Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Tuesday.

Of course, I will be called coward now, but the same people who call me this are those who have caused me to seek death, for they branded me liar and wastrel, simply on an untrue report appearing in an American newspaper. Chief among these people are that most despicable cad Hallman, and secondly, the British Consul. Even had I been guilty of all that has been said, why were they not manly and generous enough to give or find me congenial employment? They are not blind and could see how anxious and willing I was to obtain this. No, they only gloated over my starving and pitiable condition. Well, they spring from the proletariat class and not much else could be expected.

God only knows how much I want to live and how I dread having to take my own life, but only for the sake of my people. If I could only see them again it would be easier. How did I ever fall so low! God help me! Is there nothing else for me but this ignominious death? But I must save my people from knowing. I am not using my correct name here, so it will be useless for any one to make inquiries. A volume of poems will be found in my pocket. I wonder if the Bishop would kindly post these to Miss B. Wilmer, Broken Hill, West Australia, but only telling her I died here, without particulars, and saying I have written these since leaving home. Oh, why did I ever leave there, where love and all that is good and pure was lavished on me?

If it is possible, could I be buried in the sea? Just placed in a coffin and dropped into the peaceful ocean, peace that I have not known for four years. Please have this done for me.

I do not think I am committing suicide, rather I am being murdered by men who have none of the nobler feelings, ungenerous, unsympathetic and cruelly unkind. The fact of my death will not affect one of those who ruined my reputation here, who deprived me of obtaining food, and a room to sleep in. They have no more conscience so cannot feel remorse. I will not sign my true name but only part of it. Gordon Innes.

“He’s off his onion,” Stevens commented. “The bally fool needs hard labor and raw feis.”

The consul grinned.

“Wait till you hear me read the document with the suicide note. It’s as good as Marie Corelli.”

“All right, old thing,” answered Stevens. “Fire the whole broadside!”

“No, no; I’m goin’ to spare you the whole official document. It pretends to be a formal instruction to this beef-headed flunky, from his guardian, of a test to prove his mettle and gain experience to fit him for the highest posts of the diplomatic service by going round the bally world and doin’ other people in for their tin. It is a yard long, and was undoubtedly written by the same dish-washer who wrote that doggerel on his shirt. It promises him half a million sterling when he comes back to London after visiting Australasia, China, India, and other countries, and pickin’ up his tucker free as he goes. Also, the shark is permitted to send back for coin at this date, and he must get married to a Tahitian. He probably fixes it different in every country. It’s signed, ‘Your affectionate guardian, James Kitson, Baron Airedale of Gledhow.’ ”

“Whew!” spluttered Hobson, “the blighter has no limits. Do you mean to tell me he gets away with that folderol?”

“For months he has lived at Lovaina’s, Fanny’s, and even on the Chinese. He has borrowed thousands of francs, and spent it for drink and often for champagne. He did old Lovaina up for money as well as board. She believes in him yet, and calls him Lord Innes or Sir Gordon, but says she has no more to risk. He promised to build her a big hotel where the Annexe is. He’s got many of the Tahitian girls and their mothers mad over his style and his prospects. Finally, he was warned by me to leave the island, and the result was his tryin’ to borrow the lethal weapon, the poem and the letter. The Baron Airedale document he showed me when he first landed, to try to get my indorsement. There’s no Burke in the South Seas, and there probably is no such bloomin’ baron. Sounds more like a dog.” The consul chuckled.

“Those lairds are as plentiful as brands of Scotch whisky made in England,” Stevens said derisively. “What will you do to uphold the honor of the British crown? Is the Scotch bastard to go on with his fairy-tale and do brown the colonials?”

“I am going to have the diplomat repair the roads of Tahiti for two months, and then ship him third-class to New Zealand, where he has to go to carry out his blasted fate,” the consul declared, and ordered all glasses filled.

We discussed the sudden and abnormal appearance of boot-blacks. One had set up an ornate stand on the rue de Rivoli. He was an American, Tom Wilkins, and the first ever known to practise his profession in the South Seas. He had come like a non-periodic comet, and suddenly flashed his brass-tagged platform and arm-chair upon the gaping natives. Most of them being barefooted, one would have thought his customers not many; but the novelty of a white man doing anything for them was irresistible to all who had shoes. He did not lower himself in their estimation. It is noteworthy that the Tahitian does not distinguish between what we call menial labor and other work. Nor did we until recently. The kings and nobles of Europe were actually served by the lords of the bedchamber and the maids in waiting. The American boot-black was really a boot-white, as all wore white canvas shoes except preachers and sailors.

