Ralph Stock

“ How long the battle lasted she had no notion, but this she knew—that it was Bob, Bob himself, who first cried a halt. Sweating, begrimed, he burst through the smoke and bore her out of the inferno.
"Olive," he kept muttering, "Olive!"
Tahao was a semicircle of leaping flame. He took her to the "hill" and together they watched it burn itself out.
"There's nothing to be done," he said, "nothing. This is the end." ”

“ This surely was the end, Olive told herself, with a secret and guilty joy. There was nothing more on Tahao to be undertaken, persisted in, and failed over. It was her turn now. She would nurse him back to health and, in the subtle ways known only to a woman, persuade him to abandon ambition for the less harried paths of content. A new interest had come into her life. Her manner changed, and Bob noticed it.
"Olive," he said one evening, during his convalescence on the veranda, "Olive, I've been thinking."
"You mustn't—yet," she said. "Try and rest. There's plenty of time." ”

“ As incapable of recognizing defeat as of accomplishing victory, he staggered to his feet after each reverse and fought on with an ox-like stolidity that Olive knew to be heroic and blamed herself for finding exasperating.
For three years he had striven to make a home for the woman he loved. It was here—on Tahao. Then had come the vanilla boom. According to Bob, there was nothing like vanilla. The demand was unlimited. In five years, or less, they would be in a position to install a manager, and live in God's country. Well, either vanilla did not like Tahao, or Tahao did not like vanilla. ”

“ Too much of a hurry. Too much get-rich-quick. It can't be done outside of a city office, and we're on an atoll. When you come down to bedrock, there's only one thing—copra."
He paused. Olive made no comment, and presently he went on.
"Listen!" And she listened, with the old, prophetic instinct of fatal futility, to the praises of the cocoanut palm. There was no doubt about the dried kernel of the cocoanut. It was currency, and it was indigenous to Tahao. He was a fool for not having planted up the island with it at the outset. ”

“ The sunset was the same miracle of beauty that it usually is near the Equator, but below and beyond them there hovered a gray-green void that slowly spread like some disfiguring disease over the fair face of the sky. ”

“ A trading cutter was the thing! Freight rates were fantastic. The vessel would pay for herself in a year, and then——These were the days when Bob's enthusiasms were infectious. With considerable pomp the cutter was christened Olive and reduced to matchwood a month later on a neighbouring reef.
This was a calamity. There was no denying it. For a whole day Bob patrolled the veranda in subdued fashion, but at breakfast the next morning he returned to the attack with redoubled vigour. It appeared that he had explored Tahao lagoon as never before, and there was bêche-de-mer there, quantities of it. ”

“ It was so like Bob to imagine there was anything—on Tahao.
Roko, the fox terrier sybarite, was engaged in lethargic fly-catching operations on his favourite mat. The sewing-machine in its intensely varnished case with gold lettering reflected the lamplight with customary brilliance. A dog and a sewing-machine! ”

“ And she had been going to tell him, persuade him into seeing what manner of man he was, destined, inevitable. That there are men like that, and that it is better for such to leave the scene of their failures and start at the bottom of the ladder, if need be, so long as the chain of fatal futility be broken. ”

“ You need a change. Tahao is no place for a woman."
So he realized that. After three years Bob realized that much. Olive's head bent lower over the needle-work in her lap.
"What's the matter with clearing out for a while?" he droned on. "Sydney, San Francisco, anywhere you like?"
"Nothing that I can see," said Olive in a carefully controlled voice. "It would set us up."
"Ah, I didn't mean that," he objected gently. "I can't very well get away—just now. Later, perhaps, when—when I've really got things going here." He stirred uneasily. ”