our heads were below the level
+of the windows as we went along.  All the jalousies were tightly shut,
+like eyes, and the house seemed fast asleep in the afternoon sunshine.
+The entrance was at the side, in an alley even more grass-grown than the
+street: a small door, simply on the latch.
+
+With a word of apology as to showing me the way, Jacobus preceded me up a
+dark passage and led me across the naked parquet floor of what I supposed
+to be the dining-room.  It was lighted by three glass doors which stood
+wide open on to a verandah or rather loggia running its brick arches
+along the garden side of the house.  It was really a magnificent garden:
+smooth green lawns and a gorgeous maze of flower-beds in the foreground,
+displayed around a basin of dark water framed in a marble rim, and in the
+distance the massed foliage of varied trees concealing the roofs of other
+houses.  The town might have been miles away.  It was a brilliantly
+coloured solitude, drowsing in a warm, voluptuous silence.  Where the
+long, still shadows fell across the beds, and in shady nooks, the massed
+colours of the flowers had an extraordinary magnificence of effect.  I
+stood entranced.  Jacobus grasped me delicately above the elbow,
+impelling me to a half-turn to the left.
+
+I had not noticed the girl before.  She occupied a low, deep, wickerwork
+arm-chair, and I saw her in exact profile like a figure in a tapestry,
+and as motionless.  Jacobus released my arm.
+
+“This is Alice,” he announced tranquilly; and his subdued manner of
+speaking made it sound so much like a confidential communication that I
+fancied myself nodding understandingly and whispering: “I see, I see.” . . .
+Of course, I did nothing of the kind.  Neither of us did anything; we
+stood side by side looking down at the girl.  For quite a time she did
+not stir, staring straight before her as if watching the vision of some
+pageant passing through the garden in the deep, rich glow of light and
+the splendour of flowers.
+
+Then, coming to the end of her reverie, she looked round and up.  If I
+had not at first noticed her, I am certain that she too had been unaware
+of my presence till she actually perceived me by her father’s side.  The
+quickened upward movement of the heavy eyelids, the widening of the
+languid glance, passing into a fixed stare, put that beyond doubt.
+
+Under her amazement there was a hint of fear, and then came a flash as of
+anger.  Jacobus, after uttering my name fairly loud, said: “Make yourself
+at home, Captain—I won’t be gone long,” and went away rapidly.  Before I
+had time to make a bow I was left alone with the girl—who, I remembered
+suddenly, had not been seen by any man or woman of that town since she
+had found it necessary to put up her hair.  It looked as though it had
+not been touched again since that distant time of first putting up; it
+was a mass of black, lustrous locks, twisted anyhow high on her head,
+with long, untidy wisps hanging down on each side of the clear sallow
+face; a mass so thick and strong and abundant that, nothing but to look
+at, it gave you a sensation of heavy pressure on the top of your head and
+an impression of magnificently cynical untidiness.  She leaned forward,
+hugging herself with crossed legs; a dingy, amber-coloured, flounced
+wrapper of some thin stuff revealed the young supple body drawn together
+tensely in the deep low seat as if crouching for a spring.  I detected a
+slight, quivering start or two, which looked uncommonly like bounding
+away.  They were followed by the most absolute immobility.
+
+The absurd impulse to run out after Jacobus (for I had been startled,
+too) once repressed, I took a chair, placed it not very far from her, sat
+down deliberately, and began to talk about the garden, caring not what I
+said, but using a gentle caressing intonation as one talks to soothe a
+startled wild animal.  I could not even be certain that she understood
+me.  She never raised her face nor attempted to look my way.  I kept on
+talking only to prevent her from taking flight.  She had another of those
+quivering, repressed starts which made me catch my breath with
+apprehension.
+
+Ultimately I formed a notion that what prevented her perhaps from going
+off in one great, nervous leap, was the scantiness of her attire.  The
+wicker armchair was the most substantial thing about her person.  What
+she had on under that dingy, loose, amber wrapper must have been of the
+most flimsy and airy character.  One could not help being aware of it.
+It was obvious.  I felt it actually embarrassing at first; but that sort
+of embarrassment is got over easily by a mind not enslaved by narrow
+prejudices.  I did not avert my gaze from Alice.  I went on talking with
+ingratiating softness, the recollection that, most likely, she had never
+before been spoken to by a strange man adding to my assurance.  I don’t
+know why an emotional tenseness should have crept into the situation.
+But it did.  And just as I was becoming aware of it a slight scream cut
+short my flow of urbane speech.
+
+The scream did not proceed from the girl.  It was emitted behind me, and
+caused me to turn my head sharply.  I understood at once that the
+apparition in the doorway was the elderly relation of Jacobus, the
+companion, the gouvernante.  While she remained thunderstruck, I got up
+and made her a low bow.
+
+The ladies of Jacobus’s household evidently spent their days in light
+attire.  This stumpy old woman with a face like a large wrinkled lemon,
+beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was dressed in a garment of
+some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff.  It fell from her thick neck down
+to her toes with the simplicity of an unadorned nightgown.  It made her
+appear truly cylindrical.  She exclaimed: “How did you get here?”
+
+Before I could say a word she vanished and presently I heard a confusion
+of shrill protestations in a distant part of the house.  Obviously no one
+could tell her how I got there.  In a moment, with great outcries from
+two negro women following her, she waddled back to the doorway,
+infuriated.
+
+“What do you want here?”
+
+I turned to the girl.  She was sitting straight up now, her hands posed
+on the arms of the chair.  I appealed to her.
+
+“Surely, Miss Alice, you will not let them drive me out into the street?”
+
+Her magnificent black eyes, narrowed, long in shape, swept over me with
+an indefinable expression, then in a harsh, contemptuous voice she let
+fall in French a sort of explanation:
+
+“_C’est papa_.”
+
+I made another low bow to the old woman.
+
+She turned her back on me in order to drive away her black henchwomen,
+then surveying my person in a peculiar manner with one small eye nearly
+closed and her face all drawn up on that side as if with a twinge of
+toothache, she stepped out on the verandah, sat down in a rocking-chair
+some distance away, and took up her knitting from a little table.  Before
+she started at it she plunged one of the needles into the mop of her grey
+hair and stirred it vigorously.
+
+Her elementary nightgown-sort of frock clung to her ancient, stumpy, and
+floating form.  She wore white cotton stockings and flat brown velvet
+slippers.  Her feet and ankles were obtrusively visible on the foot-rest.
+She began to rock herself slightly, while she knitted.  I had resumed my
+seat and kept quiet, for I mistrusted that old woman.  What if she
+ordered me to depart?  She seemed capable of any outrage.  She had
+snorted once or twice; she was knitting violently.  Suddenly she piped at
+the young girl in French a question which I translate colloquially:
+
+“What’s your father up to, now?”
+
+The young creature shrugged her shoulders so comprehensively that her
+whole body swayed within the loose wrapper; and in that unexpectedly
+harsh voice which yet had a seductive quality to the senses, like certain
+kinds of natural rough wines one drinks with pleasure:
+
+“It’s some captain.  Leave me alone—will you!”
+
+The chair rocked quicker, the old, thin voice was like a whistle.
+
+“You and your father make a pair.  He would stick at nothing—that’s well
+known.  But I didn’t expect this.”
+
+I thought it high time to air some of my own French.  I remarked
+modestly, but firmly, that this was business.  I had some matters to talk
+over with Mr. Jacobus.
+
+At once she piped out a derisive “Poor innocent!”  Then, with a change of
+tone: “The shop’s for business.  Why don’t you go to the shop to talk
+with him?”
+
+The furious speed of her fingers and knitting-needles made one dizzy; and
+with squeaky indignation:
+
+“Sitting here staring at that girl—is that what you call business?”
+
+“No,” I said suavely.  “I call this pleasure—an unexpected pleasure.  And
+unless Miss Alice objects—”
+
+I half turned to her.  She flung at me an angry and contemptuous “Don’t
+care!” and leaning her elbow on her knees took her chin in her hand—a
+Jacobus chin undoubtedly.  And those heavy eyelids, this black irritated
+stare reminded me of Jacobus, too—the wealthy merchant, the respected
+one.  The design of her eyebrows also was the same, rigid and ill-omened.
+Yes!  I traced in her a resemblance to both of them.  It came to me as a
+sort of surprising remote inference that both these Jacobuses were rather
+handsome men after all.  I said:
+
+“Oh!  Then I shall stare at you till you smile.”
+
+She favoured me again with an even more viciously scornful “Don’t care!”
+
+The old woman broke in blunt and shrill:
+
+“Hear his impudence!  And you too!  Don’t care!  Go at least and put some
+more clothes on.  Sitting there like this before this sailor riff-raff.”
+
+The sun was about to leave the Pearl of the Ocean for other seas, for
+other lands.  The walled garden full of shadows blazed with colour as if
+the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during the day.  The
+amazing old woman became very explicit.  She suggested to the girl a
+corset and a petticoat with a cynical unreserve which humiliated me.  Was
+I of no more account than a wooden dummy?  The girl snapped out:
+“Shan’t!”
+
+It was not the naughty retort of a vulgar child; it had a note of
+desperation.  Clearly my intrusion had somehow upset the balance of their
+established relations.  The old woman knitted with furious accuracy, her
+eyes fastened down on her work.
+
+“Oh, you are the true child of your father!  And _that_ talks of entering
+a convent!  Letting herself be stared at by a fellow.”
+
+“Leave off.”
+
+“Shameless thing!”
+
+“Old sorceress,” the girl uttered distinctly, preserving her meditative
+pose, chin in hand, and a far-away stare over the garden.
+
+It was like the quarrel of the kettle and the pot.  The old woman flew
+out of the chair, banged down her work, and with a great play of thick
+limb perfectly visible in that weird, clinging garment of hers, strode at
+the girl—who never stirred.  I was experiencing a sort of trepidation
+when, as if awed by that unconscious attitude, the aged relative of
+Jacobus turned short upon me.
+
+She was, I perceived, armed with a knitting-needle; and as she raised her
+hand her intention seemed to be to throw it at me like a dart.  But she
+only used it to scratch her head with, examining me the while at close
+range, one eye nearly shut and her face distorted by a whimsical,
+one-sided grimace.
+
+“My dear man,” she asked abruptly, “do you expect any good to come of
+this?”
+
+“I do hope so indeed, Miss Jacobus.”  I tried to speak in the easy tone
+of an afternoon caller.  “You see, I am here after some bags.”
+
+“Bags!  Look at that now!  Didn’t I hear you holding forth to that
+graceless wretch?”
+
+“You would like to see me in my grave,” uttered the motionless girl
+hoarsely.
+
+“Grave!  What about me?  Buried alive before I am dead for the sake of a
+thing blessed with such a pretty father!” she cried; and turning to me:
+“You’re one of these men he does business with.  Well—why don’t you leave
+us in peace, my good fellow?”
+
+It was said in a tone—this “leave us in peace!”  There was a sort of
+ruffianly familiarity, a superiority, a scorn in it.  I was to hear it
+more than once, for you would show an imperfect knowledge of human nature
+if you thought that this was my last visit to that house—where no
+respectable person had put foot for ever so many years.  No, you would be
+very much mistaken if you imagined that this reception had scared me
+away.  First of all I was not going to run before a grotesque and
+ruffianly old woman.
+
+And then you mustn’t forget these necessary bags.  That first evening
+Jacobus made me stay to dinner; after, however, telling me loyally that
+he didn’t know whether he could do anything at all for me.  He had been
+thinking it over.  It was too difficult, he feared. . . . But he did not
+give it up in so many words.
+
+We were only three at table; the girl by means of repeated “Won’t!”
+“Shan’t!” and “Don’t care!” having conveyed and affirmed her intention
+not to come to the table, not to have any dinner, not to move from the
+verandah.  The old relative hopped about in her flat slippers and piped
+indignantly, Jacobus towered over her and murmured placidly in his
+throat; I joined jocularly from a distance, throwing in a few words, for
+which under the cover of the night I received secretly a most vicious
+poke in the ribs from the old woman’s elbow or perhaps her fist.  I
+restrained a cry.  And all the time the girl didn’t even condescend to
+raise her head to look at any of us.  All this may sound childish—and yet
+that stony, petulant sullenness had an obscurely tragic flavour.
+
+And so we sat down to the food around the light of a good many candles
+while she remained crouching out there, staring in the dark as if feeding
+her bad temper on the heavily scented air of the admirable garden.
+
+Before leaving I said to Jacobus that I would come next day to hear if
+the bag affair had made any progress.  He shook his head slightly at
+that.
+
+“I’ll haunt your house daily till you pull it off.  You’ll be always
+finding me here.”
+
+His faint, melancholy smile did not part his thick lips.
+
+“That will be all right, Captain.”
+
+Then seeing me to the door, very tranquil, he murmured earnestly the
+recommendation: “Make yourself at home,” and also the hospitable hint
+about there being always “a plate of soup.”  It was only on my way to the
+quay, down the ill-lighted streets, that I remembered I had been engaged
+to dine that very evening with the S— family.  Though vexed with my
+forgetfulness (it would be rather awkward to explain) I couldn’t help
+thinking that it had procured me a more amusing evening.  And
+besides—business.  The sacred business—.
+
+In a barefooted negro who overtook me at a run and bolted down the
+landing-steps I recognised Jacobus’s boatman, who must have been feeding
+in the kitchen.  His usual “Good-night, sah!” as I went up my ship’s
+ladder had a more cordial sound than on previous occasions.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+I KEPT my word to Jacobus.  I haunted his home.  He was perpetually
+finding me there of an afternoon when he popped in for a moment from the
+“store.”  The sound of my voice talking to his Alice greeted him on his
+doorstep; and when he returned for good in the evening, ten to one he
+would hear it still going on in the verandah.  I just nodded to him; he
+would sit down heavily and gently, and watch with a sort of approving
+anxiety my efforts to make his daughter smile.
+
+I called her often “Alice,” right before him; sometimes I would address
+her as Miss “Don’t Care,” and I exhausted myself in nonsensical chatter
+without succeeding once in taking her out of her peevish and tragic self.
+There were moments when I felt I must break out and start swearing at her
+till all was blue.  And I fancied that had I done so Jacobus would not
+have moved a muscle.  A sort of shady, intimate understanding seemed to
+have been established between us.
+
+I must say the girl treated her father exactly in the same way she
+treated me.
+
+And how could it have been otherwise?  She treated me as she treated her
+father.  She had never seen a visitor.  She did not know how men behaved.
+I belonged to the low lot with whom her father did business at the port.
+I was of no account.  So was her father.  The only decent people in the
+world were the people of the island, who would have nothing to do with
+him because of something wicked he had done.  This was apparently the
+explanation Miss Jacobus had given her of the household’s isolated
+position.  For she had to be told something!  And I feel convinced that
+this version had been assented to by Jacobus.  I must say the old woman
+was putting it forward with considerable gusto.  It was on her lips the
+universal explanation, the universal allusion, the universal taunt.
+
+One day Jacobus came in early and, beckoning me into the dining-room,
+wiped his brow with a weary gesture and told me that he had managed to
+unearth a supply of quarter-bags.
+
+“It’s fourteen hundred your ship wanted, did you say, Captain?”
+
+“Yes, yes!” I replied eagerly; but he remained calm.  He looked more
+tired than I had ever seen him before.
+
+“Well, Captain, you may go and tell your people that they can get that
+lot from my brother.”
+
+As I remained open-mouthed at this, he added his usual placid formula of
+assurance:
+
+“You’ll find it correct, Captain.”
+
+“You spoke to your brother about it?”  I was distinctly awed.  “And for
+me?  Because he must have known that my ship’s the only one hung up for
+bags.  How on earth—”
+
+He wiped his brow again.  I noticed that he was dressed with unusual
+care, in clothes in which I had never seen him before.  He avoided my
+eye.
+
+“You’ve heard people talk, of course. . . . That’s true enough.  He . . .
+I . . . We certainly. . . for several years . . .”  His voice declined to
+a mere sleepy murmur.  “You see I had something to tell him of, something
+which—”
+
+His murmur stopped.  He was not going to tell me what this something was.
+And I didn’t care.  Anxious to carry the news to my charterers, I ran
+back on the verandah to get my hat.
+
+At the bustle I made the girl turned her eyes slowly in my direction, and
+even the old woman was checked in her knitting.  I stopped a moment to
+exclaim excitedly:
+
+“Your father’s a brick, Miss Don’t Care.  That’s what he is.”
+
+She beheld my elation in scornful surprise.  Jacobus with unwonted
+familiarity seized my arm as I flew through the dining-room, and breathed
+heavily at me a proposal about “A plate of soup” that evening.  I
+answered distractedly: “Eh?  What?  Oh, thanks!  Certainly.  With
+pleasure,” and tore myself away.  Dine with him?  Of course.  The merest
+gratitude—
+
+But some three hours afterwards, in the dusky, silent street, paved with
+cobble-stones, I became aware that it was not mere gratitude which was
+guiding my steps towards the house with the old garden, where for years
+no guest other than myself had ever dined.  Mere gratitude does not gnaw
+at one’s interior economy in that particular way.  Hunger might; but I
+was not feeling particularly hungry for Jacobus’s food.
+
+On that occasion, too, the girl refused to come to the table.
+
+My exasperation grew.  The old woman cast malicious glances at me.  I
+said suddenly to Jacobus: “Here!  Put some chicken and salad on that
+plate.”  He obeyed without raising his eyes.  I carried it with a knife
+and fork and a serviette out on the verandah.  The garden was one mass of
+gloom, like a cemetery of flowers buried in the darkness, and she, in the
+chair, seemed to muse mournfully over the extinction of light and colour.
+Only whiffs of heavy scent passed like wandering, fragrant souls of that
+departed multitude of blossoms.  I talked volubly, jocularly,
+persuasively, tenderly; I talked in a subdued tone.  To a listener it
+would have sounded like the murmur of a pleading lover.  Whenever I
+paused expectantly there was only a deep silence.  It was like offering
+food to a seated statue.
+
+“I haven’t been able to swallow a single morsel thinking of you out here
+starving yourself in the dark.  It’s positively cruel to be so obstinate.
+Think of my sufferings.”
+
+“Don’t care.”
+
+I felt as if I could have done her some violence—shaken her, beaten her
+maybe.  I said:
+
+“Your absurd behaviour will prevent me coming here any more.”
+
+“What’s that to me?”
+
+“You like it.”
+
+“It’s false,” she snarled.
+
+My hand fell on her shoulder; and if she had flinched I verily believe I
+would have shaken her.  But there was no movement and this immobility
+disarmed my anger.
+
+“You do.  Or you wouldn’t be found on the verandah every day.  Why are
+you here, then?  There are plenty of rooms in the house.  You have your
+own room to stay in—if you did not want to see me.  But you do.  You know
+you do.”
+
+I felt a slight shudder under my hand and released my grip as if
+frightened by that sign of animation in her body.  The scented air of the
+garden came to us in a warm wave like a voluptuous and perfumed sigh.
+
+“Go back to them,” she whispered, almost pitifully.
+
+As I re-entered the dining-room I saw Jacobus cast down his eyes.  I
+banged the plate on the table.  At this demonstration of ill-humour he
+murmured something in an apologetic tone, and I turned on him viciously
+as if he were accountable to me for these “abominable eccentricities,” I
+believe I called them.
+
+“But I dare say Miss Jacobus here is responsible for most of this
+offensive manner,” I added loftily.
+
+She piped out at once in her brazen, ruffianly manner:
+
+“Eh?  Why don’t you leave us in peace, my good fellow?”
+
+I was astonished that she should dare before Jacobus.  Yet what could he
+have done to repress her?  He needed her too much.  He raised a heavy,
+drowsy glance for an instant, then looked down again.  She insisted with
+shrill finality:
+
+“Haven’t you done your business, you two?  Well, then—”
+
+She had the true Jacobus impudence, that old woman.  Her mop of iron-grey
+hair was parted, on the side like a man’s, raffishly, and she made as if
+to plunge her fork into it, as she used to do with the knitting-needle,
+but refrained.  Her little black eyes sparkled venomously.  I turned to
+my host at the head of the table—menacingly as it were.
+
+“Well, and what do you say to that, Jacobus?  Am I to take it that we
+have done with each other?”
+
+I had to wait a little.  The answer when it came was rather unexpected,
+and in quite another spirit than the question.
+
+“I certainly think we might do some business yet with those potatoes of
+mine, Captain.  You will find that—”
+
+I cut him short.
+
+“I’ve told you before that I don’t trade.”
+
+His broad chest heaved without a sound in a noiseless sigh.
+
+“Think it over, Captain,” he murmured, tenacious and tranquil; and I
+burst into a jarring laugh, remembering how he had stuck to the
+circus-rider woman—the depth of passion under that placid surface, which
+even cuts with a riding-whip (so the legend had it) could never raffle
+into the semblance of a storm; something like the passion of a fish would
+be if one could imagine such a thing as a passionate fish.
+
+That evening I experienced more distinctly than ever the sense of moral
+discomfort which always attended me in that house lying under the ban of
+all “decent” people.  I refused to stay on and smoke after dinner; and
+when I put my hand into the thickly-cushioned palm of Jacobus, I said to
+myself that it would be for the last time under his roof.  I pressed his
+bulky paw heartily nevertheless.  Hadn’t he got me out of a serious
+difficulty?  To the few words of acknowledgment I was bound, and indeed
+quite willing, to utter, he answered by stretching his closed lips in his
+melancholy, glued-together smile.
+
+“That will be all right, I hope, Captain,” he breathed out weightily.
+
+“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed.  “That your brother might yet—”
+
+“Oh, no,” he reassured me.  “He . . . he’s a man of his word, Captain.”
+
+My self-communion as I walked away from his door, trying to believe that
+this was for the last time, was not satisfactory.  I was aware myself
+that I was not sincere in my reflections as to Jacobus’s motives, and, of
+course, the very next day I went back again.
+
+How weak, irrational, and absurd we are!  How easily carried away
+whenever our awakened imagination brings us the irritating hint of a
+desire!  I cared for the girl in a particular way, seduced by the moody
+expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare, scornful
+words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black depths of her
+fixed gaze turned slowly upon me as if in contemptuous provocation, only
+to be averted next moment with an exasperating indifference.
+
+Of course the news of my assiduity had spread all over the little town.
+I noticed a change in the manner of my acquaintances and even something
+different in the nods of the other captains, when meeting them at the
+landing-steps or in the offices where business called me.  The
+old-maidish head clerk treated me with distant punctiliousness and, as it
+were, gathered his skirts round him for fear of contamination.  It seemed
+to me that the very niggers on the quays turned to look after me as I
+passed; and as to Jacobus’s boatman his “Good-night, sah!” when he put me
+on board was no longer merely cordial—it had a familiar, confidential
+sound as though we had been partners in some villainy.
+
+My friend S— the elder passed me on the other side of the street with a
+wave of the hand and an ironic smile.  The younger brother, the one they
+had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older
+friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to
+utter a word of warning.
+
+“You’re doing yourself no good by your choice of friends, my dear chap,”
+he said with infantile gravity.
+
+As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject of
+excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I wanted to
+know why I was blamed.
+
+“I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a reconciliation
+surely desirable from the point of view of the proprieties—don’t you
+know?”
+
+“Of course, if that girl were disposed of it would certainly facilitate—”
+he mused sagely, then, inconsequential creature, gave me a light tap on
+the lower part of my waistcoat.  “You old sinner,” he cried jovially,
+“much you care for proprieties.  But you had better look out for
+yourself, you know, with a personage like Jacobus who has no sort of
+reputation to lose.”
+
+He had recovered his gravity of a respectable citizen by that time and
+added regretfully:
+
+“All the women of our family are perfectly scandalised.”
+
+But by that time I had given up visiting the S— family and the D— family.
+The elder ladies pulled such faces when I showed myself, and the
+multitude of related young ladies received me with such a variety of
+looks: wondering, awed, mocking (except Miss Mary, who spoke to me and
+looked at me with hushed, pained compassion as though I had been ill),
+that I had no difficulty in giving them all up.  I would have given up
+the society of the whole town, for the sake of sitting near that girl,
+snarling and superb and barely clad in that flimsy, dingy, amber wrapper,
+open low at the throat.  She looked, with the wild wisps of hair hanging
+down her tense face, as though she had just jumped out of bed in the
+panic of a fire.
+
+She sat leaning on her elbow, looking at nothing.  Why did she stay
+listening to my absurd chatter?  And not only that; but why did she
+powder her face in preparation for my arrival?  It seemed to be her idea
+of making a toilette, and in her untidy negligence a sign of great effort
+towards personal adornment.
+
+But I might have been mistaken.  The powdering might have been her daily
+practice and her presence in the verandah a sign of an indifference so
+complete as to take no account of my existence.  Well, it was all one to
+me.
+
+I loved to watch her slow changes of pose, to look at her long
+immobilities composed in the graceful lines of her body, to observe the
+mysterious narrow stare of her splendid black eyes, somewhat long in
+shape, half closed, contemplating the void.  She was like a spellbound
+creature with the forehead of a goddess crowned by the dishevelled
+magnificent hair of a gipsy tramp.  Even her indifference was seductive.
+I felt myself growing attached to her by the bond of an irrealisable
+desire, for I kept my head—quite.  And I put up with the moral discomfort
+of Jacobus’s sleepy watchfulness, tranquil, and yet so expressive; as if
+there had been a tacit pact between us two.  I put up with the insolence
+of the old woman’s: “Aren’t you ever going to leave us in peace, my good
+fellow?” with her taunts; with her brazen and sinister scolding.  She was
+of the true Jacobus stock, and no mistake.
+
+Directly I got away from the girl I called myself many hard names.  What
+folly was this?  I would ask myself.  It was like being the slave of some
+depraved habit.  And I returned to her with my head clear, my heart
+certainly free, not even moved by pity for that castaway (she was as much
+of a castaway as any one ever wrecked on a desert island), but as if
+beguiled by some extraordinary promise.  Nothing more unworthy could be
+imagined.  The recollection of that tremulous whisper when I gripped her
+shoulder with one hand and held a plate of chicken with the other was
+enough to make me break all my good resolutions.
+
+Her insulting taciturnity was enough sometimes to make one gnash one’s
+teeth with rage.  When she opened her mouth it was only to be abominably
+rude in harsh tones to the associate of her reprobate father; and the
+full approval of her aged relative was conveyed to her by offensive
+chuckles.  If not that, then her remarks, always uttered in the tone of
+scathing contempt, were of the most appalling inanity.
+
+How could it have been otherwise?  That plump, ruffianly Jacobus old maid
+in the tight grey frock had never taught her any manners.  Manners I
+suppose are not necessary for born castaways.  No educational
+establishment could ever be induced to accept her as a pupil—on account
+of the proprieties, I imagine.  And Jacobus had not been able to send her
+away anywhere.  How could he have done it?  Who with?  Where to?  He
+himself was not enough of an adventurer to think of settling down
+anywhere else.  His passion had tossed him at the tail of a circus up and
+down strange coasts, but, the storm over, he had drifted back shamelessly
+where, social outcast as he was, he remained still a Jacobus—one of the
+oldest families on the island, older than the French even.  There must
+have been a Jacobus in at the death of the last Dodo. . . . The girl had
+learned nothing, she had never listened to a general conversation, she
+knew nothing, she had heard of nothing.  She could read certainly; but
+all the reading matter that ever came in her way were the newspapers
+provided for the captains’ room of the “store.”  Jacobus had the habit of
+taking these sheets home now and then in a very stained and ragged
+condition.
+
+As her mind could not grasp the meaning of any matters treated there
+except police-court reports and accounts of crimes, she had formed for
+herself a notion of the civilised world as a scene of murders,
+abductions, burglaries, stabbing affrays, and every sort of desperate
+violence.  England and France, Paris and London (the only two towns of
+which she seemed to have heard), appeared to her sinks of abomination,
+reeking with blood, in contrast to her little island where petty larceny
+was about the standard of current misdeeds, with, now and then, some more
+pronounced crime—and that only amongst the imported coolie labourers on
+sugar estates or the negroes of the town.  But in Europe these things
+were being done daily by a wicked population of white men amongst whom,
+as that ruffianly, aristocratic old Miss Jacobus pointed out, the
+wandering sailors, the associates of her precious papa, were the lowest
+of the low.
+
+It was impossible to give her a sense of proportion.  I suppose she
+figured England to herself as about the size of the Pearl of the Ocean;
+in which case it would certainly have been reeking with gore and a mere
+wreck of burgled houses from end to end.  One could not make her
+understand that these horrors on which she fed her imagination were lost
+in the mass of orderly life like a few drops of blood in the ocean.  She
+directed upon me for a moment the uncomprehending glance of her narrowed
+eyes and then would turn her scornful powdered face away without a word.
+She would not even take the trouble to shrug her shoulders.
+
+At that time the batches of papers brought by the last mail reported a
+series of crimes in the East End of London, there was a sensational case
+of abduction in France and a fine display of armed robbery in Australia.
+One afternoon crossing the dining-room I heard Miss Jacobus piping in the
+verandah with venomous animosity: “I don’t know what your precious papa
+is plotting with that fellow.  But he’s just the sort of man who’s
+capable of carrying you off far away somewhere and then cutting your
+throat some day for your money.”
+
+There was a good half of the length of the verandah between their chairs.
+I came out and sat down fiercely midway between them.
+
+“Yes, that’s what we do with girls in Europe,” I began in a grimly
+matter-of-fact tone.  I think Miss Jacobus was disconcerted by my sudden
+appearance.  I turned upon her with cold ferocity:
+
+“As to objectionable old women, they are first strangled quietly, then
+cut up into small pieces and thrown away, a bit here and a bit there.
+They vanish—”
+
+I cannot go so far as to say I had terrified her.  But she was troubled
+by my truculence, the more so because I had been always addressing her
+with a politeness she did not deserve.  Her plump, knitting hands fell
+slowly on her knees.  She said not a word while I fixed her with severe
+determination.  Then as I turned away from her at last, she laid down her
+work gently and, with noiseless movements, retreated from the verandah.
+In fact, she vanished.
+
+But I was not thinking of her.  I was looking at the girl.  It was what I
+was coming for daily; troubled, ashamed, eager; finding in my nearness to
+her a unique sensation which I indulged with dread, self-contempt, and
+deep pleasure, as if it were a secret vice bound to end in my undoing,
+like the habit of some drug or other which ruins and degrades its slave.
+
+I looked her over, from the top of her dishevelled head, down the lovely
+line of the shoulder, following the curve of the hip, the draped form of
+the long limb, right down to her fine ankle below a torn, soiled flounce;
+and as far as the point of the shabby, high-heeled, blue slipper,
+dangling from her well-shaped foot, which she moved slightly, with quick,
+nervous jerks, as if impatient of my presence.  And in the scent of the
+massed flowers I seemed to breathe her special and inexplicable charm,
+the heady perfume of the everlastingly irritated captive of the garden.
+
+I looked at her rounded chin, the Jacobus chin; at the full, red lips
+pouting in the powdered, sallow face; at the firm modelling of the cheek,
+the grains of white in the hairs of the straight sombre eyebrows; at the
+long eyes, a narrowed gleam of liquid white and intense motionless black,
+with their gaze so empty of thought, and so absorbed in their fixity that
+she seemed to be staring at her own lonely image, in some far-off mirror
+hidden from my sight amongst the trees.
+
+And suddenly, without looking at me, with the appearance of a person
+speaking to herself, she asked, in that voice slightly harsh yet mellow
+and always irritated:
+
+“Why do you keep on coming here?”
+
+“Why do I keep on coming here?” I repeated, taken by surprise.  I could
+not have told her.  I could not even tell myself with sincerity why I was
+coming there.  “What’s the good of you asking a question like that?”
+
+“Nothing is any good,” she observed scornfully to the empty air, her chin
+propped on her hand, that hand never extended to any man, that no one had
+ever grasped—for I had only grasped her shoulder once—that generous,
+fine, somewhat masculine hand.  I knew well the peculiarly efficient
+shape—broad at the base, tapering at the fingers—of that hand, for which
+there was nothing in the world to lay hold of.  I pretended to be
+playful.
+
+“No!  But do you really care to know?”
+
+She shrugged indolently her magnificent shoulders, from which the dingy
+thin wrapper was slipping a little.
+
+“Oh—never mind—never mind!”
+
+There was something smouldering under those airs of lassitude.  She
+exasperated me by the provocation of her nonchalance, by something
+elusive and defiant in her very form which I wanted to seize.  I said
+roughly:
+
+“Why?  Don’t you think I should tell you the truth?”
+
+Her eyes glided my way for a sidelong look, and she murmured, moving only
+her full, pouting lips:
+
+“I think you would not dare.”
+
+“Do you imagine I am afraid of you?  What on earth. . . . Well, it’s
+possible, after all, that I don’t know exactly why I am coming here.  Let
+us say, with Miss Jacobus, that it is for no good.  You seem to believe
+the outrageous things she says, if you do have a row with her now and
+then.”
+
+She snapped out viciously:
+
+“Who else am I to believe?
+
+“I don’t know,” I had to own, seeing her suddenly very helpless and
+condemned to moral solitude by the verdict of a respectable community.
+“You might believe me, if you chose.”
+
+She made a slight movement and asked me at once, with an effort as if
+making an experiment:
+
+“What is the business between you and papa?”
+
+“Don’t you know the nature of your father’s business?  Come!  He sells
+provisions to ships.”
+
+She became rigid again in her crouching pose.
+
+“Not that.  What brings you here—to this house?”
+
+“And suppose it’s you?  You would not call that business?  Would you?
+And now let us drop the subject.  It’s no use.  My ship will be ready for
+sea the day after to-morrow.”
+
+She murmured a distinctly scared “So soon,” and getting up quickly, went
+to the little table and poured herself a glass of water.  She walked with
+rapid steps and with an indolent swaying of her whole young figure above
+the hips; when she passed near me I felt with tenfold force the charm of
+the peculiar, promising sensation I had formed the habit to seek near
+her.  I thought with sudden dismay that this was the end of it; that
+after one more day I would be no longer able to come into this verandah,
+sit on this chair, and taste perversely the flavour of contempt in her
+indolent poses, drink in the provocation of her scornful looks, and
+listen to the curt, insolent remarks uttered in that harsh and seductive
+voice.  As if my innermost nature had been altered by the action of some
+moral poison, I felt an abject dread of going to sea.
+
+I had to exercise a sudden self-control, as one puts on a brake, to
+prevent myself jumping up to stride about, shout, gesticulate, make her a
+scene.  What for?  What about?  I had no idea.  It was just the relief of
+violence that I wanted; and I lolled back in my chair, trying to keep my
+lips formed in a smile; that half-indulgent, half-mocking smile which was
+my shield against the shafts of her contempt and the insulting sallies
+flung at me by the old woman.
+
+She drank the water at a draught, with the avidity of raging thirst, and
+let herself fall on the nearest chair, as if utterly overcome.  Her
+attitude, like certain tones of her voice, had in it something masculine:
+the knees apart in the ample wrapper, the clasped hands hanging between
+them, her body leaning forward, with drooping head.  I stared at the
+heavy black coil of twisted hair.  It was enormous, crowning the bowed
+head with a crushing and disdained glory.  The escaped wisps hung
+straight down.  And suddenly I perceived that the girl was trembling from
+head to foot, as though that glass of iced water had chilled her to the
+bone.
+
+“What’s the matter now?” I said, startled, but in no very sympathetic
+mood.
+
+She shook her bowed, overweighted head and cried in a stifled voice but
+with a rising inflection:
+
+“Go away!  Go away!  Go away!”
+
+I got up then and approached her, with a strange sort of anxiety.  I
+looked down at her round, strong neck, then stooped low enough to peep at
+her face.  And I began to tremble a little myself.
+
+“What on earth are you gone wild about, Miss Don’t Care?”
+
+She flung herself backwards violently, her head going over the back of
+the chair.  And now it was her smooth, full, palpitating throat that lay
+exposed to my bewildered stare.  Her eyes were nearly closed, with only a
+horrible white gleam under the lids as if she were dead.
+
+“What has come to you?” I asked in awe.  “What are you terrifying
+yourself with?”
