It was as though he spoke from emotion which his intellect found ridiculous.
He had said himself that he was a sentimentalist, and when sentimentality is joined with scepticism there is often the devil to pay.
He was silent for an instant and looked at the captain with eyes in which there was a sudden perplexity.
“You know, I can’t help thinking that I’ve seen you before somewhere or other,” he said.
“I couldn’t say as I remember you,” returned the skipper.
“I have a curious feeling as though your face were familiar to me. It’s been puzzling me for some time. But I can’t situate my recollection in any place or at any time.”
The skipper massively shrugged his heavy shoulders.
“It’s thirty years since I first come to the islands.
A man can’t figure on remembering all the folk he meets in awhile like that.”
The Swede shook his head.
“You know how one sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never been to before is strangely familiar.
That’s how I seem to see you.”
He gave a whimsical smile.
“Perhaps I knew you in some past existence. Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I was a slave at the oar.
Thirty years have been here?”
“Every bit of thirty years.”
“I wonder if you knew a man called Red?”
“Red?”
“That is the only name I’ve ever known him by.
I never knew him personally. I never even set eyes on him.
And yet I seem to see him more clearly than many men, my brothers, for instance, with whom I passed my daily life for many years.
He lives in my imagination with the distinctness of a Paolo Malatesta or a Romeo.
But I dare say you have never read Dante or Shakespeare?”
“I can’t say as I have,” said the captain.
Neilson, smoking a cigar, leaned back in his chair and looked vacantly at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air.
A smile played on his lips, but his eyes were grave.
Then he looked at the captain.
There was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent.
He had the plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat.
It was an outrage. It set Neilson’s nerves on edge.
But the contrast between the man before him and the man he had in mind was pleasant.
“It appears that Red was the most comely thing you ever saw.
I’ve talked to quite a number of people who knew him in those days, white men, and they all agree that the first time you saw him his beauty just look your breath away.
They called him Red on account of his flaming hair.
It had a natural wave and he wore it long.
It must have been of that wonderful colour that the pre-Raphaelilcs raved over.
I don’t think he was vain of it, he was much too ingenuous for that, but no one could have blamed him if he had been.
He was tall, six feet and an inch or two - in the native house that used to stand here was the mark of his height cut with a knife on the central trunk that supported the roof - and he was made like a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and mysterious.
His skin was dazzling while, milky, like satin; his skin was like a woman’s.”
“I had kind of a white skin myself when I was a kiddie,” said the skipper, with a twinkle in his bloodshot eyes.
But Neilson paid no attention to him.
He was telling his story now and interruption made him impatient.
“And his face was just as beautiful as his body.
He had large blue eyes, very dark, so that some say they were black, and unlike most red-haired people he had dark eyebrows and long dark lashes.
His features were perfectly regular and his mouth was like a scarlet wound.
He was twenty.”
On these words the Swede slopped with a certain sense of the dramatic. He took a sip of whisky.
“He was unique.
There never was anyone more beautiful.
There was no more reason for him than for a wonderful blossom to flower on a wild plant. He was a happy accident of nature.