"Give this to Te Ai."
"Lor' bless you, sir, 'e don't mind; 'e's a——"
"You do what you're told. Stop. Where's my daughter?"
"Walkin' on the poop, sir, uncommon lively, and looking like dirty weather ahead."
"That's all right," sighed the captain, with an air of infinite relief.
CHAPTER V
A DIAMOND WEB
It was six o'clock in Apia, and the round sun was hanging low above the rim of the level sea, like a burning coal ready to drop down upon a breadth of hyacinth silk. The stores were closed along the straggling beach street, where the sand was white under foot, and parrakeets tweedled cheerily in the scarlet-flowered flamboyant trees. Native dandies, greatly oiled and dyed, and wearing a bright hibiscus blossom over each ear, swung past with the inimitable Samoan roll, their golden brown limbs gay with the red-and-white English bath-towel that is popular as full dress for steamer days in the little island capital. Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate.
In "Charley's"—the least reputable of Apia's tavern-hotels—the egregious table d'hôte was in full progress out in the green-shuttered verandah. Charley himself, an oily, flashy New Caledonian half-caste, dressed in striped pyjamas, was eating curried tin—nature unknown—with a knife and two fingers, at the head of the table. A corpse-faced Chinese was shuffling round with the inevitable Pacific fowl, cut up in a watery soup. The table-cloth was of linoleum, the swinging lamp guttered and smoked, the cutlery was dislocated and black. But there was English beer on the bar counter, and plenty of broken ice; and the whisky that mounted high in each man's smeary tumbler was good of its kind. Charley knew his customers, and sought first the essential.
Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind. This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog.