The Moon and Sixpence
always hoped they would pay when they could. There was one man there
who had fallen on adversity, and to him she had given board and lodging
for several months. When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him
without payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers. She
could not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said,
and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a franc a day
for cigarettes. She used him with the same affability as those of her
clients who paid their bills once a week.
Age and obesity had made her inapt for love, but she took a keen
interest in the amatory affairs of the young. She looked upon venery as
the natural occupation for men and women, and was ever ready with
precept and example from her own wide experience.
“I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover,” she said.
“He was third mate on the _Tropic Bird_. A good-looking boy.”
She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her first lover
with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
“My father was a sensible man.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me marry
Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older, of course, but he was
good-looking too.”
Tiaré—her father had called her by the name of the white, scented
flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt, will always draw
you back to Tahiti in the end, however far you may have roamed—Tiaré
remembered Strickland very well.
“He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking about
Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he never had any
money. When I heard he was in town, I used to send a boy to find him
and make him come to dinner with me. I got him a job once or twice, but
he couldn’t stick to anything. After a little while he wanted to get
back to the bush, and one morning he would be gone.”
Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left Marseilles. He
worked his passage on a sailing vessel that was making the trip from
Auckland to San Francisco, and he arrived with a box of paints, an
easel, and a dozen canvases. He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he
had found work in Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house
outside the town. I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself
at home. Tiaré told me that he said to her once:
“I’d been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me: ‘Why,
there it is.’ And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island. I
knew right away that there was the place I’d been looking for all my
life. Then we came near, and I seemed to recognise it. Sometimes when I
walk about it all seems familiar. I could swear I’ve lived here
before.”
“Sometimes it takes them like that,” said Tiaré. “I’ve known men come
on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking in cargo, and
never go back. And I’ve known men who came here to be in an office for
a year, and they cursed the place, and when they went away they took
their dying oath they’d hang themselves before they came back again,
and in six months you’d see them land once more, and they’d tell you
they couldn’t live anywhere else.”
Chapter L
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident
has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a
nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their
birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the
populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of
passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred
and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it
is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search
for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps
some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his
ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits
upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is
the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never
seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar
to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
I told Tiaré the story of a man I had known at St. Thomas’s Hospital.
He was a Jew named Abraham, a blond, rather stout young man, shy and
very unassuming; but he had remarkable gifts. He entered the hospital
with a scholarship, and during the five years of the curriculum gained
every prize that was open to him. He was made house-physician and
house-surgeon. His brilliance was allowed by all. Finally he was
elected to a position on the staff, and his career was assured. So far
as human things can be predicted, it was certain that he would rise to
the greatest heights of his profession. Honours and wealth awaited him.
Before he entered upon his new duties he wished to take a holiday, and,
having no private means, he went as surgeon on a tramp steamer to the
Levant. It did not generally carry a doctor, but one of the senior
surgeons at the hospital knew a director of the line, and Abraham was
taken as a favour.
In a few weeks the authorities received his resignation of the coveted
position on the staff. It created profound astonishment, and wild
rumours were current. Whenever a man does anything unexpected, his
fellows ascribe it to the most discreditable motives. But there was a
man ready to step into Abraham’s shoes, and Abraham was forgotten.
Nothing more was heard of him. He vanished.
It was perhaps ten years later that one morning on board ship, about to
land at Alexandria, I was bidden to line up with the other passengers
for the doctor’s examination. The doctor was a stout man in shabby
clothes, and when he took off his hat I noticed that he was very bald.
I had an idea that I had seen him before. Suddenly I remembered.
“Abraham,” I said.
He turned to me with a puzzled look, and then, recognizing me, seized
my hand. After expressions of surprise on either side, hearing that I
meant to spend the night in Alexandria, he asked me to dine with him at
the English Club. When we met again I declared my astonishment at
finding him there. It was a very modest position that he occupied, and
there was about him an air of straitened circumstance. Then he told me
his story. When he set out on his holiday in the Mediterranean he had
every intention of returning to London and his appointment at St.
