Читать книгу The Forgotten One, and Other True Tales of the South Seas - James Norman Hall - Страница 3

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I had been reading late that evening. Sitting on my veranda with a shaded lamp on the table beside me, I had entered at once, without effort, into a world revealed so vividly, with such imaginative insight, that although the air my body breathed was heavy with the humid fragrance of tropical vegetation and crickets were chirping in the hibiscus shrubbery close by, I had traveled in spirit as far as Russia and was conscious only of “the clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.” It will be understood that I returned with difficulty to an awareness of present circumstances. Chancing to glance up from my book I thought for the fraction of a second that I had seen an apparition.

The man, a powerfully built native of middle age, barefoot, dressed in blue denim trousers and a coat of white drill, was standing just outside the circle of lamplight. I had heard no slightest sound, and it had not occurred to him, apparently, to attract my attention by clearing his throat or rapping on one of the veranda posts. I wondered how long he might have been standing thus, quietly waiting for me to notice him. The moment I did so he came forward with the customary Polynesian greeting, “May you live!” He had arrived at Tahiti that afternoon and had walked out from Papeete to bring me a letter which, he said, would explain the reason for this late visit. The white man who had written it had asked him to deliver it as soon as possible. I opened and read it at once:

Tanao, Low Archipelago

Dear Sir:

The service I am about to ask of you is one that I would hesitate to ask even of an old friend, but you are the only white man I know in this part of the Pacific and I must appeal to you however reluctantly.

I am ill, and as I have grave doubts as to my recovery I must try to put my affairs in order. I have no one with me but an old Chinese servant, Ling Foo, whom you may remember. Could you come to see me? I have chartered a Paumotu cutter for the purpose of carrying this letter, and if you find it possible to come this same cutter will bring you to the island. I realize that you may not be able to leave at once and I have, therefore, instructed the man who brings this letter—he is the owner of the vessel—to await your orders.

Yours very truly

Ronald Crichton

The letter had been written by hand, on a sheet of foolscap, but the lines did not follow the ruled spaces. They ran unevenly across the page, meeting, even crossing in some places, widely apart in others. Plainly it had been written by a man so ill that he could scarcely hold the pen. The appearance of the letter quite as much as the message it conveyed convinced me of the urgency of this matter. I asked the man who brought it—his name was Maitua—how he had chanced to call at Tanao. He explained that he and two other men, inhabitants of the island of Hao, had been returning there from Mangareva, an island of the Gambier Group at the southeastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, and had been blown off their course by a southerly gale. After the storm they had passed close by Tanao, and observing a signal fire lighted on the beach, two of them had gone ashore to see what was wanted. An old Chinese waiting there led them to the house of the white man. The popaa was very ill and had offered him ten thousand francs if he would sail to Tahiti at once to deliver a letter he would give him.

“What did he tell you to do in case I could not be found?” I asked.

“He said we were to return to Tanao as soon as possible to carry his Chinaman to some island where he might take passage for Tahiti.”

“Did he speak of wanting a doctor?”

“No.”

“What do you think of his condition? Is it serious?”

“Unless you can come with me at once I doubt that we shall find him living,” the man replied.

At one o’clock the following afternoon we were well out at sea, and as soon as we had passed the northeastern extremity of Tahiti the cutter was set on the course of her seven-hundred-mile voyage. There were four of us aboard: Maitua, owner of the cutter, his two companions Nau and Mangi, and myself. The barometer had fallen and the sky looked threatening. The wind was blowing from the westward, more strongly every moment as we came out from the shelter of the island. Westerly and southwesterly winds often mean bad weather in this part of the Pacific, but the month was June and nothing more serious than a moderate gale was to be expected, with frequent heavy squalls of rain. Small though she was, the cutter was an excellent sea boat and I watched with satisfaction as she settled down to her work. It was a fair wind for us.

Three days later it went round to the southeast again, and having blown freshly for several hours died away completely; but by that time we had three hundred miles of the voyage behind us. As the cutter rocked over the long glassy undulations the reef points pattered against the canvas with a sound like the drumming of so many nervous fingers impatient in idleness. Nau and Mangi rigged a mat over the boom and crawled under it to sleep. Presently Maitua joined them; there was no reason for sitting longer at the wheel. The sun set in a sea that reflected perfectly the shapes of a few fleecy clouds. It was what the natives call a huihui mania, a great calm. There was nothing to do but wait.

I wondered whether Crichton was waiting as well, or whether we were not already too late. Maitua had told me that the voyage from Tanao had taken eight days. The return voyage might require ten or twelve, what with the calms and head winds we had reason to expect at that time of year. A feeling of desolation came over me as I pictured Crichton dying on that remote atoll with only a taciturn old Chinese servant for company.

Sitting on the wheel box, in the gathering darkness, I went back in thought to the day, in 1920, when I first met him. I had been demobilized from the Army only a few months earlier, and feeling the need for solitude, after the herded life in France, I sailed from San Francisco for an indefinite sojourn in the South Seas. Shortly after arriving at Tahiti I felt a desire to penetrate even farther into the wastes of the Pacific, so I took the first opportunity that presented itself for moving on. This was a small trading schooner, the Caleb Winship, bound to the Tuamotu or, as it is more commonly called, the Low, or Dangerous, Archipelago. Crichton chanced to be a passenger on this vessel. He was traveling in company with a dignified, gentle-mannered old Polynesian lady of sixty or thereabout, dressed in a flowered Mother Hubbard, with her white hair hanging in a single braid down her back. He himself was a well-set-up man about six feet tall, with clear blue eyes and reddish-brown hair burned to a lighter hue around the edges by constant exposure to the sun. He was in his middle twenties, so I judged, and had both the appearance and the manners of a cultivated man. I decided at first sight that he was English and wondered in a speculative way what had brought him to this part of the world.

Tino, the half-caste supercargo of the Winship, was very curious about Crichton and on our first evening at sea he took me aside to speak of him. Who was he, where did he come from, and what in the name of common sense did he mean to do on that godforsaken circle of reef called Tanao? The island was not worth much, he told me. The land area was small and even if it were all planted to coconut palms in full bearing the output would not amount to ten tons of copra per year. And yet, here was this Englishman, or Swede, or Dane—whatever he was—going out there to settle with the old Kanaka woman who owned the place! He’d taken a five-year lease on it with the option of purchase at the end of that time.

This much Tino had learned from the old woman. Her people had owned Tanao time out of mind, but they were all dead or had gone elsewhere to live. Her husband and two sons had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and a third son, the last of her children, had been drowned at sea, while fishing. After this she had lived alone for months until a passing schooner gave her an opportunity to go to Tahiti where she had relatives.

“She stayed there for some time,” said Tino; “then it seems the poor old thing got to hankering for home again! It’s queer how these natives love their islands. It may be nothing but a sandbank with half a hundred coconut palms and miki-miki trees growing on it, a thousand miles from nowhere; but it’s home to them. They’ll never be happy away from it. She tried to persuade some of her fetii—what you call it, relatives—to go back there with her. They said no, of course. Tahiti was home to them and they weren’t fools enough to go to a place where there’s nothing to eat but coconuts and fish.

“Then, somehow, she met this Crichton, and he jumped at the chance she offered him. The old lady says he’s promised to stay, for good. He speaks native, and good native too. I’ve heard him talkin’ with her though he hasn’t said yes or no or how-do-you-do to me since he came aboard. He must have been living on Tahiti or somewhere in the Group for a long time. I thought I knew everyone hereabouts, but I never laid eyes on this man till he showed up at the wharf and asked for passage to Tanao. I didn’t want to go there; the island’s a hundred and fifty miles off my course for this voyage, so I asked him three times the regular passage money. He paid it straight off! Tanao ... Wait till he sees it! I’ll bet you a five-gallon demijohn of the best rum in Papeete that he’ll be comin’ back with us. He don’t know what he’s letting himself in for; that’s my opinion.”