+
+She pulled herself together, her eyes open frightfully wide now.  The
+tropical afternoon was lengthening the shadows on the hot, weary earth,
+the abode of obscure desires, of extravagant hopes, of unimaginable
+terrors.
+
+“Never mind!  Don’t care!”  Then, after a gasp, she spoke with such
+frightful rapidity that I could hardly make out the amazing words: “For
+if you were to shut me up in an empty place as smooth all round as the
+palm of my hand, I could always strangle myself with my hair.”
+
+For a moment, doubting my ears, I let this inconceivable declaration sink
+into me.  It is ever impossible to guess at the wild thoughts that pass
+through the heads of our fellow-creatures.  What monstrous imaginings of
+violence could have dwelt under the low forehead of that girl who had
+been taught to regard her father as “capable of anything” more in the
+light of a misfortune than that of a disgrace; as, evidently, something
+to be resented and feared rather than to be ashamed of?  She seemed,
+indeed, as unaware of shame as of anything else in the world; but in her
+ignorance, her resentment and fear took a childish and violent shape.
+
+Of course she spoke without knowing the value of words.  What could she
+know of death—she who knew nothing of life?  It was merely as the proof
+of her being beside herself with some odious apprehension, that this
+extraordinary speech had moved me, not to pity, but to a fascinated,
+horrified wonder.  I had no idea what notion she had of her danger.  Some
+sort of abduction.  It was quite possible with the talk of that atrocious
+old woman.  Perhaps she thought she could be carried off, bound hand and
+foot and even gagged.  At that surmise I felt as if the door of a furnace
+had been opened in front of me.
+
+“Upon my honour!” I cried.  “You shall end by going crazy if you listen
+to that abominable old aunt of yours—”
+
+I studied her haggard expression, her trembling lips.  Her cheeks even
+seemed sunk a little.  But how I, the associate of her disreputable
+father, the “lowest of the low” from the criminal Europe, could manage to
+reassure her I had no conception.  She was exasperating.
+
+“Heavens and earth!  What do you think I can do?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+Her chin certainly trembled.  And she was looking at me with extreme
+attention.  I made a step nearer to her chair.
+
+“I shall do nothing.  I promise you that.  Will that do?  Do you
+understand?  I shall do nothing whatever, of any kind; and the day after
+to-morrow I shall be gone.”
+
+What else could I have said?  She seemed to drink in my words with the
+thirsty avidity with which she had emptied the glass of water.  She
+whispered tremulously, in that touching tone I had heard once before on
+her lips, and which thrilled me again with the same emotion:
+
+“I would believe you.  But what about papa—”
+
+“He be hanged!”  My emotion betrayed itself by the brutality of my tone.
+“I’ve had enough of your papa.  Are you so stupid as to imagine that I am
+frightened of him?  He can’t make me do anything.”
+
+All that sounded feeble to me in the face of her ignorance.  But I must
+conclude that the “accent of sincerity” has, as some people say, a really
+irresistible power.  The effect was far beyond my hopes,—and even beyond
+my conception.  To watch the change in the girl was like watching a
+miracle—the gradual but swift relaxation of her tense glance, of her
+stiffened muscles, of every fibre of her body.  That black, fixed stare
+into which I had read a tragic meaning more than once, in which I had
+found a sombre seduction, was perfectly empty now, void of all
+consciousness whatever, and not even aware any longer of my presence; it
+had become a little sleepy, in the Jacobus fashion.
+
+But, man being a perverse animal, instead of rejoicing at my complete
+success, I beheld it with astounded and indignant eyes.  There was
+something cynical in that unconcealed alteration, the true Jacobus
+shamelessness.  I felt as though I had been cheated in some rather
+complicated deal into which I had entered against my better judgment.
+Yes, cheated without any regard for, at least, the forms of decency.
+
+With an easy, indolent, and in its indolence supple, feline movement, she
+rose from the chair, so provokingly ignoring me now, that for very rage I
+held my ground within less than a foot of her.  Leisurely and tranquil,
+behaving right before me with the ease of a person alone in a room, she
+extended her beautiful arms, with her hands clenched, her body swaying,
+her head thrown back a little, revelling contemptuously in a sense of
+relief, easing her limbs in freedom after all these days of crouching,
+motionless poses when she had been so furious and so afraid.
+
+All this with supreme indifference, incredible, offensive, exasperating,
+like ingratitude doubled with treachery.
+
+I ought to have been flattered, perhaps, but, on the contrary, my anger
+grew; her movement to pass by me as if I were a wooden post or a piece of
+furniture, that unconcerned movement brought it to a head.
+
+I won’t say I did not know what I was doing, but, certainly, cool
+reflection had nothing to do with the circumstance that next moment both
+my arms were round her waist.  It was an impulsive action, as one
+snatches at something falling or escaping; and it had no hypocritical
+gentleness about it either.  She had no time to make a sound, and the
+first kiss I planted on her closed lips was vicious enough to have been a
+bite.
+
+She did not resist, and of course I did not stop at one.  She let me go
+on, not as if she were inanimate—I felt her there, close against me,
+young, full of vigour, of life, a strong desirable creature, but as if
+she did not care in the least, in the absolute assurance of her safety,
+what I did or left undone.  Our faces brought close together in this
+storm of haphazard caresses, her big, black, wide-open eyes looked into
+mine without the girl appearing either angry or pleased or moved in any
+way.  In that steady gaze which seemed impersonally to watch my madness I
+could detect a slight surprise, perhaps—nothing more.  I showered kisses
+upon her face and there did not seem to be any reason why this should not
+go on for ever.
+
+That thought flashed through my head, and I was on the point of
+desisting, when, all at once, she began to struggle with a sudden
+violence which all but freed her instantly, which revived my exasperation
+with her, indeed a fierce desire never to let her go any more.  I
+tightened my embrace in time, gasping out: “No—you don’t!” as if she were
+my mortal enemy.  On her part not a word was said.  Putting her hands
+against my chest, she pushed with all her might without succeeding to
+break the circle of my arms.  Except that she seemed thoroughly awake
+now, her eyes gave me no clue whatever.  To meet her black stare was like
+looking into a deep well, and I was totally unprepared for her change of
+tactics.  Instead of trying to tear my hands apart, she flung herself
+upon my breast and with a downward, undulating, serpentine motion, a
+quick sliding dive, she got away from me smoothly.  It was all very
+swift; I saw her pick up the tail of her wrapper and run for the door at
+the end of the verandah not very gracefully.  She appeared to be limping
+a little—and then she vanished; the door swung behind her so noiselessly
+that I could not believe it was completely closed.  I had a distinct
+suspicion of her black eye being at the crack to watch what I would do.
+I could not make up my mind whether to shake my fist in that direction or
+blow a kiss.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+EITHER would have been perfectly consistent with my feelings.  I gazed at
+the door, hesitating, but in the end I did neither.  The monition of some
+sixth sense—the sense of guilt, maybe, that sense which always acts too
+late, alas!—warned me to look round; and at once I became aware that the
+conclusion of this tumultuous episode was likely to be a matter of lively
+anxiety.  Jacobus was standing in the doorway of the dining-room.  How
+long he had been there it was impossible to guess; and remembering my
+struggle with the girl I thought he must have been its mute witness from
+beginning to end.  But this supposition seemed almost incredible.
+Perhaps that impenetrable girl had heard him come in and had got away in
+time.
+
+He stepped on to the verandah in his usual manner, heavy-eyed, with glued
+lips.  I marvelled at the girl’s resemblance to this man.  Those long,
+Egyptian eyes, that low forehead of a stupid goddess, she had found in
+the sawdust of the circus; but all the rest of the face, the design and
+the modelling, the rounded chin, the very lips—all that was Jacobus,
+fined down, more finished, more expressive.
+
+His thick hand fell on and grasped with force the back of a light chair
+(there were several standing about) and I perceived the chance of a
+broken head at the end of all this—most likely.  My mortification was
+extreme.  The scandal would be horrible; that was unavoidable.  But how
+to act so as to satisfy myself I did not know.  I stood on my guard and
+at any rate faced him.  There was nothing else for it.  Of one thing I
+was certain, that, however brazen my attitude, it could never equal the
+characteristic Jacobus impudence.
+
+He gave me his melancholy, glued smile and sat down.  I own I was
+relieved.  The perspective of passing from kisses to blows had nothing
+particularly attractive in it.  Perhaps—perhaps he had seen nothing?  He
+behaved as usual, but he had never before found me alone on the verandah.
+If he had alluded to it, if he had asked: “Where’s Alice?” or something
+of the sort, I would have been able to judge from the tone.  He would
+give me no opportunity.  The striking peculiarity was that he had never
+looked up at me yet.  “He knows,” I said to myself confidently.  And my
+contempt for him relieved my disgust with myself.
+
+“You are early home,” I remarked.
+
+“Things are very quiet; nothing doing at the store to-day,” he explained
+with a cast-down air.
+
+“Oh, well, you know, I am off,” I said, feeling that this, perhaps, was
+the best thing to do.
+
+“Yes,” he breathed out.  “Day after to-morrow.”
+
+This was not what I had meant; but as he gazed persistently on the floor,
+I followed the direction of his glance.  In the absolute stillness of the
+house we stared at the high-heeled slipper the girl had lost in her
+flight.  We stared.  It lay overturned.
+
+After what seemed a very long time to me, Jacobus hitched his chair
+forward, stooped with extended arm and picked it up.  It looked a slender
+thing in his big, thick hands.  It was not really a slipper, but a low
+shoe of blue, glazed kid, rubbed and shabby.  It had straps to go over
+the instep, but the girl only thrust her feet in, after her slovenly
+manner.  Jacobus raised his eyes from the shoe to look at me.
+
+“Sit down, Captain,” he said at last, in his subdued tone.
+
+As if the sight of that shoe had renewed the spell, I gave up suddenly
+the idea of leaving the house there and then.  It had become impossible.
+I sat down, keeping my eyes on the fascinating object.  Jacobus turned
+his daughter’s shoe over and over in his cushioned paws as if studying
+the way the thing was made.  He contemplated the thin sole for a time;
+then glancing inside with an absorbed air:
+
+“I am glad I found you here, Captain.”
+
+I answered this by some sort of grunt, watching him covertly.  Then I
+added: “You won’t have much more of me now.”
+
+He was still deep in the interior of that shoe on which my eyes too were
+resting.
+
+“Have you thought any more of this deal in potatoes I spoke to you about
+the other day?”
+
+“No, I haven’t,” I answered curtly.  He checked my movement to rise by an
+austere, commanding gesture of the hand holding that fatal shoe.  I
+remained seated and glared at him.  “You know I don’t trade.”
+
+“You ought to, Captain.  You ought to.”
+
+I reflected.  If I left that house now I would never see the girl again.
+And I felt I must see her once more, if only for an instant.  It was a
+need, not to be reasoned with, not to be disregarded.  No, I did not want
+to go away.  I wanted to stay for one more experience of that strange
+provoking sensation and of indefinite desire, the habit of which had made
+me—me of all people!—dread the prospect of going to sea.
+
+“Mr. Jacobus,” I pronounced slowly.  “Do you really think that upon the
+whole and taking various’ matters into consideration—I mean everything,
+do you understand?—it would be a good thing for me to trade, let us say,
+with you?”
+
+I waited for a while.  He went on looking at the shoe which he held now
+crushed in the middle, the worn point of the toe and the high heel
+protruding on each side of his heavy fist.
+
+“That will be all right,” he said, facing me squarely at last.
+
+“Are you sure?”
+
+“You’ll find it quite correct, Captain.”  He had uttered his habitual
+phrases in his usual placid, breath-saving voice and stood my hard,
+inquisitive stare sleepily without as much as a wink.
+
+“Then let us trade,” I said, turning my shoulder to him.  “I see you are
+bent on it.”
+
+I did not want an open scandal, but I thought that outward decency may be
+bought too dearly at times.  I included Jacobus, myself, the whole
+population of the island, in the same contemptuous disgust as though we
+had been partners in an ignoble transaction.  And the remembered vision
+at sea, diaphanous and blue, of the Pearl of the Ocean at sixty miles
+off; the unsubstantial, clear marvel of it as if evoked by the art of a
+beautiful and pure magic, turned into a thing of horrors too.  Was this
+the fortune this vaporous and rare apparition had held for me in its hard
+heart, hidden within the shape as of fair dreams and mist?  Was this my
+luck?
+
+“I think”—Jacobus became suddenly audible after what seemed the silence
+of vile meditation—“that you might conveniently take some thirty tons.
+That would be about the lot, Captain.”
+
+“Would it?  The lot!  I dare say it would be convenient, but I haven’t
+got enough money for that.”
+
+I had never seen him so animated.
+
+“No!” he exclaimed with what I took for the accent of grim menace.
+“That’s a pity.”  He paused, then, unrelenting: “How much money have you
+got, Captain?” he inquired with awful directness.
+
+It was my turn to face him squarely.  I did so and mentioned the amount I
+could dispose of.  And I perceived that he was disappointed.  He thought
+it over, his calculating gaze lost in mine, for quite a long time before
+he came out in a thoughtful tone with the rapacious suggestion:
+
+“You could draw some more from your charterers.  That would be quite
+easy, Captain.”
+
+“No, I couldn’t,” I retorted brusquely.  “I’ve drawn my salary up to
+date, and besides, the ship’s accounts are closed.”
+
+I was growing furious.  I pursued: “And I’ll tell you what: if I could do
+it I wouldn’t.”  Then throwing off all restraint, I added: “You are a bit
+too much of a Jacobus, Mr. Jacobus.”
+
+The tone alone was insulting enough, but he remained tranquil, only a
+little puzzled, till something seemed to dawn upon him; but the unwonted
+light in his eyes died out instantly.  As a Jacobus on his native heath,
+what a mere skipper chose to say could not touch him, outcast as he was.
+As a ship-chandler he could stand anything.  All I caught of his mumble
+was a vague—“quite correct,” than which nothing could have been more
+egregiously false at bottom—to my view, at least.  But I remembered—I had
+never forgotten—that I must see the girl.  I did not mean to go.  I meant
+to stay in the house till I had seen her once more.
+
+“Look here!” I said finally.  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.  I’ll take as
+many of your confounded potatoes as my money will buy, on condition that
+you go off at once down to the wharf to see them loaded in the lighter
+and sent alongside the ship straight away.  Take the invoice and a signed
+receipt with you.  Here’s the key of my desk.  Give it to Burns.  He will
+pay you.”
+
+He got up from his chair before I had finished speaking, but he refused
+to take the key.  Burns would never do it.  He wouldn’t like to ask him
+even.
+
+“Well, then,” I said, eyeing him slightingly, “there’s nothing for it,
+Mr. Jacobus, but you must wait on board till I come off to settle with
+you.”
+
+“That will be all right, Captain.  I will go at once.”
+
+He seemed at a loss what to do with the girl’s shoe he was still holding
+in his fist.  Finally, looking dully at me, he put it down on the chair
+from which he had risen.
+
+“And you, Captain?  Won’t you come along, too, just to see—”
+
+“Don’t bother about me.  I’ll take care of myself.”
+
+He remained perplexed for a moment, as if trying to understand; and then
+his weighty: “Certainly, certainly, Captain,” seemed to be the outcome of
+some sudden thought.  His big chest heaved.  Was it a sigh?  As he went
+out to hurry off those potatoes he never looked back at me.
+
+I waited till the noise of his footsteps had died out of the dining-room,
+and I waited a little longer.  Then turning towards the distant door I
+raised my voice along the verandah:
+
+“Alice!”
+
+Nothing answered me, not even a stir behind the door.  Jacobus’s house
+might have been made empty for me to make myself at home in.  I did not
+call again.  I had become aware of a great discouragement.  I was
+mentally jaded, morally dejected.  I turned to the garden again, sitting
+down with my elbows spread on the low balustrade, and took my head in my
+hands.
+
+The evening closed upon me.  The shadows lengthened, deepened, mingled
+together into a pool of twilight in which the flower-beds glowed like
+coloured embers; whiffs of heavy scent came to me as if the dusk of this
+hemisphere were but the dimness of a temple and the garden an enormous
+censer swinging before the altar of the stars.  The colours of the
+blossoms deepened, losing their glow one by one.
+
+The girl, when I turned my head at a slight noise, appeared to me very
+tall and slender, advancing with a swaying limp, a floating and uneven
+motion which ended in the sinking of her shadowy form into the deep low
+chair.  And I don’t know why or whence I received the impression that she
+had come too late.  She ought to have appeared at my call.  She ought to
+have . . . It was as if a supreme opportunity had been missed.
+
+I rose and took a seat close to her, nearly opposite her arm-chair.  Her
+ever discontented voice addressed me at once, contemptuously:
+
+“You are still here.”
+
+I pitched mine low.
+
+“You have come out at last.”
+
+“I came to look for my shoe—before they bring in the lights.”
+
+It was her harsh, enticing whisper, subdued, not very steady, but its low
+tremulousness gave me no thrill now.  I could only make out the oval of
+her face, her uncovered throat, the long, white gleam of her eyes.  She
+was mysterious enough.  Her hands were resting on the arms of the chair.
+But where was the mysterious and provoking sensation which was like the
+perfume of her flower-like youth?  I said quietly:
+
+“I have got your shoe here.”  She made no sound and I continued: “You had
+better give me your foot and I will put it on for you.”
+
+She made no movement.  I bent low down and groped for her foot under the
+flounces of the wrapper.  She did not withdraw it and I put on the shoe,
+buttoning the instep-strap.  It was an inanimate foot.  I lowered it
+gently to the floor.
+
+“If you buttoned the strap you would not be losing your shoe, Miss Don’t
+Care,” I said, trying to be playful without conviction.  I felt more like
+wailing over the lost illusion of vague desire, over the sudden
+conviction that I would never find again near her the strange, half-evil,
+half-tender sensation which had given its acrid flavour to so many days,
+which had made her appear tragic and promising, pitiful and provoking.
+That was all over.
+
+“Your father picked it up,” I said, thinking she may just as well be told
+of the fact.
+
+“I am not afraid of papa—by himself,” she declared scornfully.
+
+“Oh!  It’s only in conjunction with his disreputable associates,
+strangers, the ‘riff-raff of Europe’ as your charming aunt or great-aunt
+says—men like me, for instance—that you—”
+
+“I am not afraid of you,” she snapped out.
+
+“That’s because you don’t know that I am now doing business with your
+father.  Yes, I am in fact doing exactly what he wants me to do.  I’ve
+broken my promise to you.  That’s the sort of man I am.  And now—aren’t
+you afraid?  If you believe what that dear, kind, truthful old lady says
+you ought to be.”
+
+It was with unexpected modulated softness that the affirmed:
+
+“No.  I am not afraid.”  She hesitated. . . . “Not now.”
+
+“Quite right.  You needn’t be.  I shall not see you again before I go to
+sea.”  I rose and stood near her chair.  “But I shall often think of you
+in this old garden, passing under the trees over there, walking between
+these gorgeous flower-beds.  You must love this garden—”
+
+“I love nothing.”
+
+I heard in her sullen tone the faint echo of that resentfully tragic note
+which I had found once so provoking.  But it left me unmoved except for a
+sudden and weary conviction of the emptiness of all things under Heaven.
+
+“Good-bye, Alice,” I said.
+
+She did not answer, she did not move.  To merely take her hand, shake it,
+and go away seemed impossible, almost improper.  I stooped without haste
+and pressed my lips to her smooth forehead.  This was the moment when I
+realised clearly with a sort of terror my complete detachment from that
+unfortunate creature.  And as I lingered in that cruel self-knowledge I
+felt the light touch of her arms falling languidly on my neck and
+received a hasty, awkward, haphazard kiss which missed my lips.  No!  She
+was not afraid; but I was no longer moved.  Her arms slipped off my neck
+slowly, she made no sound, the deep wicker arm-chair creaked slightly;
+only a sense of my dignity prevented me fleeing headlong from that
+catastrophic revelation.
+
+I traversed the dining-room slowly.  I thought: She’s listening to my
+footsteps; she can’t help it; she’ll hear me open and shut that door.
+And I closed it as gently behind me as if I had been a thief retreating
+with his ill-gotten booty.  During that stealthy act I experienced the
+last touch of emotion in that house, at the thought of the girl I had
+left sitting there in the obscurity, with her heavy hair and empty eyes
+as black as the night itself, staring into the walled garden, silent,
+warm, odorous with the perfume of imprisoned flowers, which, like
+herself, were lost to sight in a world buried in darkness.
+
+The narrow, ill-lighted, rustic streets I knew so well on my way to the
+harbour were extremely quiet.  I felt in my heart that the further one
+ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common,
+short, and empty; that it is in seeking the unknown in our sensations
+that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!
+Jacobus’s boatman was waiting at the steps with an unusual air of
+readiness.  He put me alongside the ship, but did not give me his
+confidential “Good-evening, sah,” and, instead of shoving off at once,
+remained holding by the ladder.
+
+I was a thousand miles from commercial affairs, when on the dark
+quarter-deck Mr. Burns positively rushed at me, stammering with
+excitement.  He had been pacing the deck distractedly for hours awaiting
+my arrival.  Just before sunset a lighter loaded with potatoes had come
+alongside with that fat ship-chandler himself sitting on the pile of
+sacks.  He was now stuck immovable in the cabin.  What was the meaning of
+it all?  Surely I did not—
+
+“Yes, Mr. Burns, I did,” I cut him short.  He was beginning to make
+gestures of despair when I stopped that, too, by giving him the key of my
+desk and desiring him, in a tone which admitted of no argument, to go
+below at once, pay Mr. Jacobus’s bill, and send him out of the ship.
+
+“I don’t want to see him,” I confessed frankly, climbing the poop-ladder.
+I felt extremely tired.  Dropping on the seat of the skylight, I gave
+myself up to idle gazing at the lights about the quay and at the black
+mass of the mountain on the south side of the harbour.  I never heard
+Jacobus leave the ship with every single sovereign of my ready cash in
+his pocket.  I never heard anything till, a long time afterwards, Mr.
+Burns, unable to contain himself any longer, intruded upon me with his
+ridiculously angry lamentations at my weakness and good nature.
+
+“Of course, there’s plenty of room in the after-hatch.  But they are sure
+to go rotten down there.  Well!  I never heard . . . seventeen tons!  I
+suppose I must hoist in that lot first thing to-morrow morning.”
+
+“I suppose you must.  Unless you drop them overboard.  But I’m afraid you
+can’t do that.  I wouldn’t mind myself, but it’s forbidden to throw
+rubbish into the harbour, you know.”
+
+“That is the truest word you have said for many a day, sir—rubbish.
+That’s just what I expect they are.  Nearly eighty good gold sovereigns
+gone; a perfectly clean sweep of your drawer, sir.  Bless me if I
+understand!”
+
+As it was impossible to throw the right light on this commercial
+transaction I left him to his lamentations and under the impression that
+I was a hopeless fool.  Next day I did not go ashore.  For one thing, I
+had no money to go ashore with—no, not enough to buy a cigarette.
+Jacobus had made a clean sweep.  But that was not the only reason.  The
+Pearl of the Ocean had in a few short hours grown odious to me.  And I
+did not want to meet any one.  My reputation had suffered.  I knew I was
+the object of unkind and sarcastic comments.
+
+The following morning at sunrise, just as our stern-fasts had been let go
+and the tug plucked us out from between the buoys, I saw Jacobus standing
+up in his boat.  The nigger was pulling hard; several baskets of
+provisions for ships were stowed between the thwarts.  The father of
+Alice was going his morning round.  His countenance was tranquil and
+friendly.  He raised his arm and shouted something with great heartiness.
+But his voice was of the sort that doesn’t carry any distance; all I
+could catch faintly, or rather guess at, were the words “next time” and
+“quite correct.”  And it was only of these last that I was certain.
+Raising my arm perfunctorily for all response, I turned away.  I rather
+resented the familiarity of the thing.  Hadn’t I settled accounts finally
+with him by means of that potato bargain?
+
+This being a harbour story it is not my purpose to speak of our passage.
+I was glad enough to be at sea, but not with the gladness of old days.
+Formerly I had no memories to take away with me.  I shared in the blessed
+forgetfulness of sailors, that forgetfulness natural and invincible,
+which resembles innocence in so far that it prevents self-examination.
+Now however I remembered the girl.  During the first few days I was for
+ever questioning myself as to the nature of facts and sensations
+connected with her person and with my conduct.
+
+And I must say also that Mr. Burns’ intolerable fussing with those
+potatoes was not calculated to make me forget the part which I had
+played.  He looked upon it as a purely commercial transaction of a
+particularly foolish kind, and his devotion—if it was devotion and not
+mere cussedness as I came to regard it before long—inspired him with a
+zeal to minimise my loss as much as possible.  Oh, yes!  He took care of
+those infamous potatoes with a vengeance, as the saying goes.
+
+Everlastingly, there was a tackle over the after-hatch and everlastingly
+the watch on deck were pulling up, spreading out, picking over,
+rebagging, and lowering down again, some part of that lot of potatoes.
+My bargain with all its remotest associations, mental and visual—the
+garden of flowers and scents, the girl with her provoking contempt and
+her tragic loneliness of a hopeless castaway—was everlastingly dangled
+before my eyes, for thousands of miles along the open sea.  And as if by
+a satanic refinement of irony it was accompanied by a most awful smell.
+Whiffs from decaying potatoes pursued me on the poop, they mingled with
+my thoughts, with my food, poisoned my very dreams.  They made an
+atmosphere of corruption for the ship.
+
+I remonstrated with Mr. Burns about this excessive care.  I would have
+been well content to batten the hatch down and let them perish under the
+deck.
+
+That perhaps would have been unsafe.  The horrid emanations might have
+flavoured the cargo of sugar.  They seemed strong enough to taint the
+very ironwork.  In addition Mr. Burns made it a personal matter.  He
+assured me he knew how to treat a cargo of potatoes at sea—had been in
+the trade as a boy, he said.  He meant to make my loss as small as
+possible.  What between his devotion—it must have been devotion—and his
+vanity, I positively dared not give him the order to throw my
+commercial-venture overboard.  I believe he would have refused point
+blank to obey my lawful command.  An unprecedented and comical situation
+would have been created with which I did not feel equal to deal.
+
+I welcomed the coming of bad weather as no sailor had ever done.  When at
+last I hove the ship to, to pick up the pilot outside Port Philip Heads,
+the after-hatch had not been opened for more than a week and I might have
+believed that no such thing as a potato had ever been on board.
+
+It was an abominable day, raw, blustering, with great squalls of wind and
+rain; the pilot, a cheery person, looked after the ship and chatted to
+me, streaming from head to foot; and the heavier the lash of the downpour
+the more pleased with himself and everything around him he seemed to be.
+He rubbed his wet hands with a satisfaction, which to me, who had stood
+that kind of thing for several days and nights, seemed inconceivable in
+any non-aquatic creature.
+
+“You seem to enjoy getting wet, Pilot,” I remarked.
+
+He had a bit of land round his house in the suburbs and it was of his
+garden he was thinking.  At the sound of the word garden, unheard,
+unspoken for so many days, I had a vision of gorgeous colour, of sweet
+scents, of a girlish figure crouching in a chair.  Yes.  That was a
+distinct emotion breaking into the peace I had found in the sleepless
+anxieties of my responsibility during a week of dangerous bad weather.
+The Colony, the pilot explained, had suffered from unparalleled drought.
+This was the first decent drop of water they had had for seven months.
+The root crops were lost.  And, trying to be casual, but with visible
+interest, he asked me if I had perchance any potatoes to spare.
+
+Potatoes!  I had managed to forget them.  In a moment I felt plunged into
+corruption up to my neck.  Mr. Burns was making eyes at me behind the
+pilot’s back.
+
+Finally, he obtained a ton, and paid ten pounds for it.  This was twice
+the price of my bargain with Jacobus.  The spirit of covetousness woke up
+in me.  That night, in harbour, before I slept, the Custom House galley
+came alongside.  While his underlings were putting seals on the
+storerooms, the officer in charge took me aside confidentially.  “I say,
+Captain, you don’t happen to have any potatoes to sell.”
+
+Clearly there was a potato famine in the land.  I let him have a ton for
+twelve pounds and he went away joyfully.  That night I dreamt of a pile
+of gold in the form of a grave in which a girl was buried, and woke up
+callous with greed.  On calling at my ship-broker’s office, that man,
+after the usual business had been transacted, pushed his spectacles up on
+his forehead.
+
+“I was thinking, Captain, that coming from the Pearl of the Ocean you may
+have some potatoes to sell.”
+
+I said negligently: “Oh, yes, I could spare you a ton.  Fifteen pounds.”
+
+He exclaimed: “I say!”  But after studying my face for a while accepted
+my terms with a faint grimace.  It seems that these people could not
+exist without potatoes.  I could.  I didn’t want to see a potato as long
+as I lived; but the demon of lucre had taken possession of me.  How the
+news got about I don’t know, but, returning on board rather late, I found
+a small group of men of the coster type hanging about the waist, while
+Mr. Burns walked to and fro the quarterdeck loftily, keeping a triumphant
+eye on them.  They had come to buy potatoes.
+
+“These chaps have been waiting here in the sun for hours,” Burns
+whispered to me excitedly.  “They have drank the water-cask dry.  Don’t
+you throw away your chances, sir.  You are too good-natured.”
+
+I selected a man with thick legs and a man with a cast in his eye to
+negotiate with; simply because they were easily distinguishable from the
+rest.  “You have the money on you?” I inquired, before taking them down
+into the cabin.
+
+“Yes, sir,” they answered in one voice, slapping their pockets.  I liked
+their air of quiet determination.  Long before the end of the day all the
+potatoes were sold at about three times the price I had paid for them.
+Mr. Burns, feverish and exulting, congratulated himself on his skilful
+care of my commercial venture, but hinted plainly that I ought to have
+made more of it.
+
+That night I did not sleep very well.  I thought of Jacobus by fits and
+starts, between snatches of dreams concerned with castaways starving on a
+desert island covered with flowers.  It was extremely unpleasant.  In the
+morning, tired and unrefreshed, I sat down and wrote a long letter to my
+owners, giving them a carefully-thought-out scheme for the ship’s
+employment in the East and about the China Seas for the next two years.
+I spent the day at that task and felt somewhat more at peace when it was
+done.
+
+Their reply came in due course.  They were greatly struck with my
+project; but considering that, notwithstanding the unfortunate difficulty
+with the bags (which they trusted I would know how to guard against in
+the future), the voyage showed a very fair profit, they thought it would
+be better to keep the ship in the sugar trade—at least for the present.
+
+I turned over the page and read on:
+
+“We have had a letter from our good friend Mr. Jacobus.  We are pleased
+to see how well you have hit it off with him; for, not to speak of his
+assistance in the unfortunate matter of the bags, he writes us that
+should you, by using all possible dispatch, manage to bring the ship back
+early in the season he would be able to give us a good rate of freight.
+We have no doubt that your best endeavours . . . etc. . . etc.”
+
+I dropped the letter and sat motionless for a long time.  Then I wrote my
+answer (it was a short one) and went ashore myself to post it.  But I
+passed one letter-box, then another, and in the end found myself going up
+Collins Street with the letter still in my pocket—against my heart.
+Collins Street at four o’clock in the afternoon is not exactly a desert
+solitude; but I had never felt more isolated from the rest of mankind as
+when I walked that day its crowded pavement, battling desperately with my
+thoughts and feeling already vanquished.
+
+There came a moment when the awful tenacity of Jacobus, the man of one
+passion and of one idea, appeared to me almost heroic.  He had not given
+me up.  He had gone again to his odious brother.  And then he appeared to
+me odious himself.  Was it for his own sake or for the sake of the poor
+girl?  And on that last supposition the memory of the kiss which missed
+my lips appalled me; for whatever he had seen, or guessed at, or risked,
+he knew nothing of that.  Unless the girl had told him.  How could I go
+back to fan that fatal spark with my cold breath?  No, no, that
+unexpected kiss had to be paid for at its full price.
+
+At the first letter-box I came to I stopped and reaching into my
+breast-pocket I took out the letter—it was as if I were plucking out my
+very heart—and dropped it through the slit.  Then I went straight on
+board.
+
+I wondered what dreams I would have that night; but as it turned out I
+did not sleep at all.  At breakfast I informed Mr. Burns that I had
+resigned my command.
+
+He dropped his knife and fork and looked at me with indignation.
+
+“You have, sir!  I thought you loved the ship.”
+
+“So I do, Burns,” I said.  “But the fact is that the Indian Ocean and
+everything that is in it has lost its charm for me.  I am going home as
+passenger by the Suez Canal.”
+
+“Everything that is in it,” he repeated angrily.  “I’ve never heard
+anybody talk like this.  And to tell you the truth, sir, all the time we
+have been together I’ve never quite made you out.  What’s one ocean more
+than another?  Charm, indeed!”
+
+He was really devoted to me, I believe.  But he cheered up when I told
+him that I had recommended him for my successor.
+
+“Anyhow,” he remarked, “let people say what they like, this Jacobus has
+served your turn.  I must admit that this potato business has paid
+extremely well.  Of course, if only you had—”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Burns,” I interrupted.  “Quite a smile of fortune.”
+
+But I could not tell him that it was driving me out of the ship I had
+learned to love.  And as I sat heavy-hearted at that parting, seeing all
+my plans destroyed, my modest future endangered—for this command was like
+a foot in the stirrup for a young man—he gave up completely for the first
+time his critical attitude.
+
+“A wonderful piece of luck!” he said.
+
+
+
+
+THE SECRET SHARER
+AN EPISODE FROM THE COAST
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+ON my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a
+mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in
+its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if
+abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other
+end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the
+eye could reach.  To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins
+of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundations set in a
+blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below
+my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly,
+without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple.
+And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had
+just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the
+flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and
+unmarked closeness, in one levelled floor half brown, half blue under the
+enormous dome of the sky.  Corresponding in their insignificance to the
+islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the
+only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river Meinam
+we had just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey;
+and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove
+surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye
+could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the
+horizon.  Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver
+marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just
+within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my
+sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had
+swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor.  My eye followed
+the light cloud of her smoke, now here, now there, above the plain,
+according to the devious curves of the stream, but always fainter and
+farther away, till I lost it at last behind the mitre-shaped hill of the
+great pagoda.  And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the
+head of the Gulf of Siam.
+
+She floated at the starting-point of a long journey, very still in an
+immense stillness, the shadows of her spars flung far to the eastward by
+the setting sun.  At that moment I was alone on her decks.  There was not
+a sound in her—and around us nothing moved, nothing lived, not a canoe on
+the water, not a bird in the air, not a cloud in the sky.  In this
+breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be
+measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed
+task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes,
+with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges.
+
+There must have been some glare in the air to interfere with one’s sight,
+because it was only just before the sun left us that my roaming eyes made
+out beyond the highest ridge of the principal islet of the group
+something which did away with the solemnity of perfect solitude.  The
+tide of darkness flowed on swiftly; and with tropical suddenness a swarm
+of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand
+resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted
+friend.  But, with all that multitude of celestial bodies staring down at
+one, the comfort of quiet communion with her was gone for good.  And
+there were also disturbing sounds by this time—voices, footsteps forward;
+the steward flitted along the maindeck, a busily ministering spirit; a
+hand-bell tinkled urgently under the poop-deck. . . .
+
+I found my two officers waiting for me near the supper table, in the
+lighted cuddy.  We sat down at once, and as I helped the chief mate, I
+said:
+
+“Are you aware that there is a ship anchored inside the islands?  I saw
+her mastheads above the ridge as the sun went down.”
+
+He raised sharply his simple face, overcharged by a terrible growth of
+whisker, and emitted his usual ejaculations: “Bless my soul, sir!  You
+don’t say so!”
