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When the Greek-owned steamship Glory of Bangkok foundered in the summer of 1913 off the Moluccas, there were only four survivors, three men and an infant boy. The men, curiously enough, were all missionaries, returning from a missionary congress in Singapore to their respective cures of Melanesian souls. Whether a life-long devotion to the gospels induces an extra toughness of fibre, or whether the example of St. Paul off the coast of Malta, as recorded in Acts xxvii. 27-44, creates a will to live among seafaring parsons, or whether the incessant side-stepping of hungry cannibals founds a natural habit of athleticism, are questions that admit of no certain solution. Let it simply be recorded that after the Greek captain and Levantine crew had departed from the foundering ship in the only available boat, after the first-class passengers had taken the only available life-belts (not knowing that they were stuffed with sawdust and Greek parsley gathered by a romantically-minded purser on the slopes of Mount Olympus), and after the steerage passengers, mainly Arab pilgrims and Chinese plantation labourers, had resignedly committed their souls to a variety of heathen and unavailing gods, the three stout clergymen, temporarily pooling their chances of Divine Assistance, got hold of a large spar of wood, went over the side, and swam for the tempestuous line of white spray which seemed to be evidence of a reef. Luck, Resolution, and three separate versions of the Prayer for those in Peril on the Sea, pulled them through, and dawn found them lying asleep after their exertions upon a small, sandy beach which divided the Flores Sea from the eternal forests. They were awoken by the wails of the fourth survivor, the baby boy, who had managed to make the journey by Luck alone, and they had to take immediate stock of their position.

Their first obvious asset was the possession of three strong and hardy physiques. The Reverend Eustace Smith had played cricket for Eton, had been Keeper of the Field, Keeper of the Oppidan Wall, had won the Weight and the Hammer for Cambridge in the Sports, and at fisticuffs had been the terror of the hooligans of Bermondsey during the short period of his curacy in that district. Twenty years among the natives of the Solomon Islands had neither impaired his wind nor noticeably increased his girth, and he was unquestionably a fine figure of a man.

Monsieur René Forgeron, one time pastor of the Protestant Church in Aix-en-Provence, was very much smaller but almost as strong. He was thin and sinewy and brown, and his small hands contained a latent strength that had surprised the chief of the Waitorowaitoro Cannibals just before they cracked his spinal cord at the neck in 1904. Monsieur had spent eighteen years in the Marquesas Islands.

The third of the survivors was Pastor Hans Schmidt, who had left a little old mother in far-away Schwartzburg in the Thuringian Forest, to spend a lifetime converting the Samoans to the general principles of Lutheranism. If Hans Schmidt had been a soldier he would have become a splendid-looking sergeant-major; had he remained in civil life in Schwartzburg, the dark brew of the Löwenbrau would have blown him out like a huge melon. As it was, twenty years of strenuous endeavour in Samoa had left him strong and burly and barrel-chested.

Their next obvious asset was a thorough familiarity with life in wild and tropical places. They knew exactly what to do and how to do it, and so in the time-honoured fashion of Alexander Selkirk, Ben Gunn, and that curiously named Robinson family from the Helvetian Republic, and with vastly greater efficiency, the three strong pastors set to work.

The unfortunate Glory of Bangkok had been driven many hundreds of miles out of its course before took place the final catastrophe which caused, as catastrophes to Greek-owned ships are apt to do, such grave suspicions and distrust at Lloyd’s, and the island upon which the survivors had clambered was far from the track of white men. In 1913 the works of Mr. Conrad had not yet obtained the wide publicity which has since made Carimata as well known as the Isle of Wight, Macassar as anti-Macassar. There were no Conrad cruises, no Ten Days in Lingard’s Country, no In Search of Almayer. But, if the tourist element was conspicuously lacking, the scenery and climate was very much the same then as now, and it was in an atmosphere of immense mirrors, unbroken lustres, gathering shadows, sleeping waters, polished and dark surfaces, and scented mantles of starlight and silence, that the three reverend castaways set to work, swiftly and efficiently, to provide board and lodging for themselves and the baby.

Their operations followed the tradition. The wreck broke up and flotsam came ashore, planks, barrels, sails, spars, and all the other odds and ends which, in the hands of heroes, have from time immemorial turned into huts, stockades, ovens, canoes, beds, chairs, brass-swivel guns, and anti-malaria medicines. Natives came to observe and stayed to talk, for between them the three parsons were fluent in every language between Singapore and Pearl Harbour. Small barterings followed and, little by little, trade and friendship grew, until a peaceful and prosperous settlement lay shimmering above the unending murmur of lagoons and southern, palm-fringed seas.

No white men came that way, or piratical dhows, or news of catastrophic battles, or tidings of the gallant new world. It was very quiet, and the missionaries were happy and the boy grew up.

