WHEN AUGUST THE SECOND WAS APRIL THE FIRST
How Ethan A. Pratt, formerly of South New Medford, in the State of
Vermont, came to be resident manager and storekeeper for the British
Great Eastern Company, Ltd., on Good Friday Island, in the South Seas,
is not our present concern. Besides, the way of it makes too long a tale
for telling here. It is sufficient to say he was.
Never having visited that wide, long, deep and mainly liquid backside of
the planet known broadly as the South Seas but always intending to do
so, I must largely depend for my local colour upon what Ethan Pratt
wrote back home to South New Medford; on that, plus what returned
travellers to those parts have from time to time told me. So if in this
small chronicle those paragraphs which purport to be of a descriptive
nature appear incomplete to readers personally acquainted with the spots
dealt with or with spots like them the fault, in some degree at least,
must rest upon the fact that I have had my main dependence in the
preserved letters of one who was by no means a sprightly correspondent,
but on the contrary was by way of being somewhat prosy, not to say
commonplace, on his literary side.
From the evidence extant one gathers that for the four years of his life
he spent on Good Friday Island Ethan Pratt lived in the rear room of a
two-room house of frame standing on a beach with a little village about
it, a jungle behind it, a river half-mooning it and a lagoon before it.
In the rear room he bedded and baited himself. The more spacious front
room into which his housekeeping quarters opened was a store of sorts
where he retailed print goods staple, tinned foods assorted and
gimcracks various to his customers, these mostly being natives. The
building was crowned with a tin roof and on top of the roof there
perched a round water tank, like a high hat on a head much too large for
it. The use of this tank was to catch and store up rain water, which ran
into it from the sloping top of a larger and taller structure standing
partly alongside and partly back of the lesser structure. The larger
building--a shed it properly was; a sprawling wide-eaved barracks of a
shed--was for the storing of copra, the chief article for export
produced on Good Friday Island.
Copra, as all know--or as all should know, since it has come to be one
of the most essential vegetable products of the world, a thing needful
in the manufacture of nearly every commercial output in which fatty
essences are required--is the dried meat of the nut of the coconut palm.
So rich is it in oils that soap makers--to cite one of the industries
employing it--scarce could do without it; but like many of this earth's
most profitable and desirable yieldings it has its unpretty aspects. For
one thing it stinks most abominably while it is being cured, and after
it has been cured it continues to stink, with a lessened intensity. For
another thing, the all-pervading reek of the stuff gets into food that
is being prepared anywhere in its bulked vicinity.
Out in front of the establishment over which Ethan Pratt presided, where
the sandy beach met the waters, was a rickety little wharf like a hyphen
to link the grit with the salt. Down to the outer tip of the wharf ran a
narrow-gauge track of rusted iron rails, and over the track on occasion
plied little straddlebug handcars. Because the water offshore was shoal
ships could not come in very close but must lie well out in the lagoon
and their unloadings and their reloadings were carried on by means of
whale-boats ferrying back and forth between ship side and dock side with
the push cars to facilitate the freight movement at the land end of the
connection. This was a laborious and a vexatious proceeding,
necessitating the handling and rehandling of every bit of incoming or
outbound cargo several times. But then, steamers did not come very
often to Good Friday Island; one came every two months about.
The expanse upon which Ethan Pratt looked when he turned his eyes
outward was of an incredible whiteness. You would have thought it to be
the whitest, most blinding thing in the world until you considered the
road that skirted it and some of the buildings that bordered it. For the
road was built of crushed coral, so dazzlingly white that to look
fixedly at it for thirty seconds in bright weather was to make the
eyeballs ache; and the buildings referred to were built of blocks of
white coral like exaggerated cubes of refined sugar. These buildings
were the chapels and churches--Methodist, Catholic, Seventh Day
Adventist, English Wesleyan and American Mormon. When the sun shone
clear the water on beyond became a shimmering blazing shield of
white-hot metal; and an hour of uninterrupted gazing upon it would have
turned an argus into a blinkard. But other times--early morning or
evening or when stormy weather impended--the lagoon became all a
wonderful deep clear blue, the colour of molten stained glass. One
peering then into its depths saw, far down below, marvellous sea gardens
all fronded and ferny and waving; and through the foliage of this
fairy-land went darting schools and shoals of fish queerly shaped and as
brilliantly coloured as tropical birds.
