(From _Scribner's Magazine_)
The real _dramatis personæ_ are three (for Schneider was only a
sign-post pointing): Follet, the remittance-man, Stires, and French Eva.
Perhaps I should include Ching Po--but I hate to. I was the man with his
hands in his pockets who saw the thing steadily and saw it whole--to
filch a windy phrase. I liked Stires, who had no social standing, even
on Naapu, and disliked Follet, who had all the standing there was.
Follet dined with magnates; and, believe me, the magnates of Naapu were
a multicolored lot. A man might have been made by copra or by pearls--or
by blackbirding. We were a plutocracy; which means that so long as a man
had the house and the drinks, you asked no questions. The same rule
holds--allowing for their dizzier sense of figures--in New York and
Chicago. On the whole, I think we were more sensible. There is certainly
more difference between good food and bad than between five millions and
fifty (which, I take it, is a figure that buys immunity over here). I
don't think any man's hospitality would have ranked him permanently on
Naapu if his dinners had been uneatable. Though perhaps--to be
frank--drinks counted more than food as a measuring-rod of aristocracy.
Well, Follet trained with the people who received consignments of
champagne and good whiskey. And Stires did not. Anyhow, Stires was a
temperance man: he took only one or two drinks a day, and seldom went
beyond a modest gin-fizz. With the remarkable native punch, compounded
secretly and by unknown ways, but purchasable, and much esteemed by the
knowing, he never would have anything to do. Stires looked like a cowboy
and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery
outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel
of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small--a very
small--way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient
Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva
dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and
chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was
a middleman between fishermen and householders. As she owned a
gramophone and one silk dress, it was clear that her business prospered.
Even Ching Po bought eggs of her, though there was a nameless,
uninterpreted hostility between them.
Let me give you, at once, the few facts I could gather about French Eva.
There were rumors a-plenty, but most of them sifted down to a little
residual malice. I confined my questionings to the respectable
inhabitants of Naapu; they were a very small circle. At last, I got some
sort of "line" on French Eva.
None within our ken fathered or mothered her. Old Dubois knew most about
her, but old Dubois, a semi-paralyzed colossus, "doped" most of the
time, kept his thick lips closed. "An excellent girl" was all that any
one could wring from him. As she had begun life on Naapu by being _dame
de comptoir_ for him, he had some right to his judgment. She had
eventually preferred independence, and had forsaken him; and if he still
had no quarrel with her, that speaks loudly for her many virtues.
Whether Dubois had sent for her originally, no one knew. His memory was
clouded by opium, and you could get little out of him. Besides, by the
time I arrived on Naapu, French Eva belonged to the landscape and to
history. She was generally supposed to be pure French, and her accent
supported the theory, though she was in a small way a linguist. Her
English was as good as any one's--on Naapu, where we were by no means
academic. She could speak the native tongue after a fashion, and her
bêche-de-mer was at least fluent.
I had heard of the lady before I ever saw her, and had wondered why
Naapu chose to distinguish a female fish-vender--even if she had begun
with old Dubois. As soon as I clapped eyes on her, I perceived her
distinction, her "difference"--the reason for the frequent "Mam'selle."
She was, at first glimpse, unusual. To begin with, never was so white a
face matched with hair and brows and eyes so black. In the ordinary
pursuit of her business she wore her hair half loose, half braided, down
her back; and it fell to her knees like a heavy crape veil. A bad
simile, you will say; but there are no words to express the unrelieved
blackness of her hair. There were no lights in it; no "reflets," to use
the French phrase. It might have been "treated" with ink. When, on rare
occasions--not often, for the weight of it, as she freely explained,
made her head ache--she put it up in coils, it was like a great mourning
bonnet under which her white face seemed to shrink away. Her eyes were
nearly as black as her hair. Her figure was very lovely, whether in
forming the loose native garment or laced into her silk dress.