It was an extraordinarily fortunate circumstance that the three men were very like each other temperamentally, for otherwise life at such close quarters, with no other white society available, would have sooner or later resulted in an explosion. But all three men were placid and mild and sympathetic. They understood each other’s difficulties, humoured each other’s whims and weaknesses, and instinctively accommodated themselves into a sort of automatic harmony, so that their friendship year after year was as tranquil and serene as the turquoise shield of ocean. Thus Smith and Schmidt never dreamt of mentioning the battle of Waterloo unless they were alone together, in which case Smith invariably called it “Blücher’s victory at Plancenoit.” Forgeron would have hurled himself into the lagoon with a stone round his neck, rather than admit that George Washington had ever existed, and a tacit understanding between Frenchman and Englishman obliterated from the entire archipelago the memory of the redoubtable Captain of Köpenick, and the unfortunate headway which had been made by King Edward VII in his work for the establishment of an Entente between England and France. Herr Schmidt, seeing clearly that exceptional circumstances required exceptional concessions, invariably spoke of Alsace-Lorraine as if it was part of France. The Reverend Eustace, in the same spirit, often told some capital anecdotes against Canute and the Danish invaders, and, while careful not to suggest anything against the Saxon Kings, often warmly praised the civilizing influence of the Norman Kings. And if no concession of similar magnitude was forthcoming from Monsieur René, the other two knew perfectly well that they must make allowances. The French, as a nation, are not taught to do very much in the conceding line, and both the Nordic pastors were delighted at the way in which Monsieur René sometimes spoke a little English or German.

It was a blessing that all three were Protestants. A Jesuit in the fold, or an Agnostic, would have been the very devil. As it was they spent many a happy evening sneering at the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, and enjoyed many a hearty laugh at the pretensions of the Holy Father. The choice of names for the infant boy provided a capital example of the harmony in which they lived. The only thing they knew about the tiny castaway was that his drowned parents had been English, and it was obvious, therefore, that the choice of his new surname, in case he never recovered his old one, should be left to the Anglican clergyman. Naturally he selected Smith. That left the two christian names to be chosen, and long and earnest were the discussions over the palm-oil candles and round the fragrant sandalwood fire. It was agreed in principle that one christian name should be typical of the genius of France, the other of the genius of Germany, and both should be literally Christian. Hans Schmidt assented to this second clause with an acquiescent but heavy sigh. More than ever he regretted the comparatively late conversion to Christianity of his Fatherland, especially as Monsieur René would strongly dislike any attempt to bring the nationality of Charlemagne into the question. No. Herr Schmidt shook his great head and mentally ruled out Siegfried, Nibelung, Wotan, and all the rest of the mighty Germanic epic. The poor little babe would never bear the name of Tannhäuser Lohengrin Smith.

Many combinations of names were anxiously tested from the social, historical, religious, psychological, and phonetic points of view. Some passed one test and failed at another; some passed two, three, even four, only to fail at the last hurdle. Thus Rabelais Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, though beautifully representing Gallic wit and Prussian learning, would be an overwhelming social handicap through life. Pascal Huss, socially impeccable, might revive round the head of the innocent youth echoes of Jansenist controversy and fanatical reform. Napoleon von Moltke was historically out of the question. Bourbon Hohenzollern would turn any head from the quiet contemplation of the principles of bourgeois democracy to which all three missionaries were firmly attached, while, on phonetic grounds alone, Bach Balzac was impossible. Other combinations which were reluctantly discarded during those long summer evenings, full of fire-flies and phosphorescence and the glow of distant volcanoes and the low murmur of native traders crouching beyond the Tuans’ palisade, were Gambetta Goethe, Heine Dreyfus, Villon Winckelmann, Grimm Delysia, and Wagner July-fourteenth. All were rejected, and it was not until the autumn was far advanced, bringing with it all that wealth of autumnal tints in which, so far as the Archipelago is concerned, Mr. Conrad subsequently pulled off his well-known corner, that the three genial men of God made their final decision. The child was to be called Hugo Bechstein Smith.

The years passed. The missionaries grew in age and wisdom and riches. To their sacred duty of converting the local rustics to one or other branch of the Protestant faith, they had added a second duty, that of making money for little Hugo, and in this they succeeded more and more with every year. As in everything else, the reverend gentlemen fitted perfectly into commercial co-partnership. The work was divided into three separate departments. The Reverend Eustace Smith, red, round-faced, jolly, interviewed the customers, and stood them drinks at an improvised bar-counter with a real brass rail, which an up-country chief had bartered for an old bowler hat that had come ashore one spring on the wings of a storm. The Reverend Smith also went out in search of new customers, at first with a small bag of samples and later, as business grew, in a palanquin carried by natives and followed by hired sample-bearers. His geniality, popularity, and childlike business abilities brought to the firm innumerable clients. It was Pastor Schmidt’s duty to keep the accounts, work out the costing, prepare the annual balance-sheet, hide the reserves, hide the existence of an inner reserve, and invest the credit balance in gilt-edged securities, in whatever form gilt-edged securities could be found in those parts. The actual bargaining, the handling of the innumerable clients, was left to Monsieur Forgeron, who soon showed an aptitude for this class of work that was surprising in a child of the indolent, dreaming, vineyards of Provence.

Rumours from the outer world seldom rippled across the gulf of burning ocean. Once or twice white men fleeing from justice passed by in stolen junks, and once an Australian desperado held up the tiny settlement with a pair of impressive revolvers while his companion ransacked the huts, or rather bungalows, for booty. Unfortunately, like the ex-king of Marquesan cannibals, the desperadoes underestimated the strength of Monsieur Forgeron’s small fingers, especially when operating from behind in the manner approved by the apaches of the Vieux Port of Marseilles, and it was but a poor consolation to these gentlemen from Ballarat that they were subsequently buried beyond the palisade with three different sets of Protestant rites.