+
+My second mate was a round-cheeked, silent young man, grave beyond his
+years, I thought; but as our eyes happened to meet I detected a slight
+quiver on his lips.  I looked down at once.  It was not my part to
+encourage sneering on board my ship.  It must be said, too, that I knew
+very little of my officers.  In consequence of certain events of no
+particular significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the
+command only a fortnight before.  Neither did I know much of the hands
+forward.  All these people had been together for eighteen months or so,
+and my position was that of the only stranger on board.  I mention this
+because it has some bearing on what is to follow.  But what I felt most
+was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I
+was somewhat of a stranger to myself.  The youngest man on board (barring
+the second mate), and untried as yet by a position of the fullest
+responsibility, I was willing to take the adequacy of the others for
+granted.  They had simply to be equal to their tasks; but I wondered how
+far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own
+personality every man sets up for himself secretly.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Meantime the chief mate, with an almost visible effect of collaboration
+on the part of his round eyes and frightful whiskers, was trying to
+evolve a theory of the anchored ship.  His dominant trait was to take all
+things into earnest consideration.  He was of a painstaking turn of mind.
+As he used to say, he “liked to account to himself” for practically
+everything that came in his way, down to a miserable scorpion he had
+found in his cabin a week before.  The why and the wherefore of that
+scorpion—how it got on board and came to select his room rather than the
+pantry (which was a dark place and more what a scorpion would be partial
+to), and how on earth it managed to drown itself in the inkwell of his
+writing-desk—had exercised him infinitely.  The ship within the islands
+was much more easily accounted for; and just as we were about to rise
+from table he made his pronouncement.  She was, he doubted not, a ship
+from home lately arrived.  Probably she drew too much water to cross the
+bar except at the top of spring tides.  Therefore she went into that
+natural harbour to wait for a few days in preference to remaining in an
+open roadstead.
+
+“That’s so,” confirmed the second mate, suddenly, in his slightly hoarse
+voice.  “She draws over twenty feet.  She’s the Liverpool ship _Sephora_
+with a cargo of coal.  Hundred and twenty-three days from Cardiff.”
+
+We looked at him in surprise.
+
+“The tugboat skipper told me when he came on board for your letters,
+sir,” explained the young man.  “He expects to take her up the river the
+day after to-morrow.”
+
+After thus overwhelming us with the extent of his information he slipped
+out of the cabin.  The mate observed regretfully that he “could not
+account for that young fellow’s whims.”  What prevented him telling us
+all about it at once, he wanted to know.
+
+I detained him as he was making a move.  For the last two days the crew
+had had plenty of hard work, and the night before they had very little
+sleep.  I felt painfully that I—a stranger—was doing something unusual
+when I directed him to let all hands turn in without setting an
+anchor-watch.  I proposed to keep on deck myself till one o’clock or
+thereabouts.  I would get the second mate to relieve me at that hour.
+
+“He will turn out the cook and the steward at four,” I concluded, “and
+then give you a call.  Of course at the slightest sign of any sort of
+wind we’ll have the hands up and make a start at once.”
+
+He concealed his astonishment.  “Very well, sir.”  Outside the cuddy he
+put his head in the second mate’s door to inform him of my unheard-of
+caprice to take a five hours’ anchor-watch on myself.  I heard the other
+raise his voice incredulously—“What?  The captain himself?”  Then a few
+more murmurs, a door closed, then another.  A few moments later I went on
+deck.
+
+My strangeness, which had made me sleepless, had prompted that
+unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary hours
+of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I knew nothing,
+manned by men of whom I knew very little more.  Fast alongside a wharf,
+littered like any ship in port with a tangle of unrelated things, invaded
+by unrelated shore people, I had hardly seen her yet properly.  Now, as
+she lay cleared for sea, the stretch of her maindeck seemed to me very
+fine under the stars.  Very fine, very roomy for her size, and very
+inviting.  I descended the poop and paced the waist, my mind picturing to
+myself the coming passage through the Malay Archipelago, down the Indian
+Ocean, and up the Atlantic.  All its phases were familiar enough to me,
+every characteristic, all the alternatives which were likely to face me
+on the high seas—everything! . . . except the novel responsibility of
+command.  But I took heart from the reasonable thought that the ship was
+like other ships, the men like other men, and that the sea was not likely
+to keep any special surprises expressly for my discomfiture.
+
+Arrived at that comforting conclusion, I bethought myself of a cigar and
+went below to get it.  All was still down there.  Everybody at the after
+end of the ship was sleeping profoundly.  I came out again on the
+quarter-deck, agreeably at ease in my sleeping-suit on that warm
+breathless night, barefooted, a glowing cigar in my teeth, and, going
+forward, I was met by the profound silence of the fore end of the ship.
+Only as I passed the door of the forecastle I heard a deep, quiet,
+trustful sigh of some sleeper inside.  And suddenly I rejoiced in the
+great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my
+choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems,
+invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute
+straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
+
+The riding-light in the fore-rigging burned with a clear, untroubled, as
+if symbolic, flame, confident and bright in the mysterious shades of the
+night.  Passing on my way aft along the other side of the ship, I
+observed that the rope side-ladder, put over, no doubt, for the master of
+the tug when he came to fetch away our letters, had not been hauled in as
+it should have been.  I became annoyed at this, for exactitude in small
+matters is the very soul of discipline.  Then I reflected that I had
+myself peremptorily dismissed my officers from duty, and by my own act
+had prevented the anchor-watch being formally set and things properly
+attended to.  I asked myself whether it was wise ever to interfere with
+the established routine of duties even from the kindest of motives.  My
+action might have made me appear eccentric.  Goodness only knew how that
+absurdly whiskered mate would “account” for my conduct, and what the
+whole ship thought of that informality of their new captain.  I was vexed
+with myself.
+
+Not from compunction certainly, but, as it were mechanically, I proceeded
+to get the ladder in myself.  Now a side-ladder of that sort is a light
+affair and comes in easily, yet my vigorous tug, which should have
+brought it flying on board, merely recoiled upon my body in a totally
+unexpected jerk.  What the devil! . . . I was so astounded by the
+immovableness of that ladder that I remained stock-still, trying to
+account for it to myself like that imbecile mate of mine.  In the end, of
+course, I put my head over the rail.
+
+The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy
+shimmer of the sea.  But I saw at once something elongated and pale
+floating very close to the ladder.  Before I could form a guess a faint
+flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the
+naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive,
+silent play of summer lightning in a night sky.  With a gasp I saw
+revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back
+immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow.  One hand,
+awash, clutched the bottom rung of the ladder.  He was complete but for
+the head.  A headless corpse!  The cigar dropped out of my gaping mouth
+with a tiny plop and a short hiss quite audible in the absolute stillness
+of all things under heaven.  At that I suppose he raised up his face, a
+dimly pale oval in the shadow of the ship’s side.  But even then I could
+only barely make out down there the shape of his black-haired head.
+However, it was enough for the horrid, frost-bound sensation which had
+gripped me about the chest to pass off.  The moment of vain exclamations
+was past, too.  I only climbed on the spare spar and leaned over the rail
+as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating
+alongside.
+
+As he hung by the ladder, like a resting swimmer, the sea-lightning
+played about his limbs at every stir; and he appeared in it ghastly,
+silvery, fish-like.  He remained as mute as a fish, too.  He made no
+motion to get out of the water, either.  It was inconceivable that he
+should not attempt to come on board, and strangely troubling to suspect
+that perhaps he did not want to.  And my first words were prompted by
+just that troubled incertitude.
+
+“What’s the matter?” I asked in my ordinary tone, speaking down to the
+face upturned exactly under mine.
+
+“Cramp,” it answered, no louder.  Then slightly anxious, “I say, no need
+to call any one.”
+
+“I was not going to,” I said.
+
+“Are you alone on deck?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+I had somehow the impression that he was on the point of letting go the
+ladder to swim away beyond my ken—mysterious as he came.  But, for the
+moment, this being appearing as if he had risen from the bottom of the
+sea (it was certainly the nearest land to the ship) wanted only to know
+the time.  I told him.  And he, down there, tentatively:
+
+“I suppose your captain’s turned in?”
+
+“I am sure he isn’t,” I said.
+
+He seemed to struggle with himself, for I heard something like the low,
+bitter murmur of doubt.  “What’s the good?”  His next words came out with
+a hesitating effort.
+
+“Look here, my man.  Could you call him out quietly?”
+
+I thought the time had come to declare myself.
+
+“_I_ am the captain.”
+
+I heard a “By Jove!” whispered at the level of the water.  The
+phosphorescence flashed in the swirl of the water all about his limbs,
+his other hand seized the ladder.
+
+“My name’s Leggatt.”
+
+The voice was calm and resolute.  A good voice.  The self-possession of
+that man had somehow induced a corresponding state in myself.  It was
+very quietly that I remarked:
+
+“You must be a good swimmer.”
+
+“Yes.  I’ve been in the water practically since nine o’clock.  The
+question for me now is whether I am to let go this ladder and go on
+swimming till I sink from exhaustion, or—to come on board here.”
+
+I felt this was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real
+alternative in the view of a strong soul.  I should have gathered from
+this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever
+confronted by such clear issues.  But at the time it was pure intuition
+on my part.  A mysterious communication was established already between
+us two—in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea.  I was young,
+too; young enough to make no comment.  The man in the water began
+suddenly to climb up the ladder, and I hastened away from the rail to
+fetch some clothes.
+
+Before entering the cabin I stood still, listening in the lobby at the
+foot of the stairs.  A faint snore came through the closed door of the
+chief mate’s room.  The second mate’s door was on the hook, but the
+darkness in there was absolutely soundless.  He, too, was young and could
+sleep like a stone.  Remained the steward, but he was not likely to wake
+up before he was called.  I got a sleeping-suit out of my room and,
+coming back on deck, saw the naked man from the sea sitting on the
+main-hatch, glimmering white in the darkness, his elbows on his knees and
+his head in his hands.  In a moment he had concealed his damp body in a
+sleeping-suit of the same grey-stripe pattern as the one I was wearing
+and followed me like my double on the poop.  Together we moved right aft,
+barefooted, silent.
+
+“What is it?” I asked in a deadened voice, taking the lighted lamp out of
+the binnacle, and raising it to his face.
+
+“An ugly business.”
+
+He had rather regular features; a good mouth; light eyes under somewhat
+heavy, dark eyebrows; a smooth, square forehead; no growth on his cheeks;
+a small, brown moustache, and a well-shaped, round chin.  His expression
+was concentrated, meditative, under the inspecting light of the lamp I
+held up to his face; such as a man thinking hard in solitude might wear.
+My sleeping-suit was just right for his size.  A well-knit young fellow
+of twenty-five at most.  He caught his lower lip with the edge of white,
+even teeth.
+
+“Yes,” I said, replacing the lamp in the binnacle.  The warm, heavy
+tropical night closed upon his head again.
+
+“There’s a ship over there,” he murmured.
+
+“Yes, I know.  The _Sephora_.  Did you know of us?”
+
+“Hadn’t the slightest idea.  I am the mate of her—”  He paused and
+corrected himself.  “I should say I _was_.”
+
+“Aha!  Something wrong?”
+
+“Yes.  Very wrong indeed.  I’ve killed a man.”
+
+“What do you mean?  Just now?”
+
+“No, on the passage.  Weeks ago.  Thirty-nine south.  When I say a man—”
+
+“Fit of temper,” I suggested, confidently.
+
+The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the
+ghostly grey of my sleeping-suit.  It was, in the night, as though I had
+been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense
+mirror.
+
+“A pretty thing to have to own up to for a Conway boy,” murmured my
+double, distinctly.
+
+“You’re a Conway boy?”
+
+“I am,” he said, as if startled.  Then, slowly . . . “Perhaps you too—”
+
+It was so; but being a couple of years older I had left before he joined.
+After a quick interchange of dates a silence fell; and I thought suddenly
+of my absurd mate with his terrific whiskers and the “Bless my soul—you
+don’t say so” type of intellect.  My double gave me an inkling of his
+thoughts by saying:
+
+“My father’s a parson in Norfolk.  Do you see me before a judge and jury
+on that charge?  For myself I can’t see the necessity.  There are fellows
+that an angel from heaven—And I am not that.  He was one of those
+creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of
+wickedness.  Miserable devils that have no business to live at all.  He
+wouldn’t do his duty and wouldn’t let anybody else do theirs.  But what’s
+the good of talking!  You know well enough the sort of ill-conditioned
+snarling cur—”
+
+He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our
+clothes.  And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a
+character where there are no means of legal repression.  And I knew well
+enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian.  I did not
+think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in
+brusque, disconnected sentences.  I needed no more.  I saw it all going
+on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping-suit.
+
+“It happened while we were setting a reefed foresail, at dusk.  Reefed
+foresail!  You understand the sort of weather.  The only sail we had left
+to keep the ship running; so you may guess what it had been like for
+days.  Anxious sort of job, that.  He gave me some of his cursed
+insolence at the sheet.  I tell you I was overdone with this terrific
+weather that seemed to have no end to it.  Terrific, I tell you—and a
+deep ship.  I believe the fellow himself was half crazed with funk.  It
+was no time for gentlemanly reproof, so I turned round and felled him
+like an ox.  He up and at me.  We closed just as an awful sea made for
+the ship.  All hands saw it coming and took to the rigging, but I had him
+by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat, the men above us
+yelling, “Look out! look out!”  Then a crash as if the sky had fallen on
+my head.  They say that for over ten minutes hardly anything was to be
+seen of the ship—just the three masts and a bit of the forecastle head
+and of the poop all awash driving along in a smother of foam.  It was a
+miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebits.  It’s
+clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat
+still when they picked us up.  He was black in the face.  It was too much
+for them.  It seems they rushed us aft together, gripped as we were,
+screaming “Murder!” like a lot of lunatics, and broke into the cuddy.
+And the ship running for her life, touch and go all the time, any minute
+her last in a sea fit to turn your hair grey only a-looking at it.  I
+understand that the skipper, too, started raving like the rest of them.
+The man had been deprived of sleep for more than a week, and to have this
+sprung on him at the height of a furious gale nearly drove him out of his
+mind.  I wonder they didn’t fling me overboard after getting the carcass
+of their precious ship-mate out of my fingers.  They had rather a job to
+separate us, I’ve been told.  A sufficiently fierce story to make an old
+judge and a respectable jury sit up a bit.  The first thing I heard when
+I came to myself was the maddening howling of that endless gale, and on
+that the voice of the old man.  He was hanging on to my bunk, staring
+into my face out of his sou’wester.
+
+“‘Mr. Leggatt, you have killed a man.  You can act no longer as chief
+mate of this ship.’”
+
+His care to subdue his voice made it sound monotonous.  He rested a hand
+on the end of the skylight to steady himself with, and all that time did
+not stir a limb, so far as I could see.  “Nice little tale for a quiet
+tea-party,” he concluded in the same tone.
+
+One of my hands, too, rested on the end of the skylight; neither did I
+stir a limb, so far as I knew.  We stood less than a foot from each
+other.  It occurred to me that if old “Bless my soul—you don’t say so”
+were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would
+think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird
+witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel
+with his own grey ghost.  I became very much concerned to prevent
+anything of the sort.  I heard the other’s soothing undertone.
+
+“My father’s a parson in Norfolk,” it said.  Evidently he had forgotten
+he had told me this important fact before.  Truly a nice little tale.
+
+“You had better slip down into my stateroom now,” I said, moving off
+stealthily.  My double followed my movements; our bare feet made no
+sound; I let him in, closed the door with care, and, after giving a call
+to the second mate, returned on deck for my relief.
+
+“Not much sign of any wind yet,” I remarked when he approached.
+
+“No, sir.  Not much,” he assented, sleepily, in his hoarse voice, with
+just enough deference, no more, and barely suppressing a yawn.
+
+“Well, that’s all you have to look out for.  You have got your orders.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+I paced a turn or two on the poop and saw him take up his position face
+forward with his elbow in the ratlines of the mizzen-rigging before I
+went below.  The mate’s faint snoring was still going on peacefully.  The
+cuddy lamp was burning over the table on which stood a vase with flowers,
+a polite attention from the ship’s provision merchant—the last flowers we
+should see for the next three months at the very least.  Two bunches of
+bananas hung from the beam symmetrically, one on each side of the
+rudder-casing.  Everything was as before in the ship—except that two of
+her captain’s sleeping-suits were simultaneously in use, one motionless
+in the cuddy, the other keeping very still in the captain’s stateroom.
+
+It must be explained here that my cabin had the form of the capital
+letter L the door being within the angle and opening into the short part
+of the letter.  A couch was to the left, the bed-place to the right; my
+writing-desk and the chronometers’ table faced the door.  But any one
+opening it, unless he stepped right inside, had no view of what I call
+the long (or vertical) part of the letter.  It contained some lockers
+surmounted by a bookcase; and a few clothes, a thick jacket or two, caps,
+oilskin coat, and such like, hung on hooks.  There was at the bottom of
+that part a door opening into my bath-room, which could be entered also
+directly from the saloon.  But that way was never used.
+
+The mysterious arrival had discovered the advantage of this particular
+shape.  Entering my room, lighted strongly by a big bulkhead lamp swung
+on gimbals above my writing-desk, I did not see him anywhere till he
+stepped out quietly from behind the coats hung in the recessed part.
+
+“I heard somebody moving about, and went in there at once,” he whispered.
+
+I, too, spoke under my breath.
+
+“Nobody is likely to come in here without knocking and getting
+permission.”
+
+He nodded.  His face was thin and the sunburn faded, as though he had
+been ill.  And no wonder.  He had been, I heard presently, kept under
+arrest in his cabin for nearly seven weeks.  But there was nothing sickly
+in his eyes or in his expression.  He was not a bit like me, really; yet,
+as we stood leaning over my bed-place, whispering side by side, with our
+dark heads together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to
+open it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a
+double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.
+
+“But all this doesn’t tell me how you came to hang on to our
+side-ladder,” I inquired, in the hardly audible murmurs we used, after he
+had told me something more of the proceedings on board the _Sephora_ once
+the bad weather was over.
+
+“When we sighted Java Head I had had time to think all those matters out
+several times over.  I had six weeks of doing nothing else, and with only
+an hour or so every evening for a tramp on the quarter-deck.”
+
+He whispered, his arms folded on the side of my bed-place, staring
+through the open port.  And I could imagine perfectly the manner of this
+thinking out—a stubborn if not a steadfast operation; something of which
+I should have been perfectly incapable.
+
+“I reckoned it would be dark before we closed with the land,” he
+continued, so low that I had to strain my hearing, near as we were to
+each other, shoulder touching shoulder almost.  “So I asked to speak to
+the old man.  He always seemed very sick when he came to see me—as if he
+could not look me in the face.  You know, that foresail saved the ship.
+She was too deep to have run long under bare poles.  And it was I that
+managed to set it for him.  Anyway, he came.  When I had him in my
+cabin—he stood by the door looking at me as if I had the halter round my
+neck already—I asked him right away to leave my cabin door unlocked at
+night while the ship was going through Sunda Straits.  There would be the
+Java coast within two or three miles, off Angier Point.  I wanted nothing
+more.  I’ve had a prize for swimming my second year in the Conway.”
+
+“I can believe it,” I breathed out.
+
+“God only knows why they locked me in every night.  To see some of their
+faces you’d have thought they were afraid I’d go about at night
+strangling people.  Am I a murdering brute?  Do I look it?  By Jove! if I
+had been he wouldn’t have trusted himself like that into my room.  You’ll
+say I might have chucked him aside and bolted out, there and then—it was
+dark already.  Well, no.  And for the same reason I wouldn’t think of
+trying to smash the door.  There would have been a rush to stop me at the
+noise, and I did not mean to get into a confounded scrimmage.  Somebody
+else might have got killed—for I would not have broken out only to get
+chucked back, and I did not want any more of that work.  He refused,
+looking more sick than ever.  He was afraid of the men, and also of that
+old second mate of his who had been sailing with him for years—a
+grey-headed old humbug; and his steward, too, had been with him devil
+knows how long—seventeen years or more—a dogmatic sort of loafer who
+hated me like poison, just because I was the chief mate.  No chief mate
+ever made more than one voyage in the _Sephora_, you know.  Those two old
+chaps ran the ship.  Devil only knows what the skipper wasn’t afraid of
+(all his nerve went to pieces altogether in that hellish spell of bad
+weather we had)—of what the law would do to him—of his wife, perhaps.
+Oh, yes! she’s on board.  Though I don’t think she would have meddled.
+She would have been only too glad to have me out of the ship in any way.
+The ‘brand of Cain’ business, don’t you see.  That’s all right.  I was
+ready enough to go off wandering on the face of the earth—and that was
+price enough to pay for an Abel of that sort.  Anyhow, he wouldn’t listen
+to me.  ‘This thing must take its course.  I represent the law here.’  He
+was shaking like a leaf.  ‘So you won’t?’  ‘No!’  ‘Then I hope you will
+be able to sleep on that,’ I said, and turned my back on him.  ‘I wonder
+that _you_ can,’ cries he, and locks the door.
+
+“Well, after that, I couldn’t.  Not very well.  That was three weeks ago.
+We have had a slow passage through the Java Sea; drifted about Carimata
+for ten days.  When we anchored here they thought, I suppose, it was all
+right.  The nearest land (and that’s five miles) is the ship’s
+destination; the consul would soon set about catching me; and there would
+have been no object in bolting to these islets there.  I don’t suppose
+there’s a drop of water on them.  I don’t know how it was, but to-night
+that steward, after bringing me my supper, went out to let me eat it, and
+left the door unlocked.  And I ate it—all there was, too.  After I had
+finished I strolled out on the quarterdeck.  I don’t know that I meant to
+do anything.  A breath of fresh air was all I wanted, I believe.  Then a
+sudden temptation came over me.  I kicked off my slippers and was in the
+water before I had made up my mind fairly.  Somebody heard the splash and
+they raised an awful hullabaloo.  ‘He’s gone!  Lower the boats!  He’s
+committed suicide!  No, he’s swimming.’  Certainly I was swimming.  It’s
+not so easy for a swimmer like me to commit suicide by drowning.  I
+landed on the nearest islet before the boat left the ship’s side.  I
+heard them pulling about in the dark, hailing, and so on, but after a bit
+they gave up.  Everything quieted down and the anchorage became as still
+as death.  I sat down on a stone and began to think.  I felt certain they
+would start searching for me at daylight.  There was no place to hide on
+those stony things—and if there had been, what would have been the good?
+But now I was clear of that ship, I was not going back.  So after a while
+I took off all my clothes, tied them up in a bundle with a stone inside,
+and dropped them in the deep water on the outer side of that islet.  That
+was suicide enough for me.  Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t
+mean to drown myself.  I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the
+same thing.  I struck out for another of these little islands, and it was
+from that one that I first saw your riding-light.  Something to swim for.
+I went on easily, and on the way I came upon a flat rock a foot or two
+above water.  In the daytime, I dare say, you might make it out with a
+glass from your poop.  I scrambled up on it and rested myself for a bit.
+Then I made another start.  That last spell must have been over a mile.”
+
+His whisper was getting fainter and fainter, and all the time he stared
+straight out through the port-hole, in which there was not even a star to
+be seen.  I had not interrupted him.  There was something that made
+comment impossible in his narrative, or perhaps in himself; a sort of
+feeling, a quality, which I can’t find a name for.  And when he ceased,
+all I found was a futile whisper: “So you swam for our light?”
+
+“Yes—straight for it.  It was something to swim for.  I couldn’t see any
+stars low down because the coast was in the way, and I couldn’t see the
+land, either.  The water was like glass.  One might have been swimming in
+a confounded thousand-feet deep cistern with no place for scrambling out
+anywhere; but what I didn’t like was the notion of swimming round and
+round like a crazed bullock before I gave out; and as I didn’t mean to go
+back . . . No.  Do you see me being hauled back, stark naked, off one of
+these little islands by the scruff of the neck and fighting like a wild
+beast?  Somebody would have got killed for certain, and I did not want
+any of that.  So I went on.  Then your ladder—”
+
+“Why didn’t you hail the ship?” I asked, a little louder.
+
+He touched my shoulder lightly.  Lazy footsteps came right over our heads
+and stopped.  The second mate had crossed from the other side of the poop
+and might have been hanging over the rail, for all we knew.
+
+“He couldn’t hear us talking—could he?”  My double breathed into my very
+ear, anxiously.
+
+His anxiety was an answer, a sufficient answer, to the question I had put
+to him.  An answer containing all the difficulty of that situation.  I
+closed the port-hole quietly, to make sure.  A louder word might have
+been overheard.
+
+“Who’s that?” he whispered then.
+
+“My second mate.  But I don’t know much more of the fellow than you do.”
+
+And I told him a little about myself.  I had been appointed to take
+charge while I least expected anything of the sort, not quite a fortnight
+ago.  I didn’t know either the ship or the people.  Hadn’t had the time
+in port to look about me or size anybody up.  And as to the crew, all
+they knew was that I was appointed to take the ship home.  For the rest,
+I was almost as much of a stranger on board as himself, I said.  And at
+the moment I felt it most acutely.  I felt that it would take very little
+to make me a suspect person in the eyes of the ship’s company.
+
+He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers in the ship,
+faced each other in identical attitudes.
+
+“Your ladder—” he murmured, after a silence.  “Who’d have thought of
+finding a ladder hanging over at night in a ship anchored out here!  I
+felt just then a very unpleasant faintness.  After the life I’ve been
+leading for nine weeks, anybody would have got out of condition.  I
+wasn’t capable of swimming round as far as your rudder-chains.  And, lo
+and behold! there was a ladder to get hold of.  After I gripped it I said
+to myself, ‘What’s the good?’  When I saw a man’s head looking over I
+thought I would swim away presently and leave him shouting—in whatever
+language it was.  I didn’t mind being looked at.  I—I liked it.  And then
+you speaking to me so quietly—as if you had expected me—made me hold on a
+little longer.  It had been a confounded lonely time—I don’t mean while
+swimming.  I was glad to talk a little to somebody that didn’t belong to
+the _Sephora_.  As to asking for the captain, that was a mere impulse.
+It could have been no use, with all the ship knowing about me and the
+other people pretty certain to be round here in the morning.  I don’t
+know—I wanted to be seen, to talk with somebody, before I went on.  I
+don’t know what I would have said. . . . ‘Fine night, isn’t it?’ or
+something of the sort.”
+
+“Do you think they will be round here presently?” I asked with some
+incredulity.
+
+“Quite likely,” he said, faintly.
+
+He looked extremely haggard all of a sudden.  His head rolled on his
+shoulders.
+
+“H’m.  We shall see then.  Meantime get into that bed,” I whispered.
+“Want help?  There.”
+
+It was a rather high bed-place with a set of drawers underneath.  This
+amazing swimmer really needed the lift I gave him by seizing his leg.  He
+tumbled in, rolled over on his back, and flung one arm across his eyes.
+And then, with his face nearly hidden, he must have looked exactly as I
+used to look in that bed.  I gazed upon my other self for a while before
+drawing across carefully the two green serge curtains which ran on a
+brass rod.  I thought for a moment of pinning them together for greater
+safety, but I sat down on the couch, and once there I felt unwilling to
+rise and hunt for a pin.  I would do it in a moment.  I was extremely
+tired, in a peculiarly intimate way, by the strain of stealthiness, by
+the effort of whispering and the general secrecy of this excitement.  It
+was three o’clock by now and I had been on my feet since nine, but I was
+not sleepy; I could not have gone to sleep.  I sat there, fagged out,
+looking at the curtains, trying to clear my mind of the confused
+sensation of being in two places at once, and greatly bothered by an
+exasperating knocking in my head.  It was a relief to discover suddenly
+that it was not in my head at all, but on the outside of the door.
+Before I could collect myself the words “Come in” were out of my mouth,
+and the steward entered with a tray, bringing in my morning coffee.  I
+had slept, after all, and I was so frightened that I shouted, “This way!
+I am here, steward,” as though he had been miles away.  He put down the
+tray on the table next the couch and only then said, very quietly, “I can
+see you are here, sir.”  I felt him give me a keen look, but I dared not
+meet his eyes just then.  He must have wondered why I had drawn the
+curtains of my bed before going to sleep on the couch.  He went out,
+hooking the door open as usual.
+
+I heard the crew washing decks above me.  I knew I would have been told
+at once if there had been any wind.  Calm, I thought, and I was doubly
+vexed.  Indeed, I felt dual more than ever.  The steward reappeared
+suddenly in the doorway.  I jumped up from the couch so quickly that he
+gave a start.
+
+“What do you want here?”
+
+“Close your port, sir—they are washing decks.”
+
+“It is closed,” I said, reddening.
+
+“Very well, sir.”  But he did not move from the doorway and returned my
+stare in an extraordinary, equivocal manner for a time.  Then his eyes
+wavered, all his expression changed, and in a voice unusually gentle,
+almost coaxingly:
+
+“May I come in to take the empty cup away, sir?”
+
+“Of course!”  I turned my back on him while he popped in and out.  Then I
+unhooked and closed the door and even pushed the bolt.  This sort of
+thing could not go on very long.  The cabin was as hot as an oven, too.
+I took a peep at my double, and discovered that he had not moved, his arm
+was still over his eyes; but his chest heaved; his hair was wet; his chin
+glistened with perspiration.  I reached over him and opened the port.
+
+“I must show myself on deck,” I reflected.
+
+Of course, theoretically, I could do what I liked, with no one to say nay
+to me within the whole circle of the horizon; but to lock my cabin door
+and take the key away I did not dare.  Directly I put my head out of the
+companion I saw the group of my two officers, the second mate barefooted,
+the chief mate in long india-rubber boots, near the break of the poop,
+and the steward half-way down the poop-ladder talking to them eagerly.
+He happened to catch sight of me and dived, the second ran down on the
+main-deck shouting some order or other, and the chief mate came to meet
+me, touching his cap.
+
+There was a sort of curiosity in his eye that I did not like.  I don’t
+know whether the steward had told them that I was “queer” only, or
+downright drunk, but I know the man meant to have a good look at me.  I
+watched him coming with a smile which, as he got into point-blank range,
+took effect and froze his very whiskers.  I did not give him time to open
+his lips.
+
+“Square the yards by lifts and braces before the hands go to breakfast.”
+
+It was the first particular order I had given on board that ship; and I
+stayed on deck to see it executed, too.  I had felt the need of asserting
+myself without loss of time.  That sneering young cub got taken down a
+peg or two on that occasion, and I also seized the opportunity of having
+a good look at the face of every foremast man as they filed past me to go
+to the after braces.  At breakfast time, eating nothing myself, I
+presided with such frigid dignity that the two mates were only too glad
+to escape from the cabin as soon as decency permitted; and all the time
+the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of
+insanity.  I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent
+on my actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, behind that
+door which faced me as I sat at the head of the table.  It was very much
+like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.
+
+I had to shake him for a solid minute, but when at last he opened his
+eyes it was in the full possession of his senses, with an inquiring look.
+
+“All’s well so far,” I whispered.  “Now you must vanish into the
+bath-room.”
+
+He did so, as noiseless as a ghost, and I then rang for the steward, and
+facing him boldly, directed him to tidy up my stateroom while I was
+having my bath—“and be quick about it.”  As my tone admitted of no
+excuses, he said, “Yes, sir,” and ran off to fetch his dust-pan and
+brushes.  I took a bath and did most of my dressing, splashing, and
+whistling softly for the steward’s edification, while the secret sharer
+of my life stood drawn up bolt upright in that little space, his face
+looking very sunken in daylight, his eyelids lowered under the stern,
+dark line of his eyebrows drawn together by a slight frown.
+
+When I left him there to go back to my room the steward was finishing
+dusting.  I sent for the mate and engaged him in some insignificant
+conversation.  It was, as it were, trifling with the terrific character
+of his whiskers; but my object was to give him an opportunity for a good
+look at my cabin.  And then I could at last shut, with a clear
+conscience, the door of my stateroom and get my double back into the
+recessed part.  There was nothing else for it.  He had to sit still on a
+small folding stool, half smothered by the heavy coats hanging there.  We
+listened to the steward going into the bath-room out of the saloon,
+filling the water-bottles there, scrubbing the bath, setting things to
+rights, whisk, bang, clatter—out again into the saloon—turn the
+key—click.  Such was my scheme for keeping my second self invisible.
+Nothing better could be contrived under the circumstances.  And there we
+sat; I at my writing-desk ready to appear busy with some papers, he
+behind me, out of sight of the door.  It would not have been prudent to
+talk in daytime; and I could not have stood the excitement of that queer
+sense of whispering to myself.  Now and then glancing over my shoulder, I
+saw him far back there, sitting rigidly on the low stool, his bare feet
+close together, his arms folded, his head hanging on his breast—and
+perfectly still.  Anybody would have taken him for me.
+
+I was fascinated by it myself.  Every moment I had to glance over my
+shoulder.  I was looking at him when a voice outside the door said:
+
+“Beg pardon, sir.”
+
+“Well!” . . . I kept my eyes on him, and so, when the voice outside the
+door announced, “There’s a ship’s boat coming our way, sir,” I saw him
+give a start—the first movement he had made for hours.  But he did not
+raise his bowed head.
+
+“All right.  Get the ladder over.”
+
+I hesitated.  Should I whisper something to him?  But what?  His
+immobility seemed to have been never disturbed.  What could I tell him he
+did not know already? . . . Finally I went on deck.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+THE skipper of the _Sephora_ had a thin red whisker all round his face,
+and the sort of complexion that goes with hair of that colour; also the
+particular, rather smeary shade of blue in the eyes.  He was not exactly
+a showy figure; his shoulders were high, his stature but middling—one leg
+slightly more bandy than the other.  He shook hands, looking vaguely
+around.  A spiritless tenacity was his main characteristic, I judged.  I
+behaved with a politeness which seemed to disconcert him.  Perhaps he was
+shy.  He mumbled to me as if he were ashamed of what he was saying; gave
+his name (it was something like Archbold—but at this distance of years I
+hardly am sure), his ship’s name, and a few other particulars of that
+sort, in the manner of a criminal making a reluctant and doleful
+confession.  He had had terrible weather on the passage
+out—terrible—terrible—wife aboard, too.
+
+By this time we were seated in the cabin and the steward brought in a
+tray with a bottle and glasses.  “Thanks!  No.”  Never took liquor.
+Would have some water, though.  He drank two tumblerfuls.  Terrible
+thirsty work.  Ever since daylight had been exploring the islands round
+his ship.
+
+“What was that for—fun?” I asked, with an appearance of polite interest.
+
+“No!”  He sighed.  “Painful duty.”
+
+As he persisted in his mumbling and I wanted my double to hear every
+word, I hit upon the notion of informing him that I regretted to say I
+was hard of hearing.
+
+“Such a young man, too!” he nodded, keeping his smeary blue,
+unintelligent eyes fastened upon me.  What was the cause of it—some
+disease? he inquired, without the least sympathy and as if he thought
+that, if so, I’d got no more than I deserved.
+
+“Yes; disease,” I admitted in a cheerful tone which seemed to shock him.
+But my point was gained, because he had to raise his voice to give me his
+tale.  It is not worth while to record that version.  It was just over
+two months since all this had happened, and he had thought so much about
+it that he seemed completely muddled as to its bearings, but still
+immensely impressed.
+
+“What would you think of such a thing happening on board your own ship?
+I’ve had the _Sephora_ for these fifteen years.  I am a well-known
+shipmaster.”
+
+He was densely distressed—and perhaps I should have sympathised with him
+if I had been able to detach my mental vision from the unsuspected sharer
+of my cabin as though he were my second self.  There he was on the other
+side of the bulkhead, four or five feet from us, no more, as we sat in
+the saloon.  I looked politely at Captain Archbold (if that was his
+name), but it was the other I saw, in a grey sleeping-suit, seated on a
+low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, and every word
+said between us falling into the ears of his dark head bowed on his
+chest.
+
+“I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years, and
+I’ve never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship.  And that
+it should be my ship.  Wife on board, too.”
+
+I was hardly listening to him.
+
+“Don’t you think,” I said, “that the heavy sea which, you told me, came
+aboard just then might have killed the man?  I have seen the sheer weight
+of a sea kill a man very neatly, by simply breaking his neck.”
+
+“Good God!” he uttered, impressively, fixing his smeary blue eyes on me.
