THE EBB-TIDE

A TRIO AND QUARTETTE


By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyde Osbourne



          'There is a tide in the affairs of men.'




Part I.



Chapter 1. NIGHT ON THE BEACH

Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many
European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and
disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted the
steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must marry
for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame supports
them in sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining
some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some relic
(such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman, they sprawl
in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with memoirs of
the music-hall. And there are still others, less pliable, less capable,
less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of
plenty, to lack bread.

At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the
beach under a purao tree.

It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home,
a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers,
dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands. Long
ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house about the tiny
pagan city. Only the street lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in
the umbrageous alleys or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the
port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the Government
pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottomed schooners,
where they lay moored close in like dinghies, and their crews were
stretched upon the deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude tent
amidst the disorder of merchandise.

But the men under the purao had no thought of sleep. The same
temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer; but
it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and the
bottle of cocoanut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about
the island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton
clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the
tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast
to mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.

In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were ON THE BEACH.
Common calamity had brought them acquainted, as the three most miserable
English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their misery, they knew
next to nothing of each other, not even their true names. For each had
made a long apprenticeship in going downward; and each, at some stage of
the descent, had been shamed into the adoption of an alias. And yet not
one of them had figured in a court of justice; two were men of kindly
virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered under the purao, had a tattered
Virgil in his pocket.

Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick
would long ago have sacrificed that last possession; but the demand
for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South
Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he
could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger.
He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the
old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less
beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. Or he
would pause on random country walks; sit on the path side, gazing over
the sea on the mountains of Eimeo; and dip into the Aeneid, seeking
sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way of oracles) replied with no
very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England at least
would throng upon the exile's memory: the busy schoolroom, the green
playing-fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and
the fireside, and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of
those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced
and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and
become native in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so
much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student's own
irrevocable youth.

Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent, active, and ambitious man,
small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived
of the boy; he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford
scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With all
his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient
in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study,
worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and
took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house
was disastrously wound up; Mr Herrick must begin the world again as
a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions and
accept with gratitude a career that he detested and despised. He had
no head for figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint of
hours, and despised the aims and the success of merchants. To grow rich
was none of his ambitions; rather to do well. A worse or a more bold
young man would have refused the destiny; perhaps tried his future with
his pen; perhaps enlisted. Robert, more prudent, possibly more timid,
consented to embrace that way of life in which he could most readily
assist his family. But he did so with a mind divided; fled the
neighbourhood of former comrades; and chose, out of several positions
placed at his disposal, a clerkship in New York.

His career thenceforth was one of unbroken shame. He did not drink,
he was exactly honest, he was never rude to his employers, yet was
everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought
no attention; his day was a tissue of things neglected and things done
amiss; and from place to place and from town to town, he carried the
character of one thoroughly incompetent. No man can bear the word
applied to him without some flush of colour, as indeed there is
none other that so emphatically slams in a man's face the door
of self-respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious of talents and
acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in which he was
found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite. Early in his fall, he
had ceased to be able to make remittances; shortly after, having nothing
but failure to communicate, he ceased writing home; and about a year
before this tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San
Francisco by a vulgar and infuriated German Jew, he had broken the last
bonds of self-respect, and upon a sudden Impulse, changed his name and
invested his last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine, the City
of Papeete. With what expectation he had trimmed his flight for the
South Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there were fortunes
to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not more gifted than
himself had climbed in the island world to be queen's consorts and
king's ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with any manful purpose,
he would have kept his father's name; the alias betrayed his moral
bankruptcy; he had struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate
himself or help his straitened family; and he came to the islands (where
he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and manners easy) a skulker
from life's battle and his own immediate duty. Failure, he had said, was
his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.

It is fortunately not enough to say 'I will be base.' Herrick continued
in the islands his career of failure; but in the new scene and under the
new name, he suffered no less sharply than before. A place was got, it
was lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the keepers of
restaurants he fell to more open charity upon the wayside; as time went
on, good nature became weary, and after a repulse or two, Herrick became
shy. There were women enough who would have supported a far worse and a
far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did both,
some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation. Drenched
with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and ruinous
prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps,
his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had
drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to
be resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion
against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair. The time
had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of an easy and perhaps
agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise; he had proved
himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience that he
could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely pride or strength,
that was perhaps only refinement, withheld him from capitulation; but
he looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing rage, and sometimes
wondered at his patience.

It was now the fourth month completed, and still there was no change
or sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds
of every size and shape and density, some black as ink stains, some
delicate as lawn, threw the marvel of her Southern brightness over the
same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the
perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the
masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of
the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,
with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the
American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master
mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes
and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was
society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he
had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution; he was one whose
hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace
about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,
and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in
Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged
from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old
employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and
all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.

Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now
raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the
purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling
as they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a
touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool and, squatting
on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.
Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from
farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in
the distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel
ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If
a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that
infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers,
perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the
London clerk. He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing,
and the dainties of the sickroom; he lay there now, in the cold open,
exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was
besides infirm; the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions
watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled
them, and contended with and conquered their abhorrence. The disgust
attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same
time, and with more than compensating strength, shame for a sentiment so
inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil
they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is
always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual
and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken
helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor
wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they
would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any
mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was
courage; and he would make haste to reassure them in a pleasantry not
always decent.

'I'm all right, pals,' he gasped once: 'this is the thing to strengthen
the muscles of the larynx.'

'Well, you take the cake!' cried the captain.

'O, I'm good plucked enough,' pursued the sufferer with a broken
utterance. 'But it do seem bloomin' hard to me, that I should be the
only party down with this form of vice, and the only one to do the funny
business. I think one of you other parties might wake up. Tell a fellow
something.'

'The trouble is we've nothing to tell, my son,' returned the captain.

'I'll tell you, if you like, what I was thinking,' said Herrick.

'Tell us anything,' said the clerk, 'I only want to be reminded that I
ain't dead.'

Herrick took up his parable, lying on his face and speaking slowly and
scarce above his breath, not like a man who has anything to say, but
like one talking against time.

'Well, I was thinking this,' he began: 'I was thinking I lay on Papeete
beach one night--all moon and squalls and fellows coughing--and I was
cold and hungry, and down in the mouth, and was about ninety years of
age, and had spent two hundred and twenty of them on Papeete beach. And
I was thinking I wished I had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother,
or could raise Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember how you did it. I
knew you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the Freischutz:
and that you took off your coat and turned up your sleeves, for I had
seen Formes do that when he was playing Kaspar, and you could see (by
the way he went about it) it was a business he had studied; and that you
ought to have something to kick up a smoke and a bad smell, I dare say
a cigar might do, and that you ought to say the Lord's Prayer backwards.
Well, I wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather a feat, you see.
And then I wondered if I would say it forward, and I thought I did.
Well, no sooner had I got to WORLD WITHOUT END, than I saw a man in a
pariu, and with a mat under his arm, come along the beach from the town.
He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped and crippled, and
all the time he kept coughing. At first I didn't cotton to his looks,
I thought, and then I got sorry for the old soul because he coughed so
hard. I remembered that we had some of that cough mixture the American
consul gave the captain for Hay. It never did Hay a ha'porth of service,
but I thought it might do the old gentleman's business for him, and
stood up. "Yorana!" says I. "Yorana!" says he. "Look here," I said,
"I've got some first-rate stuff in a bottle; it'll fix your cough,
savvy? Harry my and I'll measure you a tablespoonful in the palm of my
hand, for all our plate is at the bankers." So I thought the old party
came up, and the nearer he came, the less I took to him. But I had
passed my word, you see.'

'Wot is this bloomin' drivel?' interrupted the clerk. 'It's like the rot
there is in tracts.'

'It's a story; I used to tell them to the kids at home,' said Herrick.
'If it bores you, I'll drop it.'

'O, cut along!' returned the sick man, irritably. 'It's better than
nothing.'

'Well,' continued Herrick, 'I had no sooner given him the cough mixture
than he seemed to straighten up and change, and I saw he wasn't a
Tahitian after all, but some kind of Arab, and had a long beard on his
chin. "One good turn deserves another," says he. "I am a magician out
of the Arabian Nights, and this mat that I have under my arm is the
original carpet of Mohammed Ben Somebody-or-other. Say the word, and you
can have a cruise upon the carpet." "You don't mean to say this is the
Travelling Carpet?" I cried. "You bet I do," said he. "You've been
to America since last I read the Arabian Nights," said I, a little
suspicious. "I should think so," said he. "Been everywhere. A man with a
carpet like this isn't going to moulder in a semi-detached villa." Well,
that struck me as reasonable. "All right," I said; "and do you mean to
tell me I can get on that carpet and go straight to London, England?" I
said, "London, England," captain, because he seemed to have been so long
in your part of the world. "In the crack of a whip," said he. I
figured up the time. What is the difference between Papeete and London,
captain?'

'Taking Greenwich and Point Venus, nine hours, odd minutes and seconds,'
replied the mariner.