Apparently he did know, however; at any rate he failed to come back with us. We stopped at the island a little more than twenty-four hours, unloading supplies for him. There is no passage into the Tanao lagoon. The reef is dangerous and one of the Caleb Winship’s surf boats was damaged in making a crossing. Tino was wild about this but I knew nothing of it until later, having gone ashore earlier with Crichton and the old lady. Throughout the day and the night I had the feeling that he was secretly wishing us away and would be heartily glad to see the last of us. Although he treated the old lady with kindness and consideration I felt that he wished her away as well; that he wanted to be entirely alone on the island. What was it, I wondered—a form of selfishness? A desire to be, like Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed? Or had he perhaps, as Tino suggested, been mixed up in some affair that he was ashamed of, that made it necessary for him to hide away from the sight of other men? But this latter supposition I put aside at once. I knew nothing of his past life, but if his was not a trustworthy face, then I had never seen one. I would have taken oath that he would be incapable of a mean or dishonorable act. Furthermore, no man with a guilty conscience would have gone to a place where he would be so terribly alone with it.

My conclusion, after summing up the little evidence I had to go by, was that solitude was a vital need of his nature; not a temporary need as with most men, but a craving as fundamental as hunger, or thirst, but unlike these in that he had never been able to satisfy it. I gathered from one or two remarks of his that he had long been seeking just such an island as Tanao, and when I asked how long he meant to stay there he said, “Always. All my life,” in a quiet assured way that left no doubt in my mind as to the sincerity of his intention. I had never before met anyone who seemed so detached from life, so lacking in dependence upon any sort of companionship, brute or human. Nevertheless, after I had seen the island I doubted that any man could remain content in a place so inconceivably lonely.

We sailed from the island late in the afternoon, having been delayed in getting away because of the damaged reef boat. Tino insisted on pushing off at once, the moment the repairs were completed. Crichton and the old woman were on the lagoon side of the main island at the time so that I had no opportunity to bid them good-by, but as we were getting under way I saw him emerge from the shadows of the palms and stand for a moment, hand shading his eyes, looking out toward the schooner. In that wide land- and seascape his figure looked small and childlike and pathetic. I waved, but evidently he didn’t see me, for there was no response. For three hours I sat by the rail, aft, watching the island dwindling and blurring until, at sunset, it was lost to view beneath the rim of the southern horizon. Still I looked back, imagining that I could see a diminishing circle of surf-battered reef and palm-clad islets—a mere speck at last—dropping farther and farther away down the reverse slope of the sea, as though it were vanishing for all time from the knowledge and the concern of men.

Four years passed. Meanwhile, like many another ex-soldier, I had been wandering here and there, looking on at life in a rapidly changing world. I seemed to have lost the faculty for living in a settled, purposeful way. After two years of voyaging from island to island in the Pacific, I returned to the United States where I continued my nomadic existence, camping in hotels and in the guest bedrooms in the houses of old friends, but never staying long in any one place. In the summer of 1922 I went to Iceland and spent the following winter there, traveling on horseback through that beautiful, sparsely populated country, gazing at the northern lights from vantage points on or near the Arctic Circle. I went to the Faroe Islands and from there to Norway and elsewhere in Europe; then home again, via New York, and on westward to the Pacific Coast across the prairies and plains, and the vast deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.

Crichton was often in my thoughts during this prolonged interval of wandering. I could not account for the deepness of the impression he had made upon me in the course of our voyage in the Caleb Winship. To be sure, we had been thrown much together during that voyage, but our companionship had rested upon very slight foundations. He seemed to be afraid of any relationship even remotely approaching intimacy, and gave me the impression of being perpetually upon his guard. At times it struck me that he was merely shy, even morbidly so; therefore I was careful not to intrude upon him in any way. As a result I knew nothing of his serious thoughts and interests, nor he anything of mine. Only once did we have what might be called a conversation. In reply to a chance remark he spoke with animation of various aspects of native life. It was plain that he had a wide knowledge of the history and folk lore of that branch of the Polynesian family and of the various dialects spoken amongst the islands of the eastern Pacific. I was a willing listener, but not for long. Of a sudden he broke off, as though he felt that he had been guilty of an impropriety, and for the rest of the day he scarcely spoke.

Despite the briefness of the first visit I must have left a part of myself at Tanao, as it is said one does wherever one goes. However this may be, certain it is that, ever since I had left the island, in the strangest circumstances and at the most unlikely moments a picture of the place would float into consciousness and I would see the coconut palms of Tanao bending to the southeast wind, and Crichton sitting in the shade at the upper slope of the beach, his hands clasped around his knees, looking out over the empty sea. In Iceland, while watching the visible music of the northern lights, I had felt the softness of the air at Tanao, and the smoke of the surf on my face from the combers rising to their height and thundering over the reef. I would hear the old woman—Mama Ruau (Grandma), he called her—singing softly to herself as she broiled fish over a fire of coconut shells on the lagoon beach. The island and its two lonely inhabitants were more real to me at times than the streets through which I passed or the people with whom I sat at table, but it was Crichton who was oftenest in my thoughts. I wondered about him, and for some reason was disturbed about him. It was an unusual thing for a young man to bury himself as he had done. Even for an authentic lover of solitude such a procedure seemed to me more than a little dangerous. However I took comfort in the thought that he himself must have realized this long since and have gone elsewhere.

I returned to Tahiti in 1924, having decided to make my home there in the future, and again took quarters at the Aina Paré, a ramshackle hotel on the Papeete waterfront.

I might have left the place only the week before. There was the same old paper on the wooden walls; the same mosquito netting around the bed, the rents in it neatly drawn together; the same tin bucket with the dent in it by the washstand; the same dilapidated wardrobe, the doors slightly askew and the shelves covered with pages from the Sydney Bulletin and the Auckland Weekly News, and the same portly, barefoot landlord, dressed only in a waistcloth, coming up for a chat while I drank my morning coffee. We had a pleasant talk about island affairs, and in the midst of it I chanced to speak of a hole in the floor of the veranda, and how I had nearly broken my leg there, coming in in the dark the night before.

“Why, don’t you remember that hole?” he asked, quite seriously, with genuine surprise, and I realized that the fault was not his for not having it repaired, but mine for not having remembered during the four years that repair was needed. It was good to be back in a place where life was as leisurely as that; where all things, animate and inanimate, even a hole in a veranda floor, seemed to partake of a timeless ideal existence like that of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn.

It was still quite early. Chinese were sweeping the street with their long-handled brooms, heaping into neat piles the dead twigs and leaves and withered blossoms from the flamboyant trees, against the coming of the rubbish cart. I well remembered the former driver of this cart, Girot, a thin, wiry little Frenchman of uncertain age said to have been the son of a former convict from New Caledonia. He called his horse “Banane,” and carried on with her a continuous animated conversation as they wandered along the street, Girot pausing at times to listen to her replies audible only to himself. Were they too, I wondered, under the enchantment of timelessness? Yes, here they came, presently, Girot barefoot as usual, carrying the two little boards with which he scooped up the piles of leaves. He was in the usual costume: floppy pandanus hat with the hole in the crown, tattered undershirt, and denim trousers faded to a whitish blue by many washings. Banane was a trifle bonier, if possible, than I had remembered her. She moved as deliberately as ever, but Girot was reproaching her in the old manner for going too fast.

“Whoa! Whoa, sacré nom de Balzac! Écoute, Banane! Penses-tu que nous sommes sur un champ de course? ... Comment? ... Ah, non, alors! Oui, je comprends: pour toi ça ne fait rien. Mais pour moi? Je ne suis pas garçon, moi. J’ai plus de soixante ans. Maintenant nous allons jusqu’au coin de la rue—tu vois? Là! Et la prochaine fois quand je dis ‘Whoa!’ arrête-toi! Tu comprends? ... Bon! ... Allez! En route!”

No one paid the least attention to them and at last they were out of hearing. Natives were passing to and from the market place with strings of fish, baskets of fresh-water shrimps, fruit and vegetables. It was good to hear again their laughter, their soft voices; to smell the humid fragrance of tropical vegetation; to look across the lagoon and sea to the island of Moorea, every mountain peak outlined clearly against the sky—all that a South Sea island should be and surpassing my most splendid dreams of one, as a boy. I drank my coffee slowly, watching the animated scene in the street below; then I set out for a stroll along the waterfront.

Vessels from all parts of the eastern Pacific were moored along the sea wall, unloading pearl shell and copra, taking in cargoes of rice and flour and sugar, tinned food and assorted merchandise. Among them was the Caleb Winship, her rail festooned with bunches of green bananas and baskets of oranges and mangoes, evidence that she was about to sail for the Low Islands. Tino, her former supercargo, had since been made captain. I found him in the cabin checking over bills of lading.

