Thibaud’s Café I must tell you first, is situated on Coconut Square, Noumea. Noumea has a bad name, but it is not at all a bad place if you are not a convict, neither is New Caledonia, take it altogether, and that evening, sitting and smoking and listening to the band, and watching the crowd and the dusk taking the flame trees, it seemed to me for a moment that Tragedy had withdrawn, that there was no such place as the Isle Nou out there in the harbour, and that the musicians making the echoes ring to the “Sambre et Meuse” were primarily musicians, not convicts.
Then I saw Lewishon crossing the Square by the Liberty Statue, and attracted his attention. He came and sat by me, and we smoked and talked whilst I tried to realise that it was fifteen years since I had seen him last, and that he hadn’t altered in the least—in the dusk.
“I’ve been living here for years,” said he. “When I saw you last in ’Frisco, I was about to take up a proposition in Oregon. I didn’t, owing to a telegram going wrong. That little fact changed my whole life. I came to the Islands instead and started trading, then I came to live in New Caledonia—I’m married.”
“Oh,” I said, “is that so?”
Something in the tone of those two words, “I’m married,” struck me as strange.
We talked on indifferent subjects, and before we parted I promised to come over and see him next day at his place, a few miles from the town. I did, and I was astonished at what I saw.
New Caledonia, pleasant as the climate may be, is not the place one would live in by choice. At all events it wasn’t in those days when the convicts were still coming there from France. The gangs of prisoners shepherded by warders armed to the teeth, the great barges filled with prisoners that ply every evening when work is over between the harbour quay and the Isle Nou, the military air of the place and the fretting regulations, all these things and more robbed it of its appeal as a residential neighbourhood. Yet the Lewishons lived there, and what astonished me was the evidence of their wealth and the fact that they had no apparent interests at all to bind them to the place.
Mrs. Lewishon was a woman of forty-five or so, yet her beauty had scarcely begun to fade. I was introduced to her by Lewishon on the broad verandah of their house, which stood in the midst of gardens more wonderful than the gardens of La Mortola.
A week or so later, after dining with me in the town, he told me the story of his marriage, one of the strangest stories I ever heard, and this is it, just as he told it:
“The Pacific is the finest place in the world to drop money in. You see it’s so big and full of holes that look like safe investments. I started, after I parted with you, growing cocoanut trees in the Fijis. It takes five years for a cocoanut palm to grow, but when it’s grown it will bring you in an income of eighteen pence or so a year, according as the copra prices range. I planted forty thousand young trees, and at the end of the fourth year a hurricane took the lot. That’s the Pacific. I was down and out, and then I struck luck. That’s the Pacific again. I got to be agent for a big English firm here in Noumea, and in a short time I was friends with everyone from Chardin the governor right down. Chardin was a good sort, but very severe. The former governor had been lax, so the people said, letting rules fall into abeyance like the rule about cropping the convicts’ hair and beards to the same pattern. However that may have been, Chardin had just come as governor, and I had not been here more than a few months when one day a big white yacht from France came and dropped anchor in the harbour, and a day or two after a lady appeared at my office and asked for an interview.