'Well, that's about what I made it,' resumed Herrick, 'about nine hours.
Calling this three in the morning, I made out I would drop into London
about noon; and the idea tickled me immensely. "There's only one
bother," I said, "I haven't a copper cent. It would be a pity to go
to London and not buy the morning Standard." "O!" said he, "you don't
realise the conveniences of this carpet. You see this pocket? you've
only got to stick your hand in, and you pull it out filled with
sovereigns."

'Double-eagles, wasn't iff inquired the captain.

'That was what it was!' cried Herrick. 'I thought they seemed unusually
big, and I remember now I had to go to the money-changers at Charing
Cross and get English silver.'

'O, you went there?' said the clerk. 'Wot did you do? Bet you had a B.
and S.!'

'Well, you see, it was just as the old boy said--like the cut of a
whip,' said Herrick. 'The one minute I was here on the beach at three in
the morning, the next I was in front of the Golden Cross at midday.
At first I was dazzled, and covered my eyes, and there didn't seem the
smallest change; the roar of the Strand and the roar of the reef were
like the same: hark to it now, and you can hear the cabs and buses
rolling and the streets resound! And then at last I could look about,
and there was the old place, and no mistake! With the statues in
the square, and St Martin's-in-the-Fields, and the bobbies, and the
sparrows, and the hacks; and I can't tell you what I felt like. I felt
like crying, I believe, or dancing, or jumping clean over the Nelson
Column. I was like a fellow caught up out of Hell and flung down into
the dandiest part of Heaven. Then I spotted for a hansom with a spanking
horse. "A shilling for yourself, if you're there in twenty minutes!"
said I to the jarvey. He went a good pace, though of course it was a
trifle to the carpet; and in nineteen minutes and a half I was at the
door.'

'What door?' asked the captain.

'Oh, a house I know of,' returned Herrick.

'But it was a public-house!' cried the clerk--only these were not his
words. 'And w'y didn't you take the carpet there instead of trundling in
a growler?'

'I didn't want to startle a quiet street,' said the narrator.

'Bad form. And besides, it was a hansom.'

'Well, and what did you do next?' inquired the captain.

'Oh, I went in,' said Herrick.

'The old folks?' asked the captain.

'That's about it,' said the other, chewing a grass.

'Well, I think you are about the poorest 'and at a yarn!' cried the
clerk. 'Crikey, it's like Ministering Children! I can tell you there
would be more beer and skittles about my little jaunt. I would go and
have a B. and S. for luck. Then I would get a big ulster with astrakhan
fur, and take my cane and do the la-de-la down Piccadilly. Then I would
go to a slap-up restaurant, and have green peas, and a bottle of fizz,
and a chump chop--Oh! and I forgot, I'd 'ave some devilled whitebait
first--and green gooseberry tart, and 'ot coffee, and some of that form
of vice in big bottles with a seal--Benedictine--that's the bloomin'
nyme! Then I'd drop into a theatre, and pal on with some chappies,
and do the dancing rooms and bars, and that, and wouldn't go 'ome
till morning, till daylight doth appear. And the next day I'd have
water-cresses, 'am, muffin, and fresh butter; wouldn't I just, O my!'

The clerk was interrupted by a fresh attack of coughing.

'Well, now, I'll tell you what I would do,' said the captain: 'I would
have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from the mizzen
cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered
tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey
and a sucking-pig. Then I'd go to a wine merchant's and get a dozen of
champagne, and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and strong,
something in the port or madeira line, the best in the store. Then I'd
bear up for a toy-store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted toys
for the piccaninnies; and then to a confectioner's and take in cakes and
pies and fancy bread, and that stuff with the plums in it; and then to
a news-agency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids,
and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering
himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private
madhouse; and then I'd tell the fellow to drive home.'

'There ought to be some syrup for the kids,' suggested Herrick; 'they
like syrup.'

'Yes, syrup for the kids, red syrup at that!' said the captain. 'And
those things they pull at, and go pop, and have measly poetry inside.
And then I tell you we'd have a thanksgiving day and Christmas tree
combined. Great Scott, but I would like to see the kids! I guess they
would light right out of the house, when they saw daddy driving up. My
little Adar--'

The captain stopped sharply.

'Well, keep it up!' said the clerk.

'The damned thing is, I don't know if they ain't starving!' cried the
captain.

'They can't be worse off than we are, and that's one comfort,' returned
the clerk. 'I defy the devil to make me worse off.'

It seemed as if the devil heard him. The light of the moon had been
some time cut off and they had talked in darkness. Now there was heard a
roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of the lagoon was seen to
whiten; and before they had staggered to their feet, a squall burst in
rain upon the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche one must
have lived in the tropics to conceive; a man panted in its assault, as
he might pant under a shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night
and water.