But apart from these rare incidents, life was uneventful. The outbreak of the World War, the guns of the Emden, the sinking of Cradock’s Squadron, of Von Spee’s Squadron, the pursuit of the Dresden, the signing of the Armistice, not a murmur of any of them reached the tiny settlement. Even the news of the visit to Malaya of Mr. Somerset Maugham came to them from island to island, from tribe to tribe, from lagoon to lagoon, in so strange, so garbled, so fetish-ridden a form that it seemed to the missionaries to be some relic of old tribal lore, some epic of ancient battles, symbolical perhaps of the irresistible advance into the forests of the fighting white man, the lordly, the terrible, the demi-god. Monsieur wrote a learned paper on it, to be incorporated ultimately, if circumstances permitted, as an appendix in a later edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough.

All this time Hugo was growing up, and in 1929 he was seventeen years of age. He was of middle height and dark and slender. His face was almost as fine in profile as a girl’s, with beautifully shaped features. Masses of black hair tumbled across his forehead, and tangled themselves into his grey-blue eyes. When one of the clergymen periodically cut it for him and insisted on his brushing it, the curls fell at once into perfect natural waves. His teeth shone brightly whenever he smiled his quick shy smile, and in fact, he looked exactly what he was, a sensitive, intelligent, quicksilvery sort of young man who might turn into anything or nothing, and nobody would be much surprised at either.

The three missionaries had given him a remarkable education. He was tri-lingual in English, French, and German, and could speak in addition at least a dozen native dialects. He could sing, with restrained delicacy of tone and feeling, in a charming little light tenor, Die Lorelei, En passant par la Lorraine, Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road, the Prize Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre, and the Eton Boating Song, as well as chant a great number of local ditties, accompanying himself on an alligator-skin drum. He was intimately acquainted with a large number of fragments of French, German, and English literature, for, of course, his worthy teachers had to rely entirely upon their memories. Two complete plays of Racine he knew by heart and Act I of Voltaire’s Zaïre, and, less perfectly, a sermon by Bossuet, and the plot and general outline of eleven novels by Balzac, six by Anatole France, and Madame Bovary; he knew the essential contents of Ranke’s History of the Popes, the first volume of Diel’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (4th edition), and Klette’s great Beiträge zur Geschichte und Litteratur der italienischen Gelehrten der Renaissance. He had a working knowledge of Shakespeare in German, and had learnt to recite at least one of the great Shakespearean speeches in English, the one in which Cymbeline is exhorting the Scots to attack Harfleur, beginning:

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care

Creeps in our petty pace from day to day.

Not all the drowsy syrups of the world

Have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf.

And so once more into the breach, dear friends,

And he that fears his fellowship to die with us

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth,

and so on.

“That’s all I can remember,” Smith used to say, snapping his fingers vainly. “I shall be forgetting my own name next,” he often used to add.

Hugo’s English literature, apart from this one speech of Cymbeline’s, consisted mainly of parts of the Pickwick Papers, a rather confused synthesis of Esmond and Wuthering Heights which the Reverend Eustace was always inclined to muddle up with each other, and a minute knowledge of the earlier Sherlock Holmes stories. Pastor Schmidt had given him a useful grounding in arithmetic, Monsieur René in elementary science. History had been taught him on the same tactful lines on which the three friends conducted all their affairs. That is to say, he was to look askance at Catholicism, Mahomedanism, Anabaptistry, and Cannibalism; he was to regard Spain, Russia, and Austria, and less often Holland and Turkey, as the enemies of progress, civilization, learning, and light; he was to understand that Spanish, Russian, and Austrian armies, and less often Dutch and Turkish armies, were invariably defeated on land and sea. Napoleon was the greatest example of an Administrator, Frederick the Great of an Art-Patron, George III of a Monarch. And so it was throughout the arts and sciences. And if the Reverend Eustace sometimes found it difficult to think on the spur of the moment of an English composer to put beside Beethoven, or a canal-builder to parallel de Lesseps, it was part of the unspoken gentleman’s agreement that on these occasions an additional half-hour might be devoted to the evening’s cricket instruction.

On the practical side Hugo learnt new things every day. He picked up very quickly the arts of the forests by which alone human life in the forests is maintainable. He could shoot a macaw with his blow-pipe, skin it, fry it over a fire, lit in any one of half a dozen ways, and serve it up with butter sauce and mushrooms on a palm leaf, all inside eleven minutes. He could follow a trail, trap an alligator, or cast a balance-sheet with equal readiness. He could run, swim, row, climb, with the agility of any native, and by the time he was sixteen he could put his foot on Uncle Eustace’s brass rail with the best of them, and his fast bowling was already a source of great and legitimate pride to the Reverend Eustace. With a short run—“Never more than eight yards, my boy”—an easy, high action, and enormous strength in fingers, wrists, arms, and shoulders that were incessantly employed in leaping from tree-top to tree-top in the forests, Hugo’s off-break came fizzing off the coco-nut matting wicket like a snake. On summer evenings the little settlement would ring with the sound of bat upon ball, the panted ejaculations of the native fieldsmen, and the deep voice of Uncle Eustace calling out, “When in doubt put four men on the leg-side and bowl at the leg-stump.” Uncle René would lie in a long chair and marvel silently at the complexities of the English character, while Uncle Hans would be so absorbed in making his estimates of the probable native demand for home-brewed beer during the winter months that he could hear nothing.

