Gabrielle was silent a long time, but it was her hand now that crept toward his, and tightened on it softly. And so they sat for many minutes, without speaking.
Then the girl said, “Tell me about her.”
Tom put the picture away reverently, carefully. For a few dubious minutes she felt that she had hurt him, but suddenly he began with the whole story.
He had met Tana when she was only fourteen, just before the entrance of the United States into the war. Her father was a native trader, but the girl had some white blood. Tom had remembered her, and when he was wounded and imprisoned, had escaped to make his way back, by the devious back roads of the seas, to the tropical island, and the group of huts, and Tana. And Tana had nursed him, and married him solemnly, according to all the customs of her tribe, and they had lived there in a little corner of Paradise, loving, eating, swimming, sleeping, for happy years. And then there had been Toam, little, soft, round, and brown, never dressed in all his short three years, never bathed except in the green warm fringes of the ocean, never fed except at his mother’s tender, soft brown breast until he was big enough to sit on his father’s knee and eat his meat and bananas like a man. There were plenty of other brown babies in the settlement, but it was Toam’s staggering little footprints in the wet sand that Tom remembered, Toam standing in a sun-flooded open reed doorway, with an aureole about his curly little head.
Tom had presently drifted into the service of a small freighting line again, but never for long trips, never absent for more than a few days or a week from Tana and Toam. And so the wonderful months had become years, and Tom was content, and Tana was more than that; until the fever came.
Tom had survived them both, laid the tiny brown body straight and bare beside the straightly drawn white linen that covered Tana. And then his own illness had mercifully shut down upon him, and he had known nothing for long months of native nursing. Months afterward he had found himself in a spare cabin upon a little freighter, bound eventually for the harbour of New York. Tana’s family, her village indeed, had been wiped out, the captain had told him. The ship had delayed only to superintend some burials before carrying him upon its somewhat desultory course. They had put into a score of harbours, and Tom was convalescent, before the grim, smoke-wrapped outlines of New York, burning in midsummer glare and heat, had risen before him. And Tom, then, sick and weary and weak and heartbroken, had thought he must come home to die.
But now, after these weeks at home, a subtle change had come over him, and he did not want to die. He told Gabrielle, and she began indeed to understand it, how strangely rigid and unlovely and lifeless domestic ideals according to the New England standards had seemed to him at first, how gloomy the rooms at Wastewater, how empty and unsatisfying the life.
But he was getting used to it all now. He thought Sylvia was a “beautiful young lady, but kinder proud.” Aunt Flora also was “O. K.” And David was of course a prince.
“He’s painting a I-don’t-know-what-you-call-it up in my room,” Tom said, unaffectedly. He had furnished one of the big mansard rooms at the top of the house with odd couches, rugs, and chairs, and sometimes spent the hot mornings there, with David painting beside him. If there was air moving, it might be felt here, and Tom liked the lazy and desultory talk as David worked. “Can he paint good at all? They don’t look much like the pictures in books.”
“They are beginning to say—at least some of them do—that he is a genius, Tom. No, it’s not like the pictures that one knows. But there are other men who paint that way—in his school.”