Pelorus proved to be a comfortable and seaworthy vessel and her master
(his name was Hackett) a most comfortable and seaworthy person. Although
plainly hungry for a more intellectual brand of masculine society than
ordinarily was to be found in the out-of-the-way places he visited, he
tactfully forbore to obtrude upon Dan’s mood of depression until quite
certain that he was not obtruding—whereupon he would become a most
delightful and entertaining companion. His besetting sin was Scotch and
soda, albeit he resolutely declined, when at sea, to touch a drop before
five o’clock in the afternoon and while he helped himself liberally
until the steward announced dinner, the liquor never appeared to affect
him. It developed that he and Gaston of the Beard had been warm friends.
Hackett’s admiration for the old Breton skipper had been very profound.
One day he said suddenly to Dan: “You have an unasked question in the
back of your head, Mr. Pritchard. You need not bother to ask it. I shall
answer it, however. Old Gaston Larrieau was my friend. We stood back to
back, once, and shot our way out of rather a dirty mess in the New
Hebrides; I was wounded and unconscious at the finish and he swam with
me half a mile through shark-infested waters to his ship. I am what I am
and rather less than that in port, but I behave myself at sea and I have
a long memory. Tamea was as nice a girl when she left the Pelorus as she
was when she came aboard. I wasn’t fixed to accommodate a woman
passenger, but to such as I had she was welcome and no questions asked.”
Dan smiled. “Thank you,” he replied. “I _was_ wondering.”
“You’re devilish frank,” Hackett laughed. “I think I like you the better
for your insulting thought. However, I wouldn’t have been above it with
anybody save old Gaston’s girl. One grows to hold them rather cheaply,
you know. Half-caste or full blood, they come and they go. Hearts are
not too readily broken down this way, Mr. Pritchard.”
“Tamea,” said Dan Pritchard, “is a white woman.”
“Nonsense, my dear sir. She’s a half-caste.”
“Her soul is white,” said Dan doggedly.
“I am not prepared to dispute that assertion,” Hackett replied casually.
“I never quarrel with any man’s likes or dislikes.” He eyed Dan
narrowly. “Something tells me you’re going to marry this girl, Mr.
Pritchard.”
“Certainly.”
“And take her back to the United States with you?”
Dan nodded.
Hackett shrugged, as who should say: “Well, it’s none of my business
what you do.”
“You deprecate my decision,” Dan charged irritably.
“I do not. I don’t give a hoot what you do. I was thinking of the girl.
If I stood in your shoes I wouldn’t marry her. Why should you? You don’t
have to, and she doesn’t expect you to. You’ll regret it if you take her
back to the United States, because she’ll never be truly happy there.
When you transplant these people they die of homesickness. They’re so
far behind our civilization they can never catch up, and the effort to
do so wearies them and they die. They have the home instinct and the
home yearning of a lost fox hound. They are children, I tell you. They
never grow up—and you are not the man to wed with a woman who will
never grow up.”
“Nonsense,” Dan growled. “Sheer, unadulterated nonsense.”
Hackett shrugged and poured himself another peg of Scotch. “I’ve had
three of them in my day. I think I ought to know. One was a Pitcairn
islander and more than half white. I sailed a thousand miles off my
course to bring her back to Pitcairn. She was slowly dying. She loved me
but she loved Pitcairn and her people more.”
There the conversation ceased, yet the effect of it remained. Day after
day, night after night, as the Pelorus rolled lazily before the trades,
Dan Pritchard’s mind dwelled on his problem. What if Hackett should be
proved right, after all? Dan recalled how swiftly, how inevitably,
Tamea’s hurt heart had called her back to Riva and her own people. How
poignantly had that bruised heart yearned for the understanding of those
who could understand her?
His mind harked back to the nights when Tamea lay upon the hearthrug in
his Pacific Avenue home and played sad little songs of Riva on her
accordion. Could it have been that on such occasions her soul had been
steeped in a vague, unsuspected nostalgia? If Hackett was right, then
he, Dan Pritchard, journeyed upon worse than a fool’s errand. Might he
not be doing the kindly, the decent thing, to turn back, to trust to
time and some other man to mend that broken heart? He wondered.
He could not, however, cherish seriously even for a moment the thought
of abandoning his journey. Old Gaston had given Tamea to him to care
for; the Triton had trusted him and he must go on. There was that cursed
money he held in trust for her. She had abandoned it to him, out of the
greatness of her love, but he could no more accept it now than he could
the night she had offered it. He had to see her and return it to her. He
had to win her complete forgiveness and understanding, to render her
happy again.