It is possible that the Reverend Smith enjoyed the evening’s cricket even more than Hugo. He threw himself into it with enormous gusto, whereas Hugo, although a keen player, sometimes felt that he would prefer to be hanging head-downwards from a eucalyptus tree, or stalking the local rabbits with a blow-pipe. But Uncle Eustace was a single-minded enthusiast. After the game was over, he would often call the native fieldsmen into a circle and give them a detailed account of the innings which he had played for the M.C.C. and Ground against the Colchester Garrison, in 1901, or describe, to the accompaniment of a low ripple of native admiration, the six wickets for eleven runs which he took when bowling for the Bermondsey Clergy against the Young Amateurs of Surrey.

Once Monsieur Forgeron had found him sitting in a state of some perplexity on the beach, staring at a list of names which he had written in the sand with a stick.

“Can I assist you in the solution of some problem, my dear Eustace?” Monsieur Forgeron had enquired.

“I fear not. I greatly fear not,” the Reverend Eustace had replied. “I am drawing up a cricket eleven to play for the World against Mars.”

“Dear me!” exclaimed the other. “I had no idea cricket was played in Mars.”

“Nor, so far as I am aware, is it,” rejoined Eustace, thoughtfully adding the name V. Trumper to his list.

“Then what is the exact significance of your team-building, if I may venture to coin the expression?” asked the Frenchman.

“It is an attempt to arrive at a team which would play against Mars, if Mars actually did play cricket.”

“I must admit myself to be possessed of a truly opaque mental density,” said the puzzled Latin, “but even if we were to assume that cricket was played in Mars, and that a satisfactory date for the match could be chosen, and a uniform code of rules agreed upon, there would still remain the matter of transport.”

“I am quite aware that such a match is impracticable,” agreed Eustace, whereat the Frenchman gave a cry of comprehension, as a man in a church-tower will cry out on identifying in the confusion below him some familiar landmark, a house or a statue or a much-frequented pub.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “then you are engaged upon a work of imagination?”

“Precisely.”

“And your team is an ideal team, a vision, a grail, an unattainable perfection of a team—in your own idiom, a regular corker?”

“That is so,” conceded the Reverend Eustace, a little sheepish at being detected in close association with anything so un-English as an ideal.

“Tell me,” went on Monsieur René thoughtfully, “is this pastime of building imaginary cricket teams a popular one in your country?”

“Exceedingly,” replied the Reverend Eustace. “Nor is it confined to cricket teams alone. The English have from time immemorial been much stronger on imagination than some people think, and it is not uncommon in England to see men arguing with gentlemanly warmth the merits of their respective teams to represent the World against Mars at lacrosse, hockey, Rugby football, golf, lawn-tennis, and chess.”

“And is it always Mars?” asked the Frenchman, a little wistfully. “Is it never Venus?”

“Certainly not,” replied Eustace with quiet dignity, as he scratched out “Stoddart” with his stick and substituted “Shrewsbury.” “That would not be in accordance with the best standards of good taste.”

Monsieur went slowly back to his work, murmuring something of which the words “England” and “Parthenogenesis” were alone audible.

The one art which Hugo could never master, which made him blush all over every time he was set down at his little sandalwood desk to work at it, was Uncle René’s art of Salesmanship. Hugo suffered squirming, wriggling agonies during these hours of tuition, and his shame and shyness if anything increased with time rather than diminished. It was the only dark patch in the happy sunshine of Hugo’s life. He grew to look forward with misery and loathing to the weekly hours on Sales Resistance (for Uncle René was years in advance of his time), on Mass Suggestion, on Individual Approach, on the cultivation of the Gimlet Eye, on Hundred per Cent Results, and all the rest of the Syllabus of Efficiency and Modernity. Hugo was always glad to turn from Curves of Extractable Wealth to Uncle Eustace’s oft-heard lecture on “The Straight Bat: Its place in Cricket and Character.”

One morning when Hugo was nineteen, or as near nineteen as could be guessed, the three missionaries sent him off on a hunting excursion with one or two natives to act as trackers, beaters, and carriers, and gave him permission to camp out for the night if he found that sport was good. Hugo received the unexpected news with enthusiasm, for it meant missing a talk on Arnold of Rugby and the Public School System and also a lecture in the afternoon on “The Spanish Prisoner Trick,” in Pastor Schmidt’s new series of twelve lectures on “The Practical Philosophy of Worldly-Wisdom.” Hugo had found the first three lectures of the series intolerably dull, the ones on Fraudulent Prospectuses, the Law of Libel, and the principles of Optical Dynamics underlying the Three Card Trick.

The prospect of escaping into his beloved woods and wandering at pleasant random among the giant trees (which Hugo, not having met any Californians, was sure must be the biggest in the world), filled the lad with merry glee, and off he went, whooping and singing, with a platoon of faithful natives.

But he left behind him a conclave of gravity and importance.

For the subconscious harmony which prevailed among his adopted uncles to such an extent that it almost amounted to telepathy, had suggested to each of them simultaneously that the time had come when a Line had to be taken on the subject of Woman.