You will say that I have painted for you a person who could not, by any
possibility, be beautiful; and yet French Eva was beautiful. You got
used to that dull curtain of her hair; it made Madame Maür's lustrous
raven locks look oily. It came to seem, after a time, all that hair
should be. Her features were nearly perfect from our finicking European
point of view, and she grew in grace even while I, a newcomer, watched;
for the effect of the tropic sun upon her skin was curious and lovely:
it neither blotched nor reddened nor tanned her, but rather gilded her
pallor, touching it with the faintest brown in the world. I must, in the
interests of truth, mention one more fact. Mam'selle Eva was the sort of
woman who has a direct effect on the opposite sex. Charm hardly
expresses it; magnetism, rather, though that is a poor word. A man
simply wanted to be near her. She intrigued you, she drew you on, she
assailed your consciousness in indefinable ways--all without the sweep
of an eyelash or the pout of a lip. French Eva was a good girl, and went
her devious ways with reticent feet. But she was not in "society," for
she lived alone in a thatched hut, and attended native festivals, and
swore--when necessary--at the crews of trading barques. I am not sure
that she did not, of all tongues possible to her, prefer bêche-de-mer;
which is not, at its most innocent, an elegant language. She had no
enemies except Ching Po--for reasons unknown; and she paid her
occasional respects to any and all religions that Naapu boasted. When
there was a row, she was always, of course, on the European side; though
she would stretch a point now and then in favor of the native
constabulary.
So much for French Eva--who was by no means so important in the Naapu
scheme of things as my long description may imply. She had her eminently
respectable, her perfectly recognized niche, and we all bought eggs and
fish of her when we could. She was a curious figure, to be sure; but you
must remember that on Naapu every one, nearly, was unaverage, if not
abnormal. Even the agents and officials were apt to be the least
promising of their kind--or they would have been somewhere else. It was
a beautiful refuge for utter bounders and men who, though not bounders,
had a very low limit of achievement. The jetsam of officialdom was
washed up on that lonely, lovely shore. The magnates of Naapu were not
to be trusted. Naapu was a rich island, the richest of its group; and,
being off the main lines of traffic, was an excellent field for the
unscrupulous. Tourists did not bother us, for tourists do not like
eighty-ton schooners; maps did not particularly insist upon us; we were
well known in places where it was profitable to know us, and not much
talked about anywhere. Our copra was of the best; there were pearls to
be had in certain waters if you could bribe or fight your way to them;
and large groups of natives occasionally disappeared over night from one
of the surrounding islands. Naapu was, you might say, the clasp of a
necklace. How could we be expected to know what went on in the rest of
the string--with one leaky patrol-boat to ride those seas? Sometimes
there were fights down by the docks; strangers got arrested and were
mysteriously pardoned out; there were always a good many people in the
landscape who had had too much square-face. We were very far away from
everything, and in spite of all these drawbacks we were happy, because
the climate was, most of the year, unexceptionable. When you recall what
most civilized climates are like, "unexceptionable," that cold and
formal word, may well take your breath away. Lest any one should suspect
me of blackbirding or gin-selling, I will say at once that I had come to
Naapu by accident and that I stayed because, for reasons that I will not
go into here, I liked it. I lived in a tiny bungalow with an ex-ship's
cook whom I called Joe, and several thousand cockroaches. I had hired
Joe to cook for me, but his chief duty soon became to keep the
cockroaches out of my bedroom. As a matter of fact, I usually dined at
Dubois's hotel or at some private house.
Why so idle a person as I should have looked down--as I did, from the
first--on Follet, I cannot explain. The money I lived on was certainly
not of my own making. But, strictly speaking, I could have gone home if
I had chosen, and I more than suspected that Follet could not have.
Follet was not enamoured of Naapu, and talked grandiloquently of
Melbourne and Batavia and Hong-Kong. He continued, however, to be a
resident of the island, and none of his projects of removal to a better
place ever went beyond mere frothy talk. He lived at Dubois's, but spent
much of his time with the aforesaid magnates. He had an incorruptible
manner; some grace that had been bred in him early never forsook him,
and the ladies of Naapu liked him. Even good Madame Maür, who squinted,
squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness
was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there
were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy
natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out
and fetched him home.
My first intimation of trouble came from Stires. I had nothing to do
with this particular Yankee in the way of business, but I lingered
occasionally by his door in the cool of the afternoon, just to feed my
eyes on his brawn and my ears on his homely and pleasant nasality.
Stires's eyes were that disconcerting gray-blue which seems to prevail
among men who have lived much in the desert or on the open sea. You find
it in Arizona; and in the navies of all the northern countries. It added
to his cowboy look. I knew nothing about Stires--remember that on Naapu
we never asked a man questions about himself--but I liked him. He sat
about on heaps of indescribable junk--things that go into the bowels of
ships--and talked freely. And because Follet and I were both in what
Naapu would have called its best circles, I never talked about Follet,
though I liked him no better than Stires did. I say it began with
Stires; but it began really with Schneider, introduced by Stires into
our leisurely conversation. This is Schneider's only importance: namely,
that, mixing himself up in French Eva's context, he made other men speak
of her.
