WITHIN THE
TIDES
TALES
. . . Go, make you ready.
HAMLET _to the_ PLAYERS.
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
LONDON & TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
PARIS: J. M. DENT ET. FILS
* * * * *
FIRST EDITION _February_ 1915
REPRINTED _April_ 1915; _August_ 1919
* * * * *
To
MR. AND MRS. RALPH WEDGWOOD
THIS SHEAF OF CARE-FREE ANTE-BELLUM PAGES
IN GRATITUDE FOR THEIR CHARMING HOSPITALITY
IN THE LAST MONTH OF PEACE
Contents
PAGE
THE PLANTER OF MALATA 3
THE PARTNER 119
THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES 175
BECAUSE OF THE DOLLARS 223
THE PLANTER OF MALATA
CHAPTER I
In the private editorial office of the principal newspaper in a great
colonial city two men were talking. They were both young. The stouter
of the two, fair, and with more of an urban look about him, was the
editor and part-owner of the important newspaper.
The other’s name was Renouard. That he was exercised in his mind about
something was evident on his fine bronzed face. He was a lean, lounging,
active man. The journalist continued the conversation.
“And so you were dining yesterday at old Dunster’s.”
He used the word old not in the endearing sense in which it is sometimes
applied to intimates, but as a matter of sober fact. The Dunster in
question was old. He had been an eminent colonial statesman, but had now
retired from active politics after a tour in Europe and a lengthy stay in
England, during which he had had a very good press indeed. The colony
was proud of him.
“Yes. I dined there,” said Renouard. “Young Dunster asked me just as I
was going out of his office. It seemed to be like a sudden thought. And
yet I can’t help suspecting some purpose behind it. He was very
pressing. He swore that his uncle would be very pleased to see me. Said
his uncle had mentioned lately that the granting to me of the Malata
concession was the last act of his official life.”
“Very touching. The old boy sentimentalises over the past now and then.”
“I really don’t know why I accepted,” continued the other. “Sentiment
does not move me very easily. Old Dunster was civil to me of course, but
he did not even inquire how I was getting on with my silk plants. Forgot
there was such a thing probably. I must say there were more people there
than I expected to meet. Quite a big party.”
“I was asked,” remarked the newspaper man. “Only I couldn’t go. But
when did you arrive from Malata?”
“I arrived yesterday at daylight. I am anchored out there in the bay—off
Garden Point. I was in Dunster’s office before he had finished reading
his letters. Have you ever seen young Dunster reading his letters? I
had a glimpse of him through the open door. He holds the paper in both
hands, hunches his shoulders up to his ugly ears, and brings his long
nose and his thick lips on to it like a sucking apparatus. A commercial
monster.”
“Here we don’t consider him a monster,” said the newspaper man looking at
his visitor thoughtfully.
“Probably not. You are used to see his face and to see other faces. I
don’t know how it is that, when I come to town, the appearance of the
people in the street strike me with such force. They seem so awfully
expressive.”
“And not charming.”
“Well—no. Not as a rule. The effect is forcible without being clear. . . .
I know that you think it’s because of my solitary manner of life away
there.”
“Yes. I do think so. It is demoralising. You don’t see any one for
months at a stretch. You’re leading an unhealthy life.”
The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it
was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.
“You see,” insisted the other. “Solitude works like a sort of poison.
And then you perceive suggestions in faces—mysterious and forcible, that
no sound man would be bothered with. Of course you do.”
Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions
of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the
others. He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which
every day adds to a human countenance. They moved and disturbed him,
like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully
apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata,
where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and
exploration.
“It’s a fact,” he said, “that when I am at home in Malata I see no one
consciously. I take the plantation boys for granted.”
“Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted. And
that’s sanity.”
The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion. What
he had come to seek in the editorial office was not controversy, but
information. Yet somehow he hesitated to approach the subject. Solitary
life makes a man reticent in respect of anything in the nature of gossip,
which those to whom chatting about their kind is an everyday exercise
regard as the commonest use of speech.
“You very busy?” he asked.
The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the
pencil down.
“No. I am done. Social paragraphs. This office is the place where
everything is known about everybody—including even a great deal of
nobodies. Queer fellows drift in and out of this room. Waifs and strays
from home, from up-country, from the Pacific. And, by the way, last time
you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant—didn’t
you?”