At the top of the beach, girdling it on its land side, and stencilling
themselves against the sky line, ran a fringing of coconut palms. The
trunks were naked almost to the tops, where the foliage revealed itself
in flaring clumps of green. Viewed separately a tree was suggestive of a
great bird standing on one leg with its head hidden under its wing, its
rump up-reared and its splayed tail feathers saluting the skies. Viewed
together they made a spectacle for which nothing in the temperate zones,
animal or vegetable, offers a measurable comparison. When the wind blew
softly the trees whispered among themselves. When the wind blew hard and
furiously, as often it did, or when the trade breeze swelled to
hurricane speed, the coconuts in their long bearded husks would be
wrenched free and would come hurtling through the air like fletched
cannon balls. When one of them struck a tin roof there resulted a
terrific crashing sound fit to wake the dead and to stun the living.
Living there Pratt's diet was mainly tinned salmon, which tasted faintly
of tin and strongly of copra; and along with the salmon, crackers, which
in this climate were almost always flabby with dampness and often were
afflicted with greenish mould. Salmon and crackers had come to be his
most dependable stand-bys in the matter of provender. True the natives
brought him gifts of food dishes; dishes cooked without salt and
pleasing to the Polynesian palate. Coming out upon his balcony of a
morning he would find swinging from a cross-beam a basket made of the
green palm leaves and containing a chicken or a fish prepared according
to the primitive native recipe, or perhaps a mess of wild greens baked
on hot stones; or maybe baked green bananas or taro or yams or hard
crusty halves of baked breadfruit.
To the white man yams and taro taste mighty good at first, but
eventually he sickens of them. Pratt sickened sooner than some white men
had; and almost from the first the mere sight and savour of a
soft-fleshed baked fish had made his gorge rise in revolt. So he fell
back upon staples of his own land and ate salmon and crackers.
This island where he lived was an island of smells and insects. Consider
first the matter of the prevalent smells: When the copra was curing and
the village green was studded with thousands of little cusps, each being
brown without and milk-white within, and each destined to remain there
until the heat had dried the nut meats to the proper brownish tone,
there rose and spread upon the air a stench so thick and so heavy as to
be almost visible; a rancid, hot, rottenish stench. Then, when the wind
blew off the seas it frequently brought with it the taint of rotted
fish. Sniffing this smell Ethan Pratt would pray for a land breeze; but
since he hated perfumed smells almost as intensely as he hated
putrescent ones, a land breeze was no treat to his nose either, for it
came freighted with the sickish odour of the frangipane and of a plant
the islanders call _mosooi_, overpowering in their combined sweetness.
In his letters he complained much of these smells and likewise much of
the heat, but more than of either he complained of the insects. It would
appear that the mosquitoes worked on him in shifts. By day there came
day mosquitoes, creatures of the sunlight and matching it in a way,
seeing that they were big grey-striped fellows with keen and strident
voices. By night there were small vicious mosquitoes, in colour an
appropriate black and in habit more bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark
the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in
the traditional casement is to returning wanderers. It brought them in
millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small
coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of
many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window
openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they found a
way in. The mosquitoes and the gnats preyed upon him; the beetles and
the moths were lured by the flame to a violent end. To save the wick
from being clogged by their burnt bodies he hooded the top of the lamp
with netting. This caused the lamp chimney to smoke and foul itself with
soot. To save his shins from attack he wrapped his legs in newspaper
buskins. For his hands and his face and his neck and his ears he could
devise no protection.
To be encountered just outside the door were huge flying cockroaches
that clung in his hair or buffeted him in the face as they blundered
along on purposeless flights. Still other insects, unseen but none the
less busy, added to the burden of his jeremiad. Borers riddled the pages
of his books; and the white ant, as greedy for wood pulp as a paper
baron, was constantly sapping and mining the underpinnings of his house.
Touching on the climate his tone was most rebellious. By all accounts
the weather was rarely what one born in Vermont would regard as
seasonable weather. According to him its outstanding characteristics
were heat, moistness and stickiness. If he took a nap in the afternoon
he rose from it as from a Turkish bath. His hair was plastered to his
head all day with dampness; his forehead and his face ran sweat; his
wrists were as though they had been parboiled and freshly withdrawn from
the water. Perspiration glued his garments to his frame. His shoes
behind the door turned a leprous white from mildew and rotted to pieces
while yet they were new.
