A Smile of Fortune / Joseph Conrad

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 pate, 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.