"I wish I knew whether you are merely headstrong, or whether you really
intend to be a Solomon planter," Sheldon said in the morning, at
breakfast.
"I wish you were more adaptable," Joan retorted. "You have more
preconceived notions than any man I ever met. Why in the name of common
sense, in the name of . . . fair play, can't you get it into your head
that I am different from the women you have known, and treat me
accordingly? You surely ought to know I am different. I sailed my own
schooner here--skipper, if you please. I came here to make my living.
You know that; I've told you often enough. It was Dad's plan, and I'm
carrying it out, just as you are trying to carry out your Hughie's plan.
Dad started to sail and sail until he could find the proper islands for
planting. He died, and I sailed and sailed until I arrived here.
Well,"--she shrugged her shoulders--"the schooner is at the bottom of the
sea. I can't sail any farther, therefore I remain here. And a planter I
shall certainly be."
"You see--" he began.
"I haven't got to the point," she interrupted. "Looking back on my
conduct from the moment I first set foot on your beach, I can see no
false pretence that I have made about myself or my intentions. I was my
natural self to you from the first. I told you my plans; and yet you sit
there and calmly tell me that you don't know whether I really intend to
become a planter, or whether it is all obstinacy and pretence. Now let
me assure you, for the last time, that I really and truly shall become a
planter, thanks to you, or in spite of you. Do you want me for a
partner?"
"But do you realize that I would be looked upon as the most foolish
jackanapes in the South Seas if I took a young girl like you in with me
here on Berande?" he asked.
"No; decidedly not. But there you are again, worrying about what idiots
and the generally evil-minded will think of you. I should have thought
you had learned self-reliance on Berande, instead of needing to lean upon
the moral support of every whisky-guzzling worthless South Sea vagabond."
He smiled, and said,--
"Yes, that is the worst of it. You are unanswerable. Yours is the logic
of youth, and no man can answer that. The facts of life can, but they
have no place in the logic of youth. Youth must try to live according to
its logic. That is the only way to learn better."
"There is no harm in trying?" she interjected.
"But there is. That is the very point. The facts always smash youth's
logic, and they usually smash youth's heart, too. It's like platonic
friendships and . . . and all such things; they are all right in theory,
but they won't work in practice. I used to believe in such things once.
That is why I am here in the Solomons at present."
Joan was impatient. He saw that she could not understand. Life was too
clearly simple to her. It was only the youth who was arguing with him,
the youth with youth's pure-minded and invincible reasoning. Hers was
only the boy's soul in a woman's body. He looked at her flushed, eager
face, at the great ropes of hair coiled on the small head, at the rounded
lines of the figure showing plainly through the home-made gown, and at
the eyes--boy's eyes, under cool, level brows--and he wondered why a
being that was so much beautiful woman should be no woman at all. Why in
the deuce was she not carroty-haired, or cross-eyed, or hare-lipped?
"Suppose we do become partners on Berande," he said, at the same time
experiencing a feeling of fright at the prospect that was tangled with a
contradictory feeling of charm, "either I'll fall in love with you, or
you with me. Propinquity is dangerous, you know. In fact, it is
propinquity that usually gives the facer to the logic of youth."
"If you think I came to the Solomons to get married--" she began
wrathfully. "Well, there are better men in Hawaii, that's all. Really,
you know, the way you harp on that one string would lead an unprejudiced
listener to conclude that you are prurient-minded--"
She stopped, appalled. His face had gone red and white with such
abruptness as to startle her. He was patently very angry. She sipped
the last of her coffee, and arose, saying,--
"I'll wait until you are in a better temper before taking up the
discussion again. That is what's the matter with you. You get angry too
easily. Will you come swimming? The tide is just right."
"If she were a man I'd bundle her off the plantation root and crop, whale-
boat, Tahitian sailors, sovereigns, and all," he muttered to himself
after she had left the room.