The boot-white called out, “Shine!” and the word, unpronounceable by the native, entered a himene as tina. Within a week he had his Tahitian consort doing the shining most of the time while he loafed in the Paris saloon. He lived at the Annexe, and told me that he was not really a boot-cleaner, but was going around the world on a wager of twenty thousand dollars, “without a cent.” He, too, had a credulous circle, who paid him often five francs for a shine to help him win his bet by arriving at the New York City Hall on a fixed date with a certain sum of money earned by his hands. He raised the American flag over his stand, and referred to Uncle Sam as if he were a blood relation to whom he could appeal for anything at any time.

All the foregoing was brought out in our conversation at the British consul’s. Willi, temporarily conducting American affairs in French Oceanie, gave a denouement.

“The shine isn’t a bad fellow,” he said, “but he’s serious about the twenty thousand dollars. His statement was doubted to-day by an English sailor, who called him ’a blarsted Hamerican liar,’ and the shine took off his own rubber leg, and knocked the sailor down. He could move faster on his one leg than the other on two, and Monsieur Lontane had to summon two assistants to take him to the calaboose. He wouldn’t resume his rubber leg. I saw him being led and pulled by my office, calling out, ‘Tell the ’Merican consul a good American is in the grip of the frogs.’ ”

Within a month of the rubber-legged shiner’s début, there were two other boot-blacks on the streets. A madness possessed the people, Tahitians and French, who all their lives had cleaned their own shoes, to sit on the throne-like chairs, and women and girls waited their turns. John Conroy and a negro from Mississippi were the additions to the profession, and during the incarceration of the premier artist, his sweetheart, a former hula danseuse, remained faithful to his brushes. When a shoeless man or woman regarded the new-fangled importations interestedly, the proprietors offered to beautify their naked feet, and, ridiculous as it may seem, attempted it.

Although I heard odd tales at the consulate, it was at the parc de Bougainville that I met the gentleman of the beach intimately.

There I often sat and talked with whomever loafed. Natives frequented the parc hardly ever, but beach-combers, tourists, and sailors, or casual residents in from the districts, awaited there the opening of the stores or the post-office, or idled. The little park, or wooded strip of green, named after the admiral, and containing his monument, skirted the quay, and was between the establishment of Emile Levy, the pearl-trader, and the artificial pool of fresh water where the native women and sailors off the ships washed their clothes. From one’s bench one had a view of all the harbor and of the passers-by on the Broom Road.

In the morning the pool was thronged with the laundresses, and one heard their paddles chunking as they beat the clothes. The French warship, the Zélée, was moored close by, and often the linen of its crew hung upon lines in the parc, and the French sailors came and went upon their duties, or sat on the coral wall and smoked and sang chansons. In the afternoon horses were brought down to bathe, and guests of the Annexe swam in the lagoon. People afoot, driving carts or carriages, on bicycles and in automobiles, went by on the thoroughfare about the island, the Frenchmen always talking as if excited over cosmic affairs, and the natives laughing or calling to one another.

If there happened to be a shoal of fish near the quays, I was sure to see Joseph, to whom the wise Dr. Funk had confided his precious concoction. He would desert the Cercle Bougainville, but still within hail of a stentorious skipper whose coppers were dry, and with a dozen other native men and women, boys and girls, lure the fish with hooks baited with bits of salted shrimp. Joseph was as skilful with his rod as with a shaker, and he would catch twenty ature, four or five inches long, in half an hour.

The water, about fifteen feet deep near the made embankment, was alive with the tiny fish, squirming in a mass as they were pursued by larger fish. The son of Prince Hinoe, a round-shouldered lout, very tall, awkward, and merry, held a bamboo pole. His white suit was soiled and ragged, and he whistled “All Coons Look alike to Me!” The peanut-vender had brought a rod, and was fishing with difficulty and mostly by feel. He could keep one eye open only, as one hand was occupied, but he pulled in many ature.

