H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Did I ever tell you of Billy Broke? Brooke was the real name, only some fool of an English ancestor or another left out one of the o’s, so the poor chap was saddled with a nameplate only fit for a hoodoo. Nature not to be behind in the business, fitted him with a set of nerves and an imagination worse than yours and then turned him out into the cold world to make his living. On top of everything he was pious beyond the ordinary, bashful beyond believing and trusting in every man, which isn’t a quality which makes for success in American business circles. ”

“ That very evening they lifted Fuanatafi, their destination, a purple cloud in the sunset glow and a cloud of ebony by night as they lay off and on, listening to the far sound of the breakers till dawn revealed the great island in all its splendour and isolation; for Fuanatafi, like Nauru, has no harbour, just a landing beach to westward where boats can put in, razor-backed reefs keep ships a mile from the shore and make the place pretty useless for trade. ”

“ Then at an order from Schumways the starboard quarter-boat was lowered, Harman and Davis were ordered into it, and the Captain of the Oskosh and his engineer took their places in the stern sheets.
Nothing could be more lovely than the morning light on the streets of blue water between the reefs or the view of the great island washed by the calm, ponded sea and waiting for the approaching boat, loveliness that left no trace, however, on the minds of Bud and Billy labouring at the oars, or of Schumways and Sellers smoking in the stern. ”

“ We watched the smashed-up water of the harbour streaming like a millrace under the bat-bat-bat of the tug paddles and the stern of the Greyhound with the faded old lettering turned towards a wharf for the last time.
As the vision faded, Brent heaved a deep sigh, thinking maybe of his partner and old times.
“Well,” he said, turning away, “that’s the end of her. What gets me is that the other one may be alive and kicking her heels and enjoying herself—no knowing, it’s those sort that live longest, seems to me.” ”

“ The cold-blooded blackguardliness of Davis almost shocked him for a moment—making a girl love him like that just to use her as a spy on her family! The upright man in the soul of Billy Harman, the upright man who had never yet managed somehow to get on his feet, humped his back and tried to rise, but he had half a million dollars on top of him. ”

“ Living is cheap in Mambaya, where people mostly subsist on coco-nut milk and fried bananas, where you can get a hundred eggs for half a dollar and a chicken for a quarter. If you are an æsthete you can almost live on the scenery alone, on the sun, on the unutterably blue sky that roofs you between the rains. But Billy and his companion had little use for scenery, and after a week of lounging on the beach, wandering about the town and watching the natives surf bathing off Cape Huane, life began to pall on them. ”

“ The Oskosh had been a Farsite Enfield boat running from ’Frisco to Seattle. Cargo, Klondyke diggers and, lastly, contraband had reduced her from respectability and cleanliness to her present state. The saloon was a wreck and ruin, the panelling split, the fittings gone, bunks filled with raffle and oddments, the table covered with old oil-cloth showing the marks of coffee cups, and over all a dank throat-catching atmosphere of decay, cockroaches and dirty bunk bedding.
Schumways inhabited the cabin aft. He pointed out two bunks to port and starboard. ”

“ Buenodiaz, with its land-locked harbour, its lazy ways, its pretty women and negligent Port authorities, was his idea, and smoking Penhill’s cigars under a blazing sun whilst the Araya snored along through a Reckitts’-blue sea, he expounded matters to Billy Harman.
“Sell her on the hoof,” said Davis, “innards, outwards, hump, tail and all, that’s my idea. There are ten cent mail boats that’ll take us anywhere up or down the coast, Valparaiso for choice, once we’ve got the dollars in our pockets; there’s big things to be done in Chili with a few dollars by fellows that know the ropes.” ”

“ Night had fallen on Buenodiaz, and the band on La Plazza had ceased braying. Eleven o’clock was striking. Cathedral and churches tinkling and tankling and clanging the hour; a drunken crew had just put off for the grain ship lying farther out, and silence was falling on the scene, when, whizz-bang, off went the fireworks.
“Damn the place!” cried Harman, whose nerves were on edge. “It’s clangin’ and prayin’ and stinkin’ all day and closes down only to go off in your face—some saint’s day or ’nuther, I expect.”
Davis said nothing. ”

“ Next morning Mr. Harman did not go ashore. He spent his time fishing over the side, fishing and smoking and dreaming of all sorts of different ways of spending dollars. Now he was rolling round ’Frisco in a carriage, and a boiled shirt with a diamond solitaire in it, calling at the Palatial for drinks. Now he was in the train of quality eastward bound for N’York, smoking a big cigar. He did not delude himself that the deal would come off, but that didn’t matter a bit. The essence of dreams is unreality. ”

“ Paumotuan pearl getters haunt Mambaya, brown-skinned men who have been diving half a year or have captured in half a day the wherewithal for a spree, and on the beach when a ship comes in you will find the Chinese pearl buyers waiting for the pearl men, cigar coloured girls with liquid brown eyes, the keeper of the roulette table in Mossena Street and Fouqui, the seller of oranges, pines, bananas and custard fruit.
But Mambaya does not exist entirely on pearls. The island is rich in produce and it is a beauty spot. ”

