Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was the “perfec’ im’ge” of a man of that name, and that he owned a little cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived. I walked like him, was of the same size, and had the “same kin’ funny face.”
She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked him over narrowly. His name was Dixon,—Lovaina never got a name right,—an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short, solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye. He was not good-looking. He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.
“I’m lucky to be here at all,” he said seriously. “I have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch. Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven o’clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning. It was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,—so the steersman said,—and struck us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water fell on us like your Niagara. Christ! We gave up for gone, all of us, the other five all kanakas. We heeled over until the deck was under water,—of course we’ve got no freeboard at all,—and suddenly a gale sprung up. We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose. Under a bare pole we seemed every minute to be going under completely. We have no cabin, and all we could do was to lay flat on the deck in the water, and hold on to anything we could grab. The natives prayed, by God! They ’re Catholics, and they remembered it then. The mate wanted to throw the copra overboard. I was willing, but I said, ‘What for? We’re dead men, and it’ll do no good. She can’t stand up even empty.’ We stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be drowned any minute, and I myself said to the Lord—I was a chorister once—that if I had done anything wrong in my life, I was sorry—”
“But you knew you had?” I interposed.
“Of course I did, but I wasn’t going to rub it in on myself in that fix. I knew He knew all about me. My father was a curate in Devon. Well, we pulled through all right, because here I am, and the copra’s on the dock. What do you think—the wind died away completely, and we had to sweep in to Papeete.”
I touched his glass with mine. He was very ingenuous, a four-square man.
“Did the prayers have anything to do with your pulling through and saving the copra?” I questioned, curious.
“I don’t know. I didn’t make any fixed promises. I was bloody well scared, and I meant what I said about being sorry. But that’s all gone. Let’s drink this up and have another. Joseph!”
Hélas! the waterspout did not harm my twin half so much as the rum-spout, which soon had him three sheets in the wind and his rudder unmanageable. When I went down the rue de Rivoli that night to the Cercle Militaire, he had drifted into the Cocoanut House, and was sitting on a fallen tree telling of the storm to a woman in a scarlet gown with a hibiscus-blossom in her hair. I got him by the arm, and with an expressed desire to know more of the details of the escape, steered him to the Annexe, where he had a room.
A good sort was Dixon. He had in the Paumotus a little store, a dark mother-girl of Raiaroa who waited for him, and a new baby. He had been only a year in the group. He referred to “my family” with honest pride.