He caught sight of Red seated at the table, with his head resting heavily on his arms, fast asleep.
He made a movement towards him, intending to wake him, but a rough hand seized his arm, and a man, with a scowl and words which he did not understand, pointed to the side.
He shouted to Red, but in a moment he was seized and hung overboard.
Helpless, he swam round to his canoe, which was drifting a little way off, and pushed it on to the reef. He climbed in and, sobbing all the way, paddled back to shore.
“What had happened was obvious enough.
The whaler, by desertion or sickness, was short of hands, and the captain when Red came aboard had asked him to sign on; on his refusal he had made him drunk and kidnapped him.
“Sally was beside herself with grief.
For three days she screamed and cried.
The natives did what they could to comfort her, but she would not be comforted.
She would not eat.
And then, exhausted, she sank into a sullen apathy.
She spent long days at the cove, watching the lagoon, in the vain hope that Red somehow or other would manage to escape.
She sat on the white sand, hour after hour, with the tears running down her checks, and at night dragged herself wearily back across the creek to the little hut where she had been happy.
The people with whom she had lived before Red came to the island wished her to return to them, but she would not; she was convinced that Red would come back, and she wanted him to find her where he had left her.
Four months later she was delivered of a still-born child, and the old woman who had come to help her through her confinement remained with her in the hut.
All joy was taken from her life.
If her anguish with time became less intolerable it was replaced by a settled melancholy.
You would not have thought that among these people, whose emotions, though so violent, are very transient, a woman could be found capable of so enduring a passion.
She never lost the profound conviction that sooner or later Red would come back.
She watched for him, and every time someone crossed this slender little bridge of coconut trees she looked. It might at last be he.”
Neilson stopped talking and gave a faint sigh.
“And what happened to her in the end.” asked the skipper.
Neilson smiled bitterly.
“Oh, three years afterwards she took up with another white man.”
The skipper gave a fat, cynical chuckle. “That’s generally what happens to them,” he said.
The Swede shot him a look of hatred.
He did not know why that gross, obese man excited in him so violent a repulsion.
But his thoughts wandered and he found his mind filled with memories of the past.
He went back five-and-twenty years. It was when he first came to the island, weary of Apia, with its heavy drinking, its gambling and coarse sensuality, a sick man, trying to resign himself to the loss of the career which had fired his imagination with ambitious thought.
He set behind him resolutely all his hopes of making a great name for himself and strove to content himself with the few poor months of careful life which was all that he could count on.
He was boarding with a half-caste trader who had a store a couple of miles along the coast at the edge of a native village; and one day, wandering aimlessly along the grassy paths of the coconut groves, he had come upon the hut in which Sally lived.
The beauty of the spot had filled him with a rapture so great that it was almost painful, and then he had seen Sally.
She was the loveliest creature he had ever seen, and the sadness in those dark, magnificent eyes of hers affected him strangely.
The Kanakas were a handsome race, and beauty was not rare among them, but it was the beauty of shapely animals.
It was empty.
But those tragic eyes were dark with mystery, and you felt in them the bitter complexity of the groping, human soul.
The trader told him the story and it moved him.
“Do you think he’ll ever come back?” asked Neilson.
“No fear.
Why, it’ll be a couple of years before the ship is paid off, and by then he’ll have forgotten all about her.
I bet he was pretty mad when he woke up and found he’d been shanghaied, and I shouldn’t wonder but he wanted to fight somebody.
But he’d got to grin and bear it, and I guess in a month he was thinking it the best thing that had ever happened to him that he got away from the island.”
But Neilson could not get the story out of his head.
Perhaps because he was sick and weakly, the radiant health of Red appealed to his imagination.
Himself an ugly man, insignificant of appearance, he prized very highly comeliness in others.
He had never been passionately in love, and certainly he had never been passionately loved.
The mutual attraction of those two young things gave him a singular delight.
It had the ineffable beauty of the Absolute.
He went again to the little hut by the creek.
He had a gift for languages and an energetic mind, accustomed to work, and he had already given much time to the study of the local tongue.