They fled, groping for their usual shelter--it might be almost called
their home--in the old calaboose; came drenched into its empty chambers;
and lay down, three sops of humanity on the cold coral floors, and
presently, when the squall was overpast, the others could hear in the
darkness the chattering of the clerk's teeth.

'I say, you fellows,' he walled, 'for God's sake, lie up and try to warm
me. I'm blymed if I don't think I'll die else!'

So the three crept together into one wet mass, and lay until day came,
shivering and dozing off, and continually re-awakened to wretchedness by
the coughing of the clerk.



Chapter 2. MORNING ON THE BEACH--THE THREE LETTERS

The clouds were all fled, the beauty of the tropic day was spread upon
Papeete; and the wall of breaking seas upon the reef, and the palms upon
the islet, already trembled in the heat. A French man-of-war was going
out, homeward bound; she lay in the middle distance of the port, an ant
heap for activity. In the night a schooner had come in, and now lay far
out, hard by the passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of pestilence,
flew on her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes headed
round the point and towards the market, bright as a scarf with the
many-coloured clothing of the natives and the piles of fruit. But not
even the beauty and the welcome warmth of the morning, not even these
naval movements, so interesting to sailors and to idlers, could engage
the attention of the outcasts. They were still cold at heart, their
mouths sour from the want of steep, their steps rambling from the
lack of food; and they strung like lame geese along the beach in a
disheartened silence. It was towards the town they moved; towards the
town whence smoke arose, where happier folk were breakfasting; and as
they went, their hungry eyes were upon all sides, but they were only
scouting for a meal.

A small and dingy schooner lay snug against the quay, with which it was
connected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five
Kanakas who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried feis,
and drinking coffee from tin mugs.

'Eight bells: knock off for breakfast!' cried the captain with a
miserable heartiness. 'Never tried this craft before; positively my
first appearance; guess I'll draw a bumper house.'

He came close up to where the plank rested on the grassy quay; turned
his back upon the schooner, and began to whistle that lively air, 'The
Irish Washerwoman.' It caught the ears of the Kanaka seamen like a
preconcerted signal; with one accord they looked up from their meal and
crowded to the ship's side, fei in hand and munching as they looked.
Even as a poor brown Pyrenean bear dances in the streets of English
towns under his master's baton; even so, but with how much more
of spirit and precision, the captain footed it in time to his own
whistling, and his long morning shadow capered beyond him on the grass.
The Kanakas smiled on the performance; Herrick looked on heavy-eyed,
hunger for the moment conquering all sense of shame; and a little
farther off, but still hard by, the clerk was torn by the seven devils
of the influenza.

The captain stopped suddenly, appeared to perceive his audience for the
first time, and represented the part of a man surprised in his private
hour of pleasure.

'Hello!' said he.

The Kanakas clapped hands and called upon him to go on.

'No, SIR!' said the captain. 'No eat, no dance. Savvy?'

'Poor old man!' returned one of the crew. 'Him no eat?'

'Lord, no!' said the captain. 'Like-um too much eat. No got.'

'All right. Me got,' said the sailor; 'you tome here. Plenty toffee,
plenty fei. Nutha man him tome too.'

'I guess we'll drop right in,' observed the captain; and he and his
companions hastened up the plank. They were welcomed on board with the
shaking of hands; place was made for them about the basin; a sticky
demijohn of molasses was added to the feast in honour of company, and
an accordion brought from the forecastle and significantly laid by the
performer's side.

'Ariana,' said he lightly, touching the instrument as he spoke; and
he fell to on a long savoury fei, made an end of it, raised his mug of
coffee, and nodded across at the spokesman of the crew. 'Here's your
health, old man; you're a credit to the South Pacific,' said he.

With the unsightly greed of hounds they glutted themselves with the hot
food and coffee; and even the clerk revived and the colour deepened in
his eyes. The kettle was drained, the basin cleaned; their entertainers,
who had waited on their wants throughout with the pleased hospitality of
Polynesians, made haste to bring forward a dessert of island tobacco and
rolls of pandanus leaf to serve as paper; and presently all sat about
the dishes puffing like Indian Sachems.

'When a man 'as breakfast every day, he don't know what it is,' observed
the clerk.

'The next point is dinner,' said Herrick; and then with a passionate
utterance: 'I wish to God I was a Kanaka!'

'There's one thing sure,' said the captain. 'I'm about desperate, I'd
rather hang than rot here much longer.' And with the word he took the
accordion and struck up. 'Home, sweet home.'

'O, drop that!' cried Herrick, 'I can't stand that.'

