coconut trees came down to the water's edge, not in rows, but spaced out
with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly
but flippant, standing in affected attitudes with the simpering graces
of a bygone age. He sauntered idly through them, along a path that could
be just seen winding its tortuous way, and it led him presently to a
broad creek. There was a bridge across it, but a bridge constructed of
single trunks of coconut trees, a dozen of them, placed end to end and
supported where they met by a forked branch driven into the bed of the
creek. You walked on a smooth, round surface, narrow and slippery, and
there was no support for the hand. To cross such a bridge required sure
feet and a stout heart. The skipper hesitated. But he saw on the other
side, nestling among the trees, a white man's house; he made up his mind
and, rather gingerly, began to walk. He watched his feet carefully, and
where one trunk joined on to the next and there was a difference of
level, he tottered a little. It was with a gasp of relief that he
reached the last tree and finally set his feet on the firm ground of
the other side. He had been so intent on the difficult crossing that he
never noticed anyone was watching him, and it was with surprise that he
heard himself spoken to.
"It takes a bit of nerve to cross these bridges when you're not used to
them."
He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him. He had evidently
come out of the house which he had seen.
"I saw you hesitate," the man continued, with a smile on his lips, "and
I was watching to see you fall in."
"Not on your life," said the captain, who had now recovered his
confidence.
"I've fallen in myself before now. I remember, one evening I came back
from shooting, and I fell in, gun and all. Now I get a boy to carry my
gun for me."
He was a man no longer young, with a small beard, now somewhat grey, and
a thin face. He was dressed in a singlet, without arms, and a pair of
duck trousers. He wore neither shoes nor socks. He spoke English with a
slight accent.
"Are you Neilson?" asked the skipper.
"I am."
"I've heard about you. I thought you lived somewheres round here."
The skipper followed his host into the little bungalow and sat down
heavily in the chair which the other motioned him to take. While Neilson
went out to fetch whisky and glasses he took a look round the room. It
filled him with amazement. He had never seen so many books. The shelves
reached from floor to ceiling on all four walls, and they were closely
packed. There was a grand piano littered with music, and a large table
on which books and magazines lay in disorder. The room made him feel
embarrassed. He remembered that Neilson was a queer fellow. No one knew
very much about him, although he had been in the islands for so many
years, but those who knew him agreed that he was queer. He was a Swede.
"You've got one big heap of books here," he said, when Neilson returned.
"They do no harm," answered Neilson with a smile.
"Have you read them all?" asked the skipper.
"Most of them."
"I'm a bit of a reader myself. I have the _Saturday Evening Post_ sent
me regler."
Neilson poured his visitor a good stiff glass of whisky and gave him a
cigar. The skipper volunteered a little information.
"I got in last night, but I couldn't find the opening, so I had to
anchor outside. I never been this run before, but my people had some
stuff they wanted to bring over here. Gray, d'you know him?"
"Yes, he's got a store a little way along."
"Well, there was a lot of canned stuff that he wanted over, an' he's got
some copra. They thought I might just as well come over as lie idle at
Apia. I run between Apia and Pago-Pago mostly, but they've got smallpox
there just now, and there's nothing stirring."
He took a drink of his whisky and lit a cigar. He was a taciturn man,
but there was something in Neilson that made him nervous, and his
nervousness made him talk. The Swede was looking at him with large dark
eyes in which there was an expression of faint amusement.
"This is a tidy little place you've got here."
"I've done my best with it."
"You must do pretty well with your trees. They look fine. With copra at
the price it is now. I had a bit of a plantation myself once, in Upolu
it was, but I had to sell it."
He looked round the room again, where all those books gave him a feeling
of something incomprehensible and hostile.
"I guess you must find it a bit lonesome here though," he said.
"I've got used to it. I've been here for twenty-five years."
Now the captain could think of nothing more to say, and he smoked in
silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his
guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high,
and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little
purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness.
His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a
fringe of long curly hair, nearly white, at the back of his head, he was
quite bald; and that immense, shiny surface of forehead, which might
have given him a false look of intelligence, on the contrary gave him
one of peculiar imbecility. He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the
neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a
very old pair of blue serge trousers. He sat in his chair in a heavy
ungainly attitude, his great belly thrust forward and his fat legs
uncrossed. All elasticity had gone from his limbs. Neilson wondered idly
what sort of man he had been in his youth. It was almost impossible to
imagine that this creature of vast bulk had ever been a boy who ran
about. The skipper finished his whisky, and Neilson pushed the bottle
towards him.
"Help yourself."
The skipper leaned forward and with his great hand seized it.
"And how come you in these parts anyways?" he said.
