“She is a fine girl, but shy,” he said, and patted her clumsily.
Mademoiselle Peyral trembled under his heavy caress, and with merely a slight, awkward bow to me hurried into the sombre chamber.
“She is shy,” he repeated as he drank his absinthe with mouthing and grimacing. “She needs a man to train her right, a husband, eh, a gentleman, mon garçon. Is not that right?”
Peyral’s voice was almost gentle, but his mood changed in a breath. He struck the board hard with his shell, and yelled, “Do you understand, American, I said a gentleman. Her mother was aristocrat. Do you get that into your noddle?”
Exploding Eggs, who had waited for me on the road with my towels, laughed as we ran toward the surf.
“Peyral paeá,” he said. “Too much drink, too much fight.”
I did not stop after that when he bade me have a goutte with him, for I was sensible of a deep pity for the girl and an ardent desire to save her embarrassment, the deadly unreasoning shame or perplexity that overwhelmed her at her father’s gross attitude and my presence. After a few weeks, Peyral did not sing out to me any more, and I was conscious of a coldness, of a return of his first relation to me, and then of fits and starts of friendship. I felt oppressed by his changing tempers, and attributed them to his varying degrees of inebriety.
I split my rain-coat one day, and, after making a bad job of repairing it, thought of Peyral and his skill as a tailor. With the coat on my arm I climbed the stairs to his porch, and, finding no one there, called out Peyral’s name. My voice echoed through the house, and, with the intention of scribbling a note and leaving the coat, I entered the nearest room. Mademoiselle Peyral was sitting near the machine but was not sewing. She trembled as I approached her, and looked frightened. I am timid with women, and her nervousness communicated itself to me. I wished I was not there. She was half uncovered, having on only a chemise, and her dishabille added to my confusion, though that very morning I had bathed in the river nude with Titihuti and others.
“Please give your father this coat, and ask him to repair it,” I said, and put it down. Her downcast eyes and heaving bosom, her evident extreme timidity, and her pitiable situation overcame me. She was of my own race, and she was so white and so fair. Before I could restrain myself, I said in English, “Don’t be afraid of me! I am very sorry for you,” and I patted her shoulder as I might have a child’s.
She shrank from me in apparent horror, and ran from the room into a farther one, screaming in Marquesan. I started to follow her to explain or to appease her, but reconsidered.