'No more can I,' said the captain. 'I've got to play something though:
got to pay the shot, my son.' And he struck up 'John Brown's Body' in
a fine sweet baritone: 'Dandy Jim of Carolina,' came next; 'Rorin the
Bold,' 'Swing low, Sweet Chariot,' and 'The Beautiful Land' followed.
The captain was paying his shot with usury, as he had done many a
time before; many a meal had he bought with the same currency from the
melodious-minded natives, always, as now, to their delight.

He was in the middle of 'Fifteen Dollars in the Inside Pocket,' singing
with dogged energy, for the task went sore against the grain, when a
sensation was suddenly to be observed among the crew.

'Tapena Tom harry my,' said the spokesman, pointing.

And the three beachcombers, following his indication, saw the figure of
a man in pyjama trousers and a white jumper approaching briskly from the
town.

'Captain Tom is coming.'

'That's Tapena Tom, is it?' said the captain, pausing in his music. 'I
don't seem to place the brute.'

'We'd better cut,' said the clerk. ''E's no good.'

'Well,' said the musician deliberately, 'one can't most generally always
tell. I'll try it on, I guess. Music has charms to soothe the savage
Tapena, boys. We might strike it rich; it might amount to iced punch in
the cabin.'

'Hiced punch? O my!' said the clerk. 'Give him something 'ot, captain.
"Way down the Swannee River"; try that.'

'No, sir! Looks Scotch,' said the captain; and he struck, for his life,
into 'Auld Lang Syne.'

Captain Tom continued to approach with the same business-like alacrity;
no change was to be perceived in his bearded face as he came swinging up
the plank: he did not even turn his eyes on the performer.

    'We twa hae paidled in the burn
     Frae morning tide till dine,'

went the song.

Captain Tom had a parcel under his arm, which he laid on the house roof,
and then turning suddenly to the strangers: 'Here, you!' he bellowed,
'be off out of that!'

The clerk and Herrick stood not on the order of their going, but fled
incontinently by the plank. The performer, on the other hand, flung down
the instrument and rose to his full height slowly.

'What's that you say?' he said. 'I've half a mind to give you a lesson
in civility.'

'You set up any more of your gab to me,' returned the Scotsman, 'and
I'll show ye the wrong side of a jyle. I've heard tell of the three
of ye. Ye're not long for here, I can tell ye that. The Government has
their eyes upon ye. They make short work of damned beachcombers, I'll
say that for the French.'

'You wait till I catch you off your ship!' cried the captain: and
then, turning to the crew, 'Good-bye, you fellows!' he said. 'You're
gentlemen, anyway! The worst nigger among you would look better upon a
quarter-deck than that filthy Scotchman.'

Captain Tom scorned to reply; he watched with a hard smile the departure
of his guests; and as soon as the last foot was off the plank; turned to
the hands to work cargo.

The beachcombers beat their inglorious retreat along the shore; Herrick
first, his face dark with blood, his knees trembling under him with
the hysteria of rage. Presently, under the same purao where they had
shivered the night before, he cast himself down, and groaned aloud, and
ground his face into the sand.

'Don't speak to me, don't speak to me. I can't stand it,' broke from
him.

The other two stood over him perplexed.

'Wot can't he stand now?' said the clerk. ''Asn't he 'ad a meal? I'M
lickin' my lips.'

Herrick reared up his wild eyes and burning face. 'I can't beg!' he
screamed, and again threw himself prone.

'This thing's got to come to an end,' said the captain with an intake of
the breath.

'Looks like signs of an end, don't it?' sneered the clerk.

'He's not so far from it, and don't you deceive yourself,' replied the
captain. 'Well,' he added in a livelier voice, 'you fellows hang on
here, and I'll go and interview my representative.'

Whereupon he turned on his heel, and set off at a swinging sailor's walk
towards Papeete.

It was some half hour later when he returned. The clerk was dozing with
his back against the tree: Herrick still lay where he had flung himself;
nothing showed whether he slept or waked.

'See, boys!' cried the captain, with that artificial heartiness of his
which was at times so painful, 'here's a new idea.' And he produced note
paper, stamped envelopes, and pencils, three of each. 'We can all write
home by the mail brigantine; the consul says I can come over to his
place and ink up the addresses.'

'Well, that's a start, too,' said the clerk. 'I never thought of that.'

'It was that yarning last night about going home that put me up to it,'
said the captain.

'Well, 'and over,' said the clerk. 'I'll 'ave a shy,' and he retired a
little distance to the shade of a canoe.

The others remained under the purao. Now they would write a word or two,
now scribble it out; now they would sit biting at the pencil end and
staring seaward; now their eyes would rest on the clerk, where he sat
propped on the canoe, leering and coughing, his pencil racing glibly on
the paper.

'I can't do it,' said Herrick suddenly. 'I haven't got the heart.'