So the lad was sent out hunting, three gourds of hot arrack-punch were filled, three pipes put on, and the debate opened.

The first definite note was struck at once by the Reverend Eustace.

“The Line we ought to take is to take no line about it whatever,” he maintained. “In England, and after all the boy is English, women, as women, are not conceded to exist at all in the lives of boys of his class until they are a year or two older than nineteen——”

“I beg your pardon?” interrupted Monsieur René courteously. “But did you say nineteen or ninety?”

“Nineteen,” replied Eustace. “Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, they are put in the position of being able to meet, very occasionally, if they are flightily-disposed, a class of women called tobacconists’ daughters.”

“In France, Joy’s Daughters. It is all the same,” murmured Monsieur René, and Herr Schmidt nodded wisely.

“Nothing of the kind,” exclaimed the Reverend Eustace warmly. “That sort of woman does not exist at all in England, not officially, that is to say. And no boy of Hugo’s class ever, I say ever and I mean ever, has anything to do with them.”

There was a blank silence after this ex cathedra utterance, broken at last by Monsieur’s bewildered question, “Then up to the age of twenty-two——”

“Precisely,” said the Reverend Eustace, interrupting deftly.

Herr Schmidt looked distressed. There were many things he wanted to say, but he was rather a slow thinker and slow talker, and he was usually a few sentences behind in any conversation.

Monsieur René smoothed his neat black beard with his small fingers and gazed abstractedly at Eustace. Eustace squared his shoulders very much as Wellington squared his infantry at Waterloo, ready to defend his position to the end.

“And after twenty-two?” asked the Frenchman at last. “What happens then?”

“He meets some nice girl of his own class, County folk preferably, and marries her.”

“But how if Hugo never meets her? He may be stuck here for life.”

The Reverend Eustace waved a strong brown hand. “My dear fellow,” he said, “with your shrewdness of judgment and clearness of observation—both such typical characteristics of your nation——”

“Thank you, thank you, my dear Eustace,” murmured the Frenchman, deeply moved by this tribute.

“You cannot have failed to notice,” proceeded Eustace, “that all the symptoms point to our deliverance from exile at an early date. Praise be to God,” he added gloomily, and all three men sighed deeply.

“Tourists are pushing north and west and east in all directions. I hear of them almost daily on my business round. Sooner or later one of them is bound to call at this island, and our long captivity will be over.”

“Prosit,” murmured Schmidt heavily, shaking his head and lowering a pint of punch. “When that day comes,” went on the Englishman, “our duty to Hugo is plain. We must provide him with money and send him back to civilization.”

“Take him back, you mean, don’t you?” said Monsieur.

The Reverend Eustace looked a little confused. “I should, of course, have said take him back.”

“He will then meet lots of girls,” observed Pastor Schmidt.

“Not until he is twenty-two,” replied Eustace firmly, “and then only of the County families, and they don’t really count as girls.”

“What do they count as?” enquired the Frenchman with interest.

“You know perfectly well what I mean, René,” replied Eustace.

“It all seems very queer,” said the German. “In Thuringia it was not like that. At least not when I was young. It may be different now.”

“Germany is Germany, Hans,” Eustace reminded him. “As I was saying; when Hugo returns to England he will pursue the normal life of a normal Englishman, and there is no need to put ideas into his head that any other life exists.”

“Can you blot out the memory of all this?” René waved from the lagoon to the palm-groves and from the palm-groves to the steamy swamps.

“A year or two at Magdalen will soon put that right,” replied Eustace with a good deal less confidence. The landscape was looking particularly oriental at the moment.

“It cannot be done. René is right,” said Hans.

“But you don’t understand Englishmen,” protested Eustace.

“Hugo is not exactly typical,” replied Monsieur drily. “For one thing his French accent is impeccable.”

“Hugo is a cosmopolite,” boomed the German.

“But I say,” the Reverend Eustace fairly wriggled in his chair, “you don’t see what the implications are. You haven’t followed this thing to its logical conclusion. If we agree to your proposals, we shall have to talk to Hugo about women.”

“That was the idea,” said René gently.

“But gentlemen can’t discuss women.”

“Why not?”

“Because they would cease to be gentlemen, of course.”

“For myself, Friend Eustace,” said Schmidt, with his jolly laugh, “I don’t think I’ve been much of a gentleman since I first landed in Samoa forty years ago.”

“And you know,” said René with a sly smile, “the French are never gentlemen.”

“That may be so,” said Eustace, tugging at his great black beard in perplexity, “but it is difficult for me to forget that I am an Old Etonian. Warre’s,” he added, automatically.

Schmidt gurgled with simple fun. “It is difficult for us to forget that you are an Old Etonian, my dear Eustace,” he exclaimed, and the three missionaries laughed heartily.

Then the Anglican priest re-knitted his brows.

“I see that I’m in a minority,” he said, “and of course I give way. Under protest, be it noted, but still, definitely I give way. It is agreed, then, that we give Hugo some instruction about women?”

“Agreed,” murmured the other two.

“I think, then, that it would be best,” proceeded Eustace with a rather nervous cough, for he was not quite certain how this proposal would go, “if you left the matter in my hands. I used to be tolerably up in my ‘Idylls of the King,’ and I feel certain that with a little concentration I could marshal the main facts in the story of Sir Gawain, Sir Bedivere, Sir Gareth, King Arthur, and” he coughed again, “of course, Sir Galahad.”

