The Moon and Sixpence
his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in the
communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone. For
Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a lovely woman graciously
prodigal of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory
than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to
the quay are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and
urbane, and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt their
colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an unashamed
violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd that throngs the
wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay and debonair; it is a
noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd. It is a sea of brown faces. You
have an impression of coloured movement against the flaming blue of the
sky. Everything is done with a great deal of bustle, the unloading of
the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone seems to
smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you.
Chapter XLVI
HAD not been in Tahiti long before I met Captain Nichols. He came in
one morning when I was having breakfast on the terrace of the hotel and
introduced himself. He had heard that I was interested in Charles
Strickland, and announced that he was come to have a talk about him.
They are as fond of gossip in Tahiti as in an English village, and one
or two enquiries I had made for pictures by Strickland had been quickly
spread. I asked the stranger if he had breakfasted.
“Yes; I have my coffee early,” he answered, “but I don’t mind having a
drop of whisky.”
I called the Chinese boy.
“You don’t think it’s too early?” said the Captain.
“You and your liver must decide that between you,” I replied.
“I’m practically a teetotaller,” he said, as he poured himself out a
good half-tumbler of Canadian Club.
When he smiled he showed broken and discoloured teeth. He was a very
lean man, of no more than average height, with gray hair cut short and
a stubbly gray moustache. He had not shaved for a couple of days. His
face was deeply lined, burned brown by long exposure to the sun, and he
had a pair of small blue eyes which were astonishingly shifty. They
moved quickly, following my smallest gesture, and they gave him the
look of a very thorough rogue. But at the moment he was all heartiness
and good-fellowship. He was dressed in a bedraggled suit of khaki, and
his hands would have been all the better for a wash.
“I knew Strickland well,” he said, as he leaned back in his chair and
lit the cigar I had offered him. “It’s through me he came out to the
islands.”
“Where did you meet him?” I asked.
“In Marseilles.”
“What were you doing there?”
He gave me an ingratiating smile.
“Well, I guess I was on the beach.”
My friend’s appearance suggested that he was now in the same
predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an agreeable
acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always repays the small
pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are easy of approach and affable
in conversation. They seldom put on airs, and the offer of a drink is a
sure way to their hearts. You need no laborious steps to enter upon
familiarity with them, and you can earn not only their confidence, but
their gratitude, by turning an attentive ear to their discourse. They
look upon conversation as the great pleasure of life, thereby proving
the excellence of their civilisation, and for the most part they are
entertaining talkers. The extent of their experience is pleasantly
balanced by the fertility of their imagination. It cannot be said that
they are without guile, but they have a tolerant respect for the law,
when the law is supported by strength. It is hazardous to play poker
with them, but their ingenuity adds a peculiar excitement to the best
game in the world. I came to know Captain Nichols very well before I
left Tahiti, and I am the richer for his acquaintance. I do not
consider that the cigars and whisky he consumed at my expense (he
always refused cocktails, since he was practically a teetotaller), and
the few dollars, borrowed with a civil air of conferring a favour upon
me, that passed from my pocket to his, were in any way equivalent to
the entertainment he afforded me. I remained his debtor. I should be
sorry if my conscience, insisting on a rigid attention to the matter in
hand, forced me to dismiss him in a couple of lines.
I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England. It was a matter
upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his kind a direct
question is never very discreet. He hinted at undeserved misfortune,
and there is no doubt that he looked upon himself as the victim of
injustice. My fancy played with the various forms of fraud and
violence, and I agreed with him sympathetically when he remarked that
the authorities in the old country were so damned technical. But it was
nice to see that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land
had not impaired his ardent patriotism. He frequently declared that
England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he felt a lively
superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos, Dutchmen, and Kanakas.
But I do not think he was a happy man. He suffered from dyspepsia, and
he might often be seen sucking a tablet of pepsin; in the morning his
appetite was poor; but this affliction alone would hardly have impaired
his spirits. He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this.
Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men whom a
merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who
from wilfulness or through circumstances they could not cope with have
flown in the face of its decrees. There is no object more deserving of
pity than the married bachelor. Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his
wife. She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type
whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when
she was twenty, and at forty would look no older. She gave me an
impression of extraordinary tightness. Her plain face with its narrow
lips was tight, her skin was stretched tightly over her bones, her
smile was tight, her hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the
white drill she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not
imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having married her why
he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had, often, and his melancholy
arose from the fact that he could never succeed. However far he went
and in howsoever secret a place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs.
Nichols, inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would
presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the cause can
escape the effect.
The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs to no
class. He is not embarrassed by the _sans gene_ of the hobo, nor put
out of countenance by the etiquette of the prince. But Mrs. Nichols
belonged to the well-defined class, of late become vocal, which is
known as the lower-middle. Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am
certain that he was an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was
on the Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her
speak, but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation. At
any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her. Sometimes,
sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel, he would become conscious
that she was walking in the road outside. She did not call him; she
gave no sign that she was aware of his existence; she merely walked up
and down composedly. Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain;
he would look at his watch and sigh.
“Well, I must be off,” he said.
Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a man who had
faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would not have hesitated to
fight a dozen unarmed niggers with nothing but a revolver to help him.
Sometimes Mrs. Nichols would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen
child of seven, to the hotel.
“Mother wants you,” she said, in a whining tone.
“Very well, my dear,” said Captain Nichols.
He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter along the
road. I suppose it was a very pretty example of the triumph of spirit
over matter, and so my digression has at least the advantage of a
moral.
Chapter XLVII
I have tried to put some connection into the various things Captain
Nichols told me about Strickland, and I here set them down in the best
order I can. They made one another’s acquaintance during the latter
part of the winter following my last meeting with Strickland in Paris.
How he had passed the intervening months I do not know, but life must
have been very hard, for Captain Nichols saw him first in the Asile de
Nuit. There was a strike at Marseilles at the time, and Strickland,
having come to the end of his resources, had apparently found it
impossible to earn the small sum he needed to keep body and soul
together.
The Asile de Nuit is a large stone building where pauper and vagabond
may get a bed for a week, provided their papers are in order and they
can persuade the friars in charge that they are workingmen. Captain
Nichols noticed Strickland for his size and his singular appearance
among the crowd that waited for the doors to open; they waited
listlessly, some walking to and fro, some leaning against the wall, and
others seated on the curb with their feet in the gutter; and when they
filed into the office he heard the monk who read his papers address him
in English. But he did not have a chance to speak to him, since, as he
entered the common-room, a monk came in with a huge Bible in his arms,
mounted a pulpit which was at the end of the room, and began the
service which the wretched outcasts had to endure as the price of their
lodging. He and Strickland were assigned to different rooms, and when,
thrown out of bed at five in the morning by a stalwart monk, he had
made his bed and washed his face, Strickland had already disappeared.
Captain Nichols wandered about the streets for an hour of bitter cold,
and then made his way to the Place Victor Gélu, where the sailor-men
are wont to congregate. Dozing against the pedestal of a statue, he saw
Strickland again. He gave him a kick to awaken him.
“Come and have breakfast, mate,” he said.
“Go to hell,” answered Strickland.
I recognised my friend’s limited vocabulary, and I prepared to regard
Captain Nichols as a trustworthy witness.
“Busted?” asked the Captain.
“Blast you,” answered Strickland.
“Come along with me. I’ll get you some breakfast.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Strickland scrambled to his feet, and
together they went to the Bouchée de Pain, where the hungry are given a
wedge of bread, which they must eat there and then, for it is forbidden
to take it away; and then to the Cuillère de Soupe, where for a week,
at eleven and four, you may get a bowl of thin, salt soup. The two
buildings are placed far apart, so that only the starving should be
tempted to make use of them. So they had breakfast, and so began the
queer companionship of Charles Strickland and Captain Nichols.
They must have spent something like four months at Marseilles in one
another’s society. Their career was devoid of adventure, if by
adventure you mean unexpected or thrilling incident, for their days
were occupied in the pursuit of enough money to get a night’s lodging
and such food as would stay the pangs of hunger. But I wish I could
give here the pictures, coloured and racy, which Captain Nichols’ vivid
narrative offered to the imagination. His account of their discoveries
in the low life of a seaport town would have made a charming book, and
in the various characters that came their way the student might easily