But that was the trouble. She was not a man, and where would she go, and
what would happen to her?
He got to his feet, lighted a cigarette, and her Stetson hat, hanging on
the wall over her revolver-belt, caught his eye. That was the devil of
it, too. He did not want her to go. After all, she had not grown up
yet. That was why her logic hurt. It was only the logic of youth, but
it could hurt damnably at times. At any rate, he would resolve upon one
thing: never again would he lose his temper with her. She was a child;
he must remember that. He sighed heavily. But why in reasonableness had
such a child been incorporated in such a woman's form?
And as he continued to stare at her hat and think, the hurt he had
received passed away, and he found himself cudgelling his brains for some
way out of the muddle--for some method by which she could remain on
Berande. A chaperone! Why not? He could send to Sydney on the first
steamer for one. He could--
Her trilling laughter smote upon his reverie, and he stepped to the
screen-door, through which he could see her running down the path to the
beach. At her heels ran two of her sailors, Papehara and Mahameme, in
scarlet lava-lavas, with naked sheath-knives gleaming in their belts. It
was another sample of her wilfulness. Despite entreaties and commands,
and warnings of the danger from sharks, she persisted in swimming at any
and all times, and by special preference, it seemed to him, immediately
after eating.
He watched her take the water, diving cleanly, like a boy, from the end
of the little pier; and he watched her strike out with single overhand
stroke, her henchmen swimming a dozen feet on either side. He did not
have much faith in their ability to beat off a hungry man-eater, though
he did believe, implicitly, that their lives would go bravely before hers
in case of an attack.
Straight out they swam, their heads growing smaller and smaller. There
was a slight, restless heave to the sea, and soon the three heads were
disappearing behind it with greater frequency. He strained his eyes to
keep them in sight, and finally fetched the telescope on to the veranda.
A squall was making over from the direction of Florida; but then, she and
her men laughed at squalls and the white choppy sea at such times. She
certainly could swim, he had long since concluded. That came of her
training in Hawaii. But sharks were sharks, and he had known of more
than one good swimmer drowned in a tide-rip.
The squall blackened the sky, beat the ocean white where he had last seen
the three heads, and then blotted out sea and sky and everything with its
deluge of rain. It passed on, and Berande emerged in the bright sunshine
as the three swimmers emerged from the sea. Sheldon slipped inside with
the telescope, and through the screen-door watched her run up the path,
shaking down her hair as she ran, to the fresh-water shower under the
house.
On the veranda that afternoon he broached the proposition of a chaperone
as delicately as he could, explaining the necessity at Berande for such a
body, a housekeeper to run the boys and the storeroom, and perform divers
other useful functions. When he had finished, he waited anxiously for
what Joan would say.
"Then you don't like the way I've been managing the house?" was her first
objection. And next, brushing his attempted explanations aside, "One of
two things would happen. Either I should cancel our partnership
agreement and go away, leaving you to get another chaperone to chaperone
your chaperone; or else I'd take the old hen out in the whale-boat and
drown her. Do you imagine for one moment that I sailed my schooner down
here to this raw edge of the earth in order to put myself under a
chaperone?"
"But really . . . er . . . you know a chaperone is a necessary evil," he
objected.
"We've got along very nicely so far without one. Did I have one on the
_Miele_? And yet I was the only woman on board. There are only three
things I am afraid of--bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones. Ugh!
the clucking, evil-minded monsters, finding wrong in everything, seeing
sin in the most innocent actions, and suggesting sin--yes, causing sin--by
their diseased imaginings."
"Phew!" Sheldon leaned back from the table in mock fear.
"You needn't worry about your bread and butter," he ventured. "If you
fail at planting, you would be sure to succeed as a writer--novels with a
purpose, you know."
"I didn't think there were persons in the Solomons who needed such
books," she retaliated. "But you are certainly one--you and your
custodians of virtue."
He winced, but Joan rattled on with the platitudinous originality of
youth.