Emboldened by the silence with which this proposal was received, Eustace went on with a rush, “And I would naturally not fail to point the moral from these stories.”

“What moral?” asked René silkily.

“Moral,” echoed the bewildered Schmidt. Eustace’s fears were being realized early.

“The —er—moral that Woman, as Woman, ought to be worshipped.”

“Oh, I’m with you there,” remarked René, casually, throwing himself back in his chair. “For a moment I couldn’t see what you were driving at.”

“Woman’s place is in the kitchen,” announced Hans Schmidt, once citizen of Schwartzburg in the Forest of Thuringia.

“Woman’s place is on a Pedestal,” replied Eustace Smith strongly.

“Woman’s place,” said René Forgeron, knocking out his pipe, “is in Bed.”

“Women exist to be worshipped,” began the Reverend Eustace in the third of his lectures to Hugo on this intricate subject. He and his pupil were strolling through a cool glade, for the missionary found his thoughts flowed more smoothly when he was taking exercise of some kind. “And this worship is expressed in England in a number of different ways. For example, a woman’s name is never mentioned in the smoking-room of a club. Then again gentlemen always open the door for women and allow them precedence in passing in or out. They also remove their hats on meeting a woman, unless she happens to be their mother, wife, or sister. They fetch and carry for women, including their mothers when they are old, and their wives when they are new. Sisters are optional. The only exception to this form of adoration is that no man need feel it his duty to carry a brown-paper parcel in the street of a town for any woman.”

“May I make a note of that, please?” asked Hugo timidly. These new lectures thrilled him as none of the earlier series on such things as Double-Entry and Political Economy had thrilled him, and he was anxious to miss none of the points of this fascinating subject.

“By all means,” said the Reverend Eustace, and he waited till the lad had jotted down a few notes on his home-made papyrus with his cuttlefish-ink fountain-pen. He then proceeded, “It is difficult to paint in adequate language the chivalrous attitude towards women of the old public-school boy, especially, I think I may say, of the Old Etonian. But perhaps it is unfair to single out our school for special mention, for I have known many chivalrous gentlemen from Oundle, Ardingly, Hurstpierpoint, Winchester, Framlingham, Mill Hill, and even one, so far as I can recollect, from Harrow. Or am I thinking of St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate? At any rate, my point is that it is the public-school system which is directly responsible for this old-world chivalry. The modern Sir Galahad would never dream of using such words as ‘dash’ or ‘confound’ in front of a woman, of smoking a cigar in the drawing-room, of walking on the inside on the pavement, of serving his hardest service at lawn tennis, of allowing a lady to pay her own tram fare. In short, the Englishman looks upon all women as objects of veneration until he marries one of them and settles down.”

“In what way does he look at them then?” asked Hugo.

“After that he does not look at other women in any way at all. He is a married man.”

“Then I suppose,” ventured Hugo, “that he spends the rest of his life worshipping his wife.”

“In effect, that is the case,” said the Reverend Eustace, “although, of course, the passage of years may bring a certain—how shall I express it—slacking-off in the small, outward details of fetching and carrying. In England women do not expect, indeed do not like, their husbands to be over-demonstrative. Over-demonstrativeness during the period of betrothal and up to, say, four months after the actual wedding ceremony, is permissible. After that it becomes bad taste.”

Hugo sat down on a large stone and jotted a few more notes on his papyrus. It all seemed very confusing to him, but he expected that he would find everything perfectly clear by the time he reached the end of the course of lectures.

“Women,” continued the Reverend Eustace, “are by nature shy, modest, and retiring. The sight of violence and, above all, of bloodshed is apt to make them faint. Nor are their intelligences much stronger than their nerves. A woman could no more drive a motor-car than she could sit in Parliament; she could no more conduct a business establishment than she could fly; she is fitted neither for work in an office nor for the rigours of exploration and travel. And it is fortunate that an omniscient Deity has planted in their bosoms”—he coughed awkwardly and blushed a little—“no ambition to shine at politics, at commerce, at law, or at medicine. No, Hugo, the Englishwoman’s two ambitions are, firstly to remain on her pedestal and”—he lowered his voice and glanced furtively round—“though I would not dream of saying this in front of our two worthy friends, secondly to become the mother of Empire-builders in the greatest Empire the world has ever seen.”

“Is that all?” asked Hugo.

“That is all.”

“Women,” said Pastor Schmidt slowly, leaning forward at his desk—the German missionary did all his best thinking at his desk—“present the simplest problem in a very simple world. You choose a woman—anyone will do, provided she is of a reasonable age—and you marry her and you put her down in a kitchen, and there you leave her. All women are happy in a kitchen, provided it is their own kitchen. You see her from time to time, and you complain if the soup is cold, and then the soup is hot again, and you are both contented.”

There was a pause.

“Das ist alles?” asked Hugo after a bit.

“Das ist alles,” replied the good pastor. “We will now go on from where we stopped last time in the Real and Nominal Prices of Commodities. At the same time and place, the real and nominal prices of all commodities are exactly in proportion to one another. Let us consider this theorem.”

Monsieur René lay back in his long chair and settled a cushion behind his head. It was the attitude in which he did all his deepest thinking.