“Well!” he said, glancing up and holding out his hand, sidewise. “Haven’t seen you for some time. Where you been keeping yourself, out in the country?”

I told him I had just returned from the U.S.A.; then, after a brief chat of different matters, I asked in a by-the-way fashion for news of Crichton.

“Crichton? ... Crichton? Who’s—Oh! You mean that Swede, that Dane ...”

“He is an Englishman,” I said.

“Whatever he was. Hell, no! I ain’t seen him since the time we was out there; when the whaleboat was stove in crossin’ the reef. He might be dead for all I know—or care, for that matter.”

It was plain that Tino was still sore on the subject of Crichton. His reason in consenting to carry him to Tanao was that he thought he had plans of commercial interest in view. When he had satisfied himself that the island was as poor as it had always been he set Crichton down as crazy or some knave in hiding. Remembering his disgust at the loss of time in going so far out of his way I knew it would be useless asking him to call there again. Nevertheless, I did ask, for the Winship was bound in that general direction.

“Tanao? Not much! I’m not traveling for my health. What do you want to go back there for, if it’s any of my business?”

“I liked the place,” I said. “You don’t find such islands in my part of the world.”

“Ought to be glad you don’t. Why anyone should go to one of them godforsaken holes of his own free will beats me. Well, that Swede can rot in his. I expect he has. He’s probably dead or gone somewheres else long before this.”

I loafed through long afternoons on the veranda of the Bougainville Club and other favorite resorts of traders, planters, pearl buyers and sailors, making an occasional discreet inquiry about Crichton, for I remembered how jealous with respect to his retreat he had been. He had seemed almost afraid to mention the island by name, as though to do so in the presence of others might sully for him the purity of its loneliness. The island being one of the undoubted ends of the earth, I was not very successful in my quest for information. “Tanao? Oh, yes,” one trader remarked. “The Madeleine went on the reef there—let me see, when was it? Nineteen-four, I think.” This was about as recent a bit of news as I gathered in talk on the Club veranda. As for Crichton no one, apparently, in that place where everyone is known, could tell me what had become of him.

Then I met an old friend, Chan Lee, owner of the schooner Toafa. I had once made a long voyage with Chan. He has all the fine personal qualities of the Oriental at his best, but he carries minding-his-own-business to odd lengths. It was not until some time after I had spoken to him of Crichton that he admitted knowing him.

“Go Tanao once year,” he said, holding up a finger as though to emphasize the infrequency of his visits. “Not much copla—five ton.”

He told me that he had passed the atoll in 1920—it must have been only a month or two after my visit—and had sent his ship’s boat ashore for a supply of firewood for the galley stove. He had not known there was anyone living on the island. Crichton came out to the schooner and arranged with Chan to call once yearly to bring him supplies. On the first visit made under this arrangement he had carried out a schooner load of books and household furnishings that had arrived for Crichton from England. All of this had to be taken over the reef in the ship’s boat. It was a long and difficult business, but Crichton had paid him well for it.

“Clichton vely rich man,” said Chan. Then, as an afterthought, apparently, he added: “He say, suppose I see you, tell you come back, some time.”

I was both surprised and pleased by this information. Slightly as I knew Crichton I had a genuine liking for him but I had no reason to believe that my regard was reciprocated. His attitude toward me on the Caleb Winship was, as I have said, courteous but extremely reserved.

“Yes, he say that,” Chan added. “Bimeby nex week I go. You comealong me?”

During the voyage with Chan I became convinced, intuitively, that Crichton’s destiny was, or would be, a tragic one; that he was, somehow, doomed. I considered his situation from every point of view; took myself in hand, so to speak, as though trying to persuade another person of the absurdity of this apprehension. What was there to be concerned about? What ground had I for supposing there was anything amiss with Crichton? Here was a young Englishman of cultivated tastes, evidently of good family, who happened to be non-gregarious, and who for this reason chose to live on a small coral island in the middle of the Pacific. Was there, necessarily, anything strange or unnatural or even dangerous in that? Other men of similar tastes had lived shut off from the world and had found happiness in doing so. Why not this one? Self-confidence in such a man was usually based upon self-knowledge. This was not the case of a man foolishly enamored of a way of life for which he was unfitted. He had chosen it because he loved it and was conscious of resources within himself to make solitude not only endurable but pleasant. The fact that he was still living on Tanao was proof enough, surely, that he had not been mistaken in his choice.

So I tried to reason myself out of my misgivings; meanwhile, the Toafa proceeded on her way. Chan had a dozen islands to visit before calling at Tanao and during the early part of the voyage the schooner was crowded with native passengers. These were gradually dispersed, the last of them at an island one hundred miles from Tanao. We were three days in covering the last leg of the voyage, and thirty-eight days out from Papeete when we sighted the island.

Crichton need never have feared for the purity of its loneliness. It was lonelier than the sea. It seemed to have gathered to itself an esoteric kind of loneliness, peculiar to the man who lived at the heart of it. It seemed a place he had dreamed into being, created out of fancy through sheer strength of longing. And there he was, alone of his kind, and there he had been during four years, without once having left it. Chan gave me this information.

I asked whether he had taken a native wife.

“No, no womans,” said Chan. “I want get him nice Paumotu wife. Help make copla; make him plenty childrens. He no want.”

He had, however, provided Crichton with an old Chinese to act as cook and to care for his house. There was no one else except Mama Ruau from whom he had leased the island. She was still living, in good health; at least she had been a year ago.

“What about letters,” I asked; “and books, and papers? Does he receive many?”

Chan showed me the mail he was carrying out to Crichton. There was some printed matter, book catalogues and the like, and only one letter, as impersonal in appearance as a bank note. In fact, the name and address of a London Trust Company was stamped on the envelope.

At this second approach to his island a truer conception of Crichton’s isolation came home to me. He was like those men Matthew Arnold speaks of in “Rugby Chapel”: men who vanish without leaving a trace behind them:

... and no one asks

Who or what they have been,

More than he asks what waves,

In the moonlit solitudes mild

Of the midmost Ocean, have swell’d,

Foam’d for a moment, and gone.

Certainly, that seemed to be true of Crichton, and he was still living, in the vigor of early manhood. But, beyond the limits of his island he had long been as good as dead and buried. He had never mentioned family or friends.

To continue, as we drew near the atoll I climbed to the main cross trees for a wider view. We passed the northeast extremity of the island close inshore, between three and four in the afternoon. At that point one sees little more than barren reef washed over by the surf. There is one islet on the reef, a small boy’s dream of an island to be shipwrecked on; indeed, the bones of an old vessel still lie there, high and dry beyond the reef and bleached white by the sun—all that remains from the wreck of the Madeleine. The islet is just boy size, not more than one hundred paces across, either way. It is of clean coral sand, as level as a floor with clumps of green bush scattered over it. Eight tall coconut palms grow there, four in one clump and three in another, with one tree standing apart, holding its cluster of fronds over the surface of the lagoon. At one end of the islet the reef is pierced by a zigzag strip of blue water but the passage is too narrow to permit entrance to any craft larger than a skiff or canoe. On that side an old puketea tree throws a patch of deep shade on the sand. Within the shelter of it was a thatch-roofed hut open on all sides, and I saw a rough-hewn bench facing seaward with its back against the tree.

“Very likely Crichton comes here to fish,” I thought, but the place was deserted now. The sunlight, of that mellow, golden quality of late afternoon, gilded the stems of the palms. Nothing moved save the trees bending to the wind and their shadows on the coral sand.

We passed the islet all too quickly, then stood away to come in to the main island on the other tack. Tanao is elliptical in shape, eight miles long and five broad, with seven widely separated islets along the circle of reef and one small motu in the lagoon near the main island where Crichton lived. This last is the only piece of land of any consequence, sickle-shaped, about half a mile in length and from three to four hundred paces across in the widest part. The central portion was well planted to coconut palms, but toward the ends where it narrowed to the reef, nothing grew but low scrub. From my perch aloft I could look across to the islets on the far side of the lagoon, where the trees appeared to be growing directly out of the sea.

