“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.
“Then I came out to Taku, and I met Lulukuila. She was beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. She made other women look clumsy beside her. She stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. Those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. I can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. And so I married her.”
Cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. After a while he switched off on another tack.
“Her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. Those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and I thought I’d found happiness at last. I liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. She would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. I sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. I thought I’d teach her the songs Charlotte and I used to sing together.
“But she hated the piano,” Cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “I suppose I was rather a fool over it at first. I was so hungry for familiar music. Lulukuila couldn’t bear the music I’d grown up with. It brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. Octaves, those she’d listen to. Once when I filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. I remember yet how she looked.
“‘You are drawn by the many voices,’ she said. ‘There should, be only one for you.’
“She went off to the pavilion then, and when I went to find her she was singing, following that sound the surf made on the reefs. The perfection of her pitch made me shiver. I began to hate it then. I saw that Lulukuila was going to destroy my pleasure in the music I had loved. She was robbing me—”
I don’t believe Cartwright was talking to any one in particular by this time. His voice dropped, and I missed a lot till I heard him mention his cousin. He stopped then, and looked at me for the first time.
“My uncle threw me over when I married Lulukuila,” he said, “but when my cousin Charlotte came out from England she made her father come over with her. She brought Davidson too—good sort, Davidson.
“I must have been homesick, for the sight of them seemed to wake me from a nightmare. I remember we were very jolly at dinner. Afterward Charlotte and I sang. I was thinking how good it was to hear the music of home again, when I caught sight of Lulukuila’s face in a shaft of light that reached out to where the rest were sitting. Her face was white, and her teeth were biting her lip.