Suddenly, one evening while he paced slowly backward and forward in the
waist of the ship, he found the solution. He would marry Tamea and end
his days in the Islands. He wanted a change. He told himself he was sick
of civilization; he wanted to be simple and natural, free of the
competition of existence.
Down there nobody would wonder why he had married Tamea. Conventions did
not exist, nor foolish tradition nor social codes—and he could paint
landscapes to his heart’s content. He would establish a South Sea school
of landscape painting. He would be through with the riddle of
existence. . . and there was the embarrassment of Maisie and her aunt
and old Casson and Mellenger and all of his friends should he return to
San Francisco!
His decision, arrived at so suddenly, was peculiarly inexorable. He had
thought too long and too hard: mentally he had come to the jumping-off
place. On the instant his motto was: “The devil take
everything—including me!” The rewards to be gleaned from the struggle
that faced him, should he return to his white civilization, were
scarcely commensurate with the effort required. A sudden, passionate
yearning had seized him to chuck it all, to drift with the tide, to
sample life in its elemental phases, to be happy in a land where all of
the rules of existence were reversed . . . a man lived but once and he
was a long time dead. . . and Dan wanted Tamea. . . . Ah, how ardently
he desired her and how lonely and desolate would be his life without
her! Civilization demands much of repression, since civilized man, like
the domestic dog, still retains many of the instincts of his primitive
ancestors; and Dan was weary of repression. Hang it, he would go on the
loose! He would take the gifts that the gods provided and cease to worry
over the opinions of people whose sole claims to his consideration lay
in the fact that they were white and dwelled in his world and were
hobbled and frightened by tradition.
In all his life Dan had never arrived at a decision that he grasped more
tenaciously or which yielded him a greater measure of comfort. A
subconscious appeal permeated this new thought of freedom as a phrase
runs through an opera. Free! He was going to be free! He was a volatile
spirit and he had been corked too long; the collapse of his business
offered him a splendid excuse for pulling the cork, and by all the gods,
Christian and pagan, he would pull it. That was the idea! Chuck it,
chuck it all and walk out of the picture without even a word of farewell
to his world.
“I’ll do it! By judas priest, I’ll do it,” he said audibly.
“I thought you would,” said Captain Hackett’s calm voice. Dan turned and
caught the glow of the master’s cigar as the latter stood on the
companion with his head and shoulders out of the cabin scuttle. “You’ve
been thinking it over long enough. Your brains must be addled.”
“Well, it is comforting to have come to a conclusion, at any rate,” Dan
defended.
“My guess is that you have concluded to settle in Riva and let the rest
of the world go by, Mr. Pritchard.”
“That remark forces me to wonder again why you continue to skipper a
trading schooner, Captain. You should hang out your shingle as a
clairvoyant or mind reader or fortune teller.”
“I’ve seen your kind come and I’ve seen your kind go,” Hackett retorted.
“Once I was one of you—and I came but never went—and now it is too
late. Which is why I repeat, in all respect, that even if you stay, it
will not be necessary to marry Tamea. Let the world go by, if you
choose—you are the best judge of your wisdom in that regard—but
remember that down under the Line it goes by very slowly, my son. These
islands are not for white men—that is, your kind of white man—unless
you contemplate vegetating and going to pieces mentally, morally and
physically before you are forty. The sun does things to fair-haired and
blue-eyed men and women down in the latitude and longitude of Riva. You
will not be happy there, Mr. Pritchard, and one of these days when I
drop in at Riva you’ll hear your white world calling—and the Chink will
dig up another two thousand dollars for me. And when you leave, Mr.
Pritchard, it would be well to have no _legal_ appendages.”
Dan was silent. He wanted to bash this tropical philosopher over the
head with a belaying pin and cause him to stow forever his insulting and
impossible advice. But—he reflected—if he did that he would be delayed
getting to Riva and Tamea, and he could not bear that she should suffer
one moment longer than necessary. Hackett read his thoughts.
“We will not discuss this subject again, Mr. Pritchard,” he said gently.
“I have said my say because I have felt it my duty to do so. Personally,
I don’t give a damn what happens to you, but I should not care to see
Gaston’s daughter made unhappy. I have roved through these islands some
thirty years and I know what I know. Have a cigar. They’re genuine
Sumatras. A bit dry, but if you like a dry cigar—— No? Well, you
needn’t grow huffy.”
Dan continued his swift walk up and down the deck and Hackett continued
to smoke contemplatively. After a while he said:
“I’m going to install an ice-making machine with part of the two
thousand dollars the Chink paid me. Going to sea is a hard life and I
make enough money for my owners to entitle me to do myself rather well.
One does grow a bit weary of boiled Scotch and tepid wines.”