The forest, into which he sometimes ventured, was a place of dampness,
deepness and smells; a place of great trees, fat fungoids, sprawling
creepers, preposterous looking parasites, orchids, lianas; a place of
things that crawled and climbed and twined and clung. It was filled
with weird sounds--the booming of wild pigeons; a nagging, tapping sound
as though woodchoppers were at work far off in its depths; and a
constant insane chattering sound, as though mad children, hidden all
about him, were laughing at him. Dusk brought from their coverts the
flying foxes, to utter curious notes as they sailed through the
gloaming, and occasionally sharp squeaks as of mortal agony or intense
gratification--he couldn't make up his mind which. After nightfall if he
flung a burning cigar stump out upon the sand he could see it moving off
in the darkness apparently under its own motive power. But the truth was
that a land crab, with an unsolvable mania for playing the role of
torchbearer, would be scuttling away with the stub in one of its claws.
The forest sheltered no dangerous beasts and no venomous reptiles but in
it were stinging nettles the touch of which was like fire to a sensitive
white skin. Also, the waters of the lagoon were free from man-eaters,
but wading close to shore one was almost sure to bark one's shanks on
the poisoned coral, making sores that refused to heal. Against the
river, which flowed down out of the interior to the sea, Pratt likewise
bore a grudge, because it was in the river that a brown woman washed his
clothes on the stones, returning them with the buttons pounded off; but
for every missing button there was sure to be a bright yellow,
semi-indelible stain, where the laundress had spread the garments to dry
upon a wild berry bush.
Every two months the steamer came. Then the white population of the
station doubled and trebled itself. Traders and storekeepers came by
canoe from outlying islands or from remote stations on the farther side
of his own island, for Good Friday Island had but one port of entry and
this was it. Beachcombers who had been adopted into villages in the
interior sauntered in over jungle trails. Many of them were deserters
from whalers or from naval vessels; nearly all were handsome chaps in an
animal sort of way.
For this common sharing of a common comeliness among them there was a
reason. In a land where physical perfection literally is worshipped,
good-looking men, brawny and broad, are surest of winning an asylum and
wives and tribal equality. To Pratt it seems to have been a source of
wonderment that almost without exception they were blue-eyed and
light-haired; he could understand of course why their skins, once fair
and white, had changed to the colour of well-tanned calfskin. The sun
beating upon their naked bodies had done that.
There also would be present a party of overseers and managers from a big
German plantation on an adjacent island. The traders and the Germans
would appear in white ducks with white shoes smartly pipe-clayed, and
white straw hats. The beachcombers would be in clean pyjama suits with
bright-coloured neckties. Ordinarily these latter went about
bare-headed, bare-legged and bare-bodied except for the lava-lava made
of fibre from the paper mulberry tree and worn like a kilt about the
hips; but now, in white men's garments, they sought to prove that they
still were white men and civilised white men too. If the steamer were
late, as very often happened, some of the visitors would take advantage
of the wait to make themselves roaring drunk on gin.
So much briefly, for the stage setting of Ethan Pratt's environment; now
for the personality of the man: Of all the breeds and the mixed breeds
that have gravitated out of white lands into these sea islands of
darker-skinned peoples, there surely was never a more incongruous, more
alien figure than this man presented. For you should know that in all
things he was most typical of what is most typical in a certain
cross-section of New England life--not the coastwise New England of a
seafaring, far-ranging, adventurous race, but the New England of
long-settled remote interior districts. He came of a farming stock and a
storekeeping stock, bred out of the loins of forbears made hard by the
task of chiselling a livelihood off of flinty hillsides, made narrow by
the pent-up communal system of isolated life, made honest and truthful
by the influences behind them and the examples before them of
generations of straight-walking, strait-laced, God-dreading folk.
That form of moral dyspepsia known as the Puritanical conscience was his
by right of inheritance. In his nature there was no flexibility, no
instinct for harmonious adaptability to any surroundings excepting those
among which he had been born and in which he intended to end his days.