+“The sea!  No man killed by the sea ever looked like that.”  He seemed
+positively scandalised at my suggestion.  And as I gazed at him,
+certainly not prepared for anything original on his part, he advanced his
+head close to mine and thrust his tongue out at me so suddenly that I
+couldn’t help starting back.
+
+After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded wisely.  If
+I had seen the sight, he assured me, I would never forget it as long as I
+lived.  The weather was too bad to give the corpse a proper sea burial.
+So next day at dawn they took it up on the poop, covering its face with a
+bit of bunting; he read a short prayer, and then, just as it was, in its
+oilskins and long boots, they launched it amongst those mountainous seas
+that seemed ready every moment to swallow up the ship herself and the
+terrified lives on board of her.
+
+“That reefed foresail saved you,” I threw in.
+
+“Under God—it did,” he exclaimed fervently.  “It was by a special mercy,
+I firmly believe, that it stood some of those hurricane squalls.”
+
+“It was the setting of that sail which—” I began.
+
+“God’s own hand in it,” he interrupted me.  “Nothing less could have done
+it.  I don’t mind telling you that I hardly dared give the order.  It
+seemed impossible that we could touch anything without losing it, and
+then our last hope would have been gone.”
+
+The terror of that gale was on him yet.  I let him go on for a bit, then
+said, casually—as if returning to a minor subject:
+
+“You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I
+believe?”
+
+He was.  To the law.  His obscure tenacity on that point had in it
+something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were,
+mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should not be suspected of
+“countenancing any doings of that sort.”  Seven-and-thirty virtuous years
+at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen
+in the _Sephora_, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation.
+
+“And you know,” he went on, groping shamefacedly amongst his feelings, “I
+did not engage that young fellow.  His people had some interest with my
+owners.  I was in a way forced to take him on.  He looked very smart,
+very gentlemanly, and all that.  But do you know—I never liked him,
+somehow.  I am a plain man.  You see, he wasn’t exactly the sort for the
+chief mate of a ship like the _Sephora_.”
+
+I had become so connected in thoughts and impressions with the secret
+sharer of my cabin that I felt as if I, personally, were being given to
+understand that I, too, was not the sort that would have done for the
+chief mate of a ship like the _Sephora_.  I had no doubt of it in my
+mind.
+
+“Not at all the style of man.  You understand,” he insisted,
+superfluously, looking hard at me.
+
+I smiled urbanely.  He seemed at a loss for a while.
+
+“I suppose I must report a suicide.”
+
+“Beg pardon?”
+
+“Suicide!  That’s what I’ll have to write to my owners directly I get
+in.”
+
+“Unless you manage to recover him before to-morrow,” I assented,
+dispassionately. . . “I mean, alive.”
+
+He mumbled something which I really did not catch, and I turned my ear to
+him in a puzzled manner.  He fairly bawled:
+
+“The land—I say, the mainland is at least seven miles off my anchorage.”
+
+“About that.”
+
+My lack of excitement, of curiosity, of surprise, of any sort of
+pronounced interest, began to arouse his distrust.  But except for the
+felicitous pretence of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything.  I
+had felt utterly incapable of playing the part of ignorance properly, and
+therefore was afraid to try.  It is also certain that he had brought some
+ready-made suspicions with him, and that he viewed my politeness as a
+strange and unnatural phenomenon.  And yet how else could I have received
+him?  Not heartily!  That was impossible for psychological reasons, which
+I need not state here.  My only object was to keep off his inquiries.
+Surlily?  Yes, but surliness might have provoked a point-blank question.
+From its novelty to him and from its nature, punctilious courtesy was the
+manner best calculated to restrain the man.  But there was the danger of
+his breaking through my defence bluntly.  I could not, I think, have met
+him by a direct lie, also for psychological (not moral) reasons.  If he
+had only known how afraid I was of his putting my feeling of identity
+with the other to the test!  But, strangely enough—(I thought of it only
+afterward)—I believe that he was not a little disconcerted by the reverse
+side of that weird situation, by something in me that reminded him of the
+man he was seeking—suggested a mysterious similitude to the young fellow
+he had distrusted and disliked from the first.
+
+However that might have been, the silence was not very prolonged.  He
+took another oblique step.
+
+“I reckon I had no more than a two-mile pull to your ship.  Not a bit
+more.”
+
+“And quite enough, too, in this awful heat,” I said.
+
+Another pause full of mistrust followed.  Necessity, they say, is mother
+of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.  And
+I was afraid he would ask me point-blank for news of my other self.
+
+“Nice little saloon, isn’t it?” I remarked, as if noticing for the first
+time the way his eyes roamed from one closed door to the other.  “And
+very well fitted out too.  Here, for instance,” I continued, reaching
+over the back of my seat negligently and flinging the door open, “is my
+bath-room.”
+
+He made an eager movement, but hardly gave it a glance.  I got up, shut
+the door of the bath-room, and invited him to have a look round, as if I
+were very proud of my accommodation.  He had to rise and be shown round,
+but he went through the business without any raptures whatever.
+
+“And now we’ll have a look at my stateroom,” I declared, in a voice as
+loud as I dared to make it, crossing the cabin to the starboard side with
+purposely heavy steps.
+
+He followed me in and gazed around.  My intelligent double had vanished.
+I played my part.
+
+“Very convenient—isn’t it?”
+
+“Very nice.  Very comf. . . ”  He didn’t finish, and went out brusquely
+as if to escape from some unrighteous wiles of mine.  But it was not to
+be.  I had been too frightened not to feel vengeful; I felt I had him on
+the run, and I meant to keep him on the run.  My polite insistence must
+have had something menacing in it, because he gave in suddenly.  And I
+did not let him off a single item; mate’s room, pantry, storerooms, the
+very sail-locker which was also under the poop—he had to look into them
+all.  When at last I showed him out on the quarter-deck he drew a long,
+spiritless sigh, and mumbled dismally that he must really be going back
+to his ship now.  I desired my mate, who had joined us, to see to the
+captain’s boat.
+
+The man of whiskers gave a blast on the whistle which he used to wear
+hanging round his neck, and yelled, “_Sephoras_ away!”  My double down
+there in my cabin must have heard, and certainly could not feel more
+relieved than I.  Four fellows came running out from somewhere forward
+and went over the side, while my own men, appearing on deck too, lined
+the rail.  I escorted my visitor to the gangway ceremoniously, and nearly
+overdid it.  He was a tenacious beast.  On the very ladder he lingered,
+and in that unique, guiltily conscientious manner of sticking to the
+point:
+
+“I say . . . you . . . you don’t think that—”
+
+I covered his voice loudly:
+
+“Certainly not. . . . I am delighted.  Good-bye.”
+
+I had an idea of what he meant to say, and just saved myself by the
+privilege of defective hearing.  He was too shaken generally to insist,
+but my mate, close witness of that parting, looked mystified and his face
+took on a thoughtful cast.  As I did not want to appear as if I wished to
+avoid all communication with my officers, he had the opportunity to
+address me.
+
+“Seems a very nice man.  His boat’s crew told our chaps a very
+extraordinary story, if what I am told by the steward is true.  I suppose
+you had it from the captain, sir?”
+
+“Yes.  I had a story from the captain.”
+
+“A very horrible affair—isn’t it, sir?”
+
+“It is.”
+
+“Beats all these tales we hear about murders in Yankee ships.”
+
+“I don’t think it beats them.  I don’t think it resembles them in the
+least.”
+
+“Bless my soul—you don’t say so!  But of course I’ve no acquaintance
+whatever with American ships, not I, so I couldn’t go against your
+knowledge.  It’s horrible enough for me. . . . But the queerest part is
+that those fellows seemed to have some idea the man was hidden aboard
+here.  They had really.  Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
+
+“Preposterous—isn’t it?”
+
+We were walking to and fro athwart the quarterdeck.  No one of the crew
+forward could be seen (the day was Sunday), and the mate pursued:
+
+“There was some little dispute about it.  Our chaps took offence.  ‘As if
+we would harbour a thing like that,’ they said.  ‘Wouldn’t you like to
+look for him in our coal-hole?’  Quite a tiff.  But they made it up in
+the end.  I suppose he did drown himself.  Don’t you, sir?”
+
+“I don’t suppose anything.”
+
+“You have no doubt in the matter, sir?”
+
+“None whatever.”
+
+I left him suddenly.  I felt I was producing a bad impression, but with
+my double down there it was most trying to be on deck.  And it was almost
+as trying to be below.  Altogether a nerve-trying situation.  But on the
+whole I felt less torn in two when I was with him.  There was no one in
+the whole ship whom I dared take into my confidence.  Since the hands had
+got to know his story, it would have been impossible to pass him off for
+any one else, and an accidental discovery was to be dreaded now more than
+ever. . . .
+
+The steward being engaged in laying the table for dinner, we could talk
+only with our eyes when I first went down.  Later in the afternoon we had
+a cautious try at whispering.  The Sunday quietness of the ship was
+against us; the stillness of air and water around her was against us; the
+elements, the men were against us—everything was against us in our secret
+partnership; time itself—for this could not go on forever.  The very
+trust in Providence was, I suppose, denied to his guilt.  Shall I confess
+that this thought cast me down very much?  And as to the chapter of
+accidents which counts for so much in the book of success, I could only
+hope that it was closed.  For what favourable accident could be expected?
+
+“Did you hear everything?” were my first words as soon as we took up our
+position side by side, leaning over my bed-place.
+
+He had.  And the proof of it was his earnest whisper, “The man told you
+he hardly dared to give the order.”
+
+I understood the reference to be to that saving foresail.
+
+“Yes.  He was afraid of it being lost in the setting.”
+
+“I assure you he never gave the order.  He may think he did, but he never
+gave it.  He stood there with me on the break of the poop after the
+maintopsail blew away, and whimpered about our last hope—positively
+whimpered about it and nothing else—and the night coming on!  To hear
+one’s skipper go on like that in such weather was enough to drive any
+fellow out of his mind.  It worked me up into a sort of desperation.  I
+just took it into my own hands and went away from him, boiling, and—  But
+what’s the use telling you?  _You_ know! . . . Do you think that if I had
+not been pretty fierce with them I should have got the men to do
+anything?  Not it!  The bo’s’n perhaps?  Perhaps!  It wasn’t a heavy
+sea—it was a sea gone mad!  I suppose the end of the world will be
+something like that; and a man may have the heart to see it coming once
+and be done with it—but to have to face it day after day—I don’t blame
+anybody.  I was precious little better than the rest.  Only—I was an
+officer of that old coal-waggon, anyhow—”
+
+“I quite understand,” I conveyed that sincere assurance into his ear.  He
+was out of breath with whispering; I could hear him pant slightly.  It
+was all very simple.  The same strung-up force which had given
+twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of
+recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence.
+
+But I had no leisure to weigh the merits of the matter—footsteps in the
+saloon, a heavy knock.  “There’s enough wind to get under way with, sir.”
+Here was the call of a new claim upon my thoughts and even upon my
+feelings.
+
+“Turn the hands up,” I cried through the door.  “I’ll be on deck
+directly.”
+
+I was going out to make the acquaintance of my ship.  Before I left the
+cabin our eyes met—the eyes of the only two strangers on board.  I
+pointed to the recessed part where the little camp-stool awaited him and
+laid my finger on my lips.  He made a gesture—somewhat vague—a little
+mysterious, accompanied by a faint smile, as if of regret.
+
+This is not the place to enlarge upon the sensations of a man who feels
+for the first time a ship move under his feet to his own independent
+word.  In my case they were not unalloyed.  I was not wholly alone with
+my command; for there was that stranger in my cabin.  Or rather, I was
+not completely and wholly with her.  Part of me was absent.  That mental
+feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the
+mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul.  Before an hour had elapsed
+since the ship had begun to move, having occasion to ask the mate (he
+stood by my side) to take a compass bearing of the Pagoda, I caught
+myself reaching up to his ear in whispers.  I say I caught myself, but
+enough had escaped to startle the man.  I can’t describe it otherwise
+than by saying that he shied.  A grave, preoccupied manner, as though he
+were in possession of some perplexing intelligence, did not leave him
+henceforth.  A little later I moved away from the rail to look at the
+compass with such a stealthy gait that the helmsman noticed it—and I
+could not help noticing the unusual roundness of his eyes.  These are
+trifling instances, though it’s to no commander’s advantage to be
+suspected of ludicrous eccentricities.  But I was also more seriously
+affected.  There are to a seaman certain words, gestures, that should in
+given conditions come as naturally, as instinctively as the winking of a
+menaced eye.  A certain order should spring on to his lips without
+thinking; a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak, without
+reflection.  But all unconscious alertness had abandoned me.  I had to
+make an effort of will to recall myself back (from the cabin) to the
+conditions of the moment.  I felt that I was appearing an irresolute
+commander to those people who were watching me more or less critically.
+
+And, besides, there were the scares.  On the second day out, for
+instance, coming off the deck in the afternoon (I had straw slippers on
+my bare feet) I stopped at the open pantry door and spoke to the steward.
+He was doing something there with his back to me.  At the sound of my
+voice he nearly jumped out of his skin, as the saying is, and
+incidentally broke a cup.
+
+“What on earth’s the matter with you?” I asked, astonished.
+
+He was extremely confused.  “Beg your pardon, sir.  I made sure you were
+in your cabin.”
+
+“You see I wasn’t.”
+
+“No, sir.  I could have sworn I had heard you moving in there not a
+moment ago.  It’s most extraordinary . . . very sorry, sir.”
+
+I passed on with an inward shudder.  I was so identified with my secret
+double that I did not even mention the fact in those scanty, fearful
+whispers we exchanged.  I suppose he had made some slight noise of some
+kind or other.  It would have been miraculous if he hadn’t at one time or
+another.  And yet, haggard as he appeared, he looked always perfectly
+self-controlled, more than calm—almost invulnerable.  On my suggestion he
+remained almost entirely in the bathroom, which, upon the whole, was the
+safest place.  There could be really no shadow of an excuse for any one
+ever wanting to go in there, once the steward had done with it.  It was a
+very tiny place.  Sometimes he reclined on the floor, his legs bent, his
+head sustained on one elbow.  At others I would find him on the
+camp-stool, sitting in his grey sleeping-suit and with his cropped dark
+hair like a patient, unmoved convict.  At night I would smuggle him into
+my bed-place, and we would whisper together, with the regular footfalls
+of the officer of the watch passing and repassing over our heads.  It was
+an infinitely miserable time.  It was lucky that some tins of fine
+preserves were stowed in a locker in my stateroom; hard bread I could
+always get hold of; and so he lived on stewed chicken, paté de foie gras,
+asparagus, cooked oysters, sardines—on all sorts of abominable sham
+delicacies out of tins.  My early morning coffee he always drank; and it
+was all I dared do for him in that respect.
+
+Every day there was the horrible manoeuvring to go through so that my
+room and then the bath-room should be done in the usual way.  I came to
+hate the sight of the steward, to abhor the voice of that harmless man.
+I felt that it was he who would bring on the disaster of discovery.  It
+hung like a sword over our heads.
+
+The fourth day out, I think (we were then working down the east side of
+the Gulf of Siam, tack for tack, in light winds and smooth water)—the
+fourth day, I say, of this miserable juggling with the unavoidable, as we
+sat at our evening meal, that man, whose slightest movement I dreaded,
+after putting down the dishes ran up on deck busily.  This could not be
+dangerous.  Presently he came down again; and then it appeared that he
+had remembered a coat of mine which I had thrown over a rail to dry after
+having been wetted in a shower which had passed over the ship in the
+afternoon.  Sitting stolidly at the head of the table I became terrified
+at the sight of the garment on his arm.  Of course he made for my door.
+There was no time to lose.
+
+“Steward,” I thundered.  My nerves were so shaken that I could not govern
+my voice and conceal my agitation.  This was the sort of thing that made
+my terrifically whiskered mate tap his forehead with his forefinger.  I
+had detected him using that gesture while talking on deck with a
+confidential air to the carpenter.  It was too far to hear a word, but I
+had no doubt that this pantomime could only refer to the strange new
+captain.
+
+“Yes, sir,” the pale-faced steward turned resignedly to me.  It was this
+maddening course of being shouted at, checked without rhyme or reason,
+arbitrarily chased out of my cabin, suddenly called into it, sent flying
+out of his pantry on incomprehensible errands, that accounted for the
+growing wretchedness of his expression.
+
+“Where are you going with that coat?”
+
+“To your room, sir.”
+
+“Is there another shower coming?”
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know, sir.  Shall I go up again and see, sir?”
+
+“No! never mind.”
+
+My object was attained, as of course my other self in there would have
+heard everything that passed.  During this interlude my two officers
+never raised their eyes off their respective plates; but the lip of that
+confounded cub, the second mate, quivered visibly.
+
+I expected the steward to hook my coat on and come out at once.  He was
+very slow about it; but I dominated my nervousness sufficiently not to
+shout after him.  Suddenly I became aware (it could be heard plainly
+enough) that the fellow for some reason or other was opening the door of
+the bath-room.  It was the end.  The place was literally not big enough
+to swing a cat in.  My voice died in my throat and I went stony all over.
+I expected to hear a yell of surprise and terror, and made a movement,
+but had not the strength to get on my legs.  Everything remained still.
+Had my second self taken the poor wretch by the throat?  I don’t know
+what I would have done next moment if I had not seen the steward come out
+of my room, close the door, and then stand quietly by the sideboard.
+
+“Saved,” I thought.  “But, no!  Lost!  Gone!  He was gone!”
+
+I laid my knife and fork down and leaned back in my chair.  My head swam.
+After a while, when sufficiently recovered to speak in a steady voice, I
+instructed my mate to put the ship round at eight o’clock himself.
+
+“I won’t come on deck,” I went on.  “I think I’ll turn in, and unless the
+wind shifts I don’t want to be disturbed before midnight.  I feel a bit
+seedy.”
+
+“You did look middling bad a little while ago,” the chief mate remarked
+without showing any great concern.
+
+They both went out, and I stared at the steward clearing the table.
+There was nothing to be read on that wretched man’s face.  But why did he
+avoid my eyes I asked myself.  Then I thought I should like to hear the
+sound of his voice.
+
+“Steward!”
+
+“Sir!”  Startled as usual.
+
+“Where did you hang up that coat?”
+
+“In the bath-room, sir.”  The usual anxious tone.  “It’s not quite dry
+yet, sir.”
+
+For some time longer I sat in the cuddy.  Had my double vanished as he
+had come?  But of his coming there was an explanation, whereas his
+disappearance would be inexplicable. . . . I went slowly into my dark
+room, shut the door, lighted the lamp, and for a time dared not turn
+round.  When at last I did I saw him standing bolt-upright in the narrow
+recessed part.  It would not be true to say I had a shock, but an
+irresistible doubt of his bodily existence flitted through my mind.  Can
+it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine?
+It was like being haunted.  Motionless, with a grave face, he raised his
+hands slightly at me in a gesture which meant clearly, “Heavens! what a
+narrow escape!”  Narrow indeed.  I think I had come creeping quietly as
+near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border.  That
+gesture restrained me, so to speak.
+
+The mate with the terrific whiskers was now putting the ship on the other
+tack.  In the moment of profound silence which follows upon the hands
+going to their stations I heard on the poop his raised voice: “Hard
+alee!” and the distant shout of the order repeated on the maindeck.  The
+sails, in that light breeze, made but a faint fluttering noise.  It
+ceased.  The ship was coming round slowly; I held my breath in the
+renewed stillness of expectation; one wouldn’t have thought that there
+was a single living soul on her decks.  A sudden brisk shout, “Mainsail
+haul!” broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the
+men running away with the main-brace we two, down in my cabin, came
+together in our usual position by the bed-place.
+
+He did not wait for my question.  “I heard him fumbling here and just
+managed to squat myself down in the bath,” he whispered to me.  “The
+fellow only opened the door and put his arm in to hang the coat up.  All
+the same—”
+
+“I never thought of that,” I whispered back, even more appalled than
+before at the closeness of the shave, and marvelling at that something
+unyielding in his character which was carrying him through so finely.
+There was no agitation in his whisper.  Whoever was being driven
+distracted, it was not he.  He was sane.  And the proof of his sanity was
+continued when he took up the whispering again.
+
+“It would never do for me to come to life again.”
+
+It was something that a ghost might have said.  But what he was alluding
+to was his old captain’s reluctant admission of the theory of suicide.
+It would obviously serve his turn—if I had understood at all the view
+which seemed to govern the unalterable purpose of his action.
+
+“You must maroon me as soon as ever you can get amongst these islands off
+the Cambodje shore,” he went on.
+
+“Maroon you!  We are not living in a boy’s adventure tale,” I protested.
+His scornful whispering took me up.
+
+“We aren’t indeed!  There’s nothing of a boy’s tale in this.  But there’s
+nothing else for it.  I want no more.  You don’t suppose I am afraid of
+what can be done to me?  Prison or gallows or whatever they may please.
+But you don’t see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow
+in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you?  What can they know
+whether I am guilty or not—or of _what_ I am guilty, either?  That’s my
+affair.  What does the Bible say?  ‘Driven off the face of the earth.’
+Very well.  I am off the face of the earth now.  As I came at night so I
+shall go.”
+
+“Impossible!” I murmured.  “You can’t.”
+
+“Can’t? . . . Not naked like a soul on the Day of Judgment.  I shall
+freeze on to this sleeping-suit.  The Last Day is not yet—and you have
+understood thoroughly.  Didn’t you?”
+
+I felt suddenly ashamed of myself.  I may say truly that I understood—and
+my hesitation in letting that man swim away from my ship’s side had been
+a mere sham sentiment, a sort of cowardice.
+
+“It can’t be done now till next night,” I breathed out.  “The ship is on
+the off-shore tack and the wind may fail us.”
+
+“As long as I know that you understand,” he whispered.  “But of course
+you do.  It’s a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand.
+You seem to have been there on purpose.”  And in the same whisper, as if
+we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not
+fit for the world to hear, he added, “It’s very wonderful.”  We remained
+side by side talking in our secret way—but sometimes silent or just
+exchanging a whispered word or two at long intervals.  And as usual he
+stared through the port.  A breath of wind came now and again into our
+faces.  The ship might have been moored in dock, so gently and on an even
+keel she slipped through the water, that did not murmur even at our
+passage, shadowy and silent like a phantom sea.
+
+At midnight I went on deck, and to my mate’s great surprise put the ship
+round on the other tack.  His terrible whiskers flitted round me in
+silent criticism.  I certainly should not have done it if it had been
+only a question of getting out of that sleepy gulf as quickly as
+possible.  I believe he told the second mate, who relieved him, that it
+was a great want of judgment.  The other only yawned.  That intolerable
+cub shuffled about so sleepily and lolled against the rails in such a
+slack, improper fashion that I came down on him sharply.
+
+“Aren’t you properly awake yet?”
+
+“Yes, sir!  I am awake.”
+
+“Well, then, be good enough to hold yourself as if you were.  And keep a
+look-out.  If there’s any current we’ll be closing with some islands
+before daylight.”
+
+The east side of the gulf is fringed with islands, some solitary, others
+in groups.  On the blue background of the high coast they seem to float
+on silvery patches of calm water, arid and grey, or dark green and
+rounded like clumps of evergreen bushes, with the larger ones, a mile or
+two long, showing the outlines of ridges, ribs of grey rock under the
+dank mantle of matted leafage.  Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to
+geography, the manner of life they harbour is an unsolved secret.  There
+must be villages—settlements of fishermen at least—on the largest of
+them, and some communication with the world is probably kept up by native
+craft.  But all that forenoon, as we headed for them, fanned along by the
+faintest of breezes, I saw no sign of man or canoe in the field of the
+telescope I kept on pointing at the scattered group.
+
+At noon I gave no orders for a change of course, and the mate’s whiskers
+became much concerned and seemed to be offering themselves unduly to my
+notice.  At last I said:
+
+“I am going to stand right in.  Quite in—as far as I can take her.”
+
+The stare of extreme surprise imparted an air of ferocity also to his
+eyes, and he looked truly terrific for a moment.
+
+“We’re not doing well in the middle of the gulf,” I continued, casually.
+“I am going to look for the land breezes to-night.”
+
+“Bless my soul!  Do you mean, sir, in the dark amongst the lot of all
+them islands and reefs and shoals?”
+
+“Well—if there are any regular land breezes at all on this coast one must
+get close inshore to find them, mustn’t one?”
+
+“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed again under his breath.  All that afternoon
+he wore a dreamy, contemplative appearance which in him was a mark of
+perplexity.  After dinner I went into my stateroom as if I meant to take
+some rest.  There we two bent our dark heads over a half-unrolled chart
+lying on my bed.
+
+“There,” I said.  “It’s got to be Koh-ring.  I’ve been looking at it ever
+since sunrise.  It has got two hills and a low point.  It must be
+inhabited.  And on the coast opposite there is what looks like the mouth
+of a biggish river—with some town, no doubt, not far up.  It’s the best
+chance for you that I can see.”
+
+“Anything.  Koh-ring let it be.”
+
+He looked thoughtfully at the chart as if surveying chances and distances
+from a lofty height—and following with his eyes his own figure wandering
+on the blank land of Cochin-China, and then passing off that piece of
+paper clean out of sight into uncharted regions.  And it was as if the
+ship had two captains to plan her course for her.  I had been so worried
+and restless running up and down that I had not had the patience to dress
+that day.  I had remained in my sleeping-suit, with straw slippers and a
+soft floppy hat.  The closeness of the heat in the gulf had been most
+oppressive, and the crew were used to see me wandering in that airy
+attire.
+
+“She will clear the south point as she heads now,” I whispered into his
+ear.  “Goodness only knows when, though, but certainly after dark.  I’ll
+edge her in to half a mile, as far as I may be able to judge in the
+dark—”
+
+“Be careful,” he murmured, warningly—and I realised suddenly that all my
+future, the only future for which I was fit, would perhaps go
+irretrievably to pieces in any mishap to my first command.
+
+I could not stop a moment longer in the room.  I motioned him to get out
+of sight and made my way on the poop.  That unplayful cub had the watch.
+I walked up and down for a while thinking things out, then beckoned him
+over.
+
+“Send a couple of hands to open the two quarterdeck ports,” I said,
+mildly.
+
+He actually had the impudence, or else so forgot himself in his wonder at
+such an incomprehensible order, as to repeat:
+
+“Open the quarter-deck ports!  What for, sir?”
+
+“The only reason you need concern yourself about is because I tell you to
+do so.  Have them open wide and fastened properly.”
+
+He reddened and went off, but I believe made some jeering remark to the
+carpenter as to the sensible practice of ventilating a ship’s
+quarter-deck.  I know he popped into the mate’s cabin to impart the fact
+to him because the whiskers came on deck, as it were by chance, and stole
+glances at me from below—for signs of lunacy or drunkenness, I suppose.
+
+A little before supper, feeling more restless than ever, I rejoined, for
+a moment, my second self.  And to find him sitting so quietly was
+surprising, like something against nature, inhuman.
+
+I developed my plan in a hurried whisper.
+
+“I shall stand in as close as I dare and then put her round.  I shall
+presently find means to smuggle you out of here into the sail-locker,
+which communicates with the lobby.  But there is an opening, a sort of
+square for hauling the sails out, which gives straight on the
+quarter-deck and which is never closed in fine weather, so as to give air
+to the sails.  When the ship’s way is deadened in stays and all the hands
+are aft at the main-braces you shall have a clear road to slip out and
+get overboard through the open quarter-deck port.  I’ve had them both
+fastened up.  Use a rope’s end to lower yourself into the water so as to
+avoid a splash—you know.  It could be heard and cause some beastly
+complication.”
+
+He kept silent for a while, then whispered, “I understand.”
+
+“I won’t be there to see you go,” I began with an effort.  “The rest . . .
+I only hope I have understood, too.”
+
+“You have.  From first to last”—and for the first time there seemed to be
+a faltering, something strained in his whisper.  He caught hold of my
+arm, but the ringing of the supper bell made me start.  He didn’t,
+though; he only released his grip.
+
+After supper I didn’t come below again till well past eight o’clock.  The
+faint, steady breeze was loaded with dew; and the wet, darkened sails
+held all there was of propelling power in it.  The night, clear and
+starry, sparkled darkly, and the opaque, lightless patches shifting
+slowly against the low stars were the drifting islets.  On the port bow
+there was a big one more distant and shadowily imposing by the great
+space of sky it eclipsed.
+
+On opening the door I had a back view of my very own self looking at a
+chart.  He had come out of the recess and was standing near the table.
+
+“Quite dark enough,” I whispered.
+
+He stepped back and leaned against my bed with a level, quiet glance.  I
+sat on the couch.  We had nothing to say to each other.  Over our heads
+the officer of the watch moved here and there.  Then I heard him move
+quickly.  I knew what that meant.  He was making for the companion; and
+presently his voice was outside my door.
+
+“We are drawing in pretty fast, sir.  Land looks rather close.”
+
+“Very well,” I answered.  “I am coming on deck directly.”
+
+I waited till he was gone out of the cuddy, then rose.  My double moved
+too.  The time had come to exchange our last whispers, for neither of us
+was ever to hear each other’s natural voice.
+
+“Look here!” I opened a drawer and took out three sovereigns.  “Take
+this, anyhow.  I’ve got six and I’d give you the lot, only I must keep a
+little money to buy some fruit and vegetables for the crew from native
+boats as we go through Sunda Straits.”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Take it,” I urged him, whispering desperately.  “No one can tell what—”
+
+He smiled and slapped meaningly the only pocket of the sleeping-jacket.
+It was not safe, certainly.  But I produced a large old silk handkerchief
+of mine, and tying the three pieces of gold in a corner, pressed it on
+him.  He was touched, I suppose, because he took it at last and tied it
+quickly round his waist under the jacket, on his bare skin.
+
+Our eyes met; several seconds elapsed, till, our glances still mingled, I
+extended my hand and turned the lamp out.  Then I passed through the
+cuddy, leaving the door of my room wide open. . . . . “Steward!”
+
+He was still lingering in the pantry in the greatness of his zeal, giving
+a rub-up to a plated cruet stand the last thing before going to bed.
+Being careful not to wake up the mate, whose room was opposite, I spoke
+in an undertone.
+
+He looked round anxiously.  “Sir!”
+
+“Can you get me a little hot water from the galley?”
+
+“I am afraid, sir, the galley fire’s been out for some time now.”
+
+“Go and see.”
+
+He fled up the stairs.
+
+“Now,” I whispered, loudly, into the saloon—too loudly, perhaps, but I
+was afraid I couldn’t make a sound.  He was by my side in an instant—the
+double captain slipped past the stairs—through a tiny dark passage . . .
+a sliding door.  We were in the sail-locker, scrambling on our knees over
+the sails.  A sudden thought struck me.  I saw myself wandering
+barefooted, bareheaded, the sun beating on my dark poll.  I snatched off
+my floppy hat and tried hurriedly in the dark to ram it on my other self.
+He dodged and fended off silently.  I wonder what he thought had come to
+me before he understood and suddenly desisted.  Our hands met gropingly,
+lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second. . . . No word
+was breathed by either of us when they separated.
+
+I was standing quietly by the pantry door when the steward returned.
+
+“Sorry, sir.  Kettle barely warm.  Shall I light the spirit-lamp?”
+
+“Never mind.”
+
+I came out on deck slowly.  It was now a matter of conscience to shave
+the land as close as possible—for now he must go overboard whenever the
+ship was put in stays.  Must!  There could be no going back for him.
+After a moment I walked over to leeward and my heart flew into my mouth
+at the nearness of the land on the bow.  Under any other circumstances I
+would not have held on a minute longer.  The second mate had followed me
+anxiously.
+
+I looked on till I felt I could command my voice.  “She will weather,” I
+said then in a quiet tone.  “Are you going to try that, sir?” he
+stammered out incredulously.
+
+I took no notice of him and raised my tone just enough to be heard by the
+helmsman.
+
+“Keep her good full.”
+
+“Good full, sir.”
+
+The wind fanned my cheek, the sails slept, the world was silent.  The
+strain of watching the dark loom of the land grow bigger and denser was
+too much for me.  I had shut my eyes—because the ship must go closer.
+She must!  The stillness was intolerable.  Were we standing still?
+
+When I opened my eyes the second view started my heart with a thump.  The
+black southern hill of Koh-ring seemed to hang right over the ship like a
+towering fragment of the everlasting night.  On that enormous mass of
+blackness there was not a gleam to be seen, not a sound to be heard.  It
+was gliding irresistibly toward us and yet seemed already within reach of
+the hand.  I saw the vague figures of the watch grouped in the waist,
+gazing in awed silence.
+
+“Are you going on, sir,” inquired an unsteady voice at my elbow.
+
+I ignored it.  I had to go on.
+
+“Keep her full.  Don’t check her way.  That won’t do now,” I said,
+warningly.
+
+“I can’t see the sails very well,” the helmsman answered me, in strange,
+quavering tones.
+
+Was she close enough?  Already she was, I won’t say in the shadow of the
+land, but in the very blackness of it, already swallowed up as it were,
+gone too close to be recalled, gone from me altogether.
+
+“Give the mate a call,” I said to the young man who stood at my elbow as
+still as death.  “And turn all hands up.”
+
+My tone had a borrowed loudness reverberated from the height of the land.
+Several voices cried out together: “We are all on deck, sir.”
+
+Then stillness again, with the great shadow gliding closer, towering
+higher, without a light, without a sound.  Such a hush had fallen on the
+ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating in slowly under
+the very gate of Erebus.
+
+“My God!  Where are we?”
+
+It was the mate moaning at my elbow.  He was thunderstruck, and as it
+were deprived of the moral support of his whiskers.  He clapped his hands
+and absolutely cried out, “Lost!”
+
+“Be quiet,” I said, sternly.
+
+He lowered his tone, but I saw the shadowy gesture of his despair.  “What
+are we doing here?”
+
+“Looking for the land wind.”
+
+He made as if to tear his hair, and addressed me recklessly.
+
+“She will never get out.  You have done it, sir.  I knew it’d end in
+something like this.  She will never weather, and you are too close now
+to stay.  She’ll drift ashore before she’s round.  O my God!”
+
+I caught his arm as he was raising it to batter his poor devoted head,
+and shook it violently.
+
+“She’s ashore already,” he wailed, trying to tear himself away.
+
+“Is she? . . . Keep good full there!”
+
+“Good full, sir,” cried the helmsman in a frightened, thin, child-like
+voice.
+
+I hadn’t let go the mate’s arm and went on shaking it.  “Ready about, do
+you hear?  You go forward”—shake—“and stop there”—shake—“and hold your
+noise”—shake—“and see these head-sheets properly overhauled”—shake,
+shake—shake.
+
+And all the time I dared not look toward the land lest my heart should
+fail me.  I released my grip at last and he ran forward as if fleeing for
+dear life.
+
+I wondered what my double there in the sail-locker thought of this
+commotion.  He was able to hear everything—and perhaps he was able to
+understand why, on my conscience, it had to be thus close—no less.  My
+first order “Hard alee!” re-echoed ominously under the towering shadow of
+Koh-ring as if I had shouted in a mountain gorge.  And then I watched the
+land intently.  In that smooth water and light wind it was impossible to
+feel the ship coming-to.  No!  I could not feel her.  And my second self
+was making now ready to slip out and lower himself overboard.  Perhaps he
+was gone already . . .?
+
+The great black mass brooding over our very mastheads began to pivot away
+from the ship’s side silently.  And now I forgot the secret stranger
+ready to depart, and remembered only that I was a total stranger to the
+ship.  I did not know her.  Would she do it?  How was she to be handled?
+
+I swung the mainyard and waited helplessly.  She was perhaps stopped, and
+her very fate hung in the balance, with the black mass of Koh-ring like
+the gate of the everlasting night towering over her taffrail.  What would
+she do now?  Had she way on her yet?  I stepped to the side swiftly, and
+on the shadowy water I could see nothing except a faint phosphorescent
+flash revealing the glassy smoothness of the sleeping surface.  It was
+impossible to tell—and I had not learned yet the feel of my ship.  Was
+she moving?  What I needed was something easily seen, a piece of paper,
+which I could throw overboard and watch.  I had nothing on me.  To run
+down for it I didn’t dare.  There was no time.  All at once my strained,
+yearning stare distinguished a white object floating within a yard of the
+ship’s side.  White on the black water.  A phosphorescent flash passed
+under it.  What was that thing? . . . I recognised my own floppy hat.  It
+must have fallen off his head . . . and he didn’t bother.