“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of
solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the
half-resentful tone. His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person
shook all over. He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his
advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom—or his
sagacity. But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of
exploration: the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work,
of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded
modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial
government. And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s
advocacy with word and pen—for he was an influential man in the
community. Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was
himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he
could not quite make out. He only felt it obscurely to be his real
personality—the true—and, perhaps, the absurd. As, for instance, in that
case of the assistant. Renouard had given way to the arguments of his
friend and backer—the argument against the unwholesome effect of
solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if
quarrelsome. Very well. In this docility he was sensible and even
likeable. But what did he do next? Instead of taking counsel as to the
choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing
everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this
extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a
fellow—God knows who—and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry;
a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight.
That was the sort of thing. The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed
a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.
“Oh, yes. About that assistant of yours. . . .”
“What about him,” said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of
uneasiness on his face.
“Have you nothing to tell me of him?”
“Nothing except. . . .” Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard’s
aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously
before he changed his mind. “No. Nothing whatever.”
“You haven’t brought him along with you by chance—for a change.”
The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured
carelessly: “I think he’s very well where he is. But I wish you could
tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle
last night. Everybody knows I am not a society man.”
The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty. Didn’t his friend know that he
was their one and only explorer—that he was the man experimenting with
the silk plant. . . .
“Still, that doesn’t tell me why I was invited yesterday. For young
Dunster never thought of this civility before. . . .”
“Our Willie,” said the popular journalist, “never does anything without a
purpose, that’s a fact.”
“And to his uncle’s house too!”
“He lives there.”
“Yes. But he might have given me a feed somewhere else. The
extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything
special to say. He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all.
It was quite a party, sixteen people.”
The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to
come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.
Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there. Being a man whose
business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on
in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of
some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests. Young
Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin
shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top
of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he
had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon. Decidedly, he said, he
disliked Willie—one of these large oppressive men. . . .
A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything
more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the
editorial room.
“They looked to me like people under a spell.”
The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect
of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the
expression of faces.
“You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess. You mean
Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister—don’t you?”
Renouard assented. Yes, a white-haired lady. But from his silence, with
his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was
not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.
“Upon my word,” he said, recovering his usual bearing. “It looks to me
as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me.”
He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance.
Nobody could have helped being impressed. She was different from
everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her
London clothes. He did not take her down to dinner. Willie did that.
It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .
The evening was delightfully calm. He was sitting apart and alone, and
wishing himself somewhere else—on board the schooner for choice, with the
dinner-harness off. He hadn’t exchanged forty words altogether during
the evening with the other guests. He saw her suddenly all by herself
coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a
distance.
She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a
character which to him appeared peculiar, something—well—pagan, crowned
with a great wealth of hair. He had been about to rise, but her decided
approach caused him to remain on the seat. He had not looked much at her
that evening. He had not that freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of
society and the frequent meetings with strangers. It was not shyness,
but the reserve of a man not used to the world and to the practice of
covert staring, with careless curiosity. All he had captured by his
first, keen, instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair
was magnificently red and her eyes very black. It was a troubling
effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till very
unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and eager, as if she
were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic upward undulation of her
whole figure. The light from an open window fell across her path, and
suddenly all that mass of arranged hair appeared incandescent, chiselled
and fluid, with the daring suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and
the flowing lines of molten metal. It kindled in him an astonished
admiration. But he said nothing of it to his friend the Editor. Neither
did he tell him that her approach woke up in his brain the image of
love’s infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives
in beauty. No! What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but
mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words.
“That young lady came and sat down by me. She said: ‘Are you French, Mr.
Renouard?’”
He had breathed a whiff of perfume of which he said nothing either—of
some perfume he did not know. Her voice was low and distinct. Her
shoulders and her bare arms gleamed with an extraordinary splendour, and
when she advanced her head into the light he saw the admirable contour of
the face, the straight fine nose with delicate nostrils, the exquisite
crimson brushstroke of the lips on this oval without colour. The
expression of the eyes was lost in a shadowy mysterious play of jet and
silver, stirring under the red coppery gold of the hair as though she had
been a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living
tissue.
“. . . I told her my people were living in Canada, but that I was brought
up in England before coming out here. I can’t imagine what interest she
could have in my history.”
“And you complain of her interest?”
The accent of the all-knowing journalist seemed to jar on the Planter of
Malata.