Temperamentally he was of a fast colour. The leopard cannot change the
spots and neither could he change his; nor did he will so to do. In
short he was what he was, just as God and prenatal reactions had
fashioned him, and so he would remain to the end of the chapter.
For all the four years he had spent out there the lure of the South
Seas--about which so much has been written that it must be a verity and
not a popular myth--had never laid hold upon him. Its gorgeous physical
beauty, its languor, its voluptuous colour and abandon, its prodigally
glorious dawns and its velvety nights--held for him no value to be
reckoned as an offset against climatic discomforts; it left him
untouched. In it he never saw the wonderland that Stevenson made so
vivid to stay-at-homes, nor felt for one instant the thrill that
inspired Jack London to fine rhapsodising. In it he saw and he felt only
the sense of an everlasting struggle against foreign elements and
hostile forces.
Among the missionaries he had acquaintances but no friends. He despised
the swaggering beachcombers who had flung off the decencies of
civilisation along with the habiliments of civilisation and who found a
marrowy sweetness in the husks of the prodigal. Even more he despised
the hectoring Germans with their flaming red and yellow beards, their
thick-lensed spectacles, their gross manners when among their own kind
and their brutishness in all their dealings with the natives--a
brutishness so universal among them that no Polynesian would work at any
price for a German, and every German had to depend for his plantation
labour upon imported black boys from the Solomons and from New Guinea,
who having once been trapped or, to use the trade word, indented, were
thereafter held in an enforced servitude and paid with the bond-man's
wage of bitter bread and bloody stripes.
He had never been able to get under the skin of a native; indeed he had
never tried. In all the things that go to make up an understanding of a
fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely
strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down
in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a
castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could
have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him
been a desert island instead of a populous one.
When a chief paid him a formal visit, bringing a gift of taro root and
sitting for hours upon his veranda, the grave courtesy of the ceremony,
in which a white man differently constituted might have taken joy,
merely bored him unutterably. As for the native women, they had as
little of sex appeal for him as he had for them--which was saying a good
deal now, because he was short and of a meagre shape, and the scorn of
the Polynesian girl for a little man is measureless. The girls of Good
Friday Island called him by a name which sounded like "Pooh-pooh."
Among an English-speaking people it would have been a hard-enough lot to
be pooh-poohed through life by every personable female one met. Here the
coupled syllables carried an added sting of contemptuousness. In the
language of the country they meant runty, mean-figured, undersized. A
graceful girl, her naked limbs glistening with coconut oil, a necklet of
flowers about her throat and a hibiscus bloom pasted to her cheek like a
beauty spot, meeting him in the road would give him a derisive smile
over her shoulder and with the unconscious cruelty of primitive folk
would softly puff out "Pooh-pooh" through her pursed lips as she passed
him by. And it hurt. Certain of the white residents called him Pooh-pooh
too, which hurt more deeply.
How he hated the whole thing--the dampness which mildewed his shoes and
rusted out his nettings; the day heat which kept him bathed in
clamminess; the pestiferous insects; the forest with its voices like
sobbings and hammerings and demoniac chatterings; the food he had to
eat; the company he had to keep; the chiefs who bored him; the girls who
derided him; the beachcombers who nauseated him; the white sands, the
blue waters, the smells, the sounds, the routine of existence with one
day precisely like another--the whole thing of it. We may picture him as
a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most
tremendously lonely, most distressingly alien. We may go further and
picture him as a sort of combination of Job with his afflictions,
Robinson Crusoe with no man Friday to cheer him in his solitude, and
Peter the Hermit with no dream of a crusade to uplift him. In these four
years his hair had turned almost white, yet he was still under forty.
To all about him, white people and brown people alike, the coming of the
steamer was an event of supremest importance. For the islanders it meant
a short season of excitement, most agreeable to their natures. For the
whites it meant a fleeting but none the less delectable contact with the
world outside, with lands beyond, upon which all of them, for this
reason or that, had turned their backs, and to which some of them dared
never return.
In his case the world did not mean the world at large but merely the
small circumscribed world of South New Medford, which was his world. To
him South New Medford comprehended and summed up all that was really
worth while. He welcomed the steamer not because it brought news of wars
and rumours of wars nor tales of great events on this continent or in
that archipelago, but because it brought to him a sheaf of letters, all
addressed in the same prim handwriting and bearing the same postmark;
and a sheaf of copies of the South New Medford _Daily Republican_. The
letters he read at once greedily, but with the newspapers he had a
different way. He shucked them out of their wrappers, arranged them in
proper chronological order with those bearing the later dates at the
bottom and those bearing the older dates upon the top of the heap, then
stacked them on a shelf in his living room. And each morning he read a
paper.
In the beginning of his sojourn on Good Friday Island he had made a
grievous mistake. Following the arrival of the first steamer after he
took over his duties as resident manager for the _British Great Eastern_
he had indulged himself in a perfect orgy of reading. He had read all
his _Daily Republicans_ in two days' time, gorging himself on home news,
on mention of familiar names and on visions of familiar scenes. Then had
ensued sixty-odd days of emptiness until the steamer brought another
batch of papers to him.
From that time on he read one paper a day and one only. Reading it he
lived the life of the town and became one of its citizens; a sharer at
long distance in its joys, its sorrows and its small thrills. But never
now did he read more than one paper in a single day; the lesson of those
two months had sunk in. No temptation, howsoever strong--the desire to
know how the divorce trial of the H. K. Peabodys turned out, the itch of
yearning to learn whether the body of the man found drowned in Exeter
Pond was identified--proved potent enough to pull him away from his
rule. That the news he read was anywhere from ten weeks to four months
old when it reached him did not matter; in fact he very soon forgot that
such was the case. For two precious hours a day he was translated back
to the day and date that the rumpled sheet in his hands carried on its
first page. Afterward he reverted quite naturally and without conscious
jar to the proper time of the year as advertised by the calendar.
His routine would be like this: He would rise early, before the heat of
the day was upon Good Friday Island to make it steam and sweat and give
off smells. He would shave himself and bathe and put on clean loose
garments, all white except where the stains of the wild, yellow berries
had blotched them. His breakfast he prepared himself, afterward washing
the dishes. Then he would light his pipe or his cigar and take from the
shelf the uppermost copy of the pile of _Daily Republicans_ there. With
the love for tidiness and kemptness that was a part of him he would
smooth out its creases, then sit down on his veranda to read it.
Immediately he became detached from all his surroundings. By his
concentration he was isolated from and insulated against all external
influences. He was not in Good Friday Island then; he was in South New
Medford.
Each morning he read his paper through from the top line of the first
column of the first page to the bottom line of the last column of the
fourth, or last, page. He read it all--news matter, local items,
clippings, advertisements, want notices, church notices, lodge notices,
patent insides of boiler plate, fashion department, household hints,
farm hints, reprint, Births, Weddings and Deaths; syndicate stuff, rural
correspondence--no line of its contents did he skip. With his eyes shut
he could put his finger upon those advertisements which ran without
change and occupied set places on this page or that; such, for instance,
as the two-column display of J. Wesley Paxon, Livery Barn, Horses Kept
and Baited, Vehicles at all hours, Funeral Attendance a Specialty; and
the two-inch notice of the American Pantorium and Pressing Club,
Membership $1.00 per Month, Garments Called For and Delivered, Phone No.
41, M. Pincus, Prop. He was like a miser with a loaf; no crumb, however
tiny, got away from him. To him there was more of absorbing interest in
the appearance of the seventeen-year locust in Chittenden County than in
a Balkan outbreak; less of interest in the failing state of health of
the Czar than in the prospects for the hay crop in the Otter Creek
valley.
When he had read on through to the last ink-smudged line he would reread
the accounts of those matters which particularly attracted him on their
first reading. Then reluctantly and still in his state of absorption, he
would put the paper aside and going inside to a small desk would write
his daily chapter in a bulky letter, the whole to be posted on the next
steamer day. It was characteristic of the man that in his letter writing
he customarily dealt in comment upon the minor affairs of South New
Medford as they had passed in review before him in the printed columns,
rather than in observations regarding witnessed occurrences in Good
Friday Island. This writing stunt done, his day was done. The rest was
dulness. Unutterable, grinding dulness--the monotony of dealing out
wares to customers, of keeping his accounts, of posting his records to
date, of performing his domestic chores.