+
+Now I had what I wanted—the saving mark for my eyes.  But I hardly
+thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to be hidden forever
+from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth,
+with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand
+. . . too proud to explain.
+
+And I watched the hat—the expression of my sudden pity for his mere
+flesh.  It had been meant to save his homeless head from the dangers of
+the sun.  And now—behold—it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark
+to help out the ignorance of my strangeness.  Ha!  It was drifting
+forward, warning me just in time that the ship had gathered sternway.
+
+“Shift the helm,” I said in a low voice to the seaman standing still like
+a statue.
+
+The man’s eyes glistened wildly in the binnacle light as he jumped round
+to the other side and spun round the wheel.
+
+I walked to the break of the poop.  On the overshadowed deck all hands
+stood by the forebraces waiting for my order.  The stars ahead seemed to
+be gliding from right to left.  And all was so still in the world that I
+heard the quiet remark “She’s round,” passed in a tone of intense relief
+between two seamen.
+
+“Let go and haul.”
+
+The foreyards ran round with a great noise, amidst cheery cries.  And now
+the frightful whisker’s made themselves heard giving various orders.
+Already the ship was drawing ahead.  And I was alone with her.  Nothing!
+no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the
+way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a
+seaman with his first command.
+
+Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a
+darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of
+Erebus—yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat
+left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of
+my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into
+the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking
+out for a new destiny.
+
+
+
+FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES
+A STORY OF SHALLOW WATERS
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+ONE day—and that day was many years ago now—I received a long, chatty
+letter from one of my old chums and fellow-wanderers in Eastern waters.
+He was still out there, but settled down, and middle-aged; I imagined
+him—grown portly in figure and domestic in his habits; in short,
+overtaken by the fate common to all except to those who, being specially
+beloved by the gods, get knocked on the head early.  The letter was of
+the reminiscent “do you remember” kind—a wistful letter of backward
+glances.  And, amongst other things, “surely you remember old Nelson,” he
+wrote.
+
+Remember old Nelson!  Certainly.  And to begin with, his name was not
+Nelson.  The Englishmen in the Archipelago called him Nelson because it
+was more convenient, I suppose, and he never protested.  It would have
+been mere pedantry.  The true form of his name was Nielsen.  He had come
+out East long before the advent of telegraph cables, had served English
+firms, had married an English girl, had been one of us for years, trading
+and sailing in all directions through the Eastern Archipelago, across and
+around, transversely, diagonally, perpendicularly, in semi-circles, and
+zigzags, and figures of eights, for years and years.
+
+There was no nook or cranny of these tropical waters that the enterprise
+of old Nelson (or Nielsen) had not penetrated in an eminently pacific
+way.  His tracks, if plotted out, would have covered the map of the
+Archipelago like a cobweb—all of it, with the sole exception of the
+Philippines.  He would never approach that part, from a strange dread of
+Spaniards, or, to be exact, of the Spanish authorities.  What he imagined
+they could do to him it is impossible to say.  Perhaps at some time in
+his life he had read some stories of the Inquisition.
+
+But he was in general afraid of what he called “authorities”; not the
+English authorities, which he trusted and respected, but the other two of
+that part of the world.  He was not so horrified at the Dutch as he was
+at the Spaniards, but he was even more mistrustful of them.  Very
+mistrustful indeed.  The Dutch, in his view, were capable of “playing any
+ugly trick on a man” who had the misfortune to displease them.  There
+were their laws and regulations, but they had no notion of fair play in
+applying them.  It was really pitiable to see the anxious circumspection
+of his dealings with some official or other, and remember that this man
+had been known to stroll up to a village of cannibals in New Guinea in a
+quiet, fearless manner (and note that he was always fleshy all his life,
+and, if I may say so, an appetising morsel) on some matter of barter that
+did not amount perhaps to fifty pounds in the end.
+
+Remember old Nelson!  Rather!  Truly, none of us in my generation had
+known him in his active days.  He was “retired” in our time.  He had
+bought, or else leased, part of a small island from the Sultan of a
+little group called the Seven Isles, not far north from Banka.  It was, I
+suppose, a legitimate transaction, but I have no doubt that had he been
+an Englishman the Dutch would have discovered a reason to fire him out
+without ceremony.  In this connection the real form of his name stood him
+in good stead.  In the character of an unassuming Dane whose conduct was
+most correct, they let him be.  With all his money engaged in cultivation
+he was naturally careful not to give even the shadow of offence, and it
+was mostly for prudential reasons of that sort that he did not look with
+a favourable eye on Jasper Allen.  But of that later.  Yes!  One
+remembered well enough old Nelson’s big, hospitable bungalow erected on a
+shelving point of land, his portly form, costumed generally in a white
+shirt and trousers (he had a confirmed habit of taking off his alpaca
+jacket on the slightest provocation), his round blue eyes, his straggly,
+sandy-white moustache sticking out all ways like the quills of the
+fretful porcupine, his propensity to sit down suddenly and fan himself
+with his hat.  But there’s no use concealing the fact that what one
+remembered really was his daughter, who at that time came out to live
+with him—and be a sort of Lady of the Isles.
+
+Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) was the kind of girl one remembers.  The oval
+of her face was perfect; and within that fascinating frame the most happy
+disposition of line and feature, with an admirable complexion, gave an
+impression of health, strength, and what I might call unconscious
+self-confidence—a most pleasant and, as it were, whimsical determination.
+I will not compare her eyes to violets, because the real shade of their
+colour was peculiar, not so dark and more lustrous.  They were of the
+wide-open kind, and looked at one frankly in every mood.  I never did see
+the long, dark eyelashes lowered—I dare say Jasper Allen did, being a
+privileged person—but I have no doubt that the expression must have been
+charming in a complex way.  She could—Jasper told me once with a
+touchingly imbecile exultation—sit on her hair.  I dare say, I dare say.
+It was not for me to behold these wonders; I was content to admire the
+neat and becoming way she used to do it up so as not to conceal the good
+shape of her head.  And this wealth of hair was so glossy that when the
+screens of the west verandah were down, making a pleasant twilight there,
+or in the shade of the grove of fruit-trees near the house, it seemed to
+give out a golden light of its own.
+
+She dressed generally in a white frock, with a skirt of walking length,
+showing her neat, laced, brown boots.  If there was any colour about her
+costume it was just a bit of blue perhaps.  No exertion seemed to
+distress her.  I have seen her land from the dinghy after a long pull in
+the sun (she rowed herself about a good deal) with no quickened breath
+and not a single hair out of its place.  In the morning when she came out
+on the verandah for the first look westward, Sumatra way, over the sea,
+she seemed as fresh and sparkling as a dewdrop.  But a dewdrop is
+evanescent, and there was nothing evanescent about Freya.  I remember her
+round, solid arms with the fine wrists, and her broad, capable hands with
+tapering fingers.
+
+I don’t know whether she was actually born at sea, but I do know that up
+to twelve years of age she sailed about with her parents in various
+ships.  After old Nelson lost his wife it became a matter of serious
+concern for him what to do with the girl.  A kind lady in Singapore,
+touched by his dumb grief and deplorable perplexity, offered to take
+charge of Freya.  This arrangement lasted some six years, during which
+old Nelson (or Nielsen) “retired” and established, himself on his island,
+and then it was settled (the kind lady going away to Europe) that his
+daughter should join him.
+
+As the first and most important preparation for that event the old fellow
+ordered from his Singapore agent a Steyn and Ebhart’s “upright grand.”  I
+was then commanding a little steamer in the island trade, and it fell to
+my lot to take it out to him, so I know something of Freya’s “upright
+grand.”  We landed the enormous packing-case with difficulty on a flat
+piece of rock amongst some bushes, nearly knocking the bottom out of one
+of my boats in the course of that nautical operation.  Then, all my crew
+assisting, engineers and firemen included, by the exercise of much
+anxious ingenuity, and by means of rollers, levers, tackles, and inclined
+planes of soaped planks, toiling in the sun like ancient Egyptians at the
+building of a pyramid, we got it as far as the house and up on to the
+edge of the west verandah—which was the actual drawing-room of the
+bungalow.  There, the case being ripped off cautiously, the beautiful
+rosewood monster stood revealed at last.  In reverent excitement we
+coaxed it against the wall and drew the first free breath of the day.  It
+was certainly the heaviest movable object on that islet since the
+creation of the world.  The volume of sound it gave out in that bungalow
+(which acted as a sounding-board) was really astonishing.  It thundered
+sweetly right over the sea.  Jasper Allen told me that early of a morning
+on the deck of the _Bonito_ (his wonderfully fast and pretty brig) he
+could hear Freya playing her scales quite distinctly.  But the fellow
+always anchored foolishly close to the point, as I told him more than
+once.  Of course, these seas are almost uniformly serene, and the Seven
+Isles is a particularly calm and cloudless spot as a rule.  But still,
+now and again, an afternoon thunderstorm over Banka, or even one of these
+vicious thick squalls, from the distant Sumatra coast, would make a
+sudden sally upon the group, enveloping it for a couple of hours in
+whirlwinds and bluish-black murk of a particularly sinister aspect.
+Then, with the lowered rattan-screens rattling desperately in the wind
+and the bungalow shaking all over, Freya would sit down to the piano and
+play fierce Wagner music in the flicker of blinding flashes, with
+thunderbolts falling all round, enough to make your hair stand on end;
+and Jasper would remain stock still on the verandah, adoring the back
+view of her supple, swaying figure, the miraculous sheen of her fair
+head, the rapid hands on the keys, the white nape of her neck—while the
+brig, down at the point there, surged at her cables within a hundred
+yards of nasty, shiny, black rock-heads.  Ugh!
+
+And this, if you please, for no reason but that, when he went on board at
+night and laid his head on the pillow, he should feel that he was as near
+as he could conveniently get to his Freya slumbering in the bungalow.
+Did you ever!  And, mind, this brig was the home to be—their home—the
+floating paradise which he was gradually fitting out like a yacht to sail
+his life blissfully away in with Freya.  Imbecile!  But the fellow was
+always taking chances.
+
+One day, I remember I watched with Freya on the verandah the brig
+approaching the point from the northward.  I suppose Jasper made the girl
+out with his long glass.  What does he do?  Instead of standing on for
+another mile and a half along the shoals and then tacking for the
+anchorage in a proper and seamanlike manner, he spies a gap between two
+disgusting old jagged reefs, puts the helm down suddenly, and shoots the
+brig through, with all her sails shaking and rattling, so that we could
+hear the racket on the verandah.  I drew my breath through my teeth, I
+can tell you, and Freya swore.  Yes!  She clenched her capable fists and
+stamped with her pretty brown boot and said “Damn!”  Then, looking at me
+with a little heightened colour—not much—she remarked, “I forgot you were
+there,” and laughed.  To be sure, to be sure.  When Jasper was in sight
+she was not likely to remember that anybody else in the world was there.
+In my concern at this mad trick I couldn’t help appealing to her
+sympathetic common sense.
+
+“Isn’t he a fool?” I said with feeling.
+
+“Perfect idiot,” she agreed warmly, looking at me straight with her
+wide-open, earnest eyes and the dimple of a smile on her cheek.
+
+“And that,” I pointed out to her, “just to save twenty minutes or so in
+meeting you.”
+
+We heard the anchor go down, and then she became very resolute and
+threatening.
+
+“Wait a bit.  I’ll teach him.”
+
+She went into her own room and shut the door, leaving me alone on the
+verandah with my instructions.  Long before the brig’s sails were furled,
+Jasper came up three steps at a time, forgetting to say how d’ye do, and
+looking right and left eagerly.
+
+“Where’s Freya?  Wasn’t she here just now?”
+
+When I explained to him that he was to be deprived of Miss Freya’s
+presence for a whole hour, “just to teach him,” he said I had put her up
+to it, no doubt, and that he feared he would have yet to shoot me some
+day.  She and I were getting too thick together.  Then he flung himself
+into a chair, and tried to talk to me about his trip.  But the funny
+thing was that the fellow actually suffered.  I could see it.  His voice
+failed him, and he sat there dumb, looking at the door with the face of a
+man in pain.  Fact. . . . And the next still funnier thing was that the
+girl calmly walked out of her room in less than ten minutes.  And then I
+left.  I mean to say that I went away to seek old Nelson (or Nielsen) on
+the back verandah, which was his own special nook in the distribution of
+that house, with the kind purpose of engaging him in conversation lest he
+should start roaming about and intrude unwittingly where he was not
+wanted just then.
+
+He knew that the brig had arrived, though he did not know that Jasper was
+already with his daughter.  I suppose he didn’t think it was possible in
+the time.  A father naturally wouldn’t.  He suspected that Allen was
+sweet on his girl; the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea, most
+of the traders in the Archipelago, and all sorts and conditions of men in
+the town of Singapore were aware of it.  But he was not capable of
+appreciating how far the girl was gone on the fellow.  He had an idea
+that Freya was too sensible to ever be gone on anybody—I mean to an
+unmanageable extent.  No; it was not that which made him sit on the back
+verandah and worry himself in his unassuming manner during Jasper’s
+visits.  What he worried about were the Dutch “authorities.”  For it is a
+fact that the Dutch looked askance at the doings of Jasper Allen, owner
+and master of the brig _Bonito_.  They considered him much too
+enterprising in his trading.  I don’t know that he ever did anything
+illegal; but it seems to me that his immense activity was repulsive to
+their stolid character and slow-going methods.  Anyway, in old Nelson’s
+opinion, the captain of the _Bonito_ was a smart sailor, and a nice young
+man, but not a desirable acquaintance upon the whole.  Somewhat
+compromising, you understand.  On the other hand, he did not like to tell
+Jasper in so many words to keep away.  Poor old Nelson himself was a nice
+fellow.  I believe he would have shrunk from hurting the feelings even of
+a mop-headed cannibal, unless, perhaps, under very strong provocation.  I
+mean the feelings, not the bodies.  As against spears, knives, hatchets,
+clubs, or arrows, old Nelson had proved himself capable of taking his own
+part.  In every other respect he had a timorous soul.  So he sat on the
+back verandah with a concerned expression, and whenever the voices of his
+daughter and Jasper Allen reached him, he would blow out his cheeks and
+let the air escape with a dismal sound, like a much tried man.
+
+Naturally I derided his fears which he, more or less, confided to me.  He
+had a certain regard for my judgment, and a certain respect, not for my
+moral qualities, however, but for the good terms I was supposed to be on
+with the Dutch “authorities.”  I knew for a fact that his greatest
+bugbear, the Governor of Banka—a charming, peppery, hearty, retired
+rear-admiral—had a distinct liking for him.  This consoling assurance
+which I used always to put forward, made old Nelson (or Nielsen) brighten
+up for a moment; but in the end he would shake his head doubtfully, as
+much as to say that this was all very well, but that there were depths in
+the Dutch official nature which no one but himself had ever fathomed.
+Perfectly ridiculous.
+
+On this occasion I am speaking of, old Nelson was even fretty; for while
+I was trying to entertain him with a very funny and somewhat scandalous
+adventure which happened to a certain acquaintance of ours in Saigon, he
+exclaimed suddenly:
+
+“What the devil he wants to turn up here for!”
+
+Clearly he had not heard a word of the anecdote.  And this annoyed me,
+because the anecdote was really good.  I stared at him.
+
+“Come, come!” I cried.  “Don’t you know what Jasper Allen is turning up
+here for?”
+
+This was the first open allusion I had ever made to the true state of
+affairs between Jasper and his daughter.  He took it very calmly.
+
+“Oh, Freya is a sensible girl!” he murmured absently, his mind’s eye
+obviously fixed on the “authorities.”  No; Freya was no fool.  He was not
+concerned about that.  He didn’t mind it in the least.  The fellow was
+just company for her; he amused the girl; nothing more.
+
+When the perspicacious old chap left off mumbling, all was still in the
+house.  The other two were amusing themselves very quietly, and no doubt
+very heartily.  What more absorbing and less noisy amusement could they
+have found than to plan their future?  Side by side on the verandah they
+must have been looking at the brig, the third party in that fascinating
+game.  Without her there would have been no future.  She was the fortune
+and the home, and the great free world for them.  Who was it that likened
+a ship to a prison?  May I be ignominiously hanged at a yardarm if that’s
+true.  The white sails of that craft were the white wings—pinions, I
+believe, would be the more poetical style—well, the white pinions, of
+their soaring love.  Soaring as regards Jasper.  Freya, being a woman,
+kept a better hold of the mundane connections of this affair.
+
+But Jasper was elevated in the true sense of the word ever since the day
+when, after they had been gazing at the brig in one of those decisive
+silences that alone establish a perfect communion between creatures
+gifted with speech, he proposed that she should share the ownership of
+that treasure with him.  Indeed, he presented the brig to her altogether.
+But then his heart was in the brig since the day he bought her in Manilla
+from a certain middle-aged Peruvian, in a sober suit of black broadcloth,
+enigmatic and sententious, who, for all I know, might have stolen her on
+the South American coast, whence he said he had come over to the
+Philippines “for family reasons.”  This “for family reasons” was
+distinctly good.  No true _caballero_ would care to push on inquiries
+after such a statement.
+
+Indeed, Jasper was quite the _caballero_.  The brig herself was then all
+black and enigmatical, and very dirty; a tarnished gem of the sea, or,
+rather, a neglected work of art.  For he must have been an artist, the
+obscure builder who had put her body together on lovely lines out of the
+hardest tropical timber fastened with the purest copper.  Goodness only
+knows in what part of the world she was built.  Jasper himself had not
+been able to ascertain much of her history from his sententious,
+saturnine Peruvian—if the fellow was a Peruvian, and not the devil
+himself in disguise, as Jasper jocularly pretended to believe.  My
+opinion is that she was old enough to have been one of the last pirates,
+a slaver perhaps, or else an opium clipper of the early days, if not an
+opium smuggler.
+
+However that may be, she was as sound as on the day she first took the
+water, sailed like a witch, steered like a little boat, and, like some
+fair women of adventurous life famous in history, seemed to have the
+secret of perpetual youth; so that there was nothing unnatural in Jasper
+Allen treating her like a lover.  And that treatment restored the lustre
+of her beauty.  He clothed her in many coats of the very best white paint
+so skilfully, carefully, artistically put on and kept clean by his
+badgered crew of picked Malays, that no costly enamel such as jewellers
+use for their work could have looked better and felt smoother to the
+touch.  A narrow gilt moulding defined her elegant sheer as she sat on
+the water, eclipsing easily the professional good looks of any pleasure
+yacht that ever came to the East in those days.  For myself, I must say I
+prefer a moulding of deep crimson colour on a white hull.  It gives a
+stronger relief besides being less expensive; and I told Jasper so.  But
+no, nothing less than the best gold-leaf would do, because no decoration
+could be gorgeous enough for the future abode of his Freya.
+
+His feelings for the brig and for the girl were as indissolubly united in
+his heart as you may fuse two precious metals together in one crucible.
+And the flame was pretty hot, I can assure you.  It induced in him a
+fierce inward restlessness both of activity and desire.  Too fine in
+face, with a lateral wave in his chestnut hair, spare, long-limbed, with
+an eager glint in his steely eyes and quick, brusque movements, he made
+me think sometimes of a flashing sword-blade perpetually leaping out of
+the scabbard.  It was only when he was near the girl, when he had her
+there to look at, that this peculiarly tense attitude was replaced by a
+grave devout watchfulness of her slightest movements and utterances.  Her
+cool, resolute, capable, good-humoured self-possession seemed to steady
+his heart.  Was it the magic of her face, of her voice, of her glances
+which calmed him so?  Yet these were the very things one must believe
+which had set his imagination ablaze—if love begins in imagination.  But
+I am no man to discuss such mysteries, and it strikes me that we have
+neglected poor old Nelson inflating his cheeks in a state of worry on the
+back verandah.
+
+I pointed out to him that, after all, Jasper was not a very frequent
+visitor.  He and his brig worked hard all over the Archipelago.  But all
+old Nelson said, and he said it uneasily, was:
+
+“I hope Heemskirk won’t turn up here while the brig’s about.”
+
+Getting up a scare about Heemskirk now!  Heemskirk! . . . Really, one
+hadn’t the patience—
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+FOR, pray, who was Heemskirk?  You shall see at once how unreasonable
+this dread of Heemskirk. . . . Certainly, his nature was malevolent
+enough.  That was obvious, directly you heard him laugh.  Nothing gives
+away more a man’s secret disposition than the unguarded ring of his
+laugh.  But, bless my soul! if we were to start at every evil guffaw like
+a hare at every sound, we shouldn’t be fit for anything but the solitude
+of a desert, or the seclusion of a hermitage.  And even there we should
+have to put up with the unavoidable company of the devil.
+
+However, the devil is a considerable personage, who has known better days
+and has moved high up in the hierarchy of Celestial Host; but in the
+hierarchy of mere earthly Dutchmen, Heemskirk, whose early days could not
+have been very splendid, was merely a naval officer forty years of age,
+of no particular connections or ability to boast of.  He was commanding
+the _Neptun_, a little gunboat employed on dreary patrol duty up and down
+the Archipelago, to look after the traders.  Not a very exalted position
+truly.  I tell you, just a common middle-aged lieutenant of some
+twenty-five years’ service and sure to be retired before long—that’s all.
+
+He never bothered his head very much as to what was going on in the Seven
+Isles group till he learned from some talk in Mintok or Palembang, I
+suppose, that there was a pretty girl living there.  Curiosity, I
+presume, caused him to go poking around that way, and then, after he had
+once seen Freya, he made a practice of calling at the group whenever he
+found himself within half a day’s steaming from it.
+
+I don’t mean to say that Heemskirk was a typical Dutch naval officer.  I
+have seen enough of them not to fall into that absurd mistake.  He had a
+big, clean-shaven face; great flat, brown cheeks, with a thin, hooked
+nose and a small, pursy mouth squeezed in between.  There were a few
+silver threads in his black hair, and his unpleasant eyes were nearly
+black, too.  He had a surly way of casting side glances without moving
+his head, which was set low on a short, round neck.  A thick, round trunk
+in a dark undress jacket with gold shoulder-straps, was sustained by a
+straddly pair of thick, round legs, in white drill trousers.  His round
+skull under a white cap looked as if it were immensely thick too, but
+there were brains enough in it to discover and take advantage maliciously
+of poor old Nelson’s nervousness before everything that was invested with
+the merest shred of authority.
+
+Heemskirk would land on the point and perambulate silently every part of
+the plantation as if the whole place belonged to him, before he went to
+the house.  On the verandah he would take the best chair, and would stay
+for tiffin or dinner, just simply stay on, without taking the trouble to
+invite himself by so much as a word.
+
+He ought to have been kicked, if only for his manner to Miss Freya.  Had
+he been a naked savage, armed with spears and poisoned arrows, old Nelson
+(or Nielsen) would have gone for him with his bare fists.  But these gold
+shoulder-straps—Dutch shoulder-straps at that—were enough to terrify the
+old fellow; so he let the beggar treat him with heavy contempt, devour
+his daughter with his eyes, and drink the best part of his little stock
+of wine.
+
+I saw something of this, and on one occasion I tried to pass a remark on
+the subject.  It was pitiable to see the trouble in old Nelson’s round
+eyes.  At first he cried out that the lieutenant was a good friend of
+his; a very good fellow.  I went on staring at him pretty hard, so that
+at last he faltered, and had to own that, of course, Heemskirk was not a
+very genial person outwardly, but all the same at bottom. . . .
+
+“I haven’t yet met a genial Dutchman out here,” I interrupted.
+“Geniality, after all, is not of much consequence, but don’t you see—”
+
+Nelson looked suddenly so frightened at what I was going to say that I
+hadn’t the heart to go on.  Of course, I was going to tell him that the
+fellow was after his girl.  That just describes it exactly.  What
+Heemskirk might have expected or what he thought he could do, I don’t
+know.  For all I can tell, he might have imagined himself irresistible,
+or have taken Freya for what she was not, on account of her lively,
+assured, unconstrained manner.  But there it is.  He was after that girl.
+Nelson could see it well enough.  Only he preferred to ignore it.  He did
+not want to be told of it.
+
+“All I want is to live in peace and quietness with the Dutch
+authorities,” he mumbled shamefacedly.
+
+He was incurable.  I was sorry for him, and I really think Miss Freya was
+sorry for her father, too.  She restrained herself for his sake, and as
+everything she did she did it simply, unaffectedly, and even good
+humouredly.  No small effort that, because in Heemskirk’s attentions
+there was an insolent touch of scorn, hard to put up with.  Dutchmen of
+that sort are over-bearing to their inferiors, and that officer of the
+king looked upon old Nelson and Freya as quite beneath him in every way.
+
+I can’t say I felt sorry for Freya.  She was not the sort of girl to take
+anything tragically.  One could feel for her and sympathise with her
+difficulty, but she seemed equal to any situation.  It was rather
+admiration she extorted by her competent serenity.  It was only when
+Jasper and Heemskirk were together at the bungalow, as it happened now
+and then, that she felt the strain, and even then it was not for
+everybody to see.  My eyes alone could detect a faint shadow on the
+radiance of her personality.  Once I could not help saying to her
+appreciatively:
+
+“Upon my word you are wonderful.”
+
+She let it pass with a faint smile.
+
+“The great thing is to prevent Jasper becoming unreasonable,” she said;
+and I could see real concern lurking in the quiet depths of her frank
+eyes gazing straight at me.  “You will help to keep him quiet, won’t
+you?”
+
+“Of course, we must keep him quiet,” I declared, understanding very well
+the nature of her anxiety.  “He’s such a lunatic, too, when he’s roused.”
+
+“He is!” she assented, in a soft tone; for it was our joke to speak of
+Jasper abusively.  “But I have tamed him a bit.  He’s quite a good boy
+now.”
+
+“He would squash Heemskirk like a blackbeetle all the same,” I remarked.
+
+“Rather!” she murmured.  “And that wouldn’t do,” she added quickly.
+“Imagine the state poor papa would get into.  Besides, I mean to be
+mistress of the dear brig and sail about these seas, not go off wandering
+ten thousand miles away from here.”
+
+“The sooner you are on board to look after the man and the brig the
+better,” I said seriously.  “They need you to steady them both a bit.  I
+don’t think Jasper will ever get sobered down till he has carried you off
+from this island.  You don’t see him when he is away from you, as I do.
+He’s in a state of perpetual elation which almost frightens me.”
+
+At this she smiled again, and then looked serious.  For it could not be
+unpleasant to her to be told of her power, and she had some sense of her
+responsibility.  She slipped away from me suddenly, because Heemskirk,
+with old Nelson in attendance at his elbow, was coming up the steps of
+the verandah.  Directly his head came above the level of the floor his
+ill-natured black eyes shot glances here and there.
+
+“Where’s your girl, Nelson?” he asked, in a tone as if every soul in the
+world belonged to him.  And then to me: “The goddess has flown, eh?”
+
+Nelson’s Cove—as we used to call it—was crowded with shipping that day.
+There was first my steamer, then the _Neptun_ gunboat further out, and
+the _Bonito_, brig, anchored as usual so close inshore that it looked as
+if, with a little skill and judgment, one could shy a hat from the
+verandah on to her scrupulously holystoned quarter-deck.  Her brasses
+flashed like gold, her white body-paint had a sheen like a satin robe.
+The rake of her varnished spars and the big yards, squared to a hair,
+gave her a sort of martial elegance.  She was a beauty.  No wonder that
+in possession of a craft like that and the promise of a girl like Freya,
+Jasper lived in a state of perpetual elation fit, perhaps, for the
+seventh heaven, but not exactly safe in a world like ours.
+
+I remarked politely to Heemskirk that, with three guests in the house,
+Miss Freya had no doubt domestic matters to attend to.  I knew, of
+course, that she had gone to meet Jasper at a certain cleared spot on the
+banks of the only stream on Nelson’s little island.  The commander of the
+_Neptun_ gave me a dubious black look, and began to make himself at home,
+flinging his thick, cylindrical carcass into a rocking-chair, and
+unbuttoning his coat.  Old Nelson sat down opposite him in a most
+unassuming manner, staring anxiously with his round eyes and fanning
+himself with his hat.  I tried to make conversation to while the time
+away; not an easy task with a morose, enamoured Dutchman constantly
+looking from one door to another and answering one’s advances either with
+a jeer or a grunt.
+
+However, the evening passed off all right.  Luckily, there is a degree of
+bliss too intense for elation.  Jasper was quiet and concentrated
+silently in watching Freya.  As we went on board our respective ships I
+offered to give his brig a tow out next morning.  I did it on purpose to
+get him away at the earliest possible moment.  So in the first cold light
+of the dawn we passed by the gunboat lying black and still without a
+sound in her at the mouth of the glassy cove.  But with tropical
+swiftness the sun had climbed twice its diameter above the horizon before
+we had rounded the reef and got abreast of the point.  On the biggest
+boulder there stood Freya, all in white and, in her helmet, like a
+feminine and martial statue with a rosy face, as I could see very well
+with my glasses.  She fluttered an expressive handkerchief, and Jasper,
+running up the main rigging of the white and warlike brig, waved his hat
+in response.  Shortly afterwards we parted, I to the northward and Jasper
+heading east with a light wind on the quarter, for Banjermassin and two
+other ports, I believe it was, that trip.
+
+This peaceful occasion was the last on which I saw all these people
+assembled together; the charmingly fresh and resolute Freya, the
+innocently round-eyed old Nelson, Jasper, keen, long limbed, lean faced,
+admirably self-contained, in his manner, because inconceivably happy
+under the eyes of his Freya; all three tall, fair, and blue-eyed in
+varied shades, and amongst them the swarthy, arrogant, black-haired
+Dutchman, shorter nearly by a head, and so much thicker than any of them
+that he seemed to be a creature capable of inflating itself, a grotesque
+specimen of mankind from some other planet.
+
+The contrast struck me all at once as we stood in the lighted verandah,
+after rising from the dinner-table.  I was fascinated by it for the rest
+of the evening, and I remember the impression of something funny and
+ill-omened at the same time in it to this day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+A FEW weeks later, coming early one morning into Singapore, from a
+journey to the southward, I saw the brig lying at anchor in all her usual
+symmetry and splendour of aspect as though she had been taken out of a
+glass case and put delicately into the water that very moment.
+
+She was well out in the roadstead, but I steamed in and took up my
+habitual berth close in front of the town.  Before we had finished
+breakfast a quarter-master came to tell me that Captain Allen’s boat was
+coming our way.
+
+His smart gig dashed alongside, and in two bounds he was up our
+accommodation-ladder and shaking me by the hand with his nervous grip,
+his eyes snapping inquisitively, for he supposed I had called at the
+Seven Isles group on my way.  I reached into my pocket for a nicely
+folded little note, which he grabbed out of my hand without ceremony and
+carried off on the bridge to read by himself.  After a decent interval I
+followed him up there, and found him pacing to and fro; for the nature of
+his emotions made him restless even in his most thoughtful moments.
+
+He shook his head at me triumphantly.
+
+“Well, my dear boy,” he said, “I shall be counting the days now.”
+
+I understood what he meant.  I knew that those young people had settled
+already on a runaway match without official preliminaries.  This was
+really a logical decision.  Old Nelson (or Nielsen) would never have
+agreed to give up Freya peaceably to this compromising Jasper.  Heavens!
+What would the Dutch authorities say to such a match!  It sounds too
+ridiculous for words.  But there’s nothing in the world more selfishly
+hard than a timorous man in a fright about his “little estate,” as old
+Nelson used to call it in apologetic accents.  A heart permeated by a
+particular sort of funk is proof against sense, feeling, and ridicule.
+It’s a flint.
+
+Jasper would have made his request all the same and then taken his own
+way; but it was Freya who decided that nothing should be said, on the
+ground that, “Papa would only worry himself to distraction.”  He was
+capable of making himself ill, and then she wouldn’t have the heart to
+leave him.  Here you have the sanity of feminine outlook and the
+frankness of feminine reasoning.  And for the rest, Miss Freya could read
+“poor dear papa” in the way a woman reads a man—like an open book.  His
+daughter once gone, old Nelson would not worry himself.  He would raise a
+great outcry, and make no end of lamentable fuss, but that’s not the same
+thing.  The real agonies of indecision, the anguish of conflicting
+feelings would be spared to him.  And as he was too unassuming to rage,
+he would, after a period of lamentation, devote himself to his “little
+estate,” and to keeping on good terms with the authorities.
+
+Time would do the rest.  And Freya thought she could afford to wait,
+while ruling over her own home in the beautiful brig and over the man who
+loved her.  This was the life for her who had learned to walk on a ship’s
+deck.  She was a ship-child, a sea-girl if ever there was one.  And of
+course she loved Jasper and trusted him; but there was a shade of anxiety
+in her pride.  It is very fine and romantic to possess for your very own
+a finely tempered and trusty sword-blade, but whether it is the best
+weapon to counter with the common cudgel-play of Fate—that’s another
+question.
+
+She knew that she had the more substance of the two—you needn’t try any
+cheap jokes, I am not talking of their weights.  She was just a little
+anxious while he was away, and she had me who, being a tried confidant,
+took the liberty to whisper frequently “The sooner the better.”  But
+there was a peculiar vein of obstinacy in Miss Freya, and her reason for
+delay was characteristic.  “Not before my twenty-first birthday; so that
+there shall be no mistake in people’s minds as to me being old enough to
+know what I am doing.”
+
+Jasper’s feelings were in such subjection that he had never even
+remonstrated against the decree.  She was just splendid, whatever she did
+or said, and there was an end of it for him.  I believe that he was
+subtle enough to be even flattered at bottom—at times.  And then to
+console him he had the brig which seemed pervaded by the spirit of Freya,
+since whatever he did on board was always done under the supreme sanction
+of his love.
+
+“Yes.  I’ll soon begin to count the days,” he repeated.  “Eleven months
+more.  I’ll have to crowd three trips into that.”
+
+“Mind you don’t come to grief trying to do too much,” I admonished him.
+But he dismissed my caution with a laugh and an elated gesture.  Pooh!
+Nothing, nothing could happen to the brig, he cried, as if the flame of
+his heart could light up the dark nights of uncharted seas, and the image
+of Freya serve for an unerring beacon amongst hidden shoals; as if the
+winds had to wait on his future, the stars fight for it in their courses;
+as if the magic of his passion had the power to float a ship on a drop of
+dew or sail her through the eye of a needle—simply because it was her
+magnificent lot to be the servant of a love so full of grace as to make
+all the ways of the earth safe, resplendent, and easy.
+
+“I suppose,” I said, after he had finished laughing at my innocent enough
+remark, “I suppose you will be off to-day.”
+
+That was what he meant to do.  He had not gone at daylight only because
+he expected me to come in.
+
+“And only fancy what has happened yesterday,” he went on.  “My mate left
+me suddenly.  Had to.  And as there’s nobody to be found at a short
+notice I am going to take Schultz with me.  The notorious Schultz!  Why
+don’t you jump out of your skin?  I tell you I went and unearthed Schultz
+late last evening, after no end of trouble.  ‘I am your man, captain,’ he
+says, in that wonderful voice of his, ‘but I am sorry to confess I have
+practically no clothes to my back.  I have had to sell all my wardrobe to
+get a little food from day to day.’  What a voice that man has got.  Talk
+about moving stones!  But people seem to get used to it.  I had never
+seen him before, and, upon my word, I felt suddenly tears rising to my
+eyes.  Luckily it was dusk.  He was sitting very quiet under a tree in a
+native compound as thin as a lath, and when I peered down at him all he
+had on was an old cotton singlet and a pair of ragged pyjamas.  I bought
+him six white suits and two pairs of canvas shoes.  Can’t clear the ship
+without a mate.  Must have somebody.  I am going on shore presently to
+sign him on, and I shall take him with me as I go back on board to get
+under way.  Now, I am a lunatic—am I not?  Mad, of course.  Come on!  Lay
+it on thick.  Let yourself go.  I like to see you get excited.”