"Oh, I came out to the islands for my health. My lungs were bad and they
said I hadn't a year to live. You see they were wrong."
"I meant, how come you to settle down right here?"
"I am a sentimentalist."
"Oh!"
Neilson knew that the skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he
looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just
because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized him to
talk further.
"You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the
bridge, but this spot is generally considered rather pretty."
"It's a cute little house you've got here."
"Ah, that wasn't here when I first came. There was a native hut, with
its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red
flowers; and the croton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden,
made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees,
as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water's edge and
spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then--Good
Heavens, it's a quarter of a century ago--and I wanted to enjoy all the
loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed
into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever
seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was
afraid I was going to cry. I wasn't more than twenty-five, and though I
put the best face I could on it, I didn't want to die. And somehow it
seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to
accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen
away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the
life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality
which our doctors of philosophy--I am one myself, you know--had
discussed so much. 'A year,' I cried to myself. 'I have a year. I will
spend it here and then I am content to die.'"
"We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if
we weren't perhaps we should be less wise at fifty."
"Now drink, my friend. Don't let the nonsense I talk interfere with
you."
He waved his thin hand towards the bottle, and the skipper finished what
remained in his glass.
"You ain't drinking nothin," he said, reaching for the whisky.
"I am of a sober habit," smiled the Swede. "I intoxicate myself in ways
which I fancy are more subtle. But perhaps that is only vanity. Anyhow,
the effects are more lasting and the results less deleterious."
"They say there's a deal of cocaine taken in the States now," said the
captain.
Neilson chuckled.
"But I do not see a white man often," he continued, "and for once I
don't think a drop of whisky can do me any harm."
He poured himself out a little, added some soda, and took a sip.
"And presently I found out why the spot had such an unearthly
loveliness. Here love had tarried for a moment like a migrant bird that
happens on a ship in mid-ocean and for a little while folds its tired
wings. The fragrance of a beautiful passion hovered over it like the
fragrance of hawthorn in May in the meadows of my home. It seems to me
that the places where men have loved or suffered keep about them always
some faint aroma of something that has not wholly died. It is as though
they had acquired a spiritual significance which mysteriously affects
those who pass. I wish I could make myself clear." He smiled a little.
"Though I cannot imagine that if I did you would understand."
He paused.
"I think this place was beautiful because here I had been loved
beautifully." And now he shrugged his shoulders. "But perhaps it is only
that my æsthetic sense is gratified by the happy conjunction of young
love and a suitable setting."
Even a man less thick-witted than the skipper might have been forgiven
if he were bewildered by Neilson's words. For he seemed faintly to laugh
at what he said. It was as though he spoke from emotion which his
intellect found ridiculous. He had said himself that he was a
sentimentalist, and when sentimentality is joined with scepticism there
is often the devil to pay.
He was silent for an instant and looked at the captain with eyes in
which there was a sudden perplexity.
"You know, I can't help thinking that I've seen you before somewhere or
other," he said.
"I couldn't say as I remember you," returned the skipper.
"I have a curious feeling as though your face were familiar to me. It's
been puzzling me for some time. But I can't situate my recollection in
any place or at any time."
The skipper massively shrugged his heavy shoulders.
"It's thirty years since I first come to the islands. A man can't figure
on remembering all the folk he meets in a while like that."
The Swede shook his head.
"You know how one sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never
been to before is strangely familiar. That's how I seem to see you." He
gave a whimsical smile. "Perhaps I knew you in some past existence.
Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I
was a slave at the oar. Thirty years have you been here?"
"Every bit of thirty years."
"I wonder if you knew a man called Red?"
"Red?"
"That is the only name I've ever known him by. I never knew him
personally. I never even set eyes on him. And yet I seem to see him more
clearly than many men, my brothers, for instance, with whom I passed my
daily life for many years. He lives in my imagination with the
distinctness of a Paolo Malatesta or a Romeo. But I daresay you have
never read Dante or Shakespeare?"
"I can't say as I have," said the captain.
Neilson, smoking a cigar, leaned back in his chair and looked vacantly
at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air. A smile played on
his lips, but his eyes were grave. Then he looked at the captain. There
was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent. He had the
plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat. It was an outrage. It set
Neilson's nerves on edge. But the contrast between the man before him
and the man he had in mind was pleasant.
"It appears that Red was the most comely thing you ever saw. I've talked
to quite a number of people who knew him in those days, white men, and
they all agree that the first time you saw him his beauty just took your
breath away. They called him Red on account of his flaming hair. It had
a natural wave and he wore it long. It must have been of that wonderful
colour that the pre-Raphaelites raved over. I don't think he was vain of
it, he was much too ingenuous for that, but no one could have blamed him
if he had been. He was tall, six feet and an inch or two--in the native
house that used to stand here was the mark of his height cut with a
knife on the central trunk that supported the roof--and he was made like
a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like
Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and
that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and
mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was
like a woman's."