With my binoculars I searched the shore line for some time before I saw Crichton. He and the old woman were sitting within the border of shade at the upper slope of the beach, their figures hidden momentarily by the sunlight-filtered smoke of the surf. He was dressed in shorts and a soft-brimmed native hat. Mama Ruau was in her best black dress and hat. She pointed toward the schooner from time to time; then I saw her take Crichton by the shoulders, as though he had been an unobservant child, and turn him till he sat directly facing us.

There was a heavy onshore swell, and the roar of the surf came to us over the water with a gentle, soothing sound, but it increased in volume as we approached. The schooner was brought to, the reef boat lowered, and we approached the shore with four sailors at the oars and one at the steering sweep. The swells seemed ominously high as they swept forward and toppled in a smother of foam and spray over the ledge of the reef. We waited several minutes for a favorable opportunity to cross the reef, the men backing on their oars and the boat steerer standing with his head turned over his shoulder, watching the following seas. Of a sudden he shouted a command; the sailors put their backs into it and we were carried across at dizzy speed. The boat shot down the broad slope of broken water and through the shallows, grounding almost at the spot where Crichton and the old woman were waiting.

“Is it you, Chan?” Crichton called, in native, when he heard the keel bumping and grating over the coral.

“Yes, yes!” the old woman cried. “Don’t you believe me? It is Chan and the popaa who first came here with you! Ia ora na orua!”

She came forward and took both my hands in hers, searching my face feature by feature.

“Ua tae mai oé?” (You have come?) she added, as though still in doubt that anyone from the outside world could reach that lonely place. She had aged considerably in four years, but Crichton had not changed, outwardly, at least. The ghost of the smile I remembered curved his lips almost imperceptibly as he greeted me. His eyes I could not see; they were concealed by dark glasses.

“I am sorry not to have recognized you,” he said. “I’ve had trouble with my eyes due to the glare of the sun but it’s nothing serious. Shall we go to the house?”

I remembered the island as I had first seen it—a wilderness of brush, pandanus trees and self-sown coconut palms. Now everything was clean and orderly, the palms thinned out to six or eight paces apart, so that one had views in every direction. A well-shaded road bordered with shrubbery led from the ocean beach to the lagoon. We followed it in silence. Having greeted me he seemed to have nothing more to say. I was again conscious of the feeling of restraint I had felt in his company aboard the Caleb Winship. Mama Ruau had gone on ahead; Chan remained at the beach to oversee the landing of some supplies.

At last, with something of an effort I remarked: “You’ve not been idle here.”

“No, there’s been enough to do. I found that I needed some help at first. I had Chan bring me a dozen natives from another island. They stayed three months, clearing the land; and they helped build my house.”

I had often tried to picture the house he would have. I was not prepared to find so spacious a dwelling. It stood on the lagoon beach at the end of the road, and was in the semi-native style. The roof, of pandanus-leaf thatch, was steeply pitched and extended low over a broad veranda that ran the full length of the house. Crichton halted at the foot of the steps, and for a moment stared at the ground as though deep in thought. He seemed to have forgotten me. Then he said: “I’m sorry. I must go back to the beach. Please make yourself comfortable. You might look over my house if you care to.”

A clock with a ship’s-bell attachment, striking five as I entered the veranda, demanded immediate attention. “Odd,” I thought, “having a clock here.” But it would be a wise precaution, perhaps, in so lonely a place. One would need to live by schedule, fill one’s days with self-imposed duties to be regularly performed. No doubt Crichton did. The house gave evidence of all but meticulous concern for order, and of the methodical habits of his literal-minded Chinese. Settees, tables and easy chairs were as carefully arranged as the pieces in an upholsterer’s display window. The floors, oiled and polished, shone with a dull luster and the straw mats were precisely placed. Four shelves of books ran the length of the inner wall of the veranda. A brief examination revealed that they had been classified and subclassified. Novelists, historians, poets, biographers, travelers stood together and in the ranks of their contemporaries. I estimated that he had at least fifteen hundred volumes in his library, nothing very recent but all of them books to live with. The margins of the pages of a few that I opened were covered with penciled notes and comments and I could see what pleasure and solace Crichton found in their companionship. One section of his library contained books on Polynesia; everything important, it seemed, that had been written about the islands of the eastern Pacific. There were a number of philological books in this section and I remembered the interest Crichton had taken in the study of the various island dialects, speculating, with this study as a basis, on the probable sea routes followed during the early Polynesian migrations.

On a top shelf bare of books were models of ancient sailing canoes, spears and war clubs of ironwood, polished coconut shells and wooden bowls carved with intricate designs; stone axes, adzes, and taro mashers. The windward end of the veranda was enclosed with a wall of plaited palm fronds, built in sections to prop open in fine weather. Crichton’s desk stood here, facing a delightful view across an inlet from the lagoon bordered with palms through which, now, a greenish golden sunset light sifted like impalpable dust. A passageway led through the house to a second veranda on the lagoon side. Open doors revealed spacious airy rooms, attractively furnished with sofas, tables, bookshelves and easy chairs.

Returning to the front veranda I walked up and down for some time, thinking, “What a beautiful spot! What an ideal home!” but conscious all the while of a feeling very like depression. I was at a loss to account for this unless it were the clock ticking away with self-important industry as though it were the only one in existence. Within half an hour I revised my opinion as to the wisdom of having a clock. The silence was too profound for any such noisy piece of furniture. I could all but hear the steady drip, drip of the minutes and the tiny splash they made as they fell into the sea of time past. Then I found myself listening for voices ... of the wife who should have been there; of Crichton’s unborn children. It was that kind of house: too large, it seemed to me, for one man, and too homelike for spiritual comfort under those circumstances. One would have thought that Crichton had built it for the very purpose of evoking ghostly presences; to shelter some ideal conception of a family which he preferred to the warm, living, imperfect reality. Or, perhaps, not satisfied with the superficial aspects of a solitude that would have daunted most men, he meant his house to accentuate it, to remind him of its inviolability. Certainly he had succeeded in building into it a personality as strange as his own. It seemed conscious of having been prepared for others beside its lonely tenant, and to be awaiting them with the complaisant assurance that they would never come.

I too waited—anything but complaisantly, for the return of my host, reproaching myself, now that it was too late, for having taken a welcome for granted. To be sure, I had been invited, according to Chan, but that was three years earlier and I had neglected to ask whether Crichton had ever again inquired about me. An hour passed and still I waited, sitting on the top step of the veranda, as Crichton must have done times without number at that hour, looking down his empty roadway to the empty sea. The sun had set and the colorless light faded swiftly from the sky. The fronds of the palms, swaying gently in the last faint tremors of the breeze, came gradually to rest. In the trancelike calm of earth and air I was conscious again of the beating of the surf on the reef. Now it was measured, regular, as though it were the pulsing of blood through the mighty heart of Solitude. Now it seemed the confused roar of street traffic from a thousand cities, mingled with the voices of all humankind, flowing smoothly, in soundless waves, in narrowing circles, over the rim of the world, to break audibly at last on this minute ringed shoal in the farthermost sea of Silence.

After listening to that lonely sound for at least another half hour I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable. Dusk deepened into night and still I waited. At last I saw a glimmer of light along the passageway leading through the house, and presently a dinner gong was sounded—one of those old-fashioned bronze gongs whose soft musical summons faintly stirred innumerable ghostly recollections. I was hungry, and supposing that Crichton had returned another way and was waiting for me, I went along the passage in search of him.

I have but mentioned thus far the veranda on the lagoon side of the house. It was semicircular in shape, extending over shoal water to the brink of a magnificent coral precipice. Standing at the edge of it one looks down into a submarine garden of exquisite beauty. Gorgeously colored fish of the most fantastic shapes swim lazily in and out of the caves which honeycomb the precipice, and from the floor of the lagoon rise forests of coral, spreading their delicate branches into water as clear as air.

Emerging from the passageway I gave an inward gasp of wonder at the beauty and strangeness of the scene before me. It was now deep night. The veranda lay open to the sky, and the reflections of the stars in the water were so bright and clear it was easy to imagine that the house was adrift, motionless, in space. But what first attracted my attention was a small table, laid for one, and holding a shaded lamp. Standing near it was a Chinese with a napkin over his arm—a man so small and wrinkled and gnomelike that he might have stepped out of some centuries-old book of Chinese fairy tales. But he was dressed in a cotton shirt and a black pareu, or waistcloth, reaching to his ankles. Standing with his back to the starlit lagoon he made a striking and memorable picture. His large bald head gleamed softly, as though it had been polished with coconut oil; the lamplight filled the caverns of his eyes with shadow, and the black waistcloth blended so perfectly with the surrounding darkness that he seemed to be only half a Chinese suspended motionless above two bare feet.

