When it was over Lawson and I stood on one side for a while to watch the crowd stream out, then he held out his hand.
“Good-night,” he said. “I hope you’ll have a pleasant journey home.”
“Oh, but I shall see you before I go.”
He sniggered.
“The question is if you’ll see me drunk or sober.”
He turned and left me. I had a recollection of those very large black eyes, shining wildly under the shaggy brows. I paused irresolutely. I did not feel sleepy and I thought I would at all events go along to the club for an hour before turning in. When I got there I found the billiard-room empty, but half-a-dozen men were sitting round a table in the lounge, playing poker. Miller looked up as I came in.
“Sit down and take a hand,” he said.
“All right.”
I bought some chips and began to play. Of course it is the most fascinating game in the world and my hour lengthened out to two, and then to three. The native bar-tender, cheery and wide-awake notwithstanding the time, was at our elbow to supply us with drinks and from somewhere or other he produced a ham and a loaf of bread. We played on. Most of the party had drunk more than was good for them and the play was high and reckless. I played modestly, neither wishing to win nor anxious to lose, but I watched Miller with a fascinated interest. He drank glass for glass with the rest of the company, but remained cool and level-headed. His pile of chips increased in size and he had a neat little paper in front of him on which he had marked various sums lent to players in distress. He beamed amiably at the young men whose money he was taking. He kept up interminably his stream of jest and anecdote, but he never missed a draw, he never let an expression of the face pass him. At last the dawn crept into the windows, gently, with a sort of deprecating shyness, as though it had no business there, and then it was day.
“Well,” said Miller, “I reckon we’ve seen the old year out in style. Now let’s have a round of jackpots and me for my mosquito net. I’m fifty, remember, I can’t keep these late hours.”
The morning was beautiful and fresh when we stood on the verandah, and the lagoon was like a sheet of multicoloured glass. Someone suggested a dip before going to bed, but none cared to bathe in the lagoon, sticky and treacherous to the feet. Miller had his car at the door and he offered to take us down to the pool. We jumped in and drove along the deserted road. When we reached the pool it seemed as though the day had hardly risen there yet. Under the trees the water was all in shadow and the night had the effect of lurking still. We were in great spirits. We had no towels or any costume and in my prudence I wondered how we were going to dry ourselves. None of us had much on and it did not take us long to snatch off our clothes. Nelson, the little supercargo, was stripped first.
“I’m going down to the bottom,” he said.
He dived and in a moment another man dived too, but shallow, and was out of the water before him. Then Nelson came up and scrambled to the side.
“I say, get me out,” he said.
“What’s up?”
Something was evidently the matter. His face was terrified. Two fellows gave him their hands and he slithered up.
“I say, there’s a man down there.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’re drunk.”
“Well, if there isn’t I’m in for D. T’s. But I tell you there’s a man down there. It just scared me out of my wits.”
Miller looked at him for a moment. The little man was all white. He was actually trembling.
“Come on, Caster,” said Miller to the big Australian, “we’d better go down and see.”
“He was standing up,” said Nelson, “all dressed. I saw him. He tried to catch hold of me.”
“Hold your row,” said Miller. “Are you ready?”
They dived in. We waited on the bank, silent. It really seemed as though they were under water longer than any men could breathe. Then Caster came up, and immediately after him, red in the face as though he were going to have a fit, Miller. They were pulling something behind them. Another man jumped in to help them, and the three together dragged their burden to the side. They shoved it up. Then we saw that it was Lawson, with a great stone tied up in his coat and bound to his feet.
“He was set on making a good job of it,” said Miller, as he wiped the water from his shortsighted eyes.
Red
The skipper thrust his hand into one of his trouser pockets and with difficulty, for they were not at the sides but in front and he was a portly man, pulled out a large silver watch. He looked at it and then looked again at the declining sun. The Kanaka at the wheel gave him a glance, but did not speak. The skipper’s eyes rested on the island they were approaching. A white line of foam marked the reef. He knew there was an opening large enough to get his ship through, and when they came a little nearer he counted on seeing it. They had nearly an hour of daylight still before them. In the lagoon the water was deep and they could anchor comfortably. The chief of the village, which he could already see among the coconut trees was a friend of the mate’s, and it would be pleasant to go ashore for the night. The mate came forward at that minute and the skipper turned to him.
“We’ll take a bottle of booze along with us and get some girls in to dance,” he said.
“I don’t see the opening,” said the mate.
He was a Kanaka, a handsome, swarthy fellow, with somewhat the look of a later Roman emperor, inclined to stoutness; but his face was fine and clean-cut.
“I’m dead sure there’s one right here,” said the captain, looking through his glasses. “I can’t understand why I can’t pick it up. Send one of the boys up the mast to have a look.”
