NIGHT ON THE BEACH
Throughout the island world of the
Pacific scattered men of many European races and
from almost every grade of society carry activity
and disseminate disease. Some prosper some vegetate.
Some have mounted the steps of thrones and owned islands
and navies. Others again must marry for a livelihood;
a strapping merry chocolate-coloured dame supports
them in sheer idleness; and dressed like natives
but still retaining some foreign element of gait or
attitude still perhaps with some relic (such as a
single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman they
sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island
audience with memoirs of the music-hall. And
there are still others less pliable less capable
less fortunate perhaps less base who continue even
in these isles of plenty to lack bread.
At the far end of the town of Papeete,
three such men were seated on the beach under a purao-tree.
It was late. Long ago the band
had broken up and marched musically home, a motley
troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers,
dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with
garlands. Long ago darkness and silence had gone
from house to house about the tiny pagan city.
Only the street-lamps shone on, making a glow-worm
halo in the umbrageous alleys, or drawing a tremulous
image on the waters of the port. A sound of snoring
ran among the piles of lumber by the Government pier.
It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottomed
schooners, where they lay moored close in like
dinghies, and their crews were stretched upon the
deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude tent
amidst the disorder of merchandise.
But the men under the purao
had no thought of sleep. The same temperature
in England would have passed without remark in summer;
but it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate
nature knew it, and the bottle of cocoa-nut oil stood
frozen in every bird-cage house about the island;
and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy
cotton clothes, the same they had sweated in by day
and run the gauntlet of the tropic showers; and to
complete their evil case, they had no breakfast to
mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.
In the telling South Sea phrase, these
three men were on the beach. Common calamity
had brought them acquainted, as the three most miserable
English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their
misery, they knew next to nothing of each other, not
even their true names. For each had made a long
apprenticeship in going downward; and each, at some
stage of the descent, had been shamed into the adoption
of an alias. And yet not one of them had
figured in a court of justice; two were men of kindly
virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered under the
purao, had a tattered Virgil in his pocket.
Certainly, if money could have been
raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago
have sacrificed that last possession; but the demand
for literature, which is so marked a feature in some
parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the
dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he could not exchange
against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger.
He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on
the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favourite
passages and finding new ones only less beautiful
because they lacked the consecration of remembrance.
Or he would pause on random country walks; sit on
the path-side, gazing over the sea on the mountains
of Eimeo; and dip into the Aeneid, seeking
sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way
of oracles) replied with no very certain nor encouraging
voice, visions of England at least would throng upon
the exile’s memory: the busy schoolroom,
the green playing-fields, holidays at home, and the
perennial roar of London, and the fireside, and the
white head of his father. For it is the destiny
of those grave, restrained, and classic writers, with
whom we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship
at school, to pass into the blood and become native
in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not
so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places
and the student’s own irrevocable youth.
Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent,
active, and ambitious man, small partner in a considerable
London house. Hopes were conceived of the boy;
he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford
scholarship, and proceeded in course to the western
University. With all his talent and taste (and
he had much of both) Robert was deficient in consistency
and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study,
worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have
been at Greek, and took at last a paltry degree.
Almost at the same time, the London house was disastrously
wound up; Mr. Herrick must begin the world again as
a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish
his ambitions and accept with gratitude a career that
he detested and despised. He had no head for
figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint
of hours, and despised the aims and the success of
merchants. To grow rich was none of his ambitions;
rather to do well. A worse or a more bold young
man would have refused the destiny; perhaps tried his
future with his pen; perhaps enlisted. Robert,
more prudent, possibly more timid, consented to embrace
that way of life in which he could most readily assist
his family. But he did so with a mind divided;
fled the neighbourhood of former comrades; and chose,
out of several positions placed at his disposal, a
clerkship in New York.
His career thenceforth was one of
unbroken shame. He did not drink, he was exactly
honest, he was never rude to his employers, yet was
everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to
his duties, he brought no attention; his day was a
tissue of things neglected and things done amiss;
and from place to place, and from town to town, he
carried the character of one thoroughly incompetent.
No man can bear the word applied to him without some
flush of colour, as indeed there is none other that
so emphatically slams in a man’s face the door
of self-respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious
of talents and acquirements, who looked down upon
those humble duties in which he was found wanting,
the pain was the more exquisite. Early in his
fall he had ceased to be able to make remittances;
shortly after, having nothing but failure to communicate,
he ceased writing home; and about a year before this
tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San
Francisco by a vulgar and infuriated German Jew, he
had broken the last bonds of self-respect, and, upon
a sudden impulse, changed his name and invested his
last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine, the
City of Papeete. With what expectation
he had trimmed his flight for the South Seas, Herrick
perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there were fortunes
to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not
more gifted than himself had climbed in the island
world to be queen’s consorts and king’s
ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with
any manful purpose, he would have kept his father’s
name; the alias betrayed his moral bankruptcy;
he had struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate
himself or help his straitened family; and he came
to the islands (where he knew the climate to be soft,
bread cheap, and manners easy) a skulker from life’s
battle and his own immediate duty. Failure, he
had said, was his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.
