HAD not been in Tahiti long before I met Captain Nichols. He came in
one morning when I was having breakfast on the terrace of the hotel and
introduced himself. He had heard that I was interested in Charles
Strickland, and announced that he was come to have a talk about him.
They are as fond of gossip in Tahiti as in an English village, and one
or two enquiries I had made for pictures by Strickland had been quickly
spread. I asked the stranger if he had breakfasted.
“Yes; I have my coffee early,” he answered, “but I don’t mind having a
drop of whisky.”
I called the Chinese boy.
“You don’t think it’s too early?” said the Captain.
“You and your liver must decide that between you,” I replied.
“I’m practically a teetotaller,” he said, as he poured himself out a
good half-tumbler of Canadian Club.
When he smiled he showed broken and discoloured teeth. He was a very
lean man, of no more than average height, with gray hair cut short and
a stubbly gray moustache. He had not shaved for a couple of days. His
face was deeply lined, burned brown by long exposure to the sun, and he
had a pair of small blue eyes which were astonishingly shifty. They
moved quickly, following my smallest gesture, and they gave him the
look of a very thorough rogue. But at the moment he was all heartiness
and good-fellowship. He was dressed in a bedraggled suit of khaki, and
his hands would have been all the better for a wash.
“I knew Strickland well,” he said, as he leaned back in his chair and
lit the cigar I had offered him. “It’s through me he came out to the
islands.”
“Where did you meet him?” I asked.
“In Marseilles.”
“What were you doing there?”
He gave me an ingratiating smile.
“Well, I guess I was on the beach.”
My friend’s appearance suggested that he was now in the same
predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an agreeable
acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always repays the small
pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are easy of approach and affable
in conversation. They seldom put on airs, and the offer of a drink is a
sure way to their hearts. You need no laborious steps to enter upon
familiarity with them, and you can earn not only their confidence, but
their gratitude, by turning an attentive ear to their discourse. They
look upon conversation as the great pleasure of life, thereby proving
the excellence of their civilisation, and for the most part they are
entertaining talkers. The extent of their experience is pleasantly
balanced by the fertility of their imagination. It cannot be said that
they are without guile, but they have a tolerant respect for the law,
when the law is supported by strength. It is hazardous to play poker
with them, but their ingenuity adds a peculiar excitement to the best
game in the world. I came to know Captain Nichols very well before I
left Tahiti, and I am the richer for his acquaintance. I do not
consider that the cigars and whisky he consumed at my expense (he
always refused cocktails, since he was practically a teetotaller), and
the few dollars, borrowed with a civil air of conferring a favour upon
me, that passed from my pocket to his, were in any way equivalent to
the entertainment he afforded me. I remained his debtor. I should be
sorry if my conscience, insisting on a rigid attention to the matter in
hand, forced me to dismiss him in a couple of lines.
I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England. It was a matter
upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his kind a direct
question is never very discreet. He hinted at undeserved misfortune,
and there is no doubt that he looked upon himself as the victim of
injustice. My fancy played with the various forms of fraud and
violence, and I agreed with him sympathetically when he remarked that
the authorities in the old country were so damned technical. But it was
nice to see that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land
had not impaired his ardent patriotism. He frequently declared that
England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he felt a lively
superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos, Dutchmen, and Kanakas.
But I do not think he was a happy man. He suffered from dyspepsia, and
he might often be seen sucking a tablet of pepsin; in the morning his
appetite was poor; but this affliction alone would hardly have impaired
his spirits. He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this.
Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men whom a
merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who
from wilfulness or through circumstances they could not cope with have
flown in the face of its decrees. There is no object more deserving of
pity than the married bachelor. Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his
wife. She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type
whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when
she was twenty, and at forty would look no older. She gave me an
impression of extraordinary tightness. Her plain face with its narrow
lips was tight, her skin was stretched tightly over her bones, her
smile was tight, her hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the
white drill she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not
imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having married her why
he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had, often, and his melancholy
arose from the fact that he could never succeed. However far he went
and in howsoever secret a place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs.
Nichols, inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would
presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the cause can
escape the effect.
The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs to no
class. He is not embarrassed by the _sans gene_ of the hobo, nor put
out of countenance by the etiquette of the prince. But Mrs. Nichols
belonged to the well-defined class, of late become vocal, which is
known as the lower-middle. Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am
certain that he was an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was
on the Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her
speak, but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation. At
any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her. Sometimes,
sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel, he would become conscious
that she was walking in the road outside. She did not call him; she
gave no sign that she was aware of his existence; she merely walked up
and down composedly. Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain;
he would look at his watch and sigh.
“Well, I must be off,” he said.
Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a man who had
faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would not have hesitated to
fight a dozen unarmed niggers with nothing but a revolver to help him.
Sometimes Mrs. Nichols would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen
child of seven, to the hotel.
“Mother wants you,” she said, in a whining tone.
“Very well, my dear,” said Captain Nichols.
He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter along the
road. I suppose it was a very pretty example of the triumph of spirit
over matter, and so my digression has at least the advantage of a
moral.