The parc was the occasional assembling-place for the drifting whites made thoughtful by trolling the jolly, brown bowl, and by those to whom lack of francs denied the trolling. It was there I first met Ivan Stroganoff, the aged Russian philosopher, and it was from there I took Wilfrid Baillon to the hospital. Baillon was a very handsome cow-boy from British Columbia, and was housed in Papeete with a giant Scandinavian who owned a cattle ranch in South America. He was generally called the Great Dane, and was the person meant in the charge for three cocktails at Lovaina’s: “Germani to Fany, 3 feathers.”

The cow-boy became ill. I prescribed castor-oil, and Mme. Fanny, half a tumbler of Martinique rum, with the juice of a lime in it. She was famous for this remedy for all internal troubles, and I took one with the cowboy as a prophylactic, as I might have been exposed to the same germs. He did not improve, though he followed Fanny’s regimen exactly. He was sitting dejectedly in the parc, looking pale and thin, when I broached the subject.

“As the Fanny physic fails to straighten you out,” I said to him, “why not try the hospital?”

He recoiled.

“Have you ever lamped it?” he asked. “It looks like a calaboose.”

“It ain’t so bad,” said Kelly, the I.W.W., who was proselyting as usual among the flotsam and jetsam of the waterfront. “I ’ve been in worse joints in the United States.”

The cow-boy yielding, I escorted him to the institution, carrying his bag, as what with his disease and his antidote he was weak. The hospital was a block away from the lagoon. It was surrounded by a high stone wall, and as it was built by the military, it was ugly and had the ridiculous effrontery of the army and all its lack of common sense. The iron gate was shut, and a sign said, “Sonnez s’il vous plait!” A toothless French portière of thirty years let us in. All the doctors of Tahiti had left the island for a few days on an excursion, and the gay scientist who opened the champagne in his pockets at the Tiare Hotel New Year’s eve was in command. He sat in an arm-chair in a littered office and was smoking a pipe. His beard had a diameter of a foot, and obviated any need of collar or shirt-band, for it grew from his shoulder-blades up, so that his forehead, eyes, nose, and lips were white islands in a black sea, and even his nose was not bare, for he had been debited by Lovaina for his champagne as “Hair on nose.”

He was reading a novel, and asked gruffly what we were there for. I told him, and Baillon was assigned a room at twelve francs a day, and was required to pay for ten days in advance.

The next morning I visited him. He could speak no French, so I questioned Blackbeard in his office, where we had an aperitif. He was voluble.

“He has amoeban dysentery,” said he. “It is contagious and infectious, specifically, and it is fortunate your friend is attended by me. I have had that disease and know what’s what.”

I, too, had had it in the Philippine Islands, and I was amazed that it was infectious. How could he have got it?

“Alors,” replied the physician, “where has he taken meals?”

“Lovaina’s, Fanny’s, and some with the Chinese.”

The Frenchman threw his arms around the door in mock horror. He gagged and spat, exciting the cowboy into a fever.

“Oh! la! la!” he shouted. “Les Chinois! Certainement, he is ill. He has eaten dog. Amoeban dysentery! Mais, monsieur, it is a dispensation of the bon dieu that he has not hydrophobia or the leprosy. Les Chinois! Sacré nom de chien!”

Lovaina had often accused her rivals, the Chinese restaurateurs, of serving dog meat for beef or lamb. Perhaps it was so, for in China more than five millions of dogs are sold for food in the market every year, and in Tahiti I knew that the Chinese ate the larvae of wasps, and M. Martin had mountain rats caught for his table.

The cow-boy’s room was bare and cheerless, but two Tahitian girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age were in it. One was sitting on his bed, holding his hand, and the other was in a rocking-chair. They were very pretty and were dressed in their fête gowns. The girl on the bed was almost white, but her sister fairly brown. Probably they had different fathers. They told me that they had seen Baillon on the streets, had fallen in love with him, and though they had never spoken to him, wanted to comfort him now that he was sick. Jealousy did not rankle in their hearts, apparently. That absence often shocked non-Polynesians. Brothers shared wives, and sisters shared husbands all over old Polynesia.

This pair of love-lorn maidens had never exchanged a word with Baillon, for he spoke only English. The whiter girl wore a delicate satin gown, a red ribbon, and fine pearls in her hair. The cow-boy lay quietly, while she sat with her bare feet curled under her on the counterpane, looking actually unutterable passion.