From this dulness, though, there was sometimes an escape. To relieve the
monotony of his cheerless grind of duties and obligations there came to
him visions. And these visions, we may be very sure, mainly were induced
by what he had that day read and that day written. By virtue of a
special conjury residing in these waking dreams of his, the little man
peering nearsightedly at the shimmering white beach saw instead of a
beach the first heavy fall of snow upon the withers of the Green
Mountains; saw not unchanging stretches of sand but a blanket of purest
fleece, frilled and flounced and scrolled after the drift wind had
billowed it up in low places but otherwise smooth and fair except where
it had been rutted by sleigh runners and packed by the snow-boltered
hoofs of bay Dobbins and sorrel Dollies, the get of Morgan stock.
In the insane forest voices he heard the contented cacklings of fat hens
scratching for provender beneath the gnarled limbs of ancient apple
trees whose trunks all were so neatly whitewashed up to the lowermost
boughs. Looking upon the settlement where he lived, set as it was like a
white-and-green jewel in a ring of lush barbaric beauty, his fancy
showed him the vista of a spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by
dooryards having fences of pointed painted pickets, and behind the
pickets, peonies and hollyhocks encroaching upon prim flagged walks
which led back to the white-panelled doors of small houses buried almost
to their eaves in lilac bushes and golden glow.
The magic of it made all things to match in with the image: Thus, for
example, the tall palms with their feather-duster tops, bending
seaward, turned into broad elms standing in regular double rank, like
Yankee militiamen on a muster day. And night times, when through his
windows there came floating in the soft vowelsome voices of native
fishermen paddling their canoes upon the lagoon and singing as they
paddled, he felt himself translated many thousands of miles away to
Wednesday evening prayer meeting in a squat, brick church with a wooden
belfry rearing above its steep slated roof.
But in this last conjuring-up of a beloved scene there lay at the back
of the trick more of reminiscence than imagination, since the airs the
fishermen chanted were based, nearly all, upon Christian songs that the
earlier missionaries had brought hither; the words might be Polynesian
but the cadence that carried the words was likely to be the cadence of
some pioneer hymnster.
And ever and always the vision had a certain delectable climax; a
definite consummation most devoutly wished for. For its final upshot
would be that Ethan Pratt would behold himself growing old in the
peaceful safe harbour of South New Medford, anchored fast by his
heartstrings to a small white cottage, all furbished and plenished
within, all flowers and shrubs roundabout, with a kitchen garden at its
back, and on beyond an orchard of whitewashed trees where buff cochins
clucked beneath the ripening fruit, and on beyond this in turn a hay
meadow stretching away toward rising foothills.
He saw himself working in the flowers and tilling the vegetable garden.
He watched himself quitting this haven to walk a sedate way to worship
of a Sunday morning. With his mind's eye he followed his own course in a
buggy along a country road in the fall of the year when the maples had
turned and the goldenrod spread its carpet of tawny glory across the
fields. And invariably his companion in these simple homely comfortable
employments was a little woman who wore gold-rimmed glasses and starchy
print frocks.
Into the picture no third figure ever obtruded. With her alone he
conceived of himself as walking side by side through all the remaining
days of his life. For this mousy methodical little man had his great
romance. Unsuspected and undetected, inside the commonplace cover of his
body it burned with a clear and a steady flame. It had burned there,
never flickering, never wavering, through all the days of his faring
into far and foreign parts. Since childhood the two of them had been
engaged. It was she who wrote him the letters that came, a fat sheaf of
them, by every steamer; it was to her that he wrote in reply. It was for
the sake of her and in the intention of making a home for her that
through four years he had endured this imprisonment or this martyrdom or
this whatever you may be pleased to call it, away off here on the
opposite side of the world from her. She was saving and he was saving,
both for a common purpose. Back there at home it cost her little to
live, and out here it cost him less. In fact, it cost him almost
nothing. Ninety per cent of his pay went into his share of the pool.
Within another year the requisite sum which this pair of canny prudent
souls had set as their modest goal would be reached; and then he could
bid an everlasting farewell to these hated islands and go sailing
home--home to South New Medford and to Miss Hetty Stowe. And then she
would surrender the place she had held for so long as the teacher of
District School Number Four, to become Mrs. Ethan Allen Pratt, a wife
honoured, a helpmate well-beloved.