+
+He so evidently expected me to scold that I took especial pleasure in
+exaggerating the calmness of my attitude.
+
+“The worst that can be brought up against Schultz,” I began, folding my
+arms and speaking dispassionately, “is an awkward habit of stealing the
+stores of every ship he has ever been in.  He will do it.  That’s really
+all that’s wrong.  I don’t credit absolutely that story Captain Robinson
+tells of Schultz conspiring in Chantabun with some ruffians in a Chinese
+junk to steal the anchor off the starboard bow of the _Bohemian Girl_
+schooner.  Robinson’s story is too ingenious altogether.  That other tale
+of the engineers of the _Nan-Shan_ finding Schultz at midnight in the
+engine-room busy hammering at the brass bearings to carry them off for
+sale on shore seems to me more authentic.  Apart from this little
+weakness, let me tell you that Schultz is a smarter sailor than many who
+never took a drop of drink in their lives, and perhaps no worse morally
+than some men you and I know who have never stolen the value of a penny.
+He may not be a desirable person to have on board one’s ship, but since
+you have no choice he may be made to do, I believe.  The important thing
+is to understand his psychology.  Don’t give him any money till you have
+done with him.  Not a cent, if he begs ever so.  For as sure as Fate the
+moment you give him any money he will begin to steal.  Just remember
+that.”
+
+I enjoyed Jasper’s incredulous surprise.
+
+“The devil he will!” he cried.  “What on earth for?  Aren’t you trying to
+pull my leg, old boy?”
+
+“No.  I’m not.  You must understand Schultz’s psychology.  He’s neither a
+loafer nor a cadger.  He’s not likely to wander about looking for
+somebody to stand him drinks.  But suppose he goes on shore with five
+dollars, or fifty for that matter, in his pocket?  After the third or
+fourth glass he becomes fuddled and charitable.  He either drops his
+money all over the place, or else distributes the lot around; gives it to
+any one who will take it.  Then it occurs to him that the night is young
+yet, and that he may require a good many more drinks for himself and his
+friends before morning.  So he starts off cheerfully for his ship.  His
+legs never get affected nor his head either in the usual way.  He gets
+aboard and simply grabs the first thing that seems to him suitable—the
+cabin lamp, a coil of rope, a bag of biscuits, a drum of oil—and converts
+it into money without thinking twice about it.  This is the process and
+no other.  You have only to look out that he doesn’t get a start.  That’s
+all.”
+
+“Confound his psychology,” muttered Jasper.  “But a man with a voice like
+his is fit to talk to the angels.  Is he incurable do you think?”
+
+I said that I thought so.  Nobody had prosecuted him yet, but no one
+would employ him any longer.  His end would be, I feared, to starve in
+some hole or other.
+
+“Ah, well,” reflected Jasper.  “The _Bonito_ isn’t trading to any ports
+of civilisation.  That’ll make it easier for him to keep straight.”
+
+That was true.  The brig’s business was on uncivilised coasts, with
+obscure rajahs dwelling in nearly unknown bays; with native settlements
+up mysterious rivers opening their sombre, forest-lined estuaries among a
+welter of pale green reefs and dazzling sand-banks, in lonely straits of
+calm blue water all aglitter with sunshine.  Alone, far from the beaten
+tracks, she glided, all white, round dark, frowning headlands, stole out,
+silent like a ghost, from behind points of land stretching out all black
+in the moonlight; or lay hove-to, like a sleeping sea-bird, under the
+shadow of some nameless mountain waiting for a signal.  She would be
+glimpsed suddenly on misty, squally days dashing disdainfully aside the
+short aggressive waves of the Java Sea; or be seen far, far away, a tiny
+dazzling white speck flying across the brooding purple masses of
+thunderclouds piled up on the horizon.  Sometimes, on the rare mail
+tracks, where civilisation brushes against wild mystery, when the naïve
+passengers crowding along the rail exclaimed, pointing at her with
+interest: “Oh, here’s a yacht!” the Dutch captain, with a hostile glance,
+would grunt contemptuously: “Yacht!  No!  That’s only English Jasper.  A
+pedlar—”
+
+“A good seaman you say,” ejaculated Jasper, still in the matter of the
+hopeless Schultz with the wonderfully touching voice.
+
+“First rate.  Ask any one.  Quite worth having—only impossible,” I
+declared.
+
+“He shall have his chance to reform in the brig,” said Jasper, with a
+laugh.  “There will be no temptations either to drink or steal where I am
+going to this time.”
+
+I didn’t press him for anything more definite on that point.  In fact,
+intimate as we were, I had a pretty clear notion of the general run of
+his business.
+
+But as we are going ashore in his gig he asked suddenly: “By the way, do
+you know where Heemskirk is?”
+
+I eyed him covertly, and was reassured.  He had asked the question, not
+as a lover, but as a trader.  I told him that I had heard in Palembang
+that the _Neptun_ was on duty down about Flores and Sumbawa.  Quite out
+of his way.  He expressed his satisfaction.
+
+“You know,” he went on, “that fellow, when he gets on the Borneo coast,
+amuses himself by knocking down my beacons.  I have had to put up a few
+to help me in and out of the rivers.  Early this year a Celebes trader
+becalmed in a prau was watching him at it.  He steamed the gunboat full
+tilt at two of them, one after another, smashing them to pieces, and then
+lowered a boat on purpose to pull out a third, which I had a lot of
+trouble six months ago to stick up in the middle of a mudflat for a tide
+mark.  Did you ever hear of anything more provoking—eh?”
+
+“I wouldn’t quarrel with the beggar,” I observed casually, yet disliking
+that piece of news strongly.  “It isn’t worth while.”
+
+“I quarrel?” cried Jasper.  “I don’t want to quarrel.  I don’t want to
+hurt a single hair of his ugly head.  My dear fellow, when I think of
+Freya’s twenty-first birthday, all the world’s my friend, Heemskirk
+included.  It’s a nasty, spiteful amusement, all the same.”
+
+We parted rather hurriedly on the quay, each of us having his own
+pressing business to attend to.  I would have been very much cut up had I
+known that this hurried grasp of the hand with “So long, old boy.  Good
+luck to you!” was the last of our partings.
+
+On his return to the Straits I was away, and he was gone again before I
+got back.  He was trying to achieve three trips before Freya’s
+twenty-first birthday.  At Nelson’s Cove I missed him again by only a
+couple of days.  Freya and I talked of “that lunatic” and “perfect idiot”
+with great delight and infinite appreciation.  She was very radiant, with
+a more pronounced gaiety, notwithstanding that she had just parted from
+Jasper.  But this was to be their last separation.
+
+“Do get aboard as soon as you can, Miss Freya,” I entreated.
+
+She looked me straight in the face, her colour a little heightened and
+with a sort of solemn ardour—if there was a little catch in her voice.
+
+“The very next day.”
+
+Ah, yes!  The very next day after her twenty-first birthday.  I was
+pleased at this hint of deep feeling.  It was as if she had grown
+impatient at last of the self-imposed delay.  I supposed that Jasper’s
+recent visit had told heavily.
+
+“That’s right,” I said approvingly.  “I shall be much easier in my mind
+when I know you have taken charge of that lunatic.  Don’t you lose a
+minute.  He, of course, will be on time—unless heavens fall.”
+
+“Yes.  Unless—” she repeated in a thoughtful whisper, raising her eyes to
+the evening sky without a speck of cloud anywhere.  Silent for a time, we
+let our eyes wander over the waters below, looking mysteriously still in
+the twilight, as if trustfully composed for a long, long dream in the
+warm, tropical night.  And the peace all round us seemed without limits
+and without end.
+
+And then we began again to talk Jasper over in our usual strain.  We
+agreed that he was too reckless in many ways.  Luckily, the brig was
+equal to the situation.  Nothing apparently was too much for her.  A
+perfect darling of a ship, said Miss Freya.  She and her father had spent
+an afternoon on board.  Jasper had given them some tea.  Papa was grumpy.
+. . . I had a vision of old Nelson under the brig’s snowy awnings,
+nursing his unassuming vexation, and fanning himself with his hat.  A
+comedy father. . . . As a new instance of Jasper’s lunacy, I was told
+that he was distressed at his inability to have solid silver handles
+fitted to all the cabin doors.  “As if I would have let him!” commented
+Miss Freya, with amused indignation.  Incidentally, I learned also that
+Schultz, the nautical kleptomaniac with the pathetic voice, was still
+hanging on to his job, with Miss Freya’s approval.  Jasper had confided
+to the lady of his heart his purpose of straightening out the fellow’s
+psychology.  Yes, indeed.  All the world was his friend because it
+breathed the same air with Freya.
+
+Somehow or other, I brought Heemskirk’s name into conversation, and, to
+my great surprise, startled Miss Freya.  Her eyes expressed something
+like distress, while she bit her lip as if to contain an explosion of
+laughter.  Oh!  Yes.  Heemskirk was at the bungalow at the same time with
+Jasper, but he arrived the day after.  He left the same day as the brig,
+but a few hours later.
+
+“What a nuisance he must have been to you two,” I said feelingly.
+
+Her eyes flashed at me a sort of frightened merriment, and suddenly she
+exploded into a clear burst of laughter.  “Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+I echoed it heartily, but not with the game charming tone: “Ha, ha, ha!
+. . . Isn’t he grotesque?  Ha, ha, ha!”  And the ludicrousness of old
+Nelson’s inanely fierce round eyes in association with his conciliatory
+manner to the lieutenant presenting itself to my mind brought on another
+fit.
+
+“He looks,” I spluttered, “he looks—Ha, ha, ha!—amongst you three . . .
+like an unhappy black-beetle.  Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+She gave out another ringing peal, ran off into her own room, and slammed
+the door behind her, leaving me profoundly astounded.  I stopped laughing
+at once.
+
+“What’s the joke?” asked old Nelson’s voice, half way down the steps.
+
+He came up, sat down, and blew out his cheeks, looking inexpressibly
+fatuous.  But I didn’t want to laugh any more.  And what on earth, I
+asked myself, have we been laughing at in this uncontrollable fashion.  I
+felt suddenly depressed.
+
+Oh, yes.  Freya had started it.  The girl’s overwrought, I thought.  And
+really one couldn’t wonder at it.
+
+I had no answer to old Nelson’s question, but he was too aggrieved at
+Jasper’s visit to think of anything else.  He as good as asked me whether
+I wouldn’t undertake to hint to Jasper that he was not wanted at the
+Seven Isles group.  I declared that it was not necessary.  From certain
+circumstances which had come to my knowledge lately, I had reason to
+think that he would not be much troubled by Jasper Allen in the future.
+
+He emitted an earnest “Thank God!” which nearly set me laughing again,
+but he did not brighten up proportionately.  It seemed Heemskirk had
+taken special pains to make himself disagreeable.  The lieutenant had
+frightened old Nelson very much by expressing a sinister wonder at the
+Government permitting a white man to settle down in that part at all.
+“It is against our declared policy,” he had remarked.  He had also
+charged him with being in reality no better than an Englishman.  He had
+even tried to pick a quarrel with him for not learning to speak Dutch.
+
+“I told him I was too old to learn now,” sighed out old Nelson (or
+Nielsen) dismally.  “He said I ought to have learned Dutch long before.
+I had been making my living in Dutch dependencies.  It was disgraceful of
+me not to speak Dutch, he said.  He was as savage with me as if I had
+been a Chinaman.”
+
+It was plain he had been viciously badgered.  He did not mention how many
+bottles of his best claret he had offered up on the altar of
+conciliation.  It must have been a generous libation.  But old Nelson (or
+Nielsen) was really hospitable.  He didn’t mind that; and I only
+regretted that this virtue should be lavished on the lieutenant-commander
+of the _Neptun_.  I longed to tell him that in all probability he would
+be relieved from Heemskirk’s visitations also.  I did not do so only from
+the fear (absurd, I admit) of arousing some sort of suspicion in his
+mind.  As if with this guileless comedy father such a thing were
+possible!
+
+Strangely enough, the last words on the subject of Heemskirk were spoken
+by Freya, and in that very sense.  The lieutenant was turning up
+persistently in old Nelson’s conversation at dinner.  At last I muttered
+a half audible “Damn the lieutenant.”  I could see that the girl was
+getting exasperated, too.
+
+“And he wasn’t well at all—was he, Freya?” old Nelson went on moaning.
+“Perhaps it was that which made him so snappish, hey, Freya?  He looked
+very bad when he left us so suddenly.  His liver must be in a bad state,
+too.”
+
+“Oh, he will end by getting over it,” said Freya impatiently.  “And do
+leave off worrying about him, papa.  Very likely you won’t see much of
+him for a long time to come.”
+
+The look she gave me in exchange for my discreet smile had no hidden
+mirth in it.  Her eyes seemed hollowed, her face gone wan in a couple of
+hours.  We had been laughing too much.  Overwrought!  Overwrought by the
+approach of the decisive moment.  After all, sincere, courageous, and
+self-reliant as she was, she must have felt both the passion and the
+compunction of her resolve.  The very strength of love which had carried
+her up to that point must have put her under a great moral strain, in
+which there might have been a little simple remorse, too.  For she was
+honest—and there, across the table, sat poor old Nelson (or Nielsen)
+staring at her, round-eyed and so pathetically comic in his fierce aspect
+as to touch the most lightsome heart.
+
+He retired early to his room to soothe himself for a night’s rest by
+perusing his account-books.  We two remained on the verandah for another
+hour or so, but we exchanged only languid phrases on things without
+importance, as though we had been emotionally jaded by our long day’s
+talk on the only momentous subject.  And yet there was something she
+might have told a friend.  But she didn’t.  We parted silently.  She
+distrusted my masculine lack of common sense, perhaps. . . . O!  Freya!
+
+Going down the precipitous path to the landing-stage, I was confronted in
+the shadows of boulders and bushes by a draped feminine figure whose
+appearance startled me at first.  It glided into my way suddenly from
+behind a piece of rock.  But in a moment it occurred to me that it could
+be no one else but Freya’s maid, a half-caste Malacca Portuguese.  One
+caught fleeting glimpses of her olive face and dazzling white teeth about
+the house.  I had observed her at times from a distance, as she sat
+within call under the shade of some fruit trees, brushing and plaiting
+her long raven locks.  It seemed to be the principal occupation of her
+leisure hours.  We had often exchanged nods and smiles—and a few words,
+too.  She was a pretty creature.  And once I had watched her approvingly
+make funny and expressive grimaces behind Heemskirk’s back.  I understood
+(from Jasper) that she was in the secret, like a comedy camerista.  She
+was to accompany Freya on her irregular way to matrimony and “ever after”
+happiness.  Why should she be roaming by night near the cove—unless on
+some love affair of her own—I asked myself.  But there was nobody
+suitable within the Seven Isles group, as far as I knew.  It flashed upon
+me that it was myself she had been lying in wait for.
+
+She hesitated, muffled from head to foot, shadowy and bashful.  I
+advanced another pace, and how I felt is nobody’s business.
+
+“What is it?” I asked, very low.
+
+“Nobody knows I am here,” she whispered.
+
+“And nobody can see us,” I whispered back.
+
+The murmur of words “I’ve been so frightened” reached me.  Just then
+forty feet above our head, from the yet lighted verandah, unexpected and
+startling, Freya’s voice rang out in a clear, imperious call:
+
+“Antonia!”
+
+With a stifled exclamation, the hesitating girl vanished out of the path.
+A bush near by rustled; then silence.  I waited wondering.  The lights on
+the verandah went out.  I waited a while longer then continued down the
+path to my boat, wondering more than ever.
+
+I remember the occurrences of that visit especially, because this was the
+last time I saw the Nelson bungalow.  On arriving at the Straits I found
+cable messages which made it necessary for me to throw up my employment
+at a moment’s notice and go home at once.  I had a desperate scramble to
+catch the mailboat which was due to leave next day, but I found time to
+write two short notes, one to Freya, the other to Jasper.  Later on I
+wrote at length, this time to Allen alone.  I got no answer.  I hunted up
+then his brother, or, rather, half-brother, a solicitor in the city, a
+sallow, calm, little man who looked at me over his spectacles
+thoughtfully.
+
+Jasper was the only child of his father’s second marriage, a transaction
+which had failed to commend itself to the first, grown-up family.
+
+“You haven’t heard for ages,” I repeated, with secret annoyance.  “May I
+ask what ‘for ages’ means in this connection?”
+
+“It means that I don’t care whether I ever hear from him or not,”
+retorted the little man of law, turning nasty suddenly.
+
+I could not blame Jasper for not wasting his time in correspondence with
+such an outrageous relative.  But why didn’t he write to me—a decent sort
+of friend, after all; enough of a friend to find for his silence the
+excuse of forgetfulness natural to a state of transcendental bliss?  I
+waited indulgently, but nothing ever came.  And the East seemed to drop
+out of my life without an echo, like a stone falling into a well of
+prodigious depth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+I SUPPOSE praiseworthy motives are a sufficient justification almost for
+anything.  What could be more commendable in the abstract than a girl’s
+determination that “poor papa” should not be worried, and her anxiety
+that the man of her choice should be kept by any means from every
+occasion of doing something rash, something which might endanger the
+whole scheme of their happiness?
+
+Nothing could be more tender and more prudent.  We must also remember the
+girl’s self-reliant temperament, and the general unwillingness of women—I
+mean women of sense—to make a fuss over matters of that sort.
+
+As has been said already, Heemskirk turned up some time after Jasper’s
+arrival at Nelson’s Cove.  The sight of the brig lying right under the
+bungalow was very offensive to him.  He did not fly ashore before his
+anchor touched the ground as Jasper used to do.  On the contrary, he hung
+about his quarter-deck mumbling to himself; and when he ordered his boat
+to be manned it was in an angry voice.  Freya’s existence, which lifted
+Jasper out of himself into a blissful elation, was for Heemskirk a cause
+of secret torment, of hours of exasperated brooding.
+
+While passing the brig he hailed her harshly and asked if the master was
+on board.  Schultz, smart and neat in a spotless white suit, leaned over
+the taffrail, finding the question somewhat amusing.  He looked
+humorously down into Heemskirk’s boat, and answered, in the most amiable
+modulations of his beautiful voice: “Captain Allen is up at the house,
+sir.”  But his expression changed suddenly at the savage growl: “What the
+devil are you grinning at?” which acknowledged that information.
+
+He watched Heemskirk land and, instead of going to the house, stride away
+by another path into the grounds.
+
+The desire-tormented Dutchman found old Nelson (or Nielsen) at his
+drying-sheds, very busy superintending the manipulation of his tobacco
+crop, which, though small, was of excellent quality, and enjoying himself
+thoroughly.  But Heemskirk soon put a stop to this simple happiness.  He
+sat down by the old chap, and by the sort of talk which he knew was best
+calculated for the purpose, reduced him before long to a state of
+concealed and perspiring nervousness.  It was a horrid talk of
+“authorities,” and old Nelson tried to defend himself.  If he dealt with
+English traders it was because he had to dispose of his produce somehow.
+He was as conciliatory as he knew how to be, and this very thing seemed
+to excite Heemskirk, who had worked himself up into a heavily breathing
+state of passion.
+
+“And the worst of them all is that Allen,” he growled.  “Your particular
+friend—eh?  You have let in a lot of these Englishmen into this part.
+You ought never to have been allowed to settle here.  Never.  What’s he
+doing here now?”
+
+Old Nelson (or Nielsen), becoming very agitated, declared that Jasper
+Allen was no particular friend of his.  No friend at all—at all.  He had
+bought three tons of rice from him to feed his workpeople on.  What sort
+of evidence of friendship was that?  Heemskirk burst out at last with the
+thought that had been gnawing at his vitals:
+
+“Yes.  Sell three tons of rice and flirt three days with that girl of
+yours.  I am speaking to you as a friend, Nielsen.  This won’t do.  You
+are only on sufferance here.”
+
+Old Nelson was taken aback at first, but recovered pretty quickly.  Won’t
+do!  Certainly!  Of course, it wouldn’t do!  The last man in the world.
+But his girl didn’t care for the fellow, and was too sensible to fall in
+love with any one.  He was very earnest in impressing on Heemskirk his
+own feeling of absolute security.  And the lieutenant, casting doubting
+glances sideways, was yet willing to believe him.
+
+“Much you know about it,” he grunted nevertheless.
+
+“But I do know,” insisted old Nelson, with the greater desperation
+because he wanted to resist the doubts arising in his own mind.  “My own
+daughter!  In my own house, and I not to know!  Come!  It would be a good
+joke, lieutenant.”
+
+“They seem to be carrying on considerably,” remarked Heemskirk moodily.
+“I suppose they are together now,” he added, feeling a pang which changed
+what he meant for a mocking smile into a strange grimace.
+
+The harassed Nelson shook his hand at him.  He was at bottom shocked at
+this insistence, and was even beginning to feel annoyed at the absurdity
+of it.
+
+“Pooh!  Pooh!  I’ll tell you what, lieutenant: you go to the house and
+have a drop of gin-and-bitters before dinner.  Ask for Freya.  I must see
+the last of this tobacco put away for the night, but I’ll be along
+presently.”
+
+Heemskirk was not insensible to this suggestion.  It answered to his
+secret longing, which was not a longing for drink, however.  Old Nelson
+shouted solicitously after his broad back a recommendation to make
+himself comfortable, and that there was a box of cheroots on the
+verandah.
+
+It was the west verandah that old Nelson meant, the one which was the
+living-room of the house, and had split-rattan screens of the very finest
+quality.  The east verandah, sacred to his own privacy, puffing out of
+cheeks, and other signs of perplexed thinking, was fitted with stout
+blinds of sailcloth.  The north verandah was not a verandah at all,
+really.  It was more like a long balcony.  It did not communicate with
+the other two, and could only be approached by a passage inside the
+house.  Thus it had a privacy which made it a convenient place for a
+maiden’s meditations without words, and also for the discourses,
+apparently without sense, which, passing between a young man and a maid,
+become pregnant with a diversity of transcendental meanings.
+
+This north verandah was embowered with climbing plants.  Freya, whose
+room opened out on it, had furnished it as a sort of boudoir for herself,
+with a few cane chairs and a sofa of the same kind.  On this sofa she and
+Jasper sat as close together as is possible in this imperfect world where
+neither can a body be in two places at once nor yet two bodies can be in
+one place at the same time.  They had been sitting together all the
+afternoon, and I won’t say that their talk had been without sense.
+Loving him with a little judicious anxiety lest in his elation he should
+break his heart over some mishap, Freya naturally would talk to him
+soberly.  He, nervous and brusque when away from her, appeared always as
+if overcome by her visibility, by the great wonder of being palpably
+loved.  An old man’s child, having lost his mother early, thrown out to
+sea out of the way while very young, he had not much experience of
+tenderness of any kind.
+
+In this private, foliage-embowered verandah, and at this late hour of the
+afternoon, he bent down a little, and, possessing himself of Freya’s
+hands, was kissing them one after another, while she smiled and looked
+down at his head with the eyes of approving compassion.  At that same
+moment Heemskirk was approaching the house from the north.
+
+Antonia was on the watch on that side.  But she did not keep a very good
+watch.  The sun was setting; she knew that her young mistress and the
+captain of the _Bonito_ were about to separate.  She was walking to and
+fro in the dusky grove with a flower in her hair, and singing softly to
+herself, when suddenly, within a foot of her, the lieutenant appeared
+from behind a tree.  She bounded aside like a startled fawn, but
+Heemskirk, with a lucid comprehension of what she was there for, pounced
+upon her, and, catching her arm, clapped his other thick hand over her
+mouth.
+
+“If you try to make a noise I’ll twist your neck!”
+
+This ferocious figure of speech terrified the girl sufficiently.
+Heemskirk had seen plainly enough on the verandah Freya’s golden head
+with another head very close to it.  He dragged the unresisting maid with
+him by a circuitous way into the compound, where he dismissed her with a
+vicious push in the direction of the cluster of bamboo huts for the
+servants.
+
+She was very much like the faithful camerista of Italian comedy, but in
+her terror she bolted away without a sound from that thick, short,
+black-eyed man with a cruel grip of fingers like a vice.  Quaking all
+over at a distance, extremely scared and half inclined to laugh, she saw
+him enter the house at the back.
+
+The interior of the bungalow was divided by two passages crossing each
+other in the middle.  At that point Heemskirk, by turning his head
+slightly to the left as he passed, secured the evidence of “carrying on”
+so irreconcilable with old Nelson’s assurances that it made him stagger,
+with a rush of blood to his head.  Two white figures, distinct against
+the light, stood in an unmistakable attitude.  Freya’s arms were round
+Jasper’s neck.  Their faces were characteristically superimposed on each
+other, and Heemskirk went on, his throat choked with a sudden rising of
+curses, till on the west verandah he stumbled blindly against a chair and
+then dropped into another as though his legs had been swept from under
+him.  He had indulged too long in the habit of appropriating Freya to
+himself in his thoughts.  “Is that how you entertain your visitors—you . . . ”
+he thought, so outraged that he could not find a sufficiently
+degrading epithet.
+
+Freya struggled a little and threw her head back.
+
+“Somebody has come in,” she whispered.  Jasper, holding her clasped
+closely to his breast, and looking down into her face, suggested
+casually:
+
+“Your father.”
+
+Freya tried to disengage herself, but she had not the heart absolutely to
+push him away with her hands.
+
+“I believe it’s Heemskirk,” she breathed out at him.
+
+He, plunging into her eyes in a quiet rapture, was provoked to a vague
+smile by the sound of the name.
+
+“The ass is always knocking down my beacons outside the river,” he
+murmured.  He attached no other meaning to Heemskirk’s existence; but
+Freya was asking herself whether the lieutenant had seen them.
+
+“Let me go, kid,” she ordered in a peremptory whisper.  Jasper obeyed,
+and, stepping back at once, continued his contemplation of her face under
+another angle.  “I must go and see,” she said to herself anxiously.
+
+She instructed him hurriedly to wait a moment after she was gone and then
+to slip on to the back verandah and get a quiet smoke before he showed
+himself.
+
+“Don’t stay late this evening,” was her last recommendation before she
+left him.
+
+Then Freya came out on the west verandah with her light, rapid step.
+While going through the doorway she managed to shake down the folds of
+the looped-up curtains at the end of the passage so as to cover Jasper’s
+retreat from the bower.  Directly she appeared Heemskirk jumped up as if
+to fly at her.  She paused and he made her an exaggerated low bow.
+
+It irritated Freya.
+
+“Oh!  It’s you, Mr. Heemskirk.  How do you do?”  She spoke in her usual
+tone.  Her face was not plainly visible to him in the dusk of the deep
+verandah.  He dared not trust himself to speak, his rage at what he had
+seen was so great.  And when she added with serenity: “Papa will be
+coming in before long,” he called her horrid names silently, to himself,
+before he spoke with contorted lips.
+
+“I have seen your father already.  We had a talk in the sheds.  He told
+me some very interesting things.  Oh, very—”
+
+Freya sat down.  She thought: “He has seen us, for certain.”  She was not
+ashamed.  What she was afraid of was some foolish or awkward
+complication.  But she could not conceive how much her person had been
+appropriated by Heemskirk (in his thoughts).  She tried to be
+conversational.
+
+“You are coming now from Palembang, I suppose?”
+
+“Eh?  What?  Oh, yes!  I come from Palembang.  Ha, ha, ha!  You know what
+your father said?  He said he was afraid you were having a very dull time
+of it here.”
+
+“And I suppose you are going to cruise in the Moluccas,” continued Freya,
+who wanted to impart some useful information to Jasper if possible.  At
+the same time she was always glad to know that those two men were a few
+hundred miles apart when not under her eye.
+
+Heemskirk growled angrily.
+
+“Yes.  Moluccas,” glaring in the direction of her shadowy figure.  “Your
+father thinks it’s very quiet for you here.  I tell you what, Miss Freya.
+There isn’t such a quiet spot on earth that a woman can’t find an
+opportunity of making a fool of somebody.”
+
+Freya thought: “I mustn’t let him provoke me.”  Presently the Tamil boy,
+who was Nelson’s head servant, came in with the lights.  She addressed
+him at once with voluble directions where to put the lamps, told him to
+bring the tray with the gin and bitters, and to send Antonia into the
+house.
+
+“I will have to leave you to yourself, Mr. Heemskirk, for a while,” she
+said.
+
+And she went to her room to put on another frock.  She made a quick
+change of it because she wished to be on the verandah before her father
+and the lieutenant met again.  She relied on herself to regulate that
+evening’s intercourse between these two.  But Antonia, still scared and
+hysterical, exhibited a bruise on her arm which roused Freya’s
+indignation.
+
+“He jumped on me out of the bush like a tiger,” said the girl, laughing
+nervously with frightened eyes.
+
+“The brute!” thought Freya.  “He meant to spy on us, then.”  She was
+enraged, but the recollection of the thick Dutchman in white trousers
+wide at the hips and narrow at the ankles, with his shoulder-straps and
+black bullet head, glaring at her in the light of the lamps, was so
+repulsively comical that she could not help a smiling grimace.  Then she
+became anxious.  The absurdities of three men were forcing this anxiety
+upon her: Jasper’s impetuosity, her father’s fears, Heemskirk’s
+infatuation.  She was very tender to the first two, and she made up her
+mind to display all her feminine diplomacy.  All this, she said to
+herself, will be over and done with before very long now.
+
+Heemskirk on the verandah, lolling in a chair, his legs extended and his
+white cap reposing on his stomach, was lashing himself into a fury of an
+atrocious character altogether incomprehensible to a girl like Freya.
+His chin was resting on his chest, his eyes gazed stonily at his shoes.
+Freya examined him from behind the curtain.  He didn’t stir.  He was
+ridiculous.  But this absolute stillness was impressive.  She stole back
+along the passage to the east verandah, where Jasper was sitting quietly
+in the dark, doing what he was told, like a good boy.
+
+“Psst,” she hissed.  He was by her side in a moment.
+
+“Yes.  What is it?” he murmured.
+
+“It’s that beetle,” she whispered uneasily.  Under the impression of
+Heemskirk’s sinister immobility she had half a mind to let Jasper know
+that they had been seen.  But she was by no means certain that Heemskirk
+would tell her father—and at any rate not that evening.  She concluded
+rapidly that the safest thing would be to get Jasper out of the way as
+soon as possible.
+
+“What has he been doing?” asked Jasper in a calm undertone.
+
+“Oh, nothing!  Nothing.  He sits there looking cross.  But you know how
+he’s always worrying papa.”
+
+“Your father’s quite unreasonable,” pronounced Jasper judicially.
+
+“I don’t know,” she said in a doubtful tone.  Something of old Nelson’s
+dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since she had to live
+with it day after day.  “I don’t know.  Papa’s afraid of being reduced to
+beggary, as he says, in his old days.  Look here, kid, you had better
+clear out to-morrow, first thing.”
+
+Jasper had hoped for another afternoon with Freya, an afternoon of quiet
+felicity with the girl by his side and his eyes on his brig, anticipating
+a blissful future.  His silence was eloquent with disappointment, and
+Freya understood it very well.  She, too, was disappointed.  But it was
+her business to be sensible.
+
+“We shan’t have a moment to ourselves with that beetle creeping round the
+house,” she argued in a low, hurried voice.  “So what’s the good of your
+staying?  And he won’t go while the brig’s here.  You know he won’t.”
+
+“He ought to be reported for loitering,” murmured Jasper with a vexed
+little laugh.
+
+“Mind you get under way at daylight,” recommended Freya under her breath.
+
+He detained her after the manner of lovers.  She expostulated without
+struggling because it was hard for her to repulse him.  He whispered into
+her ear while he put his arms round her.
+
+“Next time we two meet, next time I hold you like this, it shall be on
+board.  You and I, in the brig—all the world, all the life—”  And then he
+flashed out: “I wonder I can wait!  I feel as if I must carry you off
+now, at once.  I could run with you in my hands—down the path—without
+stumbling—without touching the earth—”
+
+She was still.  She listened to the passion in his voice.  She was saying
+to herself that if she were to whisper the faintest yes, if she were but
+to sigh lightly her consent, he would do it.  He was capable of doing
+it—without touching the earth.  She closed her eyes and smiled in the
+dark, abandoning herself in a delightful giddiness, for an instant, to
+his encircling arm.  But before he could be tempted to tighten his grasp
+she was out of it, a foot away from him and in full possession of
+herself.
+
+That was the steady Freya.  She was touched by the deep sigh which
+floated up to her from the white figure of Jasper, who did not stir.
+
+“You are a mad kid,” she said tremulously.  Then with a change of tone:
+“No one could carry me off.  Not even you.  I am not the sort of girl
+that gets carried off.”  His white form seemed to shrink a little before
+the force of that assertion and she relented.  “Isn’t it enough for you
+to know that you have—that you have carried me away?” she added in a
+tender tone.
+
+He murmured an endearing word, and she continued:
+
+“I’ve promised you—I’ve said I would come—and I shall come of my own free
+will.  You shall wait for me on board.  I shall get up the side—by
+myself, and walk up to you on the deck and say: ‘Here I am, kid.’  And
+then—and then I shall be carried off.  But it will be no man who will
+carry me off—it will be the brig, your brig—our brig. . . . I love the
+beauty!”
+
+She heard an inarticulate sound, something like a moan wrung out by pain
+or delight, and glided away.  There was that other man on the other
+verandah, that dark, surly Dutchman who could make trouble between Jasper
+and her father, bring about a quarrel, ugly words, and perhaps a physical
+collision.  What a horrible situation!  But, even putting aside that
+awful extremity, she shrank from having to live for some three months
+with a wretched, tormented, angry, distracted, absurd man.  And when the
+day came, the day and the hour, what should she do if her father tried to
+detain her by main force—as was, after all, possible?  Could she actually
+struggle with him hand to hand?  But it was of lamentations and
+entreaties that she was really afraid.  Could she withstand them?  What
+an odious, cruel, ridiculous position would that be!
+
+“But it won’t be.  He’ll say nothing,” she thought as she came out
+quickly on the west verandah, and, seeing that Heemskirk did not move,
+sat down on a chair near the doorway and kept her eyes on him.  The
+outraged lieutenant had not changed his attitude; only his cap had fallen
+off his stomach and was lying on the floor.  His thick black eyebrows
+were knitted by a frown, while he looked at her out of the corners of his
+eyes.  And their sideways glance in conjunction with the hooked nose, the
+whole bulky, ungainly, sprawling person, struck Freya as so comically
+moody that, inwardly discomposed as she was, she could not help smiling.
+She did her best to give that smile a conciliatory character.  She did
+not want to provoke Heemskirk needlessly.
+
+And the lieutenant, perceiving that smile, was mollified.  It never
+entered his head that his outward appearance, a naval officer, in
+uniform, could appear ridiculous to that girl of no position—the daughter
+of old Nielsen.  The recollection of her arms round Jasper’s neck still
+irritated and excited him.  “The hussy!” he thought.  “Smiling—eh?
+That’s how you are amusing yourself.  Fooling your father finely, aren’t
+you?  You have a taste for that sort of fun—have you?  Well, we shall
+see—”  He did not alter his position, but on his pursed-up lips there
+also appeared a smile of surly and ill-omened amusement, while his eyes
+returned to the contemplation of his boots.
+
+Freya felt hot with indignation.  She sat radiantly fair in the
+lamplight, her strong, well-shaped hands lying one on top of the other in
+her lap. . . “Odious creature,” she thought.  Her face coloured with
+sudden anger.  “You have scared my maid out of her senses,” she said
+aloud.  “What possessed you?”
+
+He was thinking so deeply of her that the sound of her voice, pronouncing
+these unexpected words, startled him extremely.  He jerked up his head
+and looked so bewildered that Freya insisted impatiently:
+
+“I mean Antonia.  You have bruised her arm.  What did you do it for?”
+
+“Do you want to quarrel with me?” he asked thickly, with a sort of
+amazement.  He blinked like an owl.  He was funny.  Freya, like all
+women, had a keen sense of the ridiculous in outward appearance.
