“You deprecate my decision,” Dan charged irritably.
“I do not. I don’t give a hoot what you do. I was thinking of the girl. If I stood in your shoes I wouldn’t marry her. Why should you? You don’t have to, and she doesn’t expect you to. You’ll regret it if you take her back to the United States, because she’ll never be truly happy there. When you transplant these people they die of homesickness. They’re so far behind our civilization they can never catch up, and the effort to do so wearies them and they die. They have the home instinct and the home yearning of a lost fox hound. They are children, I tell you. They never grow up—and you are not the man to wed with a woman who will never grow up.”
“Nonsense,” Dan growled. “Sheer, unadulterated nonsense.”
Hackett shrugged and poured himself another peg of Scotch. “I’ve had three of them in my day. I think I ought to know. One was a Pitcairn islander and more than half white. I sailed a thousand miles off my course to bring her back to Pitcairn. She was slowly dying. She loved me but she loved Pitcairn and her people more.”
There the conversation ceased, yet the effect of it remained. Day after day, night after night, as the Pelorus rolled lazily before the trades, Dan Pritchard’s mind dwelled on his problem. What if Hackett should be proved right, after all? Dan recalled how swiftly, how inevitably, Tamea’s hurt heart had called her back to Riva and her own people. How poignantly had that bruised heart yearned for the understanding of those who could understand her?
His mind harked back to the nights when Tamea lay upon the hearthrug in his Pacific Avenue home and played sad little songs of Riva on her accordion. Could it have been that on such occasions her soul had been steeped in a vague, unsuspected nostalgia? If Hackett was right, then he, Dan Pritchard, journeyed upon worse than a fool’s errand. Might he not be doing the kindly, the decent thing, to turn back, to trust to time and some other man to mend that broken heart? He wondered.
He could not, however, cherish seriously even for a moment the thought of abandoning his journey. Old Gaston had given Tamea to him to care for; the Triton had trusted him and he must go on. There was that cursed money he held in trust for her. She had abandoned it to him, out of the greatness of her love, but he could no more accept it now than he could the night she had offered it. He had to see her and return it to her. He had to win her complete forgiveness and understanding, to render her happy again.
Suddenly, one evening while he paced slowly backward and forward in the waist of the ship, he found the solution. He would marry Tamea and end his days in the Islands. He wanted a change. He told himself he was sick of civilization; he wanted to be simple and natural, free of the competition of existence.
Down there nobody would wonder why he had married Tamea. Conventions did not exist, nor foolish tradition nor social codes—and he could paint landscapes to his heart’s content. He would establish a South Sea school of landscape painting. He would be through with the riddle of existence. . . and there was the embarrassment of Maisie and her aunt and old Casson and Mellenger and all of his friends should he return to San Francisco!
His decision, arrived at so suddenly, was peculiarly inexorable. He had thought too long and too hard: mentally he had come to the jumping-off place. On the instant his motto was: “The devil take everything—including me!” The rewards to be gleaned from the struggle that faced him, should he return to his white civilization, were scarcely commensurate with the effort required. A sudden, passionate yearning had seized him to chuck it all, to drift with the tide, to sample life in its elemental phases, to be happy in a land where all of the rules of existence were reversed . . . a man lived but once and he was a long time dead. . . and Dan wanted Tamea. . . . Ah, how ardently he desired her and how lonely and desolate would be his life without her! Civilization demands much of repression, since civilized man, like the domestic dog, still retains many of the instincts of his primitive ancestors; and Dan was weary of repression. Hang it, he would go on the loose! He would take the gifts that the gods provided and cease to worry over the opinions of people whose sole claims to his consideration lay in the fact that they were white and dwelled in his world and were hobbled and frightened by tradition.