The mate called one of the crew and gave him the order. The captain watched the Kanaka climb and waited for him to speak. But the Kanaka shouted down that he could see nothing but the unbroken line of foam. The captain spoke Samoan like a native, and he cursed him freely.
“Shall he stay up there?” asked the mate.
“What the hell good does that do.” answered the captain. “The blame fool can’t see worth a cent. You bet your sweet life I’d find the opening if I was up there.”
He looked at the slender mast with anger. It was all very well for a native who had been used to climbing up coconut trees all his life. He was fat and heavy.
“Come down,” he shouted. “You’re no more use than a dead dog. We’ll just have to go along the reef till we find the opening.”
It was a seventy-ton schooner with paraffin auxiliary, and it ran, when there was no head wind, between four and five knots an hour. It was a bedraggled object; it had been painted white a very long time ago, but it was now dirty, dingy, and mottled. It smelt strongly of paraffin, and of the copra which was its usual cargo. They were within a hundred feet of the reef now and the captain told the steersman to run along it till they came to the opening. But when they had gone a couple of miles he realised that they had missed it. He went about and slowly worked back again. The white foam of the reef continued without interruption and now the sun was setting. With a curse at the stupidity of the crew the skipper resigned himself to waiting till next morning.
“Put her about,” he said. “I can’t anchor here.”
They went out to sea a little and presently it was quite dark. They anchored. When the sail was furled the ship began to roll a good deal. They said at Apia that one day she would roll right over; and the owner, a German-American who managed one of the largest stores, said that no money was big enough to induce him to go out in her. The cook, a Chinese in while trousers, very dirty and ragged, and a thin white tunic, came to say that supper was ready, and when the skipper went into the cabin he found the engineer already seated at table. The engineer was a long, lean man with a scraggy neck. He was dressed in blue overalls and a sleeveless jersey which showed his thin arms tattooed from elbow to wrist.
“Hell, having to spend the night outside,” said the skipper.
The engineer did not answer, and they ate their s
upper in silence. The cabin was lit by a dim oil-lamp. When they had eaten the canned apricots with which the meal finished the Chink brought them a cup of tea. The skipper lit a cigar and went on the upper deck. The island now was only a darker mass against the night. The stars were very bright. The only sound was the ceaseless breaking of the surf. The skipper sank into a deck-chair and smoked idly. Presently three or four members of the crew came up and sat down. One of them had a banjo and another a concertina. They began to play, and one of them sang. The native song sounded strange on these instruments. Then to the singing a couple began to dance. It was a barbaric dance, savage and primeval, rapid, with quick movements of the hands and feet and contortions of the body; it was sensual, sexual even, but sexual without passion. It was very animal, direct, weird without mystery, natural in short, and one might almost say childlike. At last they grew tired. They stretched themselves on the deck and slept, and all was silent. The skipper lifted himself heavily out of his chair and clambered down the companion. He went into his cabin and got out of his clothes. He climbed into his bunk and lay there. He panted a little in the heat of the night. But next morning, when the dawn crept over the tranquil sea, the opening in the reef which had eluded them the night before was seen a little to the east of where they lay. The schooner entered the lagoon. There was not a ripple on the surface of the water. Deep down among the coral rocks you saw little coloured fish swim. When he had anchored his ship the skipper ate his breakfast and went on deck. The sun shone from an unclouded sky, but in the early morning the air was grateful and cool. It was Sunday, and there was a feeling of quietness, a silence as though nature were at rest, which gave him a peculiar sense of comfort. He sat, looking at the wooded coast, and felt lazy and well at case. Presently a slow smile moved his lips and he threw the stump of his cigar into the water.
“I guess I’ll go ashore,” he said. “Get the boat out.”
He climbed stiffly down the ladder and was rowed to a little cove. The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge, not in rows, but spaced out with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, standing in affected altitudes with the simpering graces of a bygone age. He sauntered idly through them, along a path that could be just seen winding its tortuous way, and it led him presently to a broad creek. There was a bridge across it, but a bridge constructed of single trunks of coconut trees, a dozen of them, placed end to end and supported where they met by a forked branch driven into the bed of the creek. You walked on a smooth, round surface, narrow and slippery, and there was no support for the hand. To cross such a bridge required sure feel and a stout heart. The skipper hesitated. But he saw on the other side, nestling among the trees, a white man’s house; he made up his mind and, rather gingerly, began to walk. He watched his feet carefully, and where one, trunk joined on to the next and there was a difference of level, he tottered a little. It was with a gasp of relief that he reached the last tree and finally set his feet on the firm ground of the other side. He had been so intent on the difficult crossing that he never noticed anyone was watching him, and it was with surprise that he heard himself spoken to.