So to him the coming of the steamer meant more than an orgy of drunken
beachcombers and a bustle of life and activity upon the beach; it meant
more than a thin-strained taste of contact with a distant world of white
men and white men's ways; meant more, even, than letters and papers. To
him it was a renewal of the nearing prospect of an eternal departure out
of these lands. By the steamer's movements he marked off into spaced
intervals the remaining period of his exile, he thought of the passage
of time not in terms of days or weeks but in terms of two-month
stretches. Six visits more of the ship, or possibly seven, and this
drear life would come to an end and another life, the one of his hopes
and plans, would begin.
For its next time of coming the boat was due on or about August the
first. She failed to come on the first, but on the second, early in the
morning, she came nosing into the lagoon. In a canoe with a brown man to
paddle him Pratt put off for her. He was alongside by the time her
anchor chains had rattled out, and the skipper with his own hands passed
down to him a mail bag. He brought it ashore and from it took out his
packet of letters and his sheaf of _Daily Republicans_. These he carried
to his quarters.
First he read the letters, finding them many fewer in number than was
usual. By his private system of chronological accounting there should
have been one letter for every day from the eighteenth of March well on
into May. But here were but a scant dozen instead of the expected
fifty-odd. On the other hand there seemed to be a fairly complete file
of the papers, except that about ten or twelve of the earlier-dated
numbers were missing. By some freakishness in the handling of the post
at this port or that a batch of the older papers and a larger batch of
the newer letters had failed of ultimate delivery to the steamer; so he
figured it. This thing had happened before, causing a vexatious break in
his routine. Plainly it had happened again. Well, away out here off the
beat of travel such upsettings must be endured.
He arranged the papers upon their proper shelf and in their proper
order; then, as was his wont, he turned to the letters and read them
one by one. To another they might have seemed stiff and precise in their
language; almost formal, faintly breathing as they did the restrained
affections of a woman no longer young and coming of a breed of women who
almost from the cradle are by precept and example taught how to cloak
the deeper and the more constant emotions beneath the ice skim of a
ladylike reserve. But they satisfied their reader; they were as they
always had been and as they always would be. His only complaint,
mentally registered, was that the last one should bear the date of March
twenty-ninth.
Having read them all he filed them away in a safe place, then brought
the topmost copy of his just-received file of newspapers out upon the
veranda and sat himself down to read it.
The first column always contained local news. He read of the wand drill
given by the graduating class of the South New Medford Girls' High
School; of a demonstration of Wheat-Sweet Breakfast Food in the show
window of Cody's drug store; of a fire from unknown causes in Lawyer
Horace Bartlett's offices upstairs over G. A. R. Hall, damage eighty
dollars; of the death of Aunt Priscilla Lyon, aged ninety-two; of a
bouncing, ten-pound boy born to Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Purdy, mother and
child doing well--all names familiar to him. He came to the department
devoted to weddings. There was but one notice beneath the single-line
head; it made a single paragraph.
He read it and as he read the words of it burned into his brain like a
fiery acid. He read it, and it ran like this:
"We are informed that a surprise marriage took place this morning at
Rutland. In that city Miss Hetty Stowe, of near this place, was united
in the holy bonds of wedlock to Mr. Gabriel Eno, of Vergennes. We did
not get the name of the officiating minister. The bride is an estimable
lady who for years past has taught District School Number Four in the
county. We have not the pleasure of the happy bridegroom's acquaintance
but assume he is in every way worthy of the lady he has won for a wife.
Ye Editor extends congratulations to the happy pair and will print
further details when secured."
He read it through again, to the last blurred word. And as he reread a
roaring and a crashing filled his ears. It was the castle of his hopes
crashing down in ruins. So this, then was why the sequence of letters
had been so abruptly broken off. She had lacked the courage to tell him
of her faithlessness; she had chosen the course of silence, leaving him
to learn of the treachery through other sources. It was cruelty piled
upon cruelty compounded.
For such a sorry ending he had cut four years out of his life. For this
reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh
unendurable--loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this
he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was
sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had
undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless prospect that
stretched unendingly before him. Never now could he bring himself to go
back to the spot of his shattered dreams. And to him that was the one
place in all the world worth going back to.