“Shucks!” said he to me, safe in their ignorance of his tongue, “this is getting serious. They mean business, and I was foolin’. I got a little girl in the good ol’ United States that would skin her alive if she saw her sittin’ like that on my sheets. A man’s takin’ chances here that bats his eye at one o’ these T’itian fairies. Do you know, their mother came here with them this morning?”

“They mean to have you in their family,” I said. “That mother may have had a white husband or lover, and aids in the pursuit of you for auld lang syne.”

Wilfrid Baillon was out of the hospital in just ten days. His release, as cured by the doctor, coincided curiously with his payment in advance. I saw him off for New Zealand by the steamship leaving the next day.

“Those people were awful good to me,” he said in farewell. “It hurts me to treat those girls this way, but I’m scairt o’ them. They’re too strong in their feelings.”

He ran away from a mess of love pottage that many men would have gone across seas to gain.

Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with a girl. He called me over to meet her.

“You are an old-timer here now,” he began, “and I’ve got to go away on the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow. Drop in at Tahia’s shack once in a while and cheer her up. She lives back of the Catholic mission, and she’s pretty sick.”

Tahia was desperately ill, I thought. She was thin, the color of the yellow wax candles of the high altar, and her straight nose, with expanded nostrils, and hard, almost savage mouth, features carved as with the stone chisel of her ancient tribe, conjured up the profile of Nenehofra, an Egyptian princess whose mummy I had seen. She was stern, silent, resigned to her fate, as are these races who know the inexorable will of the gods.

“Is she your girl?” I asked Ormsby.

He colored slightly.

“I suppose so, and the baby will be mine if it’s ever born. At any rate, I’m going to stick to her while she’s in this fix. I’ll tell you on the square, I’m not gone on her; but she had a lover, an Australian I knew, and he was good to her, but he got the consumption and couldn’t work. Maybe he came here with it. They hadn’t a shilling, and Tahia built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live, and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him. She went to the mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she found eggs and breadfruit in other people’s gardens. She kept him alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney to go home and die. Now, she’s got the con from him, I suppose, and it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she’s dying and will be a mother in two months, according to Doctor Cassiou!”

He made a wry face and lit his pipe. The girl could not understand a word and sat immovable.

“She’s Marquesan,” he went on. “Her mother has written through a trader in Atuona, on Hiva-Oa, to send her to her own valley, but she’s quit. She sits and broods all day. I ’d like to go back to my own home in Warwickshire. I know I’m changing for the bad here. I live like a dam’ beach-comber. I only get a screw of three hundred francs a month, and that all goes for us two, with medicines and doctors. She’d go to Atuona if I’d go; but I can’t make a living there, and I’m rotten enough now without living off her people in the cannibal group. She’s skin and bones and coughs all night.”

Ormsby puffed his pipe as Tahia put her hand in his. Her action was that of a small dog who puts his paw on his master’s sleeve, hesitating, hopeful, but uncertain. She regarded me with slightly veiled hostility. I was a white who might be taking him away to foreign things.

“She’s heard us talking about Atuona and Hiva-Oa, and she thinks maybe I ’ve concluded to go. I can’t do it, O’Brien. If I go there, I’ll go native forever. I’ve got a streak of some dam’ savage in me. Listen! I’ve got to go on the Etoile to Kaukura tojmorrow. Now, the natives are always kind to any one, but sickness they are not interested in. You go and see her, won’t you? She’s about all in, and it won’t hurt you.”

Ormsby went to the Dangerous Isles on the Etoile, and did not return for three weeks. He did not find Tahia in her shack on the hill. She was in the cemetery,—in the plot reserved for the natives of other islands,—and her babe unborn. She had died alone. I think she made up her mind to relieve the Englishman of her care, and willed to die at once. Dr. Cassiou, with whom I visited her, said:

“She ought to have lasted several months. Mais, c’est curieux. I have treated these Polynesians for many years, and I never found one I could keep alive when he wanted to die. She had already sent away her spirit, the âme, or essence vitale, or whatever it is, and then the body simply grows cold.”

Ormsby and I talked it all over in the parc. He was deeply affected, and he uncovered his own soul, as men seldom do.

“I ’m dam’ glad she’s dead,” he said, with intense feeling. “I might have failed, and she died before I did fail. I’m going back to Warwick now at first chance, and whatever I do or don’t do, I’ve got that exception to my credit. It’s one, too, to the credit of the whites that have cursed these poor islanders.”