I said “Good evening,” but he merely looked at me with a contemplative, detached expression as one might gaze at a rock or tree while thinking of something else. He drew back the single chair at the table, waiting for me to be seated. Glancing over my shoulder a few seconds later I found that he had vanished, as I more than half expected him to do even as I looked at him. He reappeared as noiselessly as he had gone and set a plate of soup before me. It was then that I discovered a piece of folded note paper tucked under the edge of my plate. Wondering what it could be I opened it and read:

I am sorry that I can’t join you at dinner, and as the Toafa will sail early tomorrow morning it may be that I shall not see you again before you leave. Ling Foo will look after you. Please believe that you are welcome here, and feel free to use my house as though it were your own.

Ling Foo had gone to the kitchen while I was puzzling over this message; at any rate, when I looked up again he was standing at my elbow holding a covered dish which, certainly, he had not been holding a moment before. I would not have been surprised, after he set it down in front of me, to have seen him conjure it away again with his napkin. It required an effort of the imagination to think of that wraith of a man who moved as soundlessly as a shadow concerning himself in the usual manner with anything as substantial as food. He brought me an excellent dinner, out of tins to be sure but admirably prepared, and he took away the scarcely tasted dishes as though he had quite expected this. Having placed a lighted lamp on the front veranda and another in the room where I was to sleep he again vanished, this time for good.

I was as forlorn as it is possible for a man to be: a guest in a house where I knew that I was not wanted. “Please believe that you are welcome here”—the words kept repeating themselves in my mind. I tried to believe it, but under the circumstances nothing seemed less likely than that Crichton meant me to accept this absentee welcome in good faith. Common sense should have warned me that a man who had chosen one of the loneliest islands in the Pacific as a home had not done so because he craved companionship. Nevertheless, putting my necessarily unannounced visit in the least favorable light, I felt that he was lacking in consideration to abandon me as he had, in his own house. I had remained ashore at his invitation, and the obligations of hospitality demanded, at the least, that he should not shame me. It would have been easy for him to have pleaded illness. Almost any excuse would have been better than no excuse.

I would have been glad to return to the Toafa, but that was impossible. When I had last seen the ship, just after sunset, she was at least three miles offshore and going farther. She had no engines and Chan Lee would stand well out to sea during the night. I smiled, lugubriously however, at thought of my anxiety to leave an island I had dreamed of so often during four years, but those dreams had been concerned with the Crichton I knew, or thought I knew, on board the Caleb Winship. Now, going back in detail over the events of my first voyage to his island, I realized how meager my knowledge of him really was. Although we were thrown constantly together, our companionship had been a strangely silent one. Often for days at a time we scarcely spoke. I was new to the islands then and under the spell of my first voyage in the South Seas; it was hard to believe that I was still in the world of reality. Crichton too, I felt, was under the same enchantment. Once, breaking a long silence, he said: “I wish I had come out here years ago. They appeal to the imagination, don’t you think—all these islands?” That struck me as a happy expression of one’s feeling about them, for we were then in the very heart of the archipelago, with islands all around us, and yet they did not seem real. The glimpses I had into his mind were all of this fragmentary nature and as brief as they were rare. I had taken the rest of him for granted. Even though I were justified, then, in doing so, who could say what might have happened to him in the meantime—what changes might have taken place during four years of complete isolation? Perhaps it had made unbearable to him the prospect of a renewed contact, however slight, with anyone from the outside world. It might even have unbalanced his mind. I was not hopeful as I thought of this. One might love solitude at a distance and long to know it intimately; but the heart of it was too vast, surely, for one poor human waif to snuggle against with impunity, or to attempt to explore in search of the secret of its peace. I tried to put myself in Crichton’s place, and succeeded so well—or so ill; I could not be sure which it was—that I came back with a feeling of great relief to my proper identity; but as a result of the attempt I could understand how one might so completely lose touch with humankind that the mere thought of renewing it, even for a day, would be unendurable.

It was not yet nine o’clock; too early for bed. I returned to the front veranda where I examined at leisure some charts and sketches—Crichton’s own handiwork, evidently—which hung on the wall above the bookshelves. There was a detailed, carefully drawn plan of the atoll and another of the main island where his house stood. Some of the sketches were extremely interesting. One had for title: “When the Seas Go Dry.” It was a sketch in crayon of a number of the atolls of the Low Archipelago as they would appear from the ocean floor if the waters should recede. Immensely high mountains in the shape of truncated cones were shown, with walls falling almost sheer from a great height to the level of the surrounding country. It was a vividly imaginative impression and true to fact at the same time. One could see that the idea had been suggested by a chart of the archipelago, with its data of soundings, which hung nearby. Another sketch showed Tanao alone, with two pygmy figures standing in the valley below—as they do in old engravings of mountain scenery—one of them pointing to the cliffs towering above them.

Having examined the drawings I turned again to the library, taking volumes at random from the shelves and reading a page here and there. It had been Crichton’s practice, apparently, upon acquiring a book, to write on the flyleaf the date and place of reading it. Nearly all of those I looked into had notations of this kind, covering a period of years reaching back to his early youth. He was also fond of marking passages in his books. One of these was in a volume of Shelley’s Lyrics and Minor Poems which fell open of itself at the Preface to “Alastor: or The Spirit of Solitude.” There was no marginal comment on the page, but the passage underscored was this:

Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow beings live unfruitful lives and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

Under the circumstances the whole of the Preface had a special interest for me and the poem as well, which I had not reread since college days. Drawing my chair close to the lamp I began, and at the second stanza started reading aloud, partly for the companionship of my own voice, and partly that I might better sense the sonorous beauty of the words:

Mother of this unfathomable world,

Favour my solemn song! For I have loved

Thee ever and thee only; I have watched

Thy shadow and the darkness of thy steps,

And my heart ever gazes on the depth

Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

In charnels and on coffins, where black Death

Keeps record of the trophies won from thee;

Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,

Thy messenger, to render up the tale

Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness ...

I had been reading for a quarter of an hour, I should say, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently, when I heard from the adjoining room a slight but very distinct noise: a drumming of fingers against the wall just back of my head. I had never been so curiously startled in my life, before. A cry, a crash of breaking glass, a pistol fired behind my back, might have produced a more violent shock but nothing like such an eerie one. I got up at once, turned down the light, tiptoed into my room at the other end of the veranda and closed the door. The reaction was purely instinctive, as a child’s would be upon hearing at night a sound it could not understand. Theoretically, I should then have jumped into bed and hidden under the coverlet, but instinct did not carry me that far. I knew of course that Crichton was in that other room. At least I knew it after hearing the noise. Previous to that the possibility of his presence in the house had not occurred to me. The fact of his sending me a message had given me a sense of his remoteness. I had taken it for granted that he was elsewhere—across the lagoon, perhaps, on one of the other islets; anywhere but under his own roof.

For some time I stood listening, in the middle of the floor; then, hearing no further sound I sat in the darkness by the open window and gave myself up to the most disquieting reflections. I winced at the thought of having read aloud. Had I set to work deliberately to torment Crichton, I doubted whether I could have hit upon a better means for doing so. Deprived, temporarily at least through his sun blindness, of the enjoyment of reading, I had reminded him of the seriousness of the deprivation. Accustomed during four years to all but unbroken silence, he had been compelled to listen to the monotonous intonation of my voice. “Alastor” might very well be the last poem in the world so lonely a man would care to hear read; and he must have heard every word distinctly, for only a thin board partition separated the veranda from the rooms behind it. At last, irritated beyond endurance, he had let me know of his presence.

I was tempted to go to Crichton’s room, to apologize for having disturbed him, for having come to Tanao at all. On second thought I decided that I had been sufficiently meddlesome and it seemed best to remain where I was, wearing out the rest of the night as unobtrusively as possible.