“Women,” he said dreamily, “are divine.”

“Like the God of Luther?” asked Hugo in surprise.

“Not in the least like the God of Luther,” replied the Frenchman with a gay laugh. A macaw, vermilion and cobalt and black, rose from the trees in startled indignation and flew across the lagoon, trailing a reflection of splendour on the water below.

“Divine as that bird is divine,” went on the missionary, “divine as all things of beauty are divine.” He fell into a deep reverie from which Hugo did not like to disturb him. When Monsieur did at last speak, it was to ask, “Which course of lectures are we on at the moment? I’ve forgotten.”

“The Woman Problem,” replied Hugo, preparing his papyrus and fountain-pen.

“There is no Woman Problem,” murmured the Frenchman. “There is only Life, and Woman holds the Key. All women are exactly the same. All women must be made love to all the time. That is the secret. One may hate you for making love to her, but you must do it. Another may despise you, but you must do it. They may hate you, despise, distrust, pity you, laugh at you or weep for you, but at least you will not have committed the most fearful of all crimes and so they will never trample you down into the deepest of hells.”

“What is the most fearful of all crimes?” whispered the bewildered and rather frightened Hugo.

“To ignore her. Listen. You will think that each one is different. It is you who are at fault for not being different. Kiss one woman and she is pleased. Kiss another and she is cross. Why? Because you did not understand that the same kiss will not do for both. It is you who must be subtle, because they are not subtle. It is you who must change with every woman, for they are unchanging as the eternal hills. And above all, above all things in this world, you must make them smile at you, for they will smile at someone. If they smile at you, life is Paradise. If they smile at someone else, it is Hell. So you must spend your whole life making them smile at you. Believe me, child, it will be time well spent.”

“Even after marriage?” enquired Hugo.

“Oh, marriage!” replied Monsieur off-handedly, “I wasn’t thinking about that. I was talking of Love. Happiness consists not in marriage or in success or gold or the esteem of one’s contemporaries, but in loving, and being loved by, as many divine ladies as possible in one’s brief journey through this mortal valley. Constancy, fidelity, monogamy, call it what you like, is the quality of a man who is incapable of happiness anyway. Once allow yourself to slip into the miserable trick of monogamy, and your life is as good as over.”

“As good as over,” repeated Hugo, writing furiously.

“The good God,” resumed the missionary, “sent Woman into the world to try us, to tempt us, to dazzle, infuriate, bewilder us, to inspire and to lead us, to amuse us, to bully us, to torment us, in short to enchant us. Very well. Be enchanted.”

He closed his eyes, and a long silence fell upon the air. The macaw came back across the lagoon to its home in the palm-trees. The distant murmur of the surf at the outer reef vibrated through the shimmering haze, and the smoke of fires went straight up to heaven.

“C’est tout?” whispered Hugo.

“C’est tout, mon petit.”

That singular state of society which is called, for want of a better name, but not by any means for want of a worse one, Western Civilization, was creeping relentlessly nearer to the peaceful settlement.

The three missionaries could feel it coming. A hint here, a rumour there, a story of white men seen in uncharted waters, an epidemic of influenza, a great clot of oil slimily fouling a pale pink reef of translucent coral, a dying albatross with a charge of shot in its snow-white breast, the annihilation of an island tribe by another tribe which was armed with Mills bombs, and everywhere a steady diminution of trade, were symptoms which, each by itself inconclusive, together made a cumulative certainty. Civilization was at hand and even the backwaters of the Moluccas were, at long last, to share in its blessings.

The first real, concrete impingement of the West was not, as might have been expected, a trading-ship. Indeed it was almost exactly the opposite. For one of the earliest ripples which arrived at Kalataheira was the Trade Depression. Business slackened off incomprehensibly. Nobody could account for it, not even the oldest inhabitant of the neighbouring islands. A lack of confidence, a sort of commercial paralysis, seemed to have settled on the archipelago like a fog. One ancient witch-doctor, who was more than a little suspected of Quackery, professed to have seen the cause of the depression in a vision which had been revealed to him, alone among men, on account of his integrity, his notable virtue of character, and his kindliness of heart. He offered to sell the secret of his vision for a mere bagatelle, a couple of sacks of salt or a dozen brass rods, to anyone who was interested in political economy and the theory of distribution. A number of native students paid up and squatted in a circle round the veteran seer.

“It has been revealed to me,” he began, “on account of my integrity, my notable——”

“Yes, yes, yes,” cried the students. “Get on with it.”

“Very well,” said the seer, rather hurt by the interruptions. “The cause of the trade depression is this. For the first time in history the world has got all the goods that it wants, and so it is ruined.”

“Say that again,” said one of the students.

The witch-doctor ignored him. “There is so much coffee in the world that no one can drink coffee. There is so much rubber in the world that no one can use rubber. There is so much tea in the world that no one can drink tea. All goods are so cheap that no one can afford to buy them. Not until they are too expensive to buy, will people be able to buy them. The only way to improve trade is to put up barriers to trade——”

At this point a stone was thrown, and the meeting broke up in confusion. The witch-doctor, ancient though he was, charlatan though he might be, had still a sufficient command over magic and spells to conjure up a capacity to cover the hundred yards in nine and four-fifths seconds, and so get away with his life. But his reputation was gone for ever, and he was compelled to support a declining old age by turning tipster at local race-meetings.