He had chalked it down on a record he thought quite black, but which I believe was better than our average. He and I went to the cemetery and had a wooden slab put up:

Tahia a Atuona
Tamau te maitai.

Tahia of Atuona
She held fast.

The Christchurch Kid and I were friendly, and he allowed me once a day during his training periods to put on the gloves with him for a mild four rounds. He was an open-hearted fellow, with a cauliflower ear and a nose a trifle awry from “a couple of years with the pork-and-beaners in California,” as he explained, but with a magnificent body. He also lived at the Annexe, and did his training in the garden under Afa’s clever hands. The Dummy must have admired him, for he would watch him exercising and boxing for hours, and make farcical sounds and grotesque gestures to indicate his understanding of the motions and blows.

The Kid asked me if I knew Ernest Darling, “the nature man,” and identified the too naked wearer of toga and sandals on the San Francisco wharf as Darling.

“’E looked like Christ,” said the boxer. “’E was a queer un. How’d you like to chyse up there to his roost in the ’ills?”

The next morning at five—it was not daybreak until six—we met at Wing Luey’s for coffee and bread, which cost four cents. Prince Hinoe was there as usual, and asked us whither away. He laughed when we told him, and said the nature men were maamaa, crazy. The Kid was of the same mind.

We went up the rue de Sainte Amelie to the end of the road, and continued on up the valley. We could see far above us a small structure, which was the Eden that Darling had made for the Adamic colony he had established.

The climb was a stiff one on a mere wild pig-trail.

“The nyture man would ’ike up ’ere several times a day, after the frogs closed his road,” said the New Zealander. “There was less brush than now, though, because ’e cut it aw’y to carry lum’ber and things up and to bring back the things ’e grew for market. ’E and ’is gang believed in nykedness, vegetables, socialism, no religion, and no drugs. The nytives think they’re bug-’ouse, like Prince Hinoe, and I don’t think they ’re all there, but you couldn’t cheat him. ’E’d myke a Glasgow peddler look sharp in buyin’ or sellin’.”

The Christchurch Kid was himself strictly conventional, and had been genuinely shocked by Darling’s practices, and especially by his striking resemblance to the Master as portrayed by the early painters, and by Munkácsy in Christ Before Pilate.

“’E was all right,” he explained to me as we climbed, “but ’e ought to been careful of ’is looks. I was ’ard up ’ere in Papeete once, and was sleepin’ in an ole ware’ouse along with others. Darling slept on a window-sill, and ’e used to talk about enjoyin’ the full sweep o’ the tradewind. We doubted that, an’ so one night we crept upstairs and surprised him. ’E was stretched out on a couple o’ sacks, and a reg’ler gale was blowin’ on him. ’E bathed a couple o’ times a day in the lagoon or in fresh water, but ’e believed in rubbin’ oil on his skin, and when a bloke is all greasy and nyked, ’e looks dirty. ’Is whiskers were too flossy in the tropics.”

It took all my wind to reach the Eden, a couple of miles from our starting-point, and we were on all fours part of the way.

“’E could run up here like an animal,” declared the fighter. “Once when a crowd of us went to visit ’im, ’e ran up this tr’il a’ead of us, and when we arrived all winded, blow me up a bloomin’ gum-tree if ’e ’ad n’t a mess of feis and breadfruit cooked for us.”

We came to a sign on the trail. “Tapu,” it said, which means taboo, or keep away; and farther on a notice in French that the owner forbade any one to enter upon his land.

“’E’s a cryzy Frenchman with long whiskers,” said the Kid. “’E ’as a grudge against any one who speaks English and also against the world. They s’y that ’is American wife ran aw’y from ’im, or an American took ’is nytive wife aw’y. ’E packs a revolver.”

Everywhere the mountain-side was terraced, and planted in cocoanuts, breadfruits, bananas, flowers, and other plants, more than two thousand growths. Darling’s toil had been great, and my heart bled at the memory of his standing on the piling as we steamed away. He had intended to have a colony, with bare nature-worshipers from all over the world. He had written articles in magazines, and tourists and authors had celebrated him in their stories. A score of needy health-seekers had arrived in Papeete and joined him, but could not survive his rigid diet and work. He had talked much of Eves, white, in the Eden, but none had offered.