"I had kind of a white skin myself when I was a kiddie," said the
skipper, with a twinkle in his bloodshot eyes.
But Neilson paid no attention to him. He was telling his story now and
interruption made him impatient.
"And his face was just as beautiful as his body. He had large blue eyes,
very dark, so that some say they were black, and unlike most red-haired
people he had dark eyebrows and long dark lashes. His features were
perfectly regular and his mouth was like a scarlet wound. He was
twenty."
On these words the Swede stopped with a certain sense of the dramatic.
He took a sip of whisky.
"He was unique. There never was anyone more beautiful. There was no more
reason for him than for a wonderful blossom to flower on a wild plant.
He was a happy accident of nature."
"One day he landed at that cove into which you must have put this
morning. He was an American sailor, and he had deserted from a
man-of-war in Apia. He had induced some good-humoured native to give him
a passage on a cutter that happened to be sailing from Apia to Safoto,
and he had been put ashore here in a dugout. I do not know why he
deserted. Perhaps life on a man-of-war with its restrictions irked him,
perhaps he was in trouble, and perhaps it was the South Seas and these
romantic islands that got into his bones. Every now and then they take a
man strangely, and he finds himself like a fly in a spider's web. It may
be that there was a softness of fibre in him, and these green hills with
their soft airs, this blue sea, took the northern strength from him as
Delilah took the Nazarite's. Anyhow, he wanted to hide himself, and he
thought he would be safe in this secluded nook till his ship had sailed
from Samoa."
"There was a native hut at the cove and as he stood there, wondering
where exactly he should turn his steps, a young girl came out and
invited him to enter. He knew scarcely two words of the native tongue
and she as little English. But he understood well enough what her smiles
meant, and her pretty gestures, and he followed her. He sat down on a
mat and she gave him slices of pineapple to eat. I can speak of Red
only from hearsay, but I saw the girl three years after he first met
her, and she was scarcely nineteen then. You cannot imagine how
exquisite she was. She had the passionate grace of the hibiscus and the
rich colour. She was rather tall, slim, with the delicate features of
her race, and large eyes like pools of still water under the palm trees;
her hair, black and curling, fell down her back, and she wore a wreath
of scented flowers. Her hands were lovely. They were so small, so
exquisitely formed, they gave your heart-strings a wrench. And in those
days she laughed easily. Her smile was so delightful that it made your
knees shake. Her skin was like a field of ripe corn on a summer day.
Good Heavens, how can I describe her? She was too beautiful to be real."
"And these two young things, she was sixteen and he was twenty, fell in
love with one another at first sight. That is the real love, not the
love that comes from sympathy, common interests, or intellectual
community, but love pure and simple. That is the love that Adam felt for
Eve when he awoke and found her in the garden gazing at him with dewy
eyes. That is the love that draws the beasts to one another, and the
Gods. That is the love that makes the world a miracle. That is the love
which gives life its pregnant meaning. You have never heard of the wise,
cynical French duke who said that with two lovers there is always one
who loves and one who lets himself be loved; it is a bitter truth to
which most of us have to resign ourselves; but now and then there are
two who love and two who let themselves be loved. Then one might fancy
that the sun stands still as it stood when Joshua prayed to the God of
Israel."
"And even now after all these years, when I think of these two, so
young, so fair, so simple, and of their love, I feel a pang. It tears my
heart just as my heart is torn when on certain nights I watch the full
moon shining on the lagoon from an unclouded sky. There is always pain
in the contemplation of perfect beauty."
"They were children. She was good and sweet and kind. I know nothing of
him, and I like to think that then at all events he was ingenuous and
frank. I like to think that his soul was as comely as his body. But I
daresay he had no more soul than the creatures of the woods and forests
who made pipes from reeds and bathed in the mountain streams when the
world was young, and you might catch sight of little fawns galloping
through the glade on the back of a bearded centaur. A soul is a
troublesome possession and when man developed it he lost the Garden of
Eden."
"Well, when Red came to the island it had recently been visited by one
of those epidemics which the white man has brought to the South Seas,
and one third of the inhabitants had died. It seems that the girl had
lost all her near kin and she lived now in the house of distant cousins.