'See here,' said the captain, speaking with unwonted gravity; 'it may be
hard to write, and to write lies at that; and God knows it is; but it's
the square thing. It don't cost anything to say you're well and happy,
and sorry you can't make a remittance this mail; and if you don't, I'll
tell you what I think it is--I think it's about the high-water mark of
being a brute beast.'

'It's easy to talk,' said Herrick. 'You don't seem to have written much
yourself, I notice.'

'What do you bring in me for?' broke from the captain. His voice was
indeed scarce raised above a whisper, but emotion clanged in it. 'What
do you know about me? If you had commanded the finest barque that ever
sailed from Portland; if you had been drunk in your berth when she
struck the breakers in Fourteen Island Group, and hadn't had the wit to
stay there and drown, but came on deck, and given drunken orders, and
lost six lives--I could understand your talking then! There,' he said
more quietly, 'that's my yarn, and now you know it. It's a pretty one
for the father of a family. Five men and a woman murdered. Yes, there
was a woman on board, and hadn't no business to be either. Guess I sent
her to Hell, if there is such a place. I never dared go home again; and
the wife and the little ones went to England to her father's place. I
don't know what's come to them,' he added, with a bitter shrug.

'Thank you, captain,' said Herrick. 'I never liked you better.'

They shook hands, short and hard, with eyes averted, tenderness swelling
in their bosoms.

'Now, boys! to work again at lying!' said the captain.

'I'll give my father up,' returned Herrick with a writhen smile. 'I'll
try my sweetheart instead for a change of evils.'

And here is what he wrote:

'Emma, I have scratched out the beginning to my father, for I think I
can write more easily to you. This is my last farewell to all, the last
you will ever hear or see of an unworthy friend and son. I have failed
in life; I am quite broken down and disgraced. I pass under a false
name; you will have to tell my father that with all your kindness. It is
my own fault. I know, had I chosen, that I might have done well; and yet
I swear to you I tried to choose. I could not bear that you should think
I did not try. For I loved you all; you must never doubt me in that,
you least of all. I have always unceasingly loved, but what was my love
worth? and what was I worth? I had not the manhood of a common clerk,
I could not work to earn you; I have lost you now, and for your sake I
could be glad of it. When you first came to my father's house--do you
remember those days? I want you to--you saw the best of me then, all
that was good in me. Do you remember the day I took your hand and would
not let it go--and the day on Battersea Bridge, when we were looking at
a barge, and I began to tell you one of my silly stories, and broke off
to say I loved you? That was the beginning, and now here is the end.
When you have read this letter, you will go round and kiss them all
good-bye, my father and mother, and the children, one by one, and poor
uncle; And tell them all to forget me, and forget me yourself. Turn
the key in the door; let no thought of me return; be done with the poor
ghost that pretended he was a man and stole your love. Scorn of myself
grinds in me as I write. I should tell you I am well and happy, and want
for nothing. I do not exactly make money, or I should send a remittance;
but I am well cared for, have friends, live in a beautiful place and
climate, such as we have dreamed of together, and no pity need be wasted
on me. In such places, you understand, it is easy to live, and live
well, but often hard to make sixpence in money. Explain this to my
father, he will understand. I have no more to say; only linger, going
out, like an unwilling guest. God in heaven bless you. Think of me to
the last, here, on a bright beach, the sky and sea immoderately blue,
and the great breakers roaring outside on a barrier reef, where a little
isle sits green with palms. I am well and strong. It is a more pleasant
way to die than if you were crowding about me on a sick-bed. And yet I
am dying. This is my last kiss. Forgive, forget the unworthy.'

So far he had written, his paper was all filled, when there returned a
memory of evenings at the piano, and that song, the masterpiece of love,
in which so many have found the expression of their dearest thoughts.
'Einst, O wunder!' he added. More was not required; he knew that in his
love's heart the context would spring up, escorted with fair images and
harmony; of how all through life her name should tremble in his ears,
her name be everywhere repeated in the sounds of nature; and when death
came, and he lay dissolved, her memory lingered and thrilled among his
elements.

    'Once, O wonder! once from the ashes of my heart
     Arose a blossom--'

Herrick and the captain finished their letters about the same time; each
was breathing deep, and their eyes met and were averted as they closed
the envelopes.

'Sorry I write so big,' said the captain gruffly. 'Came all of a rush,
when it did come.'

'Same here,' said Herrick. 'I could have done with a ream when I got
started; but it's long enough for all the good I had to say.'

They were still at the addresses when the clerk strolled up, smirking
and twirling his envelope, like a man well pleased. He looked over
Herrick's shoulder.

'Hullo,' he said, 'you ain't writing 'ome.'