+
+“Well, no; I don’t think I do.”  She could not help herself.  She laughed
+outright, a clear, nervous laugh in which Heemskirk joined suddenly with
+a harsh “Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+Voices and footsteps were heard in the passage, and Jasper, with old
+Nelson, came out.  Old Nelson looked at his daughter approvingly, for he
+liked the lieutenant to be kept in good humour.  And he also joined
+sympathetically in the laugh.  “Now, lieutenant, we shall have some
+dinner,” he said, rubbing his hands cheerily.  Jasper had gone straight
+to the balustrade.  The sky was full of stars, and in the blue velvety
+night the cove below had a denser blackness, in which the riding-lights
+of the brig and of the gunboat glimmered redly, like suspended sparks.
+“Next time this riding-light glimmers down there, I’ll be waiting for her
+on the quarter-deck to come and say ‘Here I am,’” Jasper thought; and his
+heart seemed to grow bigger in his chest, dilated by an oppressive
+happiness that nearly wrung out a cry from him.  There was no wind.  Not
+a leaf below him stirred, and even the sea was but a still uncomplaining
+shadow.  Far away on the unclouded sky the pale lightning, the
+heat-lightning of the tropics, played tremulously amongst the low stars
+in short, faint, mysteriously consecutive flashes, like incomprehensible
+signals from some distant planet.
+
+The dinner passed off quietly.  Freya sat facing her father, calm but
+pale.  Heemskirk affected to talk only to old Nelson.  Jasper’s behaviour
+was exemplary.  He kept his eyes under control, basking in the sense of
+Freya’s nearness, as people bask in the sun without looking up to heaven.
+And very soon after dinner was over, mindful of his instructions, he
+declared that it was time for him to go on board his ship.
+
+Heemskirk did not look up.  Ensconced in the rocking-chair, and puffing
+at a cheroot, he had the air of meditating surlily over some odious
+outbreak.  So at least it seemed to Freya.  Old Nelson said at once:
+“I’ll stroll down with you.”  He had begun a professional conversation
+about the dangers of the New Guinea coast, and wanted to relate to Jasper
+some experience of his own “over there.”  Jasper was such a good
+listener!  Freya made as if to accompany them, but her father frowned,
+shook his head, and nodded significantly towards the immovable Heemskirk
+blotting out smoke with half-closed eyes and protruded lips.  The
+lieutenant must not be left alone.  Take offence, perhaps.
+
+Freya obeyed these signs.  “Perhaps it is better for me to stay,” she
+thought.  Women are not generally prone to review their own conduct,
+still less to condemn it.  The embarrassing masculine absurdities are in
+the main responsible for its ethics.  But, looking at Heemskirk, Freya
+felt regret and even remorse.  His thick bulk in repose suggested the
+idea of repletion, but as a matter of fact he had eaten very little.  He
+had drunk a great deal, however.  The fleshy lobes of his unpleasant big
+ears with deeply folded rims were crimson.  They quite flamed in the
+neighbourhood of the flat, sallow cheeks.  For a considerable time he did
+not raise his heavy brown eyelids.  To be at the mercy of such a creature
+was humiliating; and Freya, who always ended by being frank with herself,
+thought regretfully: “If only I had been open with papa from the first!
+But then what an impossible life he would have led me!”  Yes.  Men were
+absurd in many ways; lovably like Jasper, impracticably like her father,
+odiously like that grotesquely supine creature in the chair.  Was it
+possible to talk him over?  Perhaps it was not necessary?  “Oh!  I can’t
+talk to him,” she thought.  And when Heemskirk, still without looking at
+her, began resolutely to crush his half-smoked cheroot on the
+coffee-tray, she took alarm, glided towards the piano, opened it in
+tremendous haste, and struck the keys before she sat down.
+
+In an instant the verandah, the whole carpetless wooden bungalow raised
+on piles, became filled with an uproarious, confused resonance.  But
+through it all she heard, she felt on the floor the heavy, prowling
+footsteps of the lieutenant moving to and fro at her back.  He was not
+exactly drunk, but he was sufficiently primed to make the suggestions of
+his excited imagination seem perfectly feasible and even clever;
+beautifully, unscrupulously clever.  Freya, aware that he had stopped
+just behind her, went on playing without turning her head.  She played
+with spirit, brilliantly, a fierce piece of music, but when his voice
+reached her she went cold all over.  It was the voice, not the words.
+The insolent familiarity of tone dismayed her to such an extent that she
+could not understand at first what he was saying.  His utterance was
+thick, too.
+
+“I suspected. . . . Of course I suspected something of your little goings
+on.  I am not a child.  But from suspecting to seeing—seeing, you
+understand—there’s an enormous difference.  That sort of thing. . . .
+Come!  One isn’t made of stone.  And when a man has been worried by a
+girl as I have been worried by you, Miss Freya—sleeping and waking, then,
+of course. . . . But I am a man of the world.  It must be dull for you
+here . . . I say, won’t you leave off this confounded playing . . .?”
+
+This last was the only sentence really which she made out.  She shook her
+head negatively, and in desperation put on the loud pedal, but she could
+not make the sound of the piano cover his raised voice.
+
+“Only, I am surprised that you should. . . . An English trading skipper,
+a common fellow.  Low, cheeky lot, infesting these islands.  I would make
+short work of such trash!  While you have here a good friend, a gentleman
+ready to worship at your feet—your pretty feet—an officer, a man of
+family.  Strange, isn’t it?  But what of that!  You are fit for a
+prince.”
+
+Freya did not turn her head.  Her face went stiff with horror and
+indignation.  This adventure was altogether beyond her conception of what
+was possible.  It was not in her character to jump up and run away.  It
+seemed to her, too, that if she did move there was no saying what might
+happen.  Presently her father would be back, and then the other would
+have to leave off.  It was best to ignore—to ignore.  She went on playing
+loudly and correctly, as though she were alone, as if Heemskirk did not
+exist.  That proceeding irritated him.
+
+“Come!  You may deceive your father,” he bawled angrily, “but I am not to
+be made a fool of!  Stop this infernal noise . . . Freya . . . Hey!  You
+Scandinavian Goddess of Love!  Stop!  Do you hear?  That’s what you
+are—of love.  But the heathen gods are only devils in disguise, and
+that’s what you are, too—a deep little devil.  Stop it, I say, or I will
+lift you off that stool!”
+
+Standing behind her, he devoured her with his eyes, from the golden crown
+of her rigidly motionless head to the heels of her shoes, the line of her
+shapely shoulders, the curves of her fine figure swaying a little before
+the keyboard.  She had on a light dress; the sleeves stopped short at the
+elbows in an edging of lace.  A satin ribbon encircled her waist.  In an
+access of irresistible, reckless hopefulness he clapped both his hands on
+that waist—and then the irritating music stopped at last.  But, quick as
+she was in springing away from the contact (the round music-stool going
+over with a crash), Heemskirk’s lips, aiming at her neck, landed a
+hungry, smacking kiss just under her ear.  A deep silence reigned for a
+time.  And then he laughed rather feebly.
+
+He was disconcerted somewhat by her white, still face, the big light
+violet eyes resting on him stonily.  She had not uttered a sound.  She
+faced him, steadying herself on the corner of the piano with one extended
+hand.  The other went on rubbing with mechanical persistency the place
+his lips had touched.
+
+“What’s the trouble?” he said, offended.  “Startled you?  Look here:
+don’t let us have any of that nonsense.  You don’t mean to say a kiss
+frightens you so much as all that. . . . I know better. . . . I don’t
+mean to be left out in the cold.”
+
+He had been gazing into her face with such strained intentness that he
+could no longer see it distinctly.  Everything round him was rather
+misty.  He forgot the overturned stool, caught his foot against it, and
+lurched forward slightly, saying in an ingratiating tone:
+
+“I’m not bad fun, really.  You try a few kisses to begin with—”
+
+He said no more, because his head received a terrific concussion,
+accompanied by an explosive sound.  Freya had swung her round, strong arm
+with such force that the impact of her open palm on his flat cheek turned
+him half round.  Uttering a faint, hoarse yell, the lieutenant clapped
+both his hands to the left side of his face, which had taken on suddenly
+a dusky brick-red tinge.  Freya, very erect, her violet eyes darkened,
+her palm still tingling from the blow, a sort of restrained determined
+smile showing a tiny gleam of her white teeth, heard her father’s rapid,
+heavy tread on the path below the verandah.  Her expression lost its
+pugnacity and became sincerely concerned.  She was sorry for her father.
+She stooped quickly to pick up the music-stool, as if anxious to
+obliterate the traces. . . . But that was no good.  She had resumed her
+attitude, one hand resting lightly on the piano, before old Nelson got up
+to the top of the stairs.
+
+Poor father!  How furious he will be—how upset!  And afterwards, what
+tremors, what unhappiness!  Why had she not been open with him from the
+first?  His round, innocent stare of amazement cut her to the quick.  But
+he was not looking at her.  His stare was directed to Heemskirk, who,
+with his back to him and with his hands still up to his face, was hissing
+curses through his teeth, and (she saw him in profile) glaring at her
+balefully with one black, evil eye.
+
+“What’s the matter?” asked old Nelson, very much bewildered.
+
+She did not answer him.  She thought of Jasper on the deck of the brig,
+gazing up at the lighted bungalow, and she felt frightened.  It was a
+mercy that one of them at least was on board out of the way.  She only
+wished he were a hundred miles off.  And yet she was not certain that she
+did.  Had Jasper been mysteriously moved that moment to reappear on the
+verandah she would have thrown her consistency, her firmness, her
+self-possession, to the winds, and flown into his arms.
+
+“What is it?  What is it?” insisted the unsuspecting Nelson, getting
+quite excited.  “Only this minute you were playing a tune, and—”
+
+Freya, unable to speak in her apprehension of what was coming (she was
+also fascinated by that black, evil, glaring eye), only nodded slightly
+at the lieutenant, as much as to say: “Just look at him!”
+
+“Why, yes!” exclaimed old Nelson.  “I see.  What on earth—”
+
+Meantime he had cautiously approached Heemskirk, who, bursting into
+incoherent imprecations, was stamping with both feet where he stood.  The
+indignity of the blow, the rage of baffled purpose, the ridicule of the
+exposure, and the impossibility of revenge maddened him to a point when
+he simply felt he must howl with fury.
+
+“Oh, oh, oh!” he howled, stamping across the verandah as though he meant
+to drive his foot through the floor at every step.
+
+“Why, is his face hurt?” asked the astounded old Nelson.  The truth
+dawned suddenly upon his innocent mind.  “Dear me!” he cried,
+enlightened.  “Get some brandy, quick, Freya. . . . You are subject to
+it, lieutenant?  Fiendish, eh?  I know, I know!  Used to go crazy all of
+a sudden myself in the time. . . . And the little bottle of laudanum from
+the medicine-chest, too, Freya.  Look sharp. . . . Don’t you see he’s got
+a toothache?”
+
+And, indeed, what other explanation could have presented itself to the
+guileless old Nelson, beholding this cheek nursed with both hands, these
+wild glances, these stampings, this distracted swaying of the body?  It
+would have demanded a preternatural acuteness to hit upon the true cause.
+Freya had not moved.  She watched Heemskirk’s savagely inquiring, black
+stare directed stealthily upon herself.  “Aha, you would like to be let
+off!” she said to herself.  She looked at him unflinchingly, thinking it
+out.  The temptation of making an end of it all without further trouble
+was irresistible.  She gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and
+glided away.
+
+“Hurry up that brandy!” old Nelson shouted, as she disappeared in the
+passage.
+
+Heemskirk relieved his deeper feelings by a sudden string of curses in
+Dutch and English which he sent after her.  He raved to his heart’s
+content, flinging to and fro the verandah and kicking chairs out of his
+way; while Nelson (or Nielsen), whose sympathy was profoundly stirred by
+these evidences of agonising pain, hovered round his dear (and dreaded)
+lieutenant, fussing like an old hen.
+
+“Dear me, dear me!  Is it so bad?  I know well what it is.  I used to
+frighten my poor wife sometimes.  Do you get it often like this,
+lieutenant?”
+
+Heemskirk shouldered him viciously out of his way, with a short, insane
+laugh.  But his staggering host took it in good part; a man beside
+himself with excruciating toothache is not responsible.
+
+“Go into my room, lieutenant,” he suggested urgently.  “Throw yourself on
+my bed.  We will get something to ease you in a minute.”
+
+He seized the poor sufferer by the arm and forced him gently onwards to
+the very bed, on which Heemskirk, in a renewed access of rage, flung
+himself down with such force that he rebounded from the mattress to the
+height of quite a foot.
+
+“Dear me!” exclaimed the scared Nelson, and incontinently ran off to
+hurry up the brandy and the laudanum, very angry that so little alacrity
+was shown in relieving the tortures of his precious guest.  In the end he
+got these things himself.
+
+Half an hour later he stood in the inner passage of the house, surprised
+by faint, spasmodic sounds of a mysterious nature, between laughter and
+sobs.  He frowned; then went straight towards his daughter’s room and
+knocked at the door.
+
+Freya, her glorious fair hair framing her white face and rippling down a
+dark-blue dressing-gown, opened it partly.
+
+The light in the room was dim.  Antonia, crouching in a corner, rocked
+herself backwards and forwards, uttering feeble moans.  Old Nelson had
+not much experience in various kinds of feminine laughter, but he was
+certain there had been laughter there.
+
+“Very unfeeling, very unfeeling!” he said, with weighty displeasure.
+“What is there so amusing in a man being in pain?  I should have thought
+a woman—a young girl—”
+
+“He was so funny,” murmured Freya, whose eyes glistened strangely in the
+semi-obscurity of the passage.  “And then, you know, I don’t like him,”
+she added, in an unsteady voice.
+
+“Funny!” repeated old Nelson, amazed at this evidence of callousness in
+one so young.  “You don’t like him!  Do you mean to say that, because you
+don’t like him, you—Why, it’s simply cruel!  Don’t you know it’s about
+the worst sort of pain there is?  Dogs have been known to go mad with
+it.”
+
+“He certainly seemed to have gone mad,” Freya said with an effort, as if
+she were struggling with some hidden feeling.
+
+But her father was launched.
+
+“And you know how he is.  He notices everything.  He is a fellow to take
+offence for the least little thing—regular Dutchman—and I want to keep
+friendly with him.  It’s like this, my girl: if that rajah of ours were
+to do something silly—and you know he is a sulky, rebellious beggar—and
+the authorities took into their heads that my influence over him wasn’t
+good, you would find yourself without a roof over your head—”
+
+She cried: “What nonsense, father!” in a not very assured tone, and
+discovered that he was angry, angry enough to achieve irony; yes, old
+Nelson (or Nielsen), irony!  Just a gleam of it.
+
+“Oh, of course, if you have means of your own—a mansion, a plantation
+that I know nothing of—”  But he was not capable of sustained irony.  “I
+tell you they would bundle me out of here,” he whispered forcibly;
+“without compensation, of course.  I know these Dutch.  And the
+lieutenant’s just the fellow to start the trouble going.  He has the ear
+of influential officials.  I wouldn’t offend him for anything—for
+anything—on no consideration whatever. . . . What did you say?”
+
+It was only an inarticulate exclamation.  If she ever had a half-formed
+intention of telling him everything she had given it up now.  It was
+impossible, both out of regard for his dignity and for the peace of his
+poor mind.
+
+“I don’t care for him myself very much,” old Nelson’s subdued undertone
+confessed in a sigh.  “He’s easier now,” he went on, after a silence.
+“I’ve given him up my bed for the night.  I shall sleep on my verandah,
+in the hammock.  No; I can’t say I like him either, but from that to
+laugh at a man because he’s driven crazy with pain is a long way.  You’ve
+surprised me, Freya.  That side of his face is quite flushed.”
+
+Her shoulders shook convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her
+paternally.  His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a
+good-night kiss.  She closed the door, and went away from it to the
+middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort of laugh,
+without buoyancy.
+
+“Flushed!  A little flushed!” she repeated to herself.  “I hope so,
+indeed!  A little—”
+
+Her eyelashes were wet.  Antonia, in her corner, moaned and giggled, and
+it was impossible to tell where the moans ended and the giggles began.
+
+The mistress and the maid had been somewhat hysterical, for Freya, on
+fleeing into her room, had found Antonia there, and had told her
+everything.
+
+“I have avenged you, my girl,” she exclaimed.
+
+And then they had laughingly cried and cryingly laughed with
+admonitions—“Ssh, not so loud!  Be quiet!” on one part, and interludes of
+“I am so frightened. . . . He’s an evil man,” on the other.
+
+Antonia was very much afraid of Heemskirk.  She was afraid of him because
+of his personal appearance: because of his eyes and his eyebrows, and his
+mouth and his nose and his limbs.  Nothing could be more rational.  And
+she thought him an evil man, because, to her eyes, he looked evil.  No
+ground for an opinion could be sounder.  In the dimness of the room, with
+only a nightlight burning at the head of Freya’s bed, the camerista crept
+out of her corner to crouch at the feet of her mistress, supplicating in
+whispers:
+
+“There’s the brig.  Captain Allen.  Let us run away at once—oh, let us
+run away!  I am so frightened.  Let us!  Let us!”
+
+“I!  Run away!” thought Freya to herself, without looking down at the
+scared girl.  “Never.”
+
+Both the resolute mistress under the mosquito-net and the frightened maid
+lying curled up on a mat at the foot of the bed did not sleep very well
+that night.  The person that did not sleep at all was Lieutenant
+Heemskirk.  He lay on his back staring vindictively in the darkness.
+Inflaming images and humiliating reflections succeeded each other in his
+mind, keeping up, augmenting his anger.  A pretty tale this to get about!
+But it must not be allowed to get about.  The outrage had to be swallowed
+in silence.  A pretty affair!  Fooled, led on, and struck by the girl—and
+probably fooled by the father, too.  But no.  Nielsen was but another
+victim of that shameless hussy, that brazen minx, that sly, laughing,
+kissing, lying . . .
+
+“No; he did not deceive me on purpose,” thought the tormented lieutenant.
+“But I should like to pay him off, all the same, for being such an
+imbecile—”
+
+Well, some day, perhaps.  One thing he was firmly resolved on: he had
+made up his mind to steal early out of the house.  He did not think he
+could face the girl without going out of his mind with fury.
+
+“Fire and perdition!  Ten thousand devils!  I shall choke here before the
+morning!” he muttered to himself, lying rigid on his back on old Nelson’s
+bed, his breast heaving for air.
+
+He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door.  Faint
+sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he saw Freya
+coming out.  This unexpected sight deprived him of all power to move away
+from the crack of the door.  It was the narrowest crack possible, but
+commanding the view of the end of the verandah.  Freya made for that end
+hastily to watch the brig passing the point.  She wore her dark
+dressing-gown; her feet were bare, because, having fallen asleep towards
+the morning, she ran out headlong in her fear of being too late.
+Heemskirk had never seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back
+smoothly to the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress
+down her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and
+eagerness.  And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his teeth.
+He could not face her at all.  He muttered a curse, and kept still behind
+the door.
+
+With a low, deep-breathed “Ah!” when she first saw the brig already under
+way, she reached for Nelson’s long glass reposing on brackets high up the
+wall.  The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped back, uncovering her
+white arm as far as the shoulder.  Heemskirk gripping the door-handle, as
+if to crush it, felt like a man just risen to his feet from a drinking
+bout.
+
+And Freya knew that he was watching her.  She knew.  She had seen the
+door move as she came out of the passage.  She was aware of his eyes
+being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant contempt.
+
+“You are there,” she thought, levelling the long glass.  “Oh, well, look
+on, then!”
+
+The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was smooth as
+glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which even the brig
+appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east.  Directly Freya had
+made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass directed to the
+bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her beautiful white arms
+above her head.  In that attitude of supreme cry she stood still, glowing
+with the consciousness of Jasper’s adoration going out to her figure held
+in the field of his glass away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of
+evil passion, the burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her
+back.  In the fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with
+that mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to,
+she thought:
+
+“You are looking on—you will—you must!  Then you shall see something.”
+
+She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out, sending a
+kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart along with it on
+the deck of the brig.  Her face was rosy, her eyes shone.  Her repeated,
+passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by the hundred again and again
+and again, while the slowly ascending sun brought the glory of colour to
+the world, turning the islets green, the sea blue, the brig below her
+white—dazzlingly white in the spread of her wings—with the red ensign
+streaming like a tiny flame from the peak.
+
+And each time she murmured with a rising inflexion:
+
+“Take this—and this—and this—” till suddenly her arms fell.  She had seen
+the ensign dipped in response, and next moment the point below hid the
+hull of the brig from her view.  Then she turned away from the
+balustrade, and, passing slowly before the door of her father’s room with
+her eyelids lowered, and an enigmatic expression on her face, she
+disappeared behind the curtain.
+
+But instead of going along the passage, she remained concealed and very
+still on the other side to watch what would happen.  For some time the
+broad, furnished verandah remained empty.  Then the door of old Nelson’s
+room came open suddenly, and Heemskirk staggered out.  His hair was
+rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his unshaven face looked very dark.  He
+gazed wildly about, saw his cap on a table, snatched it up, and made for
+the stairs quietly, but with a strange, tottering gait, like the last
+effort of waning strength.
+
+Shortly after his head had sunk below the level of the floor, Freya came
+out from behind the curtain, with compressed, scheming lips, and no
+softness at all in her luminous eyes.  He could not be allowed to sneak
+off scot free.  Never—never!  She was excited, she tingled all over, she
+had tasted blood!  He must be made to understand that she had been aware
+of having been watched; he must know that he had been seen slinking off
+shamefully.  But to run to the front rail and shout after him would have
+been childish, crude—undignified.  And to shout—what?  What word?  What
+phrase?  No; it was impossible.  Then how? . . . She frowned, discovered
+it, dashed at the piano, which had stood open all night, and made the
+rosewood monster growl savagery in an irritated bass.  She struck chords
+as if firing shots after that straddling, broad figure in ample white
+trousers and a dark uniform jacket with gold shoulder-straps, and then
+she pursued him with the same thing she had played the evening before—a
+modern, fierce piece of love music which had been tried more than once
+against the thunderstorms of the group.  She accentuated its rhythm with
+triumphant malice, so absorbed in her purpose that she did not notice the
+presence of her father, who, wearing an old threadbare ulster of a check
+pattern over his sleeping suit, had run out from the back verandah to
+inquire the reason of this untimely performance.  He stared at her.
+
+“What on earth? . . . Freya!”  His voice was nearly drowned by the piano.
+“What’s become of the lieutenant?” he shouted.
+
+She looked up at him as if her soul were lost in her music, with unseeing
+eyes.
+
+“Gone.”
+
+“Wha-a-t? . . . Where?”
+
+She shook her head slightly, and went on playing louder than before.  Old
+Nelson’s innocently anxious gaze starting from the open door of his room,
+explored the whole place high and low, as if the lieutenant were
+something small which might have been crawling on the floor or clinging
+to a wall.  But a shrill whistle coming somewhere from below pierced the
+ample volume of sound rolling out of the piano in great, vibrating waves.
+The lieutenant was down at the cove, whistling for the boat to come and
+take him off to his ship.  And he seemed to be in a terrific hurry, too,
+for he whistled again almost directly, waited for a moment, and then sent
+out a long, interminable, shrill call as distressful to hear as though he
+had shrieked without drawing breath.  Freya ceased playing suddenly.
+
+“Going on board,” said old Nelson, perturbed by the event.  “What could
+have made him clear out so early?  Queer chap.  Devilishly touchy, too!
+I shouldn’t wonder if it was your conduct last night that hurt his
+feelings?  I noticed you, Freya.  You as well as laughed in his face,
+while he was suffering agonies from neuralgia.  It isn’t the way to get
+yourself liked.  He’s offended with you.”
+
+Freya’s hands now reposed passive on the keys; she bowed her fair head,
+feeling a sudden discontent, a nervous lassitude, as though she had
+passed through some exhausting crisis.  Old Nelson (or Nielsen), looking
+aggrieved, was revolving matters of policy in his bald head.
+
+“I think it would be right for me to go on board just to inquire, some
+time this morning,” he declared fussily.  “Why don’t they bring me my
+morning tea?  Do you hear, Freya?  You have astonished me, I must say.  I
+didn’t think a young girl could be so unfeeling.  And the lieutenant
+thinks himself a friend of ours, too!  What?  No?  Well, he calls himself
+a friend, and that’s something to a person in my position.  Certainly!
+Oh, yes, I must go on board.”
+
+“Must you?” murmured Freya listlessly; then added, in her thought: “Poor
+man!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+IN respect of the next seven weeks, all that is necessary to say is,
+first, that old Nelson (or Nielsen) failed in paying his politic call.
+The _Neptun_ gunboat of H.M. the King of the Netherlands, commanded by an
+outraged and infuriated lieutenant, left the cove at an unexpectedly
+early hour.  When Freya’s father came down to the shore, after seeing his
+precious crop of tobacco spread out properly in the sun, she was already
+steaming round the point.  Old Nelson regretted the circumstance for many
+days.
+
+“Now, I don’t know in what disposition the man went away,” he lamented to
+his hard daughter.  He was amazed at her hardness.  He was almost
+frightened by her indifference.
+
+Next, it must be recorded that the same day the gunboat _Neptun_,
+steering east, passed the brig _Bonito_ becalmed in sight of Carimata,
+with her head to the eastward, too.  Her captain, Jasper Allen, giving
+himself up consciously to a tender, possessive reverie of his Freya, did
+not get out of his long chair on the poop to look at the _Neptun_ which
+passed so close that the smoke belching out suddenly from her short black
+funnel rolled between the masts of the Bonito, obscuring for a moment the
+sunlit whiteness of her sails, consecrated to the service of love.
+Jasper did not even turn his head for a glance.  But Heemskirk, on the
+bridge, had gazed long and earnestly at the brig from the distance,
+gripping hard the brass rail in front of him, till, the two ships
+closing, he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the
+chartroom, pulled the door to with a crash.  There, his brows knitted,
+his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many
+still hours—a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having
+his very vitals torn by the beak and claws of humiliated passion.
+
+That species of fowl is not to be shooed off as easily as a chicken.
+Fooled, cheated, deceived, led on, outraged, mocked at—beak and claws!  A
+sinister bird!  The lieutenant had no mind to become the talk of the
+Archipelago, as the naval officer who had had his face slapped by a girl.
+Was it possible that she really loved that rascally trader?  He tried not
+to think, but, worse than thoughts, definite impressions beset him in his
+retreat.  He saw her—a vision plain, close to, detailed, plastic,
+coloured, lighted up—he saw her hanging round the neck of that fellow.
+And he shut his eyes, only to discover that this was no remedy.  Then a
+piano began to play near by, very plainly; and he put his fingers to his
+ears with no better effect.  It was not to be borne—not in solitude.  He
+bolted out of the chartroom, and talked of indifferent things somewhat
+wildly with the officer of the watch on the bridge, to the mocking
+accompaniment of a ghostly piano.
+
+The last thing to be recorded is that Lieutenant Heemskirk instead of
+pursuing his course towards Ternate, where he was expected, went out of
+his way to call at Makassar, where no one was looking for his arrival.
+Once there, he gave certain explanations and laid a certain proposal
+before the governor, or some other authority, and obtained permission to
+do what he thought fit in these matters.  Thereupon the _Neptun_, giving
+up Ternate altogether, steamed north in view of the mountainous coast of
+Celebes, and then crossing the broad straits took up her station on the
+low coast of virgin forests, inviolate and mute, in waters phosphorescent
+at night; deep blue in daytime with gleaming green patches over the
+submerged reefs.  For days the _Neptun_ could be seen moving smoothly up
+and down the sombre face of the shore, or hanging about with a watchful
+air near the silvery breaks of broad estuaries, under the great luminous
+sky never softened, never veiled, and flooding the earth with the
+everlasting sunshine of the tropics—that sunshine which, in its unbroken
+splendour, oppresses the soul with an inexpressible melancholy more
+intimate, more penetrating, more profound than the grey sadness of the
+northern mists.
+
+                                . . . . .
+
+The trading brig _Bonito_ appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad
+point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river.  The breath of air
+that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a torch.  She
+stole out into the open from behind a veil of unstirring leaves,
+mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly stealthy in her
+imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in the main rigging, and
+his head leaning against his hand, thought of Freya.  Everything in the
+world reminded him of her.  The beauty of the loved woman exists in the
+beauties of Nature.  The swelling outlines of the hills, the curves of a
+coast, the free sinuosities of a river are less suave than the harmonious
+lines of her body, and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her
+progress suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating
+aspects of the visible world.
+
+Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel—the house of
+his dreams.  He lent to her something of Freya’s soul.  Her deck was the
+foothold of their love.  The possession of his brig appeased his passion
+in a soothing certitude of happiness already conquered.
+
+The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air as
+calm and limpid as the glance of Freya’s eyes.  There was not a sound in
+the brig.
+
+“Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this,” he thought,
+with rapture.
+
+And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under the
+full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea without a
+wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature had assumed its
+most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the gunboat _Neptun_,
+detaching herself from the dark coast under which she had been lying
+invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading brig _Bonito_ standing
+out to sea.
+
+Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush, Schultz,
+of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange agitation.  All that
+day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the river, he had shown a
+haggard face, going about his duties like a man with something weighing
+on his mind.  Jasper had noticed it, but the mate, turning away, as
+though he had not liked being looked at, had muttered shamefacedly of a
+headache and a touch of fever.  He must have had it very badly when,
+dodging behind his captain he wondered aloud: “What can that fellow want
+with us?” . . . A naked man standing in a freezing blast and trying not
+to shiver could not have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation.
+But it might have been fever—a cold fit.
+
+“He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply,” said Jasper, with
+perfect good humour.  “He has tried it on me before.  However, we shall
+soon see.”
+
+And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy hail.
+The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked vaporous and
+sylph-like in the moonlight.  The gunboat, short, squat, with her stumpy
+dark spars naked like dead trees, raised against the luminous sky of that
+resplendent night, threw a heavy shadow on the lane of water between the
+two ships.
+
+Freya haunted them both like an ubiquitous spirit, and as if she were the
+only woman in the world.  Jasper remembered her earnest recommendation to
+be guarded and cautious in all his acts and words while he was away from
+her.  In this quite unforeseen encounter he felt on his ear the very
+breath of these hurried admonitions customary to the last moment of their
+partings, heard the half-jesting final whisper of the “Mind, kid, I’d
+never forgive you!” with a quick pressure on his arm, which he answered
+by a quiet, confident smile.  Heemskirk was haunted in another fashion.
+There were no whispers in it; it was more like visions.  He saw that girl
+hanging round the neck of a low vagabond—that vagabond, the vagabond who
+had just answered his hail.  He saw her stealing bare-footed across a
+verandah with great, clear, wide-open, eager eyes to look at a brig—that
+brig.  If she had shrieked, scolded, called names! . . . But she had
+simply triumphed over him.  That was all.  Led on (he firmly believed
+it), fooled, deceived, outraged, struck, mocked at. . . . Beak and claws!
+The two men, so differently haunted by Freya of the Seven Isles, were not
+equally matched.
+
+In the intense stillness, as of sleep, which had fallen upon the two
+vessels, in a world that itself seemed but a delicate dream, a boat
+pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water came alongside
+the brig.  The white warrant officer in her, perhaps the gunner, climbed
+aboard.  He was a short man, with a rotund stomach and a wheezy voice.
+His immovable fat face looked lifeless in the moonlight, and he walked
+with his thick arms hanging away from his body as though he had been
+stuffed.  His cunning little eyes glittered like bits of mica.  He
+conveyed to Jasper, in broken English, a request to come on board the
+_Neptun_.
+
+Jasper had not expected anything so unusual.  But after a short
+reflection he decided to show neither annoyance, nor even surprise.  The
+river from which he had come had been politically disturbed for a couple
+of years, and he was aware that his visits there were looked upon with
+some suspicion.  But he did not mind much the displeasure of the
+authorities, so terrifying to old Nelson.  He prepared to leave the brig,
+and Schultz followed him to the rail as if to say something, but in the
+end stood by in silence.  Jasper getting over the side, noticed his
+ghastly face.  The eyes of the man who had found salvation in the brig
+from the effects of his peculiar psychology looked at him with a dumb,
+beseeching expression.
+
+“What’s the matter?” Jasper asked.
+
+“I wonder how this will end?” said he of the beautiful voice, which had
+even fascinated the steady Freya herself.  But where was its charming
+timbre now?  These words had sounded like a raven’s croak.
+
+“You are ill,” said Jasper positively.
+
+“I wish I were dead!” was the startling statement uttered by Schultz
+talking to himself in the extremity of some mysterious trouble.  Jasper
+gave him a keen glance, but this was not the time to investigate the
+morbid outbreak of a feverish man.  He did not look as though he were
+actually delirious, and that for the moment must suffice.  Schultz made a
+dart forward.
+
+“That fellow means harm!” he said desperately.  “He means harm to you,
+Captain Allen.  I feel it, and I—”
+
+He choked with inexplicable emotion.
+
+“All right, Schultz.  I won’t give him an opening.”  Jasper cut him short
+and swung himself into the boat.
+
+On board the _Neptun_ Heemskirk, standing straddle-legs in the flood of
+moonlight, his inky shadow falling right across the quarter-deck, made no
+sign at his approach, but secretly he felt something like the heave of
+the sea in his chest at the sight of that man.  Jasper waited before him
+in silence.
+
+Brought face to face in direct personal contact, they fell at once into
+the manner of their casual meetings in old Nelson’s bungalow.  They
+ignored each other’s existence—Heemskirk moodily; Jasper, with a
+perfectly colourless quietness.
+
+“What’s going on in that river you’ve just come out of?” asked the
+lieutenant straight away.
+
+“I know nothing of the troubles, if you mean that,” Jasper answered.
+“I’ve landed there half a cargo of rice, for which I got nothing in
+exchange, and went away.  There’s no trade there now, but they would have
+been starving in another week—if I hadn’t turned up.”
+
+“Meddling!  English meddling!  And suppose the rascals don’t deserve
+anything better than to starve, eh?”
+
+“There are women and children there, you know,” observed Jasper, in his
+even tone.
+
+“Oh, yes!  When an Englishman talks of women and children, you may be
+sure there’s something fishy about the business.  Your doings will have
+to be investigated.”
+
+They spoke in turn, as though they had been disembodied spirits—mere
+voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there had been
+nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as one gives to an
+inanimate object, and no more.  But now a silence fell.  Heemskirk had
+thought, all at once: “She will tell him all about it.  She will tell him
+while she hangs round his neck laughing.”  And the sudden desire to
+annihilate Jasper on the spot almost deprived him of his senses by its
+vehemence.  He lost the power of speech, of vision.  For a moment he
+absolutely couldn’t see Jasper.  But he heard him inquiring, as of the
+world at large:
+
+“Am I, then, to conclude that the brig is detained?”
+
+Heemskirk made a recovery in a flush of malignant satisfaction.
+
+“She is.  I am going to take her to Makassar in tow.”
+
+“The courts will have to decide on the legality of this,” said Jasper,
+aware that the matter was becoming serious, but with assumed
+indifference.
+
+“Oh, yes, the courts!  Certainly.  And as to you, I shall keep you on
+board here.”
+
+Jasper’s dismay at being parted from his ship was betrayed by a stony
+immobility.  It lasted but an instant.  Then he turned away and hailed
+the brig.  Mr. Schultz answered:
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Get ready to receive a tow-rope from the gunboat!  We are going to be
+taken to Makassar.”
+
+“Good God!  What’s that for, sir?” came an anxious cry faintly.
+
+“Kindness, I suppose,” Jasper, ironical, shouted with great deliberation.
+“We might have been—becalmed in here—for days.  And hospitality.  I am
+invited to stay—on board here.”
+
+The answer to this information was a loud ejaculation of distress.
+Jasper thought anxiously: “Why, the fellow’s nerve’s gone to pieces;” and
+with an awkward uneasiness of a new sort, looked intently at the brig.