But although Ling Foo had garnished and freshened the room and turned the coverlet back, I did not go to bed. Instead, I sat by the window listening to the clock on the veranda measuring eternity. I dozed off at last, to be wakened out of uneasy slumber by the crowing of a cock. It was a welcome sound for I thought day was at hand but this was far from being the case. Low Island fowls, like the islanders themselves, are semi-nocturnal in their habits. Cocks greet the rising of the moon as well as the sun, and often break into a prolonged ecstasy of crowing for no reason at all, in the middle of a starlit night. One can scarcely blame them, for the nights are enchantingly beautiful; but the sound of persistent crowing may be extremely annoying if close at hand, and this cock was perched in some shrubbery just in front of the veranda. A late moon was rising which may have caused the outburst. However that may be he kept it up. With a premonitory flapping of wings he shattered the silence time after time, waiting with seeming intent for it to heal that he might shatter it again, more effectively. The thing got on my nerves; I thought he would never leave off. At last I got up, again tiptoed across the veranda and down the steps, and walked along the lagoon beach, keeping within the shadows of the trees.

The crowing stopped at once. I was in the mood to be chagrined at this, and to take as an intentional affront the habitual action of hermit crabs—there were thousands of them along the beach—snapping into their shells at my approach and closing their doors behind them. The land crabs, too, showed hostility in their own fashion, holding up their little claws in menace, scurrying away on either side and dodging into their holes as though fleeing a pestilence. “I’m having a strange welcome all round,” I thought. But Mama Ruau, the old native woman, had been friendly. I had no doubt of the sincerity of her welcome.

Her little thatched hut on the lagoon beach a short distance from Crichton’s place seemed as essential a feature of the landscape as the old kahaia tree that shaded it. All was silent there. A fire of coconut husks smoldered on the earthen floor of the kitchen at the back. Passing this I knocked on the door post of the dwelling house, and receiving no response looked in. The reflections from the moonlit water made the room almost as light as day. A wooden chest for clothing stood against one wall and a sewing machine in a corner. This was all the furniture the room contained except for a mat spread over the coral sand and some beautifully formed branches of antler coral hanging from the wall posts. The old woman lay on the mat, her hands, palm to palm, tucked under her cheek. She was sleeping so peacefully that I hadn’t the heart to waken her but slipped quietly away and sat for a time on the beach nearby.

Here Mama Ruau had prepared supper for Crichton and me on the day of our arrival at the island. I recalled a story that she had told us that evening, which Crichton translated for me: a weird tale of the spirit of the last of her sons who had, somehow, been drowned while spearing fish on the outer reef of a neighboring islet. It appeared to her but rarely, she said, and always in the form of a huge dog. She would see it only at the full of the moon, lying on the lagoon beach, its head resting on its paws. As she approached it would rise to its feet, yawn, stretch, and gaze mournfully at her. Then it would take a long drink of salt water and start at a lope down the beach. Soon it would break into a run, gathering tremendous speed, and upon reaching the end of the islet it would make a flying spring. She would last see it clearly outlined against the moonlit sky, crossing in one gigantic leap the two-mile gap to the islet where her son had been drowned.

The story had made a deep impression upon me, and the simplicity and earnestness of her manner in telling it convinced me of the realness of the apparition to Mama Ruau. She believed in all sorts of spirits, good and bad. Her grandmother, a Marquesan, although converted to Christianity, had never been quite sure what to believe, and shortly before her death at Tanao, many years ago, she had left instructions that a small stone idol which she had always kept was to be set at the head of her grave, and a slab of coral with a cross cut upon it, at the foot. I had seen this grave at the time of my former visit; it is in the family burying ground at the east end of the main islet. As day was long distant I decided to go there again and look at it by moonlight.

I doubt whether there is a cemetery in all the Pacific—except at the bottom of it—more impressively lonely than the one at Tanao. It lies close to the ocean beach where, owing to the contour of the fringing reef, the sea breaks with unusual violence; and the moonlight-silvered spray drifting slowly across the land makes one think of an endless procession of ghosts. There are fifteen or twenty graves in all, most of them in a sadly neglected condition, overgrown with shrubs and coarse vines. I found the grandmother’s grave. The little idol, hands folded across its fat paunch, seemed to be gazing with stony-eyed hostility at the nearby cross. An inscription had once been chiseled on the coral slab beneath the cross, but the action of wind and rain had long since made it illegible.

But what interested me more than this grave was another close by, freshly prepared and ready for occupancy. It had been dug to a depth of five or six feet and roofed over with sheets of corrugated iron to keep out the rain. A shallow drainage trench surrounded it and nearby were a number of thin coral slabs chiseled square and the edges beveled with which to cover the grave at last. The headstone was ready to be set in place and on it was cut Mama Ruau’s name—Fainau a Hiva. I was not greatly surprised at this, for it is not unusual for Polynesians to make preparations for their end when they know that it cannot be far distant. They have no dread of death; indeed, in old age they seem rather to welcome its approach and make all ready for their last long sleep. Mama Ruau was merely following the custom of her people, but she was too frail, I knew, to have done this work herself. Crichton must have helped her with it, and it struck me that he may have found zest in it as though he were thinking: “It won’t be long, now. I’ll soon have the island to myself.”

I stood for a time, watching the great seventh waves crashing over the reef. The ground trembled under their ceaseless impact and the roar of broken water was loud enough, one would think, to disturb even the repose of the dead. Crichton would be lying here eventually if he held firm to his voluntary exile; but in the ordinary course of events that would be years hence. Meanwhile, what of the present and the years just ahead? Walking slowly back along the outer beach I tried to persuade myself that it was my duty to urge him to come away with us. The trouble he was having with his eyes gave me an excellent pretext. I could suggest the need for his coming to Tahiti for advice and treatment lest his sight be seriously impaired.

Quickening my pace I crossed to the lagoon beach, and as I approached the house that cock started crowing again as though it had been waiting all this while to warn Crichton of the return of his unwelcome guest. The shrill cry brought me to a halt. While I stood there doubtful as to what I should do, Crichton himself emerged from the darkness of the veranda, ran lightly down the steps and disappeared in the shrubbery beside them. A moment later he again came into view with something under his arm. He then came along the beach directly toward me. I was standing in the shadow of a tree. He passed so closely that I could almost have touched him with my outstretched hand, and he stopped not half-a-dozen paces distant. He was not then wearing the sun glasses and his eyes had a vacant, expressionless look. I saw that he was holding the offending rooster. He stood for a moment gently stroking the bird, speaking to it in a gently reproachful manner as one might address a pet dog or an innocently naughty child.

“You shouldn’t have made such a racket,” he said, “and just below the veranda, too. It isn’t the first time. Now you’re going to receive the punishment you deserve.”

With that he took the fowl firmly by the legs, one in each hand, and slowly, deliberately tore it apart. I could hear the smothered rending of the flesh. To say that it was a horrible sight is to say nothing at all, but more horrible still was the expression on Crichton’s face. The cock gave one loud squawk but Crichton soon silenced it. He bashed it again and again against the stem of a coconut palm until it was only a shapeless mass of bloody feathers; then he tossed it into the lagoon.

He was dressed in a waistcloth, and his bare chest as well as his hands and face was spattered with blood. Having washed with sea water he dried himself with his pareu and sat down on the beach in such a position that he was turned halfway toward me with the moon shining full in his face. I will not venture to say how long he sat thus, quite motionless, his eyes closed as though deep in reverie. At last the shadow of a frown darkened his features and he said, in a low intense voice: “Why did you come here? Did you think I was lonely?”

For two or three seconds I was convinced that he had spoken to me direct, conscious of my presence, and it was only the shock of dismay and astonishment that prevented me from giving myself away. But his air of complete self-absorption reassured me. It was plain that he believed himself alone.

“You are too kind, my friend,” he went on. “Too considerate by far. You will forgive me if I deprive myself ...”

He broke off and was again long silent, sitting with his arms crossed on his knees and his forehead resting against them. I was compelled to stand absolutely motionless, scarcely daring to breathe. He could have heard the slightest sound I might have made. When at last he raised his head, the expression on his face was one of utter hopelessness and desolation, and he said, in a low, broken, heartsick voice: “I don’t know what’s to come.... I don’t know....” A moment later he rose and walked slowly back to the house.

I did not see him again. Neither he nor Mama Ruau appeared at the beach the following morning. I went out to the schooner with the first boatload of copra, and being dead tired after my all-night vigil, turned into my bunk and slept heavily. When I came on deck the Toafa was headed westward, and Tanao was only a faint bluish haze far to windward. Chan, the least inquisitive of men, asked no questions as to my stay ashore; in fact, as soon as we had left the island it seemed to have dropped completely out of his thoughts.