'I am, though,' said Herrick; 'she lives with my father. Oh, I see what
you mean,' he added. 'My real name is Herrick. No more Hay'--they had
both used the same alias--'no more Hay than yours, I dare say.'

'Clean bowled in the middle stump!' laughed the clerk. 'My name's 'Uish
if you want to know. Everybody has a false nyme in the Pacific. Lay you
five to three the captain 'as.'

'So I have too,' replied the captain; 'and I've never told my own since
the day I tore the title page out of my Bowditch and flung the damned
thing into the sea. But I'll tell it to you, boys. John Davis is my
name. I'm Davis of the Sea Ranger.'

'Dooce you are!' said Hush. 'And what was she? a pirate or a slyver?'

'She was the fastest barque out of Portland, Maine,' replied the
captain; 'and for the way I lost her, I might as well have bored a hole
in her side with an auger.'

'Oh, you lost her, did you?' said the clerk. ''Ope she was insured?'

No answer being returned to this sally, Huish, still brimming over with
vanity and conversation, struck into another subject.

'I've a good mind to read you my letter,' said he. 'I've a good fist
with a pen when I choose, and this is a prime lark. She was a barmaid
I ran across in Northampton; she was a spanking fine piece, no end
of style; and we cottoned at first sight like parties in the play. I
suppose I spent the chynge of a fiver on that girl. Well, I 'appened to
remember her nyme, so I wrote to her, and told her 'ow I had got rich,
and married a queen in the Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace.
Such a sight of crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the
nigger parliament in a cocked 'at. It's really prime.'

The captain jumped to his feet. 'That's what you did with the paper that
I went and begged for you?' he roared.

It was perhaps lucky for Huish--it was surely in the end unfortunate for
all--that he was seized just then by one of his prostrating accesses of
cough; his comrades would have else deserted him, so bitter was their
resentment. When the fit had passed, the clerk reached out his hand,
picked up the letter, which had fallen to the earth, and tore it into
fragments, stamp and all.

'Does that satisfy you?' he asked sullenly.

'We'll say no more about it,' replied Davis.



Chapter 3. THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR

The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low,
rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western
avenue and a little townward of the British consulate. Within was
a grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant
occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court: the doors, that
had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the
grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars
upon the windows.

The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the
last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of
water by the door, a half cocoanut shell beside it for a drinking cup;
and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open,
his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of
sunbright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window;
and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused
and laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket. His long
arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the insults of the morning, and
the harrowing business of the letter, had strung him to that point when
pain is almost pleasure, time shrinks to a mere point, and death and
life appear indifferent. To and fro he paced like a caged brute; his
mind whirling through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes, as
he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crumbling whitewash was
all full of them: Tahitian names, and French, and English, and rude
sketches of ships under sail and men at fisticuffs.

It came to him of a sudden that he too must leave upon these walls the
memorial of his passage. He paused before a clean space, took the pencil
out, and pondered. Vanity, so hard to dislodge, awoke in him. We call it
vanity at least; perhaps unjustly. Rather it was the bare sense of his
existence prompted him; the sense of his life, the one thing wonderful,
to which he scarce clung with a finger. From his jarred nerves there
came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could
not say: change, he knew no more--change, with inscrutable veiled face,
approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert
room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud
voice of the symphony. 'Destiny knocking at the door,' he thought; drew
a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth
Symphony. 'So,' thought he, 'they will know that I loved music and had
classical tastes. They? He, I suppose: the unknown, kindred spirit that
shall come some day and read my memor querela. Ha, he shall have Latin
too!' And he added: terque quaterque beati Queis ante ora patrum.

He turned again to his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and
supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he
had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should
he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and
looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment
and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance.
Could the thing continue? What bound him now? Had he no rights?--only
the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the
unbearable? Ich trage unertragliches, the quotation rose in his mind; he
repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect of
poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, A hast
es ja gewolit. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against
himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn.
'I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood,' he thought, 'or why
should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I
have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit!
and to be starving here with worse than banditti--with this trivial
hell-hound!' His rage against his comrade rose and flooded him, and he
shook a trembling fist at the sleeper.

A swift step was audible. The captain appeared upon the threshold of the
cell, panting and flushed, and with a foolish face of happiness. In his
arms he carried a loaf of bread and bottles of beer; the pockets of his
coat were bulging with cigars.

He rolled his treasures on the floor, grasped Herrick by both hands, and
crowed with laughter.

'Broach the beer!' he shouted. 'Broach the beer, and glory hallelujah!'

'Beer?' repeated Huish, struggling to his feet. 'Beer it is!' cried
Davis. 'Beer and plenty of it. Any number of persons can use it (like
Lyon's tooth-tablet) with perfect propriety and neatness. Who's to
officiate?'