Thomas’s. One morning the tramp docked at Alexandria, and from the deck
he looked at the city, white in the sunlight, and the crowd on the
wharf; he saw the natives in their shabby gabardines, the blacks from
the Soudan, the noisy throng of Greeks and Italians, the grave Turks in
tarbooshes, the sunshine and the blue sky; and something happened to
him. He could not describe it. It was like a thunder-clap, he said, and
then, dissatisfied with this, he said it was like a revelation.
Something seemed to twist his heart, and suddenly he felt an
exultation, a sense of wonderful freedom. He felt himself at home, and
he made up his mind there and then, in a minute, that he would live the
rest of his life in Alexandria. He had no great difficulty in leaving
the ship, and in twenty-four hours, with all his belongings, he was on
shore.
“The Captain must have thought you as mad as a hatter,” I smiled.
“I didn’t care what anybody thought. It wasn’t I that acted, but
something stronger within me. I thought I would go to a little Greek
hotel, while I looked about, and I felt I knew where to find one. And
do you know, I walked straight there, and when I saw it, I recognised
it at once.”
“Had you been to Alexandria before?”
“No; I’d never been out of England in my life.”
Presently he entered the Government service, and there he had been ever
since.
“Have you never regretted it?”
“Never, not for a minute. I earn just enough to live upon, and I’m
satisfied. I ask nothing more than to remain as I am till I die. I’ve
had a wonderful life.”
I left Alexandria next day, and I forgot about Abraham till a little
while ago, when I was dining with another old friend in the profession,
Alec Carmichael, who was in England on short leave. I ran across him in
the street and congratulated him on the knighthood with which his
eminent services during the war had been rewarded. We arranged to spend
an evening together for old time’s sake, and when I agreed to dine with
him, he proposed that he should ask nobody else, so that we could chat
without interruption. He had a beautiful old house in Queen Anne
Street, and being a man of taste he had furnished it admirably. On the
walls of the dining-room I saw a charming Bellotto, and there was a
pair of Zoffanys that I envied. When his wife, a tall, lovely creature
in cloth of gold, had left us, I remarked laughingly on the change in
his present circumstances from those when we had both been medical
students. We had looked upon it then as an extravagance to dine in a
shabby Italian restaurant in the Westminster Bridge Road. Now Alec
Carmichael was on the staff of half a dozen hospitals. I should think
he earned ten thousand a year, and his knighthood was but the first of
the honours which must inevitably fall to his lot.
“I’ve done pretty well,” he said, “but the strange thing is that I owe
it all to one piece of luck.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, do you remember Abraham? He was the man who had the future. When
we were students he beat me all along the line. He got the prizes and
the scholarships that I went in for. I always played second fiddle to
him. If he’d kept on he’d be in the position I’m in now. That man had a
genius for surgery. No one had a look in with him. When he was
appointed Registrar at Thomas’s I hadn’t a chance of getting on the
staff. I should have had to become a G.P., and you know what likelihood
there is for a G.P. ever to get out of the common rut. But Abraham fell
out, and I got the job. That gave me my opportunity.”
“I dare say that’s true.”
“It was just luck. I suppose there was some kink in Abraham. Poor
devil, he’s gone to the dogs altogether. He’s got some
twopenny-halfpenny job in the medical at Alexandria—sanitary officer or
something like that. I’m told he lives with an ugly old Greek woman and
has half a dozen scrofulous kids. The fact is, I suppose, that it’s not
enough to have brains. The thing that counts is character. Abraham
hadn’t got character.”
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to
throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in
another way of living a more intense significance. And it required
still more character never to regret the sudden step. But I said
nothing, and Alec Carmichael proceeded reflectively:
“Of course it would be hypocritical for me to pretend that I regret
what Abraham did. After all, I’ve scored by it.” He puffed luxuriously
at the long Corona he was smoking. “But if I weren’t personally
concerned I should be sorry at the waste. It seems a rotten thing that
a man should make such a hash of life.”
I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you
most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with
yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent
surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it
depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you
acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I
held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?
Chapter LI
Tiaré, when I told her this story, praised my prudence, and for a few
minutes we worked in silence, for we were shelling peas. Then her eyes,