“It takes a bit of nerve to cross these bridges when you’re not used to them.”
He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him. He had evidently come out of the house which he had seen.
“I saw you hesitate,” the man continued, with a smile on his lips, “and I was watching to see you fall in.”
“Not on your life,” said the captain, who had now recovered his confidence.
“I’ve fallen in myself before now. I remember, one evening I came back from shooting, and I fell in, gun and all. Now I get a boy to carry my gun for me.”
He was a man no longer young, with a small beard, now somewhat grey, and a thin face. He was dressed in a singlet, without arms, and a pair of duck trousers. He wore neither shoes nor socks. He spoke English with a slight accent.
“Are you Neilson?” asked the skipper.
“I am.”
“I’ve heard about you. I thought you lived somewheres round here.”
The skipper followed his host into the little bungalow and sat down heavily in the chair which the other motioned him to take. While Neilson went out to fetch whisky and glasses he took a look round the room. It filled him with amazement. He had never seen so many books. The shelves reached from floor to ceiling on all four walls, and they were closely packed. There was a grand piano littered with music, and a large table on which books and magazines lay in disorder. The room made him feel embarrassed. He remembered that Neilson was a queer fellow. No one knew very much about him, although he had been in the islands for so many years, but those who knew him agreed that he was queer. He was a Swede.
“You’ve got one big heap of books here,” he said, when Neilson returned.
“They do no harm,” answered Neilson with a smile.
“Have you read them all?” asked the skipper.
“Most of them.”
“I’m a bit of a reader myself. I have the Saturday Evening Post sent me regler.”
Neilson poured his visitor a good stiff glass of whisky and gave him a cigar. The skipper volunteered a little information.
“I got in last night, but I couldn’t find the opening, so I had to anchor outside. I never been this run before, but my people had some stuff they wanted to bring over here. Gray, d’you know him?”
“Yes, he’s got a store a little way along.”
“Well, there was a lot of canned stuff that he wanted over, an’ he’s got some copra. They thought I might just as well come over as lie idle at Apia. I run between Apia and Pago-Pago molly, but they’ve got smallpox there just now, and there’s nothing stirring.”
He took a drink of his whisky and lit a cigar. He was a taciturn man, but there was something in Neilson that made him nervous, and his nervousness made him talk. The Swede was looking at him with large dark eyes in which there was an expression of faint amusement.
“This is a tidy little place you’ve got here,”
“I’ve done my best with it.”
“You must do pretty well with your trees. They look fine. With copra at the price it is now. I had a bit of a plantation myself once, in Upolu it was, but I had to sell it.”
He looked round the room again, where all those books gave him a feeling of something incomprehensible and hostile.
“I guess you must find it a bit lonesome here though,” he said.
“I’ve got used to it. I’ve been here for twenty-five years.”
Now the captain could think of nothing more to say, and he smoked in silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the checks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a fringe of long curly hair, nearly while, at the back of his head, he was quite bald; and that immense, shiny surface of forehead, which might have given him a false look of intelligence, on the contrary gave him one of peculiar imbecility. He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers. He sat in his chair in a heavy ungainly attitude, his great belly thrust forward and his fat legs uncrossed. All elasticity had gone from his limbs. Neilson wondered idly what sort of man he had been in his youth. It was almost impossible to imagine that this creature of vast bulk had ever been a boy who ran about. The skipper finished his whisky, and Neilson pushed the bottle towards him.
“Help yourself.”
The skipper leaned forward and with his great hand seized it.
“And how come you in these parts anyways?” he said.
“Oh, I came out to the islands for my health. My lungs were bad and they said I hadn’t a year to live. You see they were wrong.”
“I meant, how com
e you to settle down right here?”
“I am a sentimentalist.”
“Oh!”
Neilson knew that the skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized him to talk further.
“You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the bridge, but this spot is generally considered rather pretty.”
“It’s a cute little house you’ve got here.”
“Ah, that wasn’t here when I first came. There was a native hut, with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers; and the craton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden, made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees, as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water’s edge and spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then - good heavens, it’s a quarter of a century ago - and I wanted to enjoy all the loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was afraid I was going to cry. I wasn’t more than twenty-five, and though I put the best face I could on it, I didn’t want to die. And somehow it seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality which our doctors of philosophy - I am one myself, you know - had discussed so much. ‘A year,’ I cried to myself. ‘I have a year. I will spend it here and then I am content to die.’”
“We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren’t perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.
“Now drink, my friend. Don’t let the nonsense I talk interfere with you.”
The Great Exotic Novels and Short Stories of Somerset Maugham Page 14