The household consisted of two ancient crones, bowed and wrinkled, two
younger women, and a man and a boy. For a few days he stayed there. But
perhaps he felt himself too near the shore, with the possibility that
he might fall in with white men who would reveal his hiding-place;
perhaps the lovers could not bear that the company of others should rob
them for an instant of the delight of being together. One morning they
set out, the pair of them, with the few things that belonged to the
girl, and walked along a grassy path under the coconuts, till they came
to the creek you see. They had to cross the bridge you crossed, and the
girl laughed gleefully because he was afraid. She held his hand till
they came to the end of the first tree, and then his courage failed him
and he had to go back. He was obliged to take off all his clothes before
he could risk it, and she carried them over for him on her head. They
settled down in the empty hut that stood here. Whether she had any
rights over it (land tenure is a complicated business in the islands),
or whether the owner had died during the epidemic, I do not know, but
anyhow no one questioned them, and they took possession. Their furniture
consisted of a couple of grass-mats on which they slept, a fragment of
looking-glass, and a bowl or two. In this pleasant land that is enough
to start housekeeping on."
"They say that happy people have no history, and certainly a happy love
has none. They did nothing all day long and yet the days seemed all too
short. The girl had a native name, but Red called her Sally. He picked
up the easy language very quickly, and he used to lie on the mat for
hours while she chattered gaily to him. He was a silent fellow, and
perhaps his mind was lethargic. He smoked incessantly the cigarettes
which she made him out of the native tobacco and pandanus leaf, and he
watched her while with deft fingers she made grass mats. Often natives
would come in and tell long stories of the old days when the island was
disturbed by tribal wars. Sometimes he would go fishing on the reef, and
bring home a basket full of coloured fish. Sometimes at night he would
go out with a lantern to catch lobster. There were plantains round the
hut and Sally would roast them for their frugal meal. She knew how to
make delicious messes from coconuts, and the bread-fruit tree by the
side of the creek gave them its fruit. On feast-days they killed a
little pig and cooked it on hot stones. They bathed together in the
creek; and in the evening they went down to the lagoon and paddled about
in a dugout, with its great outrigger. The sea was deep blue,
wine-coloured at sundown, like the sea of Homeric Greece; but in the
lagoon the colour had an infinite variety, aquamarine and amethyst and
emerald; and the setting sun turned it for a short moment to liquid
gold. Then there was the colour of the coral, brown, white, pink, red,
purple; and the shapes it took were marvellous. It was like a magic
garden, and the hurrying fish were like butterflies. It strangely lacked
reality. Among the coral were pools with a floor of white sand and here,
where the water was dazzling clear, it was very good to bathe. Then,
cool and happy, they wandered back in the gloaming over the soft grass
road to the creek, walking hand in hand, and now the mynah birds filled
the coconut trees with their clamour. And then the night, with that
great, sky shining with gold, that seemed to stretch more widely than
the skies of Europe, and the soft airs that blew gently through the open
hut, the long night again was all too short. She was sixteen and he was
barely twenty. The dawn crept in among the wooden pillars of the hut and
looked at those lovely children sleeping in one another's arms. The sun
hid behind the great tattered leaves of the plantains so that it might
not disturb them, and then, with playful malice, shot a golden ray, like
the outstretched paw of a Persian cat, on their faces. They opened their
sleepy eyes and they smiled to welcome another day. The weeks lengthened
into months, and a year passed. They seemed to love one another as--I
hesitate to say passionately, for passion has in it always a shade of
sadness, a touch of bitterness or anguish, but as whole heartedly, as
simply and naturally as on that first day on which, meeting, they had
recognised that a god was in them."
"If you had asked them I have no doubt that they would have thought it
impossible to suppose their love could ever cease. Do we not know that
the essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity? And yet
perhaps in Red there was already a very little seed, unknown to himself
and unsuspected by the girl, which would in time have grown to
weariness. For one day one of the natives from the cove told them that
some way down the coast at the anchorage was a British whaling-ship."
"'Gee,' he said, 'I wonder if I could make a trade of some nuts and
plantains for a pound or two of tobacco.'"
"The pandanus cigarettes that Sally made him with untiring hands were
strong and pleasant enough to smoke, but they left him unsatisfied; and
he yearned on a sudden for real tobacco, hard, rank, and pungent. He had
not smoked a pipe for many, months. His mouth watered at the thought of
it. One would have thought some premonition of harm would have made
Sally seek to dissuade him, but love possessed her so completely that it
never occurred to her any power on earth could take him from her. They
went up into the hills together and gathered a great basket of wild
oranges, green, but sweet and juicy; and they picked plantains from
around the hut, and coconuts from their trees, and breadfruit and
mangoes; and they carried them down to the cove. They loaded the
unstable canoe with them, and Red and the native boy who had brought
them the news of the ship paddled along outside the reef."
"It was the last time she ever saw him."