He put his face down upon his crossed arms, and presently there began to
escape from him strangled sobs sounding most grotesquely like some
strange mimicry of the name the native girls had for him--"Pooh-pooh,
pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh," over and over again repeated. Beyond his doorstep
the life of the station hummed and throbbed, quickened into joyous
activity by the coming of the steamer. He was not conscious of it. That
roaring still was in his ears.
Now between his racking sobs he began to pray aloud a broken prayer. He
did not pray for divine forgiveness of the thing he meant to do. By the
narrow tenets of his faith his soul, through the deliberate act of his
hands, would go forth from the body, doomed to everlasting torment. It
did not appear feasible to him that God might understand. The God he
believed in was a stern God of punishments, sitting in strict judgment
upon mortal transgressions. So he prayed not for mercy but for strength
to carry him through that which faced him.
In a cupboard in the inner room was a single-barreled, muzzle-loading
fowling piece made at Liege, in Belgium, many years before. His
predecessor in the station had left it behind him and Pratt had
succeeded to possession of it. He knew how to load and fire and clean
it. Occasionally he had used it in shooting at wood pigeons. He went
inside and took it from its place and charged it with black powder from
an old-fashioned metal powder flask and with heavy shot from a worn shot
pouch. For wadding he tore apart the front page of the uppermost copy of
the file of _Daily Republicans_ lying upon the shelf where he had placed
them less than half an hour before.
He rammed the charge home, with wadding between powder and shot, with
more wadding on top of the shot. He withdrew the ramrod and cast it
aside; he brought the hammer back to full cock and fixed a cap upon the
nipple. He stood the gun upright upon the floor and leaned forward, the
muzzle against his upper chest, the stock braced against the edge of a
crack in the planking. With the great toe of his bare right foot he
pressed the trigger.
Two natives, passing, heard the booming report and ran in to see what
had caused it. They quickly ran out again and brought white men. After
the body had been moved from where it had fallen but before the scanty
personal belongings of the dead man had been sealed up and before the
store had been put under lock and key, the white men made search about
the place for any farewell message, or lacking that, any physical
evidence that might furnish a possible explanation for the cause of the
suicide. They found neither message nor clew. In searching about one of
them came upon a tattered scrap of newspaper. Its burnt edges and its
general singed condition proved that it had been used for wadding. The
force of the discharge had blown it out, almost intact, to flutter off
into a corner.
Moved by a curiosity natural under the circumstances the finder
deciphered the smudged and blackened reading that he found upon the two
surfaces of the fragment. On one side appeared part of an advertisement
of a merchant tailor; on the other side he made out this, which he read
with a casual interest only:
"The Editor regrets exceedingly that in yesterday's issue he was
victimised and imposed upon to the extent of printing an erroneous and
entirely incorrect item, for which mistake we now hasten to make prompt
correction and due amends. Some person unknown, taking advantage of the
fact that yesterday was April the first, or All Fools' Day, telephoned
to our sanctum the information that Miss Hetty Stowe, the well-known
teacher, of near here, had been married yesterday morning at Rutland to
a Mr. Gabriel Eno, of Vergennes. Accepting the report in good faith,
this paper printed it in good faith, as an item of news. We now learn
that the entire story was untrue, being, not to mince words, a lie
manufactured out of the whole cloth. We learn that Miss Stowe knows the
gentleman whose name was given as bridegroom but very slightly, having
met him but once, as we are now reliably informed. In fact, nothing
could be farther from her thoughts than marriage with the gentleman in
question, he being considerably her junior in years. The cruelty of the
hoax thus perpetrated is increased by the fact that for the past several
days Miss Stowe has been confined to the bed of illness, suffering from
a sudden and violent attack of fever, which illness has naturally been
enhanced by the embarrassing position in which she has been placed
through the act of an anonymous practical joker. Such jokes are entirely
out of place and cannot be too strongly reprehended. In correcting this
falsehood the _Daily Republican_ wishes to state that the perpetrator of
the same is deserving of severe----"
Here the fragment was torn across.
To the tale there is no moral unless it be an indirect moral to be
derived from contemplation of a strange contradiction in our modern
life, to wit: That practical burglary is by law sternly discouraged and
practical joking is not.