“ From the island of Laut away down south where the bad men live, came one day to the beach of Mambaya two men of the sea, ragged and tanned, with their pockets stuffed with gold and hungering for pleasure—Bud Davis and Billy Harman, no less. ”

“ He and Davis had built themselves a house in forty-eight hours and food was on every hand; they had no cares or worries, no taxes, eternal summer and the best fishing south of California, bathing, boating, yet they were not happy; at least, Davis was not.
Civilization, like savagery, breeds hunters, and your hunter is not happy when he is idle; there was nothing to be shot at here in the way of money, so Davis was not happy. Harman, dead to the beauty around him, might have shared the discontent of the other, only for Kinie. ”

“ But I said nothing, just kept my head shut and let him talk, and glad I was the morning we raised Levua.
It’s a big island—if you’ve never been down that way—mountainous and with no proper reef only to the west, for east the sea comes smack up to the cliffs—but it’s pretty, what with the trees and all, and there’s a big waterfall comes down on the south from the hills that’s reckoned one of the sights of the island.
Levenstein’s house was on the beach to the west; a run of reef, broken here and there, kept the sea pretty smooth on the beach, and there was ten fathoms close up to the sand. ”

“ It is always so in pearling; a man may make a small fortune out of a fishery in a few months, but the take is never consistent, and if he strikes it rich at first, it is ten to one he will have to pay for his luck.
One morning, just as the sun was freeing himself from the reef and the last of the gulls departing for their deep-sea fishing grounds, Harman, who had been to draw water from the well, suddenly dropped the bucket he was carrying, shaded his eyes and gave a shout that brought Davis from the house. ”

“ THE STORY OF BILLY BROKE
I Do you know that fiction, without side-tracking interest, can often teach a man what he will never learn in a class-room or from a text-book? It can, and the lesson sticks, because the human mind is so constituted that it will retain and assimilate a moral wrapped up in a story, whereas the moral naked and unadorned would be forgotten in fifteen minutes or rejected at once. ”

“ Well, you’re askin’ for it.”
“Oh, close up or you’ll be capsizing the canoe,” cried Davis. “Shove her off—Now paddle for all you’re worth. Mind! the outrigger is lifting.”
The canoes parted and the moonlit waving water came between them like a river, then, driven by tide and paddle, they passed the shadows of the cliffs at the harbour mouth, and Harman, looking back, saw the glow of the festival fire like a topaz beyond the silver-satin of the harbour water, and against the glow the canoe of Kinie making for the shore. ”

“ I’ve told you Buck was married to a woman who had run away from him. He’d never bothered to get divorced from her, fearing if he got amongst lawyers, he’d be sure to be robbed, and feeling that, as he didn’t ever want to get married again, buying a divorce would be like a chap with no heart for music buying a concertina.
“Well,” I says, rubbing it into him, “here’s a nice cargo. I’m no marrying man, and you’re hitched, so what’s the good of her; a thousand dollars won’t pay us for freightage, and if there’s a scratch on her when we get back, there’ll be hell to pay with Pat. ”

“ Davis did not answer for a moment, he was watching an opulent looking American tourist in white drill who had just left the Island headdress shop across the way. The tourist opened a white umbrella with a green inside and passed away towards the sea.
“No-how,” said Davis, “unless you set to work and open a shop or something, you can’t skin a town like this same as a pearl lagoon. If you want money here, you’ll have to work blame hard for it buying and selling against chaps that are bred to the business better than you—that’s civilisation.”
“Dam civilisation!” said Harman. ”

“ Given the offer of a canoe to go to the devil in or honest work at two dollars a day with board and lodging free, they had chosen the canoe.
They could work; they had worked like beavers for months and months collecting those pearls, but they weren’t going to work for wages.
“No, sir,” said Harman, “I ain’t come down to that yet. Billy Harman’s done signin’ on to be sweated like a gun-mule and hove in the harbour when he’s old bones; the beach is good enough for him if it comes to bed-rock.” ”

“ It was almost as though some Pelée had erupted and covered the place with the lava of pure desolation clear as glass.
“Taking their siestas,” said Davis. “Keep her as she goes. I know this harbour and it’s all good holding ground, beyond that buoy.”
Harman at the wheel nodded, and Davis went forward to superintend the fellows getting the anchor ready while the Araya, her canvas quivering to the last of the dying breeze, stole in past an old rusty torpedo boat, past a grain ship that seemed dead, on and on, dropping her anchor at least two cable lengths from the mole. ”

“ He rose, dressed, and went out. Down on the beach the sea breeze refreshed Mr. Harman, and life began to take a rosier colour. He sat on the sand, and taking the chamois leather bag from his pocket, counted the coins in it. ”

“ Amongst savages you come sometimes upon the strangest facts bearing upon the structure of mind, facts that lose half their significance in the atmosphere of London, yet which, all the same, are not unconnected with our processes of reasoning and conduct.
I was sitting with Brent in the house of Ibanez, the agent of the Southern Islands Soap Syndicate, an institution that turns cocoanut trees and native labour into soap, mats, margarine, dollars and dividends, beats up the blue Pacific with the propellers of filthy steamboats and has its offices in San Francisco, London and New York. ”

“ 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. ”