+The thought that he was parted from her—for the first time since they
+came together—shook the apparently careless fortitude of his character to
+its very foundations, which were deep.  All that time neither Heemskirk
+nor even his inky shadow had stirred in the least.
+
+“I am going to send a boat’s crew and an officer on board your vessel,”
+he announced to no one in particular.  Jasper, tearing himself away from
+the absorbed contemplation of the brig, turned round, and, without
+passion, almost without expression in his voice, entered his protest
+against the whole of the proceedings.  What he was thinking of was the
+delay.  He counted the days.  Makassar was actually on his way; and to be
+towed there really saved time.  On the other hand, there would be some
+vexing formalities to go through.  But the thing was too absurd.  “The
+beetle’s gone mad,” he thought.  “I’ll be released at once.  And if not,
+Mesman must enter into a bond for me.”  Mesman was a Dutch merchant with
+whom Jasper had had many dealings, a considerable person in Makassar.
+
+“You protest?  H’m!” Heemskirk muttered, and for a little longer remained
+motionless, his legs planted well apart, and his head lowered as though
+he were studying his own comical, deeply-split shadow.  Then he made a
+sign to the rotund gunner, who had kept at hand, motionless, like a
+vilely-stuffed specimen of a fat man, with a lifeless face and glittering
+little eyes.  The fellow approached, and stood at attention.
+
+“You will board the brig with a boat’s crew!”
+
+“Ya, mynherr!”
+
+“You will have one of your men to steer her all the time,” went on
+Heemskirk, giving his orders in English, apparently for Jasper’s
+edification.  “You hear?”
+
+“Ya, mynherr.”
+
+“You will remain on deck and in charge all the time.”
+
+“Ya, mynherr.”
+
+Jasper felt as if, together with the command of the brig, his very heart
+were being taken out of his breast.  Heemskirk asked, with a change of
+tone:
+
+“What weapons have you on board?”
+
+At one time all the ships trading in the China Seas had a licence to
+carry a certain quantity of firearms for purposes of defence.  Jasper
+answered:
+
+“Eighteen rifles with their bayonets, which were on board when I bought
+her, four years ago.  They have been declared.”
+
+“Where are they kept?”
+
+“Fore-cabin.  Mate has the key.”
+
+“You will take possession of them,” said Heemskirk to the gunner.
+
+“Ya, mynherr.”
+
+“What is this for?  What do you mean to imply?” cried out Jasper; then
+bit his lip.  “It’s monstrous!” he muttered.
+
+Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.
+
+“You may go,” he said to his gunner.  The fat man saluted, and departed.
+
+During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted once.  At
+a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the forecastle, the
+gunboat was stopped.  The badly-stuffed specimen of a warrant-officer,
+getting into his boat, arrived on board the _Neptun_ and hurried straight
+into his commander’s cabin, his excitement at something he had to
+communicate being betrayed by the blinking of his small eyes.  These two
+were closeted together for some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried
+to make out if anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.
+
+But nothing seemed to be amiss on board.  However, he kept a look-out for
+the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody since he had
+finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he came out on deck
+again to ask how his mate was.
+
+“He was feeling not very well when I left,” he explained.
+
+The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of carrying
+his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage, understood
+with difficulty.  Not a single one of his features showed the slightest
+animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly at last.
+
+“Oh, ya!  The mate.  Ya, ya!  He is very well.  But, mein Gott, he is one
+very funny man!”
+
+Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the Dutchman got
+into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the brig.  But he
+consoled himself with the thought that very soon all this unpleasant and
+rather absurd experience would be over.  The roadstead of Makassar was in
+sight already.  Heemskirk passed by him going on the bridge.  For the
+first time the lieutenant looked at Jasper with marked intention; and the
+strange roll of his eyes was so funny—it had been long agreed by Jasper
+and Freya that the lieutenant was funny—so ecstatically gratified, as
+though he were rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could
+not help a broad smile.  And then he turned to his brig again.
+
+To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his
+Freya’s soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the
+security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to snatch
+the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to the end of
+the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying worthily his pride and
+his love, to see her captive at the end of a tow-rope was not indeed a
+pleasant experience.  It had something nightmarish in it, as, for
+instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird loaded with chains.
+
+Yet what else could he want to look at?  Her beauty would sometimes come
+to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would forget where he
+was.  And, besides, that sense of superiority which the certitude of
+being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of being set above the
+Fates by a tender look in a woman’s eyes, helped him, the first shock
+over, to go through these experiences with an amused self-confidence.
+For what evil could touch the elect of Freya?
+
+It was now afternoon, the sun being behind the two vessels as they headed
+for the harbour.  “The beetle’s little joke shall soon be over,” thought
+Jasper, without any great animosity.  As a seaman well acquainted with
+that part of the world, a casual glance was enough to tell him what was
+being done.  “Hallo,” he thought, “he is going through Spermonde Passage.
+We shall be rounding Tamissa reef presently.”  And again he returned to
+the contemplation of his brig, that main-stay of his material and
+emotional existence which would be soon in his hands again.  On a sea,
+calm like a millpond, a heavy smooth ripple undulated and streamed away
+from her bows, for the powerful _Neptun_ was towing at great speed, as if
+for a wager.  The Dutch gunner appeared on the forecastle of the
+_Bonito_, and with him a couple of men.  They stood looking at the coast,
+and Jasper lost himself in a loverlike trance.
+
+The deep-toned blast of the gunboat’s steam-whistle made him shudder by
+its unexpectedness.  Slowly he looked about.  Swift as lightning he
+leaped from where he stood, bounding forward along the deck.
+
+“You will be on Tamissa reef!” he yelled.
+
+High up on the bridge Heemskirk looked back over his shoulder heavily;
+two seamen were spinning the wheel round, and the _Neptun_ was already
+swinging rapidly away from the edge of the pale water over the danger.
+Ha! just in time.  Jasper turned about instantly to watch his brig; and,
+even before he realised that—in obedience, it appears, to Heemskirk’s
+orders given beforehand to the gunner—the tow-rope had been let go at the
+blast of the whistle, before he had time to cry out or to move a limb, he
+saw her cast adrift and shooting across the gunboat’s stern with the
+impetus of her speed.  He followed her fine, gliding form with eyes
+growing big with incredulity, wild with horror.  The cries on board of
+her came to him only as a dreadful and confused murmur through the loud
+thumping of blood in his ears, while she held on.  She ran upright in a
+terrible display of her gift of speed, with an incomparable air of life
+and grace.  She ran on till the smooth level of water in front of her
+bows seemed to sink down suddenly as if sucked away; and, with a strange,
+violent tremor of her mast-heads she stopped, inclined her lofty spars a
+little, and lay still.  She lay still on the reef, while the _Neptun_,
+fetching a wide circle, continued at full speed up Spermonde Passage,
+heading for the town.  She lay still, perfectly still, with something
+ill-omened and unnatural in her attitude.  In an instant the subtle
+melancholy of things touched by decay had fallen on her in the sunshine;
+she was but a speck in the brilliant emptiness of space, already lonely,
+already desolate.
+
+“Hold him!” yelled a voice from the bridge.
+
+Jasper had started to run to his brig with a headlong impulse, as a man
+dashes forward to pull away with his hands a living, breathing, loved
+creature from the brink of destruction.  “Hold him!  Stick to him!”
+vociferated the lieutenant at the top of the bridge-ladder, while Jasper
+struggled madly without a word, only his head emerging from the heaving
+crowd of the _Neptun’s_ seamen, who had flung themselves upon him
+obediently.  “Hold—I would not have that fellow drown himself for
+anything now!”
+
+Jasper ceased struggling.
+
+One by one they let go of him; they fell back gradually farther and
+farther, in attentive silence, leaving him standing unsupported in a
+widened, clear space, as if to give him plenty of room to fall after the
+struggle.  He did not even sway perceptibly.  Half an hour later, when
+the _Neptun_ anchored in front of the town, he had not stirred yet, had
+moved neither head nor limb as much as a hair’s breadth.  Directly the
+rumble of the gunboat’s cable had ceased, Heemskirk came down heavily
+from the bridge.
+
+“Call a sampan” he said, in a gloomy tone, as he passed the sentry at the
+gangway, and then moved on slowly towards the spot where Jasper, the
+object of many awed glances, stood looking at the deck, as if lost in a
+brown study.  Heemskirk came up close, and stared at him thoughtfully,
+with his fingers over his lips.  Here he was, the favoured vagabond, the
+only man to whom that infernal girl was likely to tell the story.  But he
+would not find it funny.  The story how Lieutenant Heemskirk—No, he would
+not laugh at it.  He looked as though he would never laugh at anything in
+his life.
+
+Suddenly Jasper looked up.  His eyes, without any other expression but
+bewilderment, met those of Heemskirk, observant and sombre.
+
+“Gone on the reef!” he said, in a low, astounded tone.  “On-the-reef!” he
+repeated still lower, and as if attending inwardly to the birth of some
+awful and amazing sensation.
+
+“On the very top of high-water, spring tides,” Heemskirk struck in, with
+a vindictive, exulting violence which flashed and expired.  He paused, as
+if weary, fixing upon Jasper his arrogant eyes, over which secret
+disenchantment, the unavoidable shadow of all passion, seemed to pass
+like a saddening cloud.  “On the very top,” he repeated, rousing himself
+in fierce reaction to snatch his laced cap off his head with a
+horizontal, derisive flourish towards the gangway.  “And now you may go
+ashore to the courts, you damned Englishman!” he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE affair of the brig _Bonito_ was bound to cause a sensation in
+Makassar, the prettiest, and perhaps the cleanest-looking of all the
+towns in the Islands; which however knows few occasions for excitement.
+The “front,” with its special population, was soon aware that something
+had happened.  A steamer towing a sailing vessel had been observed far
+out to sea for some time, and when the steamer came in alone, leaving the
+other outside, attention was aroused.  Why was that?  Her masts only
+could be seen—with furled sails—remaining in the same place to the
+southward.  And soon the rumour ran all along the crowded seashore street
+that there was a ship on Tamissa reef.  That crowd interpreted the
+appearance correctly.  Its cause was beyond their penetration, for who
+could associate a girl nine hundred miles away with the stranding of a
+ship on Tamissa reef, or look for the remote filiation of that event in
+the psychology of at least three people, even if one of them, Lieutenant
+Heemskirk, was at that very moment passing amongst them on his way to
+make his verbal report?
+
+No; the minds on the “front” were not competent for that sort of
+investigation, but many hands there—brown hands, yellow hands, white
+hands—were raised to shade the eyes gazing out to sea.  The rumour spread
+quickly.  Chinese shopkeepers came to their doors, more than one white
+merchant, even, rose from his desk to go to the window.  After all, a
+ship on Tamissa was not an everyday occurrence.  And presently the rumour
+took a more definite shape.  An English trader—detained on suspicion at
+sea by the _Neptun_—Heemskirk was towing him in to test a case, and by
+some strange accident—
+
+Later on the name came out.  “The _Bonito_—what!  Impossible!  Yes—yes,
+the _Bonito_.  Look!  You can see from here; only two masts.  It’s a
+brig.  Didn’t think that man would ever let himself be caught.
+Heemskirk’s pretty smart, too.  They say she’s fitted out in her cabin
+like a gentleman’s yacht.  That Allen is a sort of gentleman too.  An
+extravagant beggar.”
+
+A young man entered smartly Messrs. Mesman Brothers’ office on the
+“front,” bubbling with some further information.
+
+“Oh, yes; that’s the _Bonito_ for certain!  But you don’t know the story
+I’ve heard just now.  The fellow must have been feeding that river with
+firearms for the last year or two.  Well, it seems he has grown so
+reckless from long impunity that he has actually dared to sell the very
+ship’s rifles this time.  It’s a fact.  The rifles are not on board.
+What impudence!  Only, he didn’t know that there was one of our warships
+on the coast.  But those Englishmen are so impudent that perhaps he
+thought that nothing would be done to him for it.  Our courts do let off
+these fellows too often, on some miserable excuse or other.  But, at any
+rate, there’s an end of the famous _Bonito_.  I have just heard in the
+harbour-office that she must have gone on at the very top of high-water;
+and she is in ballast, too.  No human power, they think, can move her
+from where she is.  I only hope it is so.  It would be fine to have the
+notorious _Bonito_ stuck up there as a warning to others.”
+
+Mr. J. Mesman, a colonial-born Dutchman, a kind, paternal old fellow,
+with a clean-shaven, quiet, handsome face, and a head of fine iron-grey
+hair curling a little on his collar, did not say a word in defence of
+Jasper and the _Bonito_.  He rose from his arm-chair suddenly.  His face
+was visibly troubled.  It had so happened that once, from a business talk
+of ways and means, island trade, money matters, and so on, Jasper had
+been led to open himself to him on the subject of Freya; and the
+excellent man, who had known old Nelson years before and even remembered
+something of Freya, was much astonished and amused by the unfolding of
+the tale.
+
+“Well, well, well!  Nelson!  Yes; of course.  A very honest sort of man.
+And a little child with very fair hair.  Oh, yes!  I have a distinct
+recollection.  And so she has grown into such a fine girl, so very
+determined, so very—”  And he laughed almost boisterously.  “Mind, when
+you have happily eloped with your future wife, Captain Allen, you must
+come along this way, and we shall welcome her here.  A little fair-headed
+child!  I remember.  I remember.”
+
+It was that knowledge which had brought trouble to his face at the first
+news of the wreck.  He took up his hat.
+
+“Where are you going, Mr. Mesman?”
+
+“I am going to look for Allen.  I think he must be ashore.  Does anybody
+know?”
+
+No one of those present knew.  And Mr. Mesman went out on the “front” to
+make inquiries.
+
+The other part of the town, the part near the church and the fort, got
+its information in another way.  The first thing disclosed to it was
+Jasper himself, walking rapidly, as though he were pursued.  And, as a
+matter of fact, a Chinaman, obviously a sampan man, was following him at
+the same headlong pace.  Suddenly, while passing Orange House, Jasper
+swerved and went in, or, rather, rushed in, startling Gomez, the hotel
+clerk, very much.  But a Chinaman beginning to make an unseemly noise at
+the door claimed the immediate attention of Gomez.  His grievance was
+that the white man whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not
+paid him his boat-fare.  He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the
+way.  But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim.
+Gomez satisfied the coolie with a few coppers, and then went to look for
+Jasper, whom he knew very well.  He found him standing stiffly by a
+little round table.  At the other end of the verandah a few men sitting
+there had stopped talking, and were looking at him in silence.  Two
+billiard-players, with cues in their hands, had come to the door of the
+billiard-room and stared, too.
+
+On Gomez coming up to him, Jasper raised one hand to point at his own
+throat.  Gomez noted the somewhat soiled state of his white clothes, then
+took one look at his face, and fled away to order the drink for which
+Jasper seemed to be asking.
+
+Where he wanted to go—or what purpose—where he, perhaps, only imagined
+himself to be going, when a sudden impulse or the sight of a familiar
+place had made him turn into Orange House—it is impossible to say.  He
+was steadying himself lightly with the tips of his fingers on the little
+table.  There were on that verandah two men whom he knew well personally,
+but his gaze roaming incessantly as though he were looking for a way of
+escape, passed and repassed over them without a sign of recognition.
+They, on their side, looking at him, doubted the evidence of their own
+eyes.  It was not that his face was distorted.  On the contrary, it was
+still, it was set.  But its expression, somehow, was unrecognisable.  Can
+that be him? they wondered with awe.
+
+In his head there was a wild chaos of clear thoughts.  Perfectly clear.
+It was this clearness which was so terrible in conjunction with the utter
+inability to lay hold of any single one of them all.  He was saying to
+himself, or to them: “Steady, steady.”  A China boy appeared before him
+with a glass on a tray.  He poured the drink down his throat, and rushed
+out.  His disappearance removed the spell of wonder from the beholders.
+One of the men jumped up and moved quickly to that side of the verandah
+from which almost the whole of the roadstead could be seen.  At the very
+moment when Jasper, issuing from the door of the Orange House, was
+passing under him in the street below, he cried to the others excitedly:
+
+“That was Allen right enough!  But where is his brig?”
+
+Jasper heard these words with extraordinary loudness.  The heavens rang
+with them, as if calling him to account; for those were the very words
+Freya would have to use.  It was an annihilating question; it struck his
+consciousness like a thunderbolt and brought a sudden night upon the
+chaos of his thoughts even as he walked.  He did not check his pace.  He
+went on in the darkness for another three strides, and then fell.
+
+The good Mesman had to push on as far as the hospital before he found
+him.  The doctor there talked of a slight heatstroke.  Nothing very much.
+Out in three days. . . . It must be admitted that the doctor was right.
+In three days, Jasper Allen came out of the hospital and became visible
+to the town—very visible indeed—and remained so for quite a long time;
+long enough to become almost one of the sights of the place; long enough
+to become disregarded at last; long enough for the tale of his haunting
+visibility to be remembered in the islands to this day.
+
+The talk on the “front” and Jasper’s appearance in the Orange House stand
+at the beginning of the famous _Bonito_ case, and give a view of its two
+aspects—the practical and the psychological.  The case for the courts and
+the case for compassion; that last terribly evident and yet obscure.
+
+It has, you must understand, remained obscure even for that friend of
+mine who wrote me the letter mentioned in the very first lines of this
+narrative.  He was one of those in Mr. Mesman’s office, and accompanied
+that gentleman in his search for Jasper.  His letter described to me the
+two aspects and some of the episodes of the case.  Heemskirk’s attitude
+was that of deep thankfulness for not having lost his own ship, and that
+was all.  Haze over the land was his explanation of having got so close
+to Tamissa reef.  He saved his ship, and for the rest he did not care.
+As to the fat gunner, he deposed simply that he thought at the time that
+he was acting for the best by letting go the tow-rope, but admitted that
+he was greatly confused by the suddenness of the emergency.
+
+As a matter of fact, he had acted on very precise instructions from
+Heemskirk, to whom through several years’ service together in the East he
+had become a sort of devoted henchman.  What was most amazing in the
+detention of the _Bonito_ was his story how, proceeding to take
+possession of the firearms as ordered, he discovered that there were no
+firearms on board.  All he found in the fore-cabin was an empty rack for
+the proper number of eighteen rifles, but of the rifles themselves never
+a single one anywhere in the ship.  The mate of the brig, who looked
+rather ill and behaved excitedly, as though he were perhaps a lunatic,
+wanted him to believe that Captain Allen knew nothing of this; that it
+was he, the mate, who had recently sold these rifles in the dead of night
+to a certain person up the river.  In proof of this story he produced a
+bag of silver dollars and pressed it on his, the gunner’s, acceptance.
+Then, suddenly flinging it down on the deck, he beat his own head with
+both his fists and started heaping shocking curses upon his own soul for
+an ungrateful wretch not fit to live.
+
+All this the gunner reported at once to his commanding officer.
+
+What Heemskirk intended by taking upon himself to detain the _Bonito_ it
+is difficult to say, except that he meant to bring some trouble into the
+life of the man favoured by Freya.  He had been looking at Jasper with a
+desire to strike that man of kisses and embraces to the earth.  The
+question was: How could he do it without giving himself away?  But the
+report of the gunner created a serious case enough.  Yet Allen had
+friends—and who could tell whether he wouldn’t somehow succeed in
+wriggling out of it?  The idea of simply towing the brig so much
+compromised on to the reef came to him while he was listening to the fat
+gunner in his cabin.  There was but little risk of being disapproved now.
+And it should be made to appear an accident.
+
+Going out on deck he had gloated upon his unconscious victim with such a
+sinister roll of his eyes, such a queerly pursed mouth, that Jasper could
+not help smiling.  And the lieutenant had gone on the bridge, saying to
+himself:
+
+“You wait!  I shall spoil the taste of those sweet kisses for you.  When
+you hear of Lieutenant Heemskirk in the future that name won’t bring a
+smile on your lips, I swear.  You are delivered into my hands.”
+
+And this possibility had come about without any planning, one could
+almost say naturally, as if events had mysteriously shaped themselves to
+fit the purposes of a dark passion.  The most astute scheming could not
+have served Heemskirk better.  It was given to him to taste a
+transcendental, an incredible perfection of vengeance; to strike a deadly
+blow into that hated person’s heart, and to watch him afterwards walking
+about with the dagger in his breast.
+
+For that is what the state of Jasper amounted to.  He moved, acted,
+weary-eyed, keen-faced, lank and restless, with brusque movements and
+fierce gestures; he talked incessantly in a frenzied and fatigued voice,
+but within himself he knew that nothing would ever give him back the
+brig, just as nothing can heal a pierced heart.  His soul, kept quiet in
+the stress of love by the unflinching Freya’s influence, was like a still
+but overwound string.  The shock had started it vibrating, and the string
+had snapped.  He had waited for two years in a perfectly intoxicated
+confidence for a day that now would never come to a man disarmed for life
+by the loss of the brig, and, it seemed to him, made unfit for love to
+which he had no foothold to offer.
+
+Day after day he would traverse the length of the town, follow the coast,
+and, reaching the point of land opposite that part of the reef on which
+his brig lay stranded, look steadily across the water at her beloved
+form, once the home of an exulting hope, and now, in her inclined,
+desolated immobility, towering above the lonely sea-horizon, a symbol of
+despair.
+
+The crew had left her in due course in her own boats which directly they
+reached the town were sequestrated by the harbour authorities.  The
+vessel, too, was sequestrated pending proceedings; but these same
+authorities did not take the trouble to set a guard on board.  For,
+indeed, what could move her from there?  Nothing, unless a miracle;
+nothing, unless Jasper’s eyes, fastened on her tensely for hours
+together, as though he hoped by the mere power of vision to draw her to
+his breast.
+
+All this story, read in my friend’s very chatty letter, dismayed me not a
+little.  But it was really appalling to read his relation of how Schultz,
+the mate, went about everywhere affirming with desperate pertinacity that
+it was he alone who had sold the rifles.  “I stole them,” he protested.
+Of course, no one would believe him.  My friend himself did not believe
+him, though he, of course, admired this self-sacrifice.  But a good many
+people thought it was going too far to make oneself out a thief for the
+sake of a friend.  Only, it was such an obvious lie, too, that it did not
+matter, perhaps.
+
+I, who, in view of Schultz’s psychology, knew how true that must be,
+admit that I was appalled.  So this was how a perfidious destiny took
+advantage of a generous impulse!  And I felt as though I were an
+accomplice in this perfidy, since I did to a certain extent encourage
+Jasper.  Yet I had warned him as well.
+
+“The man seemed to have gone crazy on this point,” wrote my friend.  “He
+went to Mesman with his story.  He says that some rascally white man
+living amongst the natives up that river made him drunk with some gin one
+evening, and then jeered at him for never having any money.  Then he,
+protesting to us that he was an honest man and must be believed,
+described himself as being a thief whenever he took a drop too much, and
+told us that he went on board and passed the rifles one by one without
+the slightest compunction to a canoe which came alongside that night,
+receiving ten dollars apiece for them.
+
+“Next day he was ill with shame and grief, but had not the courage to
+confess his lapse to his benefactor.  When the gunboat stopped the brig
+he felt ready to die with the apprehension of the consequences, and would
+have died happily, if he could have been able to bring the rifles back by
+the sacrifice of his life.  He said nothing to Jasper, hoping that the
+brig would be released presently.  When it turned out otherwise and his
+captain was detained on board the gunboat, he was ready to commit suicide
+from despair; only he thought it his duty to live in order to let the
+truth be known.  ‘I am an honest man!  I am an honest man!’ he repeated,
+in a voice that brought tears to our eyes.  ‘You must believe me when I
+tell you that I am a thief—a vile, low, cunning, sneaking thief as soon
+as I’ve had a glass or two.  Take me somewhere where I may tell the truth
+on oath.’
+
+“When we had at last convinced him that his story could be of no use to
+Jasper—for what Dutch court, having once got hold of an English trader,
+would accept such an explanation; and, indeed, how, when, where could one
+hope to find proofs of such a tale?—he made as if to tear his hair in
+handfuls, but, calming down, said: ‘Good-bye, then, gentlemen,’ and went
+out of the room so crushed that he seemed hardly able to put one foot
+before the other.  That very night he committed suicide by cutting his
+throat in the house of a half-caste with whom he had been lodging since
+he came ashore from the wreck.”
+
+That throat, I thought with a shudder, which could produce the tender,
+persuasive, manly, but fascinating voice which had aroused Jasper’s ready
+compassion and had secured Freya’s sympathy!  Who could ever have
+supposed such an end in store for the impossible, gentle Schultz, with
+his idiosyncrasy of naïve pilfering, so absurdly straightforward that,
+even in the people who had suffered from it, it aroused nothing more than
+a sort of amused exasperation?  He was really impossible.  His lot
+evidently should have been a half-starved, mysterious, but by no means
+tragic existence as a mild-eyed, inoffensive beachcomber on the fringe of
+native life.  There are occasions when the irony of fate, which some
+people profess to discover in the working out of our lives, wears the
+aspect of crude and savage jesting.
+
+I shook my head over the manes of Schultz, and went on with my friend’s
+letter.  It told me how the brig on the reef, looted by the natives from
+the coast villages, acquired gradually the lamentable aspect, the grey
+ghastliness of a wreck; while Jasper, fading daily into a mere shadow of
+a man, strode brusquely all along the “front” with horribly lively eyes
+and a faint, fixed smile on his lips, to spend the day on a lonely spit
+of sand looking eagerly at her, as though he had expected some shape on
+board to rise up and make some sort of sign to him over the decaying
+bulwarks.  The Mesmans were taking care of him as far as it was possible.
+The _Bonito_ case had been referred to Batavia, where no doubt it would
+fade away in a fog of official papers. . . . It was heartrending to read
+all this.  That active and zealous officer, Lieutenant Heemskirk, his air
+of sullen, darkly-pained self-importance not lightened by the approval of
+his action conveyed to him unofficially, had gone on to take up his
+station in the Moluccas. . . .
+
+Then, at the end of the bulky, kindly-meant epistle, dealing with the
+island news of half a year at least, my friend wrote: “A couple of months
+ago old Nelson turned up here, arriving by the mail-boat from Java.  Came
+to see Mesman, it seems.  A rather mysterious visit, and extraordinarily
+short, after coming all that way.  He stayed just four days at the Orange
+House, with apparently nothing in particular to do, and then caught the
+south-going steamer for the Straits.  I remember people saying at one
+time that Allen was rather sweet on old Nelson’s daughter, the girl that
+was brought up by Mrs. Harley and then went to live with him at the Seven
+Isles group.  Surely you remember old Nelson—”
+
+Remember old Nelson!  Rather!
+
+The letter went on to inform me further that old Nelson, at least,
+remembered me, since some time after his flying visit to Makassar he had
+written to the Mesmans asking for my address in London.
+
+That old Nelson (or Nielsen), the note of whose personality was a
+profound, echoless irresponsiveness to everything around him, should wish
+to write, or find anything to write about to anybody, was in itself a
+cause for no small wonder.  And to me, of all people!  I waited with
+uneasy impatience for whatever disclosure could come from that naturally
+benighted intelligence, but my impatience had time to wear out before my
+eyes beheld old Nelson’s trembling, painfully-formed handwriting, senile
+and childish at the same time, on an envelope bearing a penny stamp and
+the postal mark of the Notting Hill office.  I delayed opening it in
+order to pay the tribute of astonishment due to the event by flinging my
+hands above my head.  So he had come home to England, to be definitely
+Nelson; or else was on his way home to Denmark, where he would revert for
+ever to his original Nielsen!  But old Nelson (or Nielsen) out of the
+tropics seemed unthinkable.  And yet he was there, asking me to call.
+
+His address was at a boarding-house in one of those Bayswater squares,
+once of leisure, which nowadays are reduced to earning their living.
+Somebody had recommended him there.  I started to call on him on one of
+those January days in London, one of those wintry days composed of the
+four devilish elements, cold, wet, mud, and grime, combined with a
+particular stickiness of atmosphere that clings like an unclean garment
+to one’s very soul.  Yet on approaching his abode I saw, like a flicker
+far behind the soiled veil of the four elements, the wearisome and
+splendid glitter of a blue sea with the Seven Islets like minute specks
+swimming in my eye, the high red roof of the bungalow crowning the very
+smallest of them all.  This visual reminiscence was profoundly
+disturbing.  I knocked at the door with a faltering hand.
+
+Old Nelson (or Nielsen) got up from the table at which he was sitting
+with a shabby pocket-book full of papers before him.  He took off his
+spectacles before shaking hands.  For a moment neither of us said a word;
+then, noticing me looking round somewhat expectantly, he murmured some
+words, of which I caught only “daughter” and “Hong Kong,” cast his eyes
+down, and sighed.
+
+His moustache, sticking all ways out, as of yore, was quite white now.
+His old cheeks were softly rounded, with some colour in them; strangely
+enough, that something childlike always noticeable in the general contour
+of his physiognomy had become much more marked.  Like his handwriting, he
+looked childish and senile.  He showed his age most in his
+unintelligently furrowed, anxious forehead and in his round, innocent
+eyes, which appeared to me weak and blinking and watery; or was it that
+they were full of tears? . . .
+
+To discover old Nelson fully informed upon any matter whatever was a new
+experience.  And after the first awkwardness had worn off he talked
+freely, with, now and then, a question to start him going whenever he
+lapsed into silence, which he would do suddenly, clasping his hands on
+his waistcoat in an attitude which would recall to me the east verandah,
+where he used to sit talking quietly and puffing out his cheeks in what
+seemed now old, very old days.  He talked in a reasonable somewhat
+anxious tone.
+
+“No, no.  We did not know anything for weeks.  Out of the way like that,
+we couldn’t, of course.  No mail service to the Seven Isles.  But one day
+I ran over to Banka in my big sailing-boat to see whether there were any
+letters, and saw a Dutch paper.  But it looked only like a bit of marine
+news: English brig _Bonito_ gone ashore outside Makassar roads.  That was
+all.  I took the paper home with me and showed it to her.  ‘I will never
+forgive him!’ she cries with her old spirit.  ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you are
+a sensible girl.  The best man may lose a ship.  But what about your
+health?’  I was beginning to be frightened at her looks.  She would not
+let me talk even of going to Singapore before.  But, really, such a
+sensible girl couldn’t keep on objecting for ever.  ‘Do what you like,
+papa,’ she says.  Rather a job, that.  Had to catch a steamer at sea, but
+I got her over all right.  There, doctors, of course.  Fever.  Anæmia.
+Put her to bed.  Two or three women very kind to her.  Naturally in our
+papers the whole story came out before long.  She reads it to the end,
+lying on the couch; then hands the newspaper back to me, whispers
+‘Heemskirk,’ and goes off into a faint.”
+
+He blinked at me for quite a long time, his eyes running full of tears
+again.
+
+“Next day,” he began, without any emotion in his voice, “she felt
+stronger, and we had a long talk.  She told me everything.”
+
+Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story of the
+Heemskirk episode in Freya’s words; then went on in his rather jerky
+utterance, and looking up innocently:
+
+“‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you have behaved in the main like a sensible girl.’
+‘I have been horrid,’ she cries, ‘and he is breaking his heart over
+there.’  Well, she was too sensible not to see she wasn’t in a state to
+travel.  But I went.  She told me to go.  She was being looked after very
+well.  Anæmia.  Getting better, they said.”
+
+He paused.
+
+“You did see him?” I murmured.
+
+“Oh, yes; I did see him,” he started again, talking in that reasonable
+voice as though he were arguing a point.  “I did see him.  I came upon
+him.  Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing but skin on the bones of
+his face, a skeleton in dirty white clothes.  That’s what he looked like.
+How Freya . . . But she never did—not really.  He was sitting there, the
+only live thing for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on
+the shore.  They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not
+grown again.  He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing
+on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck.  When I came up to him
+he just moved his head a bit.  ‘Is that you, old man?’ says he—like that.
+
+“If you had seen him you would have understood at once how impossible it
+was for Freya to have ever loved that man.  Well, well.  I don’t say.
+She might have—something.  She was lonely, you know.  But really to go
+away with him!  Never!  Madness.  She was too sensible . . . I began to
+reproach him gently.  And by and by he turns on me.  ‘Write to you!  What
+about?  Come to her!  What with?  If I had been a man I would have
+carried her off, but she made a child, a happy child, of me.  Tell her
+that the day the only thing I had belonging to me in the world perished
+on this reef I discovered that I had no power over her. . . Has she come
+here with you?’ he shouts, blazing at me suddenly with his hollow eyes.
+I shook my head.  Come with me, indeed!  Anæmia!  ‘Aha!  You see?  Go
+away, then, old man, and leave me alone here with that ghost,’ he says,
+jerking his head at the wreck of his brig.
+
+“Mad!  It was getting dusk.  I did not care to stop any longer all by
+myself with that man in that lonely place.  I was not going to tell him
+of Freya’s illness.  Anæmia!  What was the good?  Mad!  And what sort of
+husband would he have made, anyhow, for a sensible girl like Freya?  Why,
+even my little property I could not have left them.  The Dutch
+authorities would never have allowed an Englishman to settle there.  It
+was not sold then.  My man Mahmat, you know, was looking after it for me.
+Later on I let it go for a tenth of its value to a Dutch half-caste.  But
+never mind.  It was nothing to me then.  Yes; I went away from him.  I
+caught the return mail-boat.  I told everything to Freya.  ‘He’s mad,’ I
+said; ‘and, my dear, the only thing he loved was his brig.’
+
+“‘Perhaps,’ she says to herself, looking straight away—her eyes were
+nearly as hollow as his—‘perhaps it is true.  Yes!  I would never allow
+him any power over me.’”
+
+Old Nelson paused.  I sat fascinated, and feeling a little cold in that
+room with a blazing fire.
+
+“So you see,” he continued, “she never really cared for him.  Much too
+sensible.  I took her away to Hong Kong.  Change of climate, they said.
+Oh, these doctors!  My God!  Winter time!  There came ten days of cold
+mists and wind and rain.  Pneumonia.  But look here!  We talked a lot
+together.  Days and evenings.  Who else had she? . . . She talked a lot
+to me, my own girl.  Sometimes she would laugh a little.  Look at me and
+laugh a little—”
+
+I shuddered.  He looked up vaguely, with a childish, puzzled moodiness.
+
+“She would say: ‘I did not really mean to be a bad daughter to you,
+papa.’  And I would say: ‘Of course, my dear.  You could not have meant
+it.’  She would lie quiet and then say: ‘I wonder?’  And sometimes, ‘I’ve
+been really a coward,’ she would tell me.  You know, sick people they say
+things.  And so she would say too: ‘I’ve been conceited, headstrong,
+capricious.  I sought my own gratification.  I was selfish or afraid.’
+. . . But sick people, you know, they say anything.  And once, after lying
+silent almost all day, she said: ‘Yes; perhaps, when the day came I would
+not have gone.  Perhaps!  I don’t know,’ she cried.  ‘Draw the curtain,
+papa.  Shut the sea out.  It reproaches me with my folly.’”  He gasped
+and paused.
+
+“So you see,” he went on in a murmur.  “Very ill, very ill indeed.
+Pneumonia.  Very sudden.”  He pointed his finger at the carpet, while the
+thought of the poor girl, vanquished in her struggle with three men’s
+absurdities, and coming at last to doubt her own self, held me in a very
+anguish of pity.
+
+“You see yourself,” he began again in a downcast manner.  “She could not
+have really . . . She mentioned you several times.  Good friend.
+Sensible man.  So I wanted to tell you myself—let you know the truth.  A
+fellow like that!  How could it be?  She was lonely.  And perhaps for a
+while . . . Mere nothing.  There could never have been a question of love
+for my Freya—such a sensible girl—”
+
+“Man!” I cried, rising upon him wrathfully, “don’t you see that she died
+of it?”
+
+He got up too.  “No! no!” he stammered, as if angry.  “The doctors!
+Pneumonia.  Low state.  The inflammation of the . . . They told me.
+Pneu—”
+
+He did not finish the word.  It ended in a sob.  He flung his arms out in
+a gesture of despair, giving up his ghastly pretence with a low,
+heartrending cry:
+
+“And I thought that she was so sensible!”
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1055 ***