On a platform fifteen hundred feet above the sea Darling had built a frame of beams, boards, and branches, with bunks and seats, much like a woodcutter’s temporary shelter in the mountains, a mere lean-to. The view was stupendous, with the sea, the harbor, Moorea, and Papeete hardly seen in the foliage. He had thought his work in life to be peopling these hills with big families of nature children and the spread of socialism and reformed spelling.

His dream was transient. He had been treated with contempt, and had been driven from his garden, as had his first father, and without an Eve or a serpent. The whiskered Frenchman had bought Eden for a song, and had made it taboo to all.

We shouted in vain for the Frenchman, so we searched the premises. The boxer was afraid that after we left he might roll a rock down our trail because of our breaking his taboo. We found the spring from which he drank, and a pool dug by Darling for bathing, now only a mass of vegetation. Evidently the present tenant was not an ablutionist.

“There’s a beastly German down on that next level,” remarked the Christchurch Kid. “’E ’ates this Frenchman. Now they don’t speak, but they sent warnin’ to each other o’ trouble. The frog carries the revolver for the sauer-kraut. Some day they’ll kill each other right ’ere. They’re both ’ermits, and ’ermits are terrible when they get excited.”

It was almost a straight drop to the German’s, a small promontory, with an acre of land, a platform raised eight feet on poles for a roof, and under it a berth. A chest held his belongings. He lived on the fruit he raised and the fish he caught in the sea, to which he went every day. He tried to keep chickens, but the mountain rats, of which Darling had trapped more than five thousand, ate most of them. The German, too, was away from his simple home. Both these men sought in life only peace and plain living, yet were consumed with hate. One day the upper dweller had accidentally caused a small stone to roll down upon the other’s roof. The German had shouted something to the Frenchman, hot words had passed, and now they carried revolvers to intimidate or shoot each other. Their days and nights were spent on plans to insult or injure. And because of their feud they hated the whole world.

Once again in Papeete, we met the Swiss of the Noa-Noa who had intended to eat raw foods in the Marquesas. He was to return to America on the next steamer.

“De wegetables in Tahiti have no wim in dem,” he said. “In California I ead nudds und raisins mit shtrent’ in dem. I go back.”

The fighter pointed out the “cryzy” Frenchman of Eden. He was the customs employee who had provoked the American consul by refusing to understand English.

I asked M. Lontane, the second in command of the police, why Darling had gone.

The hero of the battle of the limes, coal, and potatoes, looked at me fiercely.

“Is the French republic to permit here in its colony the whites who enjoy its hospitality to shame the nation before the Tahitians by their nakedness? That sacrée bête wore a pareu in town because the law compelled him to, but, monsieur, on the road, in his aerial resort, he and all his disciples were as naked as—”

“I have seen artistes at the music-halls of Paris,” I finished.

“Exactement,” he spluttered. “Are we to let Tahiti rival Paris?”

Ivan Stroganoff I met two or three times a month. He stayed in his chicken-coop except when the opportunities came for gaining a few francs, at steamer-time, and when sheer boredom drove him to Papeete for converse. With his dislike for the natives and his disdainful attitude toward the French, he had to seek other nationals in town, for there were none at Fa’a except a Chinese storekeeper. Stroganoff at eighty was as keen for interesting things as a young man, but his philosophy was fatal to his enjoyment. He saw the flaw in the diamond the sunbeam made of the drop of water on the leaf. He had lived too long and was too wise in disappointments. He was generous in his poverty, for he brought me a tin of guava-jelly he had made and a box of dried bananas. These had had their skins removed, and were black and not desirable-looking, but they were delicious and rare. In turn, not wishing to exaggerate the difference between our means, I gave him a box of cigars I had brought from America. I visited him at Fa’a, and found his coop had been a poultry shelter, and was humble, indeed; but I had slept a hundred nights in many countries in worse. He had a box for a table for eating and writing, and a rude cot. A few dishes and implements, and a roost of books and reviews in Russian, English, French, German, and other languages, completed his equipment.

He had several times reiterated his earnest wish to leave Tahiti, and his longing rested heavily on my heart. Upon lying down at night I had felt my own illiberality in not making it possible for him to realize his desire. A hundred dollars would send him there, with enough left over for a fortnight’s keep. But my apology for not buying him a ticket was the real fear of his unhappiness. What could a friendless man of eighty do to exist in the United States other than become the inmate of a poorhouse? The best he could hope for would be to be taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who house a few old men. They were, doubtless, kind, but probably insistent on neatness and religiosity.