'Leave me alone for that,' said the clerk. He knocked the necks off with
a lump of coral, and each drank in succession from the shell.

'Have a weed,' said Davis. 'It's all in the bill.'

'What is up?' asked Herrick.

The captain fell suddenly grave. 'I'm coming to that,' said he. 'I want
to speak with Herrick here. You, Hay--or Huish, or whatever your name
is--you take a weed and the other bottle, and go and see how the wind is
down by the purao. I'll call you when you're wanted!'

'Hay? Secrets? That ain't the ticket,' said Huish.

'Look here, my son,' said the captain, 'this is business, and don't you
make any mistake about it. If you're going to make trouble, you can
have it your own way and stop right here. Only get the thing right: if
Herrick and I go, we take the beer. Savvy?'

'Oh, I don't want to shove my oar in,' returned Huish. 'I'll cut right
enough. Give me the swipes. You can jaw till you're blue in the face for
what I care. I don't think it's the friendly touch: that's all.' And he
shambled grumbling out of the cell into the staring sun.

The captain watched him clear of the courtyard; then turned to Herrick.

'What is it?' asked Herrick thickly.

'I'll tell you,' said Davis. 'I want to consult you. It's a chance we've
got. What's that?' he cried, pointing to the music on the wall.

'What?' said the other. 'Oh, that! It's music; it's a phrase of
Beethoven's I was writing up. It means Destiny knocking at the door.'

'Does it?' said the captain, rather low; and he went near and studied
the inscription; 'and this French?' he asked, pointing to the Latin.

'O, it just means I should have been luckier if I had died at horne,'
returned Herrick impatiently. 'What is this business?'

'Destiny knocking at the door,' repeated the captain; and then, looking
over his shoulder. 'Well, Mr Herrick, that's about what it comes to,' he
added.

'What do you mean? Explain yourself,' said Herrick.

But the captain was again staring at the music. 'About how long ago
since you wrote up this truck?' he asked.

'What does it matter?' exclaimed Herrick. 'I dare say half an hour.'

'My God, it's strange!' cried Davis. 'There's some men would call that
accidental: not me. That--' and he drew his thick finger under the
music--'that's what I call Providence.'

'You said we had a chance,' said Herrick.

'Yes, SIR!' said the captain, wheeling suddenly face to face with
his companion. 'I did so. If you're the man I take you for, we have a
chance.'

'I don't know what you take me for,' was the reply. 'You can scarce take
me too low.'

'Shake hands, Mr Herrick,' said the captain. 'I know you. You're a
gentleman and a man of spirit. I didn't want to speak before that bummer
there; you'll see why. But to you I'll rip it right out. I got a ship.'

'A ship?' cried Herrick. 'What ship?'

'That schooner we saw this morning off the passage.'

'The schooner with the hospital flag?'

'That's the hooker,' said Davis. 'She's the Farallone, hundred and
sixty tons register, out of 'Frisco for Sydney, in California champagne.
Captain, mate, and one hand all died of the smallpox, same as they had
round in the Paumotus, I guess. Captain and mate were the only white
men; all the hands Kanakas; seems a queer kind of outfit from a
Christian port. Three of them left and a cook; didn't know where they
were; I can't think where they were either, if you come to that;
Wiseman must have been on the booze, I guess, to sail the course he did.
However, there HE was, dead; and here are the Kanakas as good as lost.
They bummed around at sea like the babes in the wood; and tumbled
end-on upon Tahiti. The consul here took charge. He offered the berth to
Williams; Williams had never had the smallpox and backed down. That was
when I came in for the letter paper; I thought there was something up
when the consul asked me to look in again; but I never let on to you
fellows, so's you'd not be disappointed. Consul tried M'Neil; scared of
smallpox. He tried Capirati, that Corsican and Leblue, or whatever his
name is, wouldn't lay a hand on it; all too fond of their sweet lives.
Last of all, when there wasn't nobody else left to offer it to, he
offers it to me. "Brown, will you ship captain and take her to Sydney?"
says he. "Let me choose my own mate and another white hand," says I,
"for I don't hold with this Kanaka crew racket; give us all two months'
advance to get our clothes and instruments out of pawn, and I'll take
stock tonight, fill up stores, and get to sea tomorrow before dark!"
That's what I said. "That's good enough," says the consul, "and you
can count yourself damned lucky, Brown," says he. And he said it pretty
meaningful-appearing, too. However, that's all one now. I'll ship Huish
before the mast--of course I'll let him berth aft--and I'll ship you
mate at seventy-five dollars and two months' advance.'