To return. The first Western ship that arrived at Kalataheira was not a trading-ship. It was a beautiful white steam-yacht, and it came slowly up the coast outside the coral reef.

The three missionaries raced down to the reef and waved improvised flags and shouted wildly and gesticulated. No wonder they were excited. After twenty-one years of exile they were to be rescued at last. Piccadilly, the Cours Mirabeau at Aix, the dusty little Square at Schwartzburg, the old familiar haunts, the sights and sounds of their youth, Home, Home was beckoning to them at last. With tears of emotion rolling down his checks, honest Pastor Schmidt watched the yacht come gently to a halt; Monsieur René was frankly crying as the boat was swung out on the davits; the Reverend Eustace had to hum the Eton Boating Song for all he was worth to conceal the lump in his throat. Home, Home at last.

Hugo goggled with excitement at the beautiful, swan-white, iron ship, so different from the praus and dhows of the Moluccas, and at the smart rowing of the boat’s crew, and the smart blue and white and gold uniform of the officer, and the American flag at the stern of the pinnace. This at last was Life.

The American officer came ashore. The missionaries fell on his neck, René literally, the other two metaphorically. Great bowls of arrack punch were brought out, long chairs stretched, punkah-boys set to work, and the whole apparatus of hospitality set in enthusiastic motion.

The Reverend Eustace and Monsieur René explained the situation of the little colony, punctuated with much slow head-nodding from Herr Schmidt. They wanted four passages home, preferably to Europe, but failing that, to America. They were prepared to pay for the passages, either in money on arrival, or else in kind, pearls, ambergris, gold dust, gold bars, turquoises, or any of the numerous portable securities in which Herr Hans had invested the profits of long years of successful trading.

The officer, on his side, explained the situation of the yacht. It had been chartered, he said, by a powerful literary club, The Joseph Conrad Society of Boston, with its two affiliated subsidiaries, the Joseph Conrad Society of Milwaukee and the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Society of Chicago, to tour the Archipelago in search of the spirit of the Master, and also local colour for lectures, addresses, learned papers, etcetera, which were to be written and read during the forthcoming winter. At Singapore, however, the entire party, which consisted of thirty-one lady and four gentlemen novelists, sixteen critics, and twenty-eight mixed poets, had been seduced, in the metaphorical sense, from the admiration of Conrad by a book about Northern Siam by Mr. Alec Waugh. With the impulsive decision which is so characteristic of the citizens of the United States, the party immediately departed for Northern Siam, whether in search of local colour or of Mr. Waugh himself was not known. Before they left they instructed the captain of the yacht to cruise the Archipelago with the very extensive cinematograph apparatus that had been thoughtfully provided by the Society, to shoot half a million feet of typically Conrad country, return to New York and have the film developed and ready by the time the party got back from Siam by P. & O. and Cunarder.

It was in pursuance of these instructions that the yacht had come cruising past the lovely settlement at Kalataheira, “shooting” diligently as it went. As there was accommodation for one hundred passengers on the yacht and not one single passenger, the captain was delighted to put four first-class suites at the disposal of the castaways and to load their boxes of gilt-edged securities into the hold. He also agreed to wait for three days in order to allow the missionaries to wind up their affairs, for an American, however keen a hustler he may be, has always time for courtesy. It would give him an opportunity, he explained, of scouring the country in search of potatoes, an article of provision which had recently run out on board the yacht.

By the end of the third day everything was ready. The packing-cases had been stowed under hatches; farewells had been exchanged with the natives; Monsieur René’s wives and Herr Schmidt’s wife had been paid off; the ladies of the Dorcas Society, and the members of the Mothers’ Union, and of the Women’s Rural Institute, had combined to present the Reverend Eustace with a dozen pairs of plaited bedroom slippers; a great banquet had been eaten; speeches had been made; and Monsieur René, who had recently brought off a local corner in potatoes, was able to make a deal with the American captain that afforded a very handsome profit indeed. The three missionaries were in the highest of spirits.

“Home again, Hans,” cried the Reverend Eustace boisterously, slapping the big German on the back.

“Yes,” replied Hans.

“Back to London village, Eustace,” shouted René across the lagoon, as he superintended the loading of a pearl-chest into the yacht.

“Yes,” replied Eustace.

“Two months and you will see the Champs-Élysées,” boomed Hans over the steaming punch.

“Yes,” replied René.

Late in the evening the passengers went aboard. The lagoon and the deserted settlement and the fire-flies and the homing parrakeets lent themselves to a first-class piece of descriptive writing, and the Society’s caption-writer was hard at work under a stars-and-stripes awning on the main deck.

It had been a long and tiring day, both emotionally and physically, and the four passengers went straight to their suites. At midnight the anchor was weighed, and by the time Hugo came down to breakfast next morning the yacht was slipping easily along through the Jilolo Strait, a hundred and fifty miles from Kalataheira. At ten o’clock the chief steward came in some alarm to the captain. The three Reverend gentlemen had not slept in their bunks, nor was there any trace of them in the yacht. Each had left a letter pinned to the dressing-table in his stateroom, addressed to the other two. After some hesitation, due to his American sense of delicacy, the captain opened the three letters. Each missionary had committed Hugo to the care of the others, and swum back to Kalataheira.