But I was to hear of Crichton once more at another island where we called for copra. We spent a night there anchored in the lagoon close to the principal village and some natives came aboard to yarn with the sailors. I was lying on deck looking at the stars, paying little attention to their conversation until I heard Tanao mentioned.

One voice said, “Pupuré, the old woman calls him.” (That was Crichton’s native name, meaning Fair Hair.)

“Ah, É” (Oh, yes), a second voice replied. “Tera popaa. Tera taata haa-moe-hia.” (That white man. That forgotten one.)

I heard nothing more of Crichton until the evening when Maitua walked into the circle of lamplight on my veranda at Tahiti, bringing me his letter.

This third voyage seemed interminable; we were at the end of our second week when we sighted Tanao. Under a light breeze we approached slowly and toward midday were within a quarter of a mile of the landing place. The cutter was brought to and Maitua and Nau rowed me ashore. I examined the shore line but saw no sign of life excepting a flock of white terns floating aimlessly over the bush at the far end of the island. We might have been the first men ever to view that lonely place.

Fortunately the sea was calm and we crossed the reef without mishap. Then something I had thought was a round black rock detached itself from the sand and moved down to the edge of the water. It was an umbrella almost completely hiding Ling Foo, who carried it. Maitua and Nau jumped into waist-deep water and guided the boat across the shallows. The umbrella moved away as we approached, up the beach and along the roadway leading to the house. The old Chinese kept well ahead of us, tilting his sunshade now and then to see that we were following. I called to him, but his only reply was to glance back and make a quick beckoning gesture.

Crichton was lying propped up with pillows on a sofa on the veranda. He was shockingly altered, so pale and emaciated that I should not have recognized him, elsewhere. Indeed, I thought for a moment that we had arrived just too late, for his eyes were closed in their deep hollows, his hands folded on his breast, and his face wore the expression of peace and indifference that one sees on the faces of the dead. Ling Foo ran noiselessly across the veranda and stood beside him, looking from Crichton to me and back again. Maitua halted at the top step as though he had been stopped by a viewless barrier. No one spoke. The clock with the ship’s-bell attachment was still measuring eternity by seconds. It struck half-past twelve.

Crichton opened his eyes at the sound and stared vacantly before him. “Ling Foo, are you there?” he asked.

The old servant touched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Go down again to the beach. They must be close inshore by this time.”

I stepped forward. “We’re here, Crichton,” I said.

His worn face lighted up. “Please forgive me,” he said. “I must have been asleep.” He held out his hand, gropingly. “I am deeply grateful.”

I could think of nothing to say. The fact that Crichton had no one but me to turn to in his need gave me a truer conception of his aloneness in the world. Nearly a decade had passed since the Caleb Winship had brought him here. The events of that well-remembered day, viewed in the light of all that had since happened to me, seemed to have taken place in the course of a previous existence. To find him still here was a shock to my sense of probability, like that one would feel at discovering a man swimming alone in mid-ocean. For all my sympathy I was conscious of a feeling of dull anger against him. What reason or excuse could a man of his age, with the best of life still before him, have had for throwing that life away? What a senseless waste of abilities, of opportunities! And now there would be no more opportunities. He was dying; there was little question of that. It seemed to me that he must have been keeping himself alive for weeks by sheer strength of will.

“I had only a faint hope that you would be able to come,” he added; “but I clung to that hope.”

“Does the Toafa still call here?” I asked.

“Yes, once a year, but she’s not due again until September.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and lay with his hands outstretched, palms upward. I glanced around the veranda. It was just as I had remembered it; only the man himself had changed. Again he looked dully at the ceiling. “What was it I wanted to say? Oh ... you must be tired after your voyage. Ling Foo has lunch ready. Afterward, perhaps you would like a siesta? It’s very hot here in the middle of the day.”

I was glad of an excuse for leaving him for a time. He was very weak and I could see that it tired him to talk. After lunch I returned to the beach with Maitua. Nau had been spearing fish during our absence and had prepared his own food Low Island fashion: raw fish dipped in sea water and eaten with the meat of ripe coconuts. Maitua, through shyness, had eaten sparingly of Ling Foo’s luncheon. He joined Nau in his meal and the two men ate with keen appetite, squatting on a coral mushroom beside a pool of water that reflected their faces and the sky. Beyond them was the reef where the surf spouted up in fountains of spume, luminous in the sunlight, and beyond that, the sea, ruffled to the deepest blue by the breeze, and empty save for the cutter a mile offshore. It was a lonely picture, full of harmony and beauty with those natives in the foreground. Maitua and Nau belonged in the setting; they were as much a part of it as the sea fowl skimming along the slopes of the combers. But I had only to imagine Crichton in their place and immediately the beauty seemed to become hostile beauty, and mid-ocean silence the measure of Nature’s disapproval of the incongruous element.

When the men had finished their meal I discussed plans with them. They had been long from home and were, I knew, anxious to have news of their families. It seemed useless to keep them waiting at Tanao, the more so as there was no safe anchorage for the cutter. I arranged with them that they should go to their own island of Hao and return within two weeks’ time, if possible. The wind was favorable for their voyage and when they had speared some more fish and gathered a supply of green drinking coconuts they rowed out to the cutter, hoisted in their small boat and stood off to the northwest. The little vessel crept up the long slope of the sea until she was lost to view.

It was midafternoon when I returned to the house. Crichton was sleeping; at least I thought he was. A low table stood beside his couch with a glass and a pitcher of water on it and a bell for summoning Ling Foo. I went through to the kitchen connected with the main house by a covered passageway. Here as elsewhere everything was in perfect order. Pots and pans, burnished and shining, hung from hooks along the wall. The stove was brightly polished and sticks of firewood cut at precisely the same length were corded up in a bin nearby. Ling Foo was not there. I returned to the front veranda and seated myself near Crichton’s couch. Looking toward him presently I found that he was awake, regarding me with a vacant, and at the same time a thoughtful expression. I awaited, surprised that he didn’t speak. At length I forced myself to say, “Is there anything you want, Crichton?”

He started slightly at the sound of my voice. “Oh, I didn’t know you were back,” he said. “You must have come in very quietly.”

“But ... haven’t you seen me sitting here?”

Even as I asked the question I realized that he had not seen me; that he was blind. He then told me what I had almost forgotten until that moment, of the trouble he had had with his eyes, caused by the glare of the sun from the lagoon and the beaches of white sand. He had not realized that it was anything serious and had neglected to take adequate precautions.

“How long have you been like this?” I asked.

“Nearly three years. I can still see the faint outline of objects close by, directly in front of me, but nothing more.”

I admired him for his stoicism. He spoke quietly of his loss as though it were a matter of no great importance. “I know the place so well: every foot of beach and nearly every bush and tree. I’ve not been hampered as much as you might think; and Ling Foo has been a faithful servant, one in a thousand.”

“Is Mama Ruau still living?” I asked.

“No, she died two years ago. I’ve missed her greatly; she was as good to me as a man’s own mother could be. She told me that she would always watch over me after her death. It’s curious; at times I’ve been all but convinced of her presence. One has strange fancies in such a lonely place.”

“That is an extraordinary old servant of yours,” I said. “Does he never speak?”

“Not often. He is a remarkable old chap, never for a moment idle.”

“Is he contented here?”

“Yes—quite. I used to urge him to return with Chan Lee to visit his friends on Tahiti, but he’s never cared to go.”

“And you, Crichton? Have you never left Tanao in all these years?”

“Never,” he replied. For a moment the expression on his face grew somber; then he said: “I feel much better. Your coming has done me good.”

“I’m delighted to hear you say that,” I replied. “By the way, I’ve let the cutter go. The men were anxious to have news of their families.”

“Naturally. I was going to suggest that you do just that. When will they be coming back?”

“Within ten days or two weeks, depending upon the weather. Do you think you might be strong enough by that time to make the voyage to Tahiti? If not, we can hold the cutter here until you are. Will you come?”

He smiled faintly and shook his head.

“To Tahiti? I have a longer voyage than that to make. Don’t imagine that I regret it. On the contrary.... But let’s not discuss my affairs this afternoon. Do you know what I’d like, if it isn’t too much of an imposition? I said just now that I’d not minded losing my sight, but I have minded in one respect. I miss my books. Would you be willing to read to me for an hour or so?”