“No!” he said, in a deadened voice that was almost sullen. But after a
short silence he went on. “Very extraordinary. I told her I came out to
wander at large in the world when I was nineteen, almost directly after I
left school. It seems that her late brother was in the same school a
couple of years before me. She wanted me to tell her what I did at first
when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out—where
they went, what was likely to happen to them—as if I could guess and
foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a
hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons—for no
reason but restlessness—who come, and go, and disappear! Preposterous.
She seemed to want to hear their histories. I told her that most of them
were not worth telling.”
The distinguished journalist leaning on his elbow, his head resting
against the knuckles of his left hand, listened with great attention, but
gave no sign of that surprise which Renouard, pausing, seemed to expect.
“You know something,” the latter said brusquely. The all-knowing man
moved his head slightly and said, “Yes. But go on.”
“It’s just this. There is no more to it. I found myself talking to her
of my adventures, of my early days. It couldn’t possibly have interested
her. Really,” he cried, “this is most extraordinary. Those people have
something on their minds. We sat in the light of the window, and her
father prowled about the terrace, with his hands behind his back and his
head drooping. The white-haired lady came to the dining-room window
twice—to look at us I am certain. The other guests began to go away—and
still we sat there. Apparently these people are staying with the
Dunsters. It was old Mrs. Dunster who put an end to the thing. The
father and the aunt circled about as if they were afraid of interfering
with the girl. Then she got up all at once, gave me her hand, and said
she hoped she would see me again.”
While he was speaking Renouard saw again the sway of her figure in a
movement of grace and strength—felt the pressure of her hand—heard the
last accents of the deep murmur that came from her throat so white in the
light of the window, and remembered the black rays of her steady eyes
passing off his face when she turned away. He remembered all this
visually, and it was not exactly pleasurable. It was rather startling
like the discovery of a new faculty in himself. There are faculties one
would rather do without—such, for instance, as seeing through a stone
wall or remembering a person with this uncanny vividness. And what about
those two people belonging to her with their air of expectant solicitude!
Really, those figures from home got in front of one. In fact, their
persistence in getting between him and the solid forms of the everyday
material world had driven Renouard to call on his friend at the office.
He hoped that a little common, gossipy information would lay the ghost of
that unexpected dinner-party. Of course the proper person to go to would
have been young Dunster, but, he couldn’t stand Willie Dunster—not at any
price.
In the pause the Editor had changed his attitude, faced his desk, and
smiled a faint knowing smile.
“Striking girl—eh?” he said.
The incongruity of the word was enough to make one jump out of the chair.
Striking! That girl striking! Stri . . .! But Renouard restrained his
feelings. His friend was not a person to give oneself away to. And,
after all, this sort of speech was what he had come there to hear. As,
however, he had made a movement he re-settled himself comfortably and
said, with very creditable indifference, that yes—she was, rather.
Especially amongst a lot of over-dressed frumps. There wasn’t one woman
under forty there.
“Is that the way to speak of the cream of our society; the ‘top of the
basket,’ as the French say,” the Editor remonstrated with mock
indignation. “You aren’t moderate in your expressions—you know.”
“I express myself very little,” interjected Renouard seriously.
“I will tell you what you are. You are a fellow that doesn’t count the
cost. Of course you are safe with me, but will you never learn. . . .”
“What struck me most,” interrupted the other, “is that she should pick me
out for such a long conversation.”
“That’s perhaps because you were the most remarkable of the men there.”
Renouard shook his head.
“This shot doesn’t seem to me to hit the mark,” he said calmly. “Try
again.”
“Don’t you believe me? Oh, you modest creature. Well, let me assure you
that under ordinary circumstances it would have been a good shot. You
are sufficiently remarkable. But you seem a pretty acute customer too.
The circumstances are extraordinary. By Jove they are!”
He mused. After a time the Planter of Malata dropped a negligent—
“And you know them.”
“And I know them,” assented the all-knowing Editor, soberly, as though
the occasion were too special for a display of professional vanity; a
vanity so well known to Renouard that its absence augmented his wonder
and almost made him uneasy as if portending bad news of some sort.
“You have met those people?” he asked.
“No. I was to have met them last night, but I had to send an apology to
Willie in the morning. It was then that he had the bright idea to invite
you to fill the place, from a muddled notion that you could be of use.
Willie is stupid sometimes. For it is clear that you are the last man
able to help.”
“How on earth do I come to be mixed up in this—whatever it is?”
Renouard’s voice was slightly altered by nervous irritation. “I only
arrived here yesterday morning.”