The less said about Schneider, the better; which means always that there
is a great deal to say. In this case, there was perhaps less to say than
to surmise. He did not give himself away--to us. Schneider had turned up
on a trading schooner from Melbourne, was stopping at the hotel in one
of the best rooms, and had a general interest in the potentialities of
Naapu. I say potentialities advisedly, for he was not directly
concerned, so far as I know, with any existing business there. He
frequented everybody, and asked questions in the meticulous German way.
He wandered all over the island--islands, I should say, for once or
twice I saw him banging off in a creaky motor-boat to the other jewels
of the necklace. Guesses as to his real business were free and frequent.
He was a pearl-smuggler; the agent of a Queensland planter; a fugitive
from justice; a mad scientist; a servant of the Imperial German
Government. No one presumed to certitude--which was in itself a tribute
to German efficiency. Schneider was blond and brush-haired and
thick-lipped; he was unpleasant from the crown of his ill-shaped head to
the soles of his ill-shaped shoes; but, though lacking in every charm,
he was not sinister. He had seen curious places and amusing things, and
could cap most adventures with something relevant; but his type and
temperament prevented him from being a "good mixer," and he was not
popular.
Stires, however, had his own grievance, and his judgment of Schneider
went deep. He did not mind the shape of Schneider's skull, or the hint
of goose-step in Schneider's gait; but he minded, very much, the kind of
interest that Schneider took in French Eva. He told me that, straight,
emphasizing his statements with a rusty spanner, which he wielded in a
curious, classical way, like a trident. According to him, Schneider was
bothering the life out of the girl. "Always asking her to dress up and
come over to chow with him at the hotel." And the spanner went down as
if Neptune were rebuking the seas.
"Does she go?"
"No."
"Well, then--can't you leave the lady to discourage him in her own way?"
"She won't go to the ho-tel, because she hates Ching Po. But she walks
out with him Sunday afternoons. He gives her gimcracks."
"Then she likes him?"
"There's no telling. She's a real lady." And the discouraged Stires
beat, with his spanner, a refrain to his involuntary epigram.
"She can take care of herself, can't she?" I had watched her deal with a
drunken Solomon Islander, and did not see how Schneider could be a match
for her.
"I don't know." Stires's lazy drawl challenged the sunset.
"Anything I can do?" I asked as I rose.
"Unless you go in and cut him out," he meditated with a grin.
"But I'm not in love with her," I protested.
"You might take her to church."
But I refused. Philandering was not my forte, and church, in any case,
was the last thing I should venture to propose.
"Why don't you go in yourself?"
Stires scratched his head. The trident trailed upon the ground. "It's
serious or nothing with me, I guess. And she's got something against me.
I don't know what. Thinks I don't blarney the Kanakas enough, perhaps.
Then there's Follet."
"Oh, is he in it?" I forgot to go.
"He's more in it than I am, and I'm darned if I know what she's up to
with the three of us. I'm playing 'possum, till I find out."
"If you can stand Follet butting in, why can't you stand Schneider?
Safety in numbers, you know."
"Well, Mr. Follet belongs here. I can have it out with him any time.
He'll have to play the game. But if I know Schneider, there's no wedding
bells in his. And Mam'selle Eva hasn't, as you might say, got a
chaperon."
The spectacle of "Mam'selle Eva," as I had last seen her, perspiring,
loosely girdled, buying a catch of fish at a fair price from three
mercenary natives adorned with shark's-tooth necklaces, rose before me.
"Man alive, you don't have to chaperon _her_," I cried. "She's on to
everything."
The sun-and-wind-whipt eyes flashed at me. The spanner trembled a
little.
"Don't misunderstand me," I insisted. "But it stands to reason that,
here on Naapu, she's learned a good many things they don't teach in
little red schoolhouses. I have a great respect for her, and, between
you and me, I shouldn't wonder if she had sized Schneider up already."
The eyes were appeased. "Maybe, maybe," he grunted. "But lies come easy
to him, I guess. Miss Eva wouldn't be the first he'd fooled."
"Do you know anything about him?"
"Not a thing, except what sticks out all over him. For a man's eyes,
that is. You never can tell what a woman will see."