I thought of the last time I had read aloud on his veranda, with such unhappy results, but he seemed to have forgotten that. He was a great admirer of Thoreau and we began with his favorite chapters in Walden. Then he asked for Comus, and after that for some of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Poems. Ling Foo brought our supper to the table by Crichton’s couch, and he ate with some appetite, for the first time in weeks, he said. Throughout the meal he talked with animation; he seemed to be as starved for conversation as he was for reading. This was a Crichton I had never seen before: urbane, wholly at ease, almost lighthearted in manner. I could not reconcile this view of him with the one I’d had at the time of my second visit.

Afterward when the lamps were lighted I continued reading whatever he asked for, and it was not until the clock struck ten that he said, “Good Lord! Can it be as late as that?”

I told him that I would gladly continue as long as he liked.

“No, not another word! Thanks ever so much. I can’t tell you what a treat this has been for me.”

We chatted for a few moments; then I called Ling Foo, who was dozing in a chair by the kitchen table. He brought his sleeping mat and a pillow and spread them on the floor by Crichton’s couch in case he should be wanted during the night. I retired to my room—the same room that had been prepared for me at the time of my last visit; but on this occasion I went to bed and slept soundly until morning.

We spent the following morning in settling his affairs. A copy of his will had been filed long since with his attorney in London. He asked me to read over to him his own copy. I was not surprised to learn that he was a man of considerable means. All of his property in England was to be divided equally between a nephew and a niece, his only surviving relatives. What he particularly wished me to do was to send to his attorney—with a personal letter which I wrote at his dictation—the official papers to be secured from the French authorities at Tahiti, establishing the fact of his death. He had something over five hundred pounds on deposit in a Papeete bank, and this money was to go to Ling Foo who had served him so faithfully all these years.

It seemed strange to be discussing these matters with Crichton. He was businesslike, methodical, painstaking. Death was in the background, and yet, because of his quiet, matter-of-fact way of speaking of it, I had no emotional conviction of its nearness. The last thing he asked me to do was to go through his desk and clear out all of his papers and notebooks, including half-a-dozen thick manuscript volumes. These latter, I imagine, contained a personal record of his life at Tanao until the loss of his sight had made writing no longer possible. “Will you please burn all this?” he said. “I shall feel much better when you tell me that it has been destroyed.” It required half an hour of poking and stirring the fire to consume the journals, but in the end they were all reduced to ashes.

On the evening of that day Ling Foo and I carried Crichton on his sofa to the open veranda built over the water on the opposite side of the house. It was a glorious night, perfectly still, and not a cloud in the sky. The air was cool and Crichton was covered with a rug. As darkness came on we seemed to be suspended between an upper and nether firmament, so bright and clear were the reflections of the stars in the lagoon. Crichton was weaker than he had been the previous day. The business of settling his affairs had exhausted his little reserve of strength, and he was running a temperature that made him restless and lightheaded. Neither of us spoke for a long time; then he asked for a glass of water which he drank greedily. Presently he roused himself with an effort.

“There is something I have long had on my conscience,” he said. “You will remember, when you were last here, my ... my strange behavior. What must you have thought of me, leaving you like that? ... And a guest in my own house, too!”

“Don’t speak of it, Crichton,” I replied. “If apologies are in order let mine come first. I barged in on you without ...”

He interrupted me.

“No, please! You have nothing to reproach yourself for. I was guilty of an unpardonable breach of hospitality. I owe you the fullest explanation of my actions on that occasion; but I don’t see how I can explain without saying more than ... than you may care to hear.... Would you mind if I were to tell you something that I have never spoken of to anyone?”

“No, not if you want to tell me.”

“I do want to; but whether it will be possible ... Let me ask a question: have you ever wondered why I came here to live?”

“Many times.”

“What was your supposition?”

“I have never found a satisfactory one. You have always been a puzzle to me, Crichton.”

“You’re being quite frank? You don’t know why I have hidden myself away here?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“I believe you. Well, let me get this out, if I can. For some reason I feel a great need to speak, for the first and the last time.

“I am one of those men ...” He broke off, and after a moment of silence began again. “I am one of those men who ... who are ... mistakes of Nature.

“Does this mean anything to you? Do you understand what I am trying to say? Mistakes of Nature ... tragic, irremediable mistakes. Or experiments, perhaps—who knows? How many there are, of how many kinds! There is one ... A victim of that blunder in creation is the most unhappy, surely, of all the children of men.

“This sounds maudlin. I am aware of the fact. But I ask you to believe that I am not indulging in self-pity. I gave up that habit long ago. If you like, in this darkness think of me only as a voice, speaking of a man who no longer exists. That is not far from the truth.

“I was in my late teens before I knew. My people never knew. They are all dead now. Three brothers, two older and one younger than myself, were killed during the war. I was the one to be spared. The irony of that fact has given me some bitter moments.

“My boyhood was all that boyhood at its best can be. My parents made comrades of their children and they had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss with one of them. Their desire was to make our childhood happy, and, as we grew older, to help us shape our lives according to our own wishes and abilities. My father believed that education was, in the beginning, a matter of arousing in our minds a disciplined curiosity about life; and in my case he wanted me to be furnished with certain tools to work with: principally languages, both ancient and modern, and mathematics. Thanks to his guidance and encouragement I felt the keenest desire to acquire mastery in the use of these tools, realizing that the drudgery entailed was necessary, and that the tools were not ends in themselves but the means to ends far beyond.

“You may wonder why I speak of this. It is to make clear to you why I remained so long in ignorance of ... of one side of my nature. If this is not the reason I can assign no other. Unlike my brothers I was not sent to public school but was furnished with private tutors at home where I prepared for the university. I was devoted to hard study and had neither the time nor the inclination for self-exploration on the emotional side. I was more studious than most boys of my years and believed that scholarship was of greater importance than sport. Otherwise, I was not eccentric in any way.

“At seventeen I went up to the university where my father, grandfather and great-grandfather had gone before me. Some of the drudgery of education was past; I now began to know a few, at least, of its delights. And what can equal them? What joy is keener, purer than that of a young man when he first becomes conscious of the unfolding of his powers and looks forward to years of quiet, uninterrupted study? I already knew what my lifework was to be. I had a scholarship in physics, and with the confidence and the arrogance of youth I resolved to be one of the greatest physicists in England.

“In my second year at the university I discovered ... what, it seems, had to be discovered. It was a gradual revelation, but, in the end, complete. My case may have been exceptional, and from what I now know I think it was. The fact remains that I was unaware of the existence of such ... of such abnormality until it was revealed to me by a friend and classmate to whom I was deeply devoted. In the long vacation of my second year I went to Germany for further study. It was the worst move I could have made, it seems. What happened there ... Oh, I’m so mortally tired!”

That cry went to my heart. “Crichton, you needn’t go on,” I said. “Believe me, I ...”

“Wait! I beg your pardon,” he said. He raised himself on his elbow and his voice became as hard and cold as ice.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I was not at the point of making any sordid confessions. Allow me to finish. I have little more to say.”

He sank back on his pillow and lay still.

“In Germany I found myself on the brink of an abyss—so at least I conceived of it. I looked down. I saw unhappy creatures like myself moving about in those depths. I pitied them from my heart, but it was loathing that saved me. I differed from them only in this: they had accepted their fate; many of them, I discovered, gloried in it. I would not accept mine—at least I would not accept the common implications of that fate. I saw what I had to do. I gave up my plans for a career. I cut myself off from family and friends. You see, I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know what wretched folly friendship might lead me into. I set out in search of some place, preferably an island, where there could be no question of friendship, not even of companionship. When I found that place, I remained ... as you know.”

He died very peacefully three days later. I was sitting with him and we had talked a little of common things; then he fell into a quiet sleep. About an hour afterward he awoke and asked me to help him turn on his side. That was the last time he spoke.

Ling Foo and I buried him at the spot he had chosen. It was not in the cemetery at the far end of the islet, but near the lagoon beach at the head of the small cove that could be seen from his house. In accordance with his own wishes, no stone, not even a border of sea shells, was placed to mark his grave. It is marked, adequately and beautifully, by the shadows of palm fronds moving to and fro over the coral sand.