The cold, the brutal policemen and guards, the venial justice, the crystallized charity in the name of a statistical Christ, arrested my hand. I had known it all at first hand, asking no favor. I believed that he would be worse off than in his chicken-coop. He could wear anything or nearly nothing in Tahiti, and his old Prince Albert comforted him; but he would have to conform to dress rules in a stricter civilization. Nature was a loving mother here and a shrewish hag there, at least toward the poor. And yet I was uneasy at my own argument.

For a month or two he had led the talk between us and any others in the parc to new discoveries in medicine. From his Fa’a seclusion he followed these very closely through European publications, for which his slender funds went. He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such abject materialism as haunting the bishop’s palace for the cigar-stubs.

He would say that the purest joy in life is that which lifts us out of our daily existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it.

“This divine release from the common ways of men can be found only through art,” Stroganoff would apostrophize. “The final and only true solution of life is to be found in the life of the saint. True morality passes through virtue, which is rooted in sympathy into asceticism. Renunciation only offers a complete release from the evils and terrors of existence.”

Kelly was on the bench one day when the Russian uttered this rule of the cenobite school. They were good friends, but differed. They agreed that the world was sick and needed a radical medicine. Kelly was for a complete cure by ending private business through the workers seizing it when the time was ripe, which he believed would be soon. Stroganoff was for an empery of wise men, of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who would kick out the statesmen and politicians, and manage things by enlightened pragmatism. For the individual man who sought happiness his formula was as above—retirement to an aery.

When Kelly was gone to practise on his accordion,—he had opened a dancing academy at Fa’a,—the octogenarian asked me if I had read of the recent achievements of the scientists who were making the old young. He elaborated on the discoveries and experiments of Professor Leonard Huxley in England with thyroid gland injections, of Voronoff in France with the grafting of interstitial glands of monkeys, and of Eugen Steinach in Austria and Roux in Germany, with germ glands and X-rays. Steinach, especially, he discoursed on, and drew a magazine picture of him from his Prince Albert. The Vienna savant had a cordon of whiskers that made him resemble Stroganoff, and his eyes in the photograph peered through all one’s disguises.

“That is what grates me,” said Stroganoff. “I am far from all these worth-while things, these men of brain. I knew Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff before he became director of the Pasteur Institute. Here I am a rotting hulk. In the Caucasus I had kephir, and I used to carry kephir grains, and in America I, at least, could have kumiss or Ilya Ilich’s lait caille. Look! I came here as Ponce de León to Florida to find youth, or to keep from growing older; in a word to escape anno Domini.”

I turned and looked at him. He was a venerable figure, but there was no sign of eighty years in him. Rid of that white, hirsute mask, so associated with age, Stroganoff might have been twenty years younger. I said so, but it did not allay his yearning.

“I am well enough,” he said, “because I have not dissipated for thirty years. I turned a leaf, as did Leo Nikolaievitch, after ‘War and Peace.’ Now I feel myself slipping into the grave.”

He gazed ruminantly away from the lagoon to the pool of Psyche, where the Tahitian women squatted on their shapely haunches and thumped their clothes.

“See,” he said earnestly. “I am old and useless. Why should not Steinach or the others make the grand experiment on me? If they succeed, very good; if they fail, there is no loss. They say those glands make a man over, no matter what his age. I offer myself freely. I am not afraid of death. Me, I am a philosopher.”

He spoke excitedly. His eyes were fixed on distance, and I followed them.

Auro, the Golden One, as her name meant, had been washing her muslin slips in the pool of Psyche, and now stood in the entrance to it. She was for a fleeting second in her pareu only, her tunic raised above her head to pull on, and her enravishing form disclosed from her waist to her piquant face, over which tumbled her opulent locks.

It flashed on me that, wise and old as he was, the spectrum of the philosopher’s soul had all the colors of the ignorant and the young. I looked from the nymphs of the pool to his darkening eyes, and I had a revelation of the persistence of common humanity in the most learned and the most philosophical. My castigation of myself for not buying his steamship ticket ceased in a moment, though not the less did I continue to enjoy his fount of learning and experience.