"As if anything good were worth while when it has to be guarded and put
in leg-irons and handcuffs in order to keep it good. Your desire for a
chaperone as much as implies that I am that sort of creature. I prefer
to be good because it is good to be good, rather than because I can't be
bad because some argus-eyed old frump won't let me have a chance to be
bad."
"But it--it is not that," he put in. "It is what others will think."
"Let them think, the nasty-minded wretches! It is because men like you
are afraid of the nasty-minded that you allow their opinions to rule
you."
"I am afraid you are a female Shelley," he replied; "and as such, you
really drive me to become your partner in order to protect you."
"If you take me as a partner in order to protect me . . . I . . . I
shan't be your partner, that's all. You'll drive me into buying Pari-
Sulay yet."
"All the more reason--" he attempted.
"Do you know what I'll do?" she demanded. "I'll find some man in the
Solomons who won't want to protect me."
Sheldon could not conceal the shock her words gave him.
"You don't mean that, you know," he pleaded.
"I do; I really do. I am sick and tired of this protection dodge. Don't
forget for a moment that I am perfectly able to take care of myself.
Besides, I have eight of the best protectors in the world--my sailors."
"You should have lived a thousand years ago," he laughed, "or a thousand
years hence. You are very primitive, and equally super-modern. The
twentieth century is no place for you."
"But the Solomon Islands are. You were living like a savage when I came
along and found you--eating nothing but tinned meat and scones that would
have ruined the digestion of a camel. Anyway, I've remedied that; and
since we are to be partners, it will stay remedied. You won't die of
malnutrition, be sure of that."
"If we enter into partnership," he announced, "it must be thoroughly
understood that you are not allowed to run the schooner. You can go down
to Sydney and buy her, but a skipper we must have--"
"At so much additional expense, and most likely a whisky-drinking,
irresponsible, and incapable man to boot. Besides, I'd have the business
more at heart than any man we could hire. As for capability, I tell you
I can sail all around the average broken captain or promoted able seaman
you find in the South Seas. And you know I am a navigator."
"But being my partner," he said coolly, "makes you none the less a lady."
"Thank you for telling me that my contemplated conduct is unladylike."
She arose, tears of anger and mortification in her eyes, and went over to
the phonograph.
"I wonder if all men are as ridiculous as you?" she said.
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Discussion was useless--he had
learned that; and he was resolved to keep his temper. And before the day
was out she capitulated. She was to go to Sydney on the first steamer,
purchase the schooner, and sail back with an island skipper on board. And
then she inveigled Sheldon into agreeing that she could take occasional
cruises in the islands, though he was adamant when it came to a
recruiting trip on Malaita. That was the one thing barred.
And after it was all over, and a terse and business-like agreement (by
her urging) drawn up and signed, Sheldon paced up and down for a full
hour, meditating upon how many different kinds of a fool he had made of
himself. It was an impossible situation, and yet no more impossible than
the previous one, and no more impossible than the one that would have
obtained had she gone off on her own and bought Pari-Sulay. He had never
seen a more independent woman who stood more in need of a protector than
this boy-minded girl who had landed on his beach with eight picturesque
savages, a long-barrelled revolver, a bag of gold, and a gaudy
merchandise of imagined romance and adventure.
He had never read of anything to compare with it. The fictionists, as
usual, were exceeded by fact. The whole thing was too preposterous to be
true. He gnawed his moustache and smoked cigarette after cigarette.
Satan, back from a prowl around the compound, ran up to him and touched
his hand with a cold, damp nose. Sheldon caressed the animal's ears,
then threw himself into a chair and laughed heartily. What would the
Commissioner of the Solomons think? What would his people at home think?
And in the one breath he was glad that the partnership had been effected
and sorry that Joan Lackland had ever come to the Solomons. Then he went
inside and looked at himself in a hand-mirror. He studied the reflection
long and thoughtfully and wonderingly.