It is fortunately not enough to say,
“I will be base.” Herrick continued
in the islands his career of failure; but in the new
scene and under the new name, he suffered no less
sharply than before. A place was got, it was
lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the
keepers of restaurants he fell to more open charity
upon the wayside; as time went on, good-nature became
weary, and, after a repulse or two, Herrick became
shy. There were women enough who would have supported
a far worse and a far uglier man; Herrick never met
or never knew them: or if he did both, some manlier
feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation.
Drenched with rains, broiling by day, shivering by
night, a disused and ruinous prison for a bedroom,
his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps,
his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself,
he had drained for months the cup of penitence.
He had known what it was to be resigned, what it was
to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion against
fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair.
The time had changed him. He told himself no
longer tales of an easy and perhaps agreeable declension;
he read his nature otherwise; he had proved himself
incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience
that he could not stoop to fall. Something that
was scarcely pride or strength, that was perhaps only
refinement, withheld him from capitulation; but he
looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing rage,
and sometimes wondered at his patience.
It was now the fourth month completed,
and still there was no change or sign of change.
The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds of
every size and shape and density, some black as inkstains,
some delicate as lawn, threw the marvel of her southern
brightness over the same lovely and detested scene:
the island mountains crowned with the perennial island
cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps,
the masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the
lagoon, and the mole of the barrier reef on which
the breakers whitened. The moon shone too, with
bull’s-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the
stalwart frame of the American who called himself
Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner in some
disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes
and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney
clerk. Here was society for Robert Herrick!
The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he had
sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution:
he was one whose hand you could take without a blush.
But there was no redeeming grace about the other,
who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,
and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed
in every store in Papeete, for the creature was able
in his way; who had been discharged from each in turn,
for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old
employers so that they passed him in the street as
if he were a dog, and all his old comrades so that
they shunned him as they would a creditor.
Not long before, a ship from Peru
had brought an influenza, and it now raged in the
island, and particularly in Papeete. From all
round the purao arose and fell a dismal sound
of men coughing, and strangling as they coughed.
The sick natives, with the islander’s impatience
of a touch of fever, had crawled from their houses
to be cool, and, squatting on the shore or on the
beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.
Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country
in the night from farm to farm, accesses of coughing
arose and spread, and died in the distance, and sprang
up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes
by that cruel ecstasy, and left spent and without
voice or courage when it passed. If a man had
pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and
in that infected season, was a place to spend it on.
And of all the sufferers perhaps the least deserving,
but surely the most pitiable, was the London clerk.
He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing,
and the dainties of the sick-room; he lay here now,
in the cold open, exposed to the gusting of the wind,
and with an empty belly. He was besides infirm;
the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions
watched his endurance with surprise. A profound
commiseration filled them, and contended with and
conquered their abhorrence. The disgust attendant
on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the
same time, and with more than compensating strength,
shame for a sentiment so inhuman bound them the more
straitly to his service; and even the evil they knew
of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of
death is always the least supportable when it draws
near to the merely sensual and selfish. Sometimes
they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness,
they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor
wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm
of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face,
doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life.
There is no one but has some virtue: that of the
clerk was courage; and he would make haste to reassure
them in a pleasantry not always decent.
“I’m all right, pals,”
he gasped once: “this is the thing to strengthen
the muscles of the larynx.”
“Well, you take the cake!” cried the captain.
“O, I’m good plucked enough,”
pursued the sufferer with a broken utterance.
“But it do seem bloomin’ hard to me, that
I should be the only party down with this form of
vice, and the only one to do the funny business.
I think one of you other parties might wake up.
Tell a fellow something.”
“The trouble is we’ve
nothing to tell, my son,” returned the captain.
“I’ll tell you, if you
like, what I was thinking,” said Herrick.
“Tell us anything,” said
the clerk, “I only want to be reminded that I
ain’t dead.”
Herrick took up his parable, lying
on his face and speaking slowly and scarce above his
breath, not like a man who has anything to say, but
like one talking against time.
“Well, I was thinking this,”
he began: “I was thinking I lay on Papeete
beach one night all moon and squalls and
fellows coughing and I was cold and hungry,
and down in the mouth, and was about ninety years of
age, and had spent two hundred and twenty of them on
Papeete beach. And I was thinking I wished I
had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother, or could
raise Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember
how you did it. I knew you made a ring of skulls,
for I had seen that in the Freischütz:
and that you took off your coat and turned up your
sleeves, for I had seen Formes do that when he was
playing Kaspar, and you could see (by the way he went
about it) it was a business he had studied; and that
you ought to have something to kick up a smoke and
a bad smell, I daresay a cigar might do, and that
you ought to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards.
Well, I wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather
a feat, you see. And then I wondered if I would
say it forward, and I thought I did. Well, no
sooner had I got to world without end, than
I saw a man in a pariu, and with a mat under
his arm, come along the beach from the town.
He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped
and crippled, and all the time he kept coughing.
At first I didn’t cotton to his looks, I thought,
and then I got sorry for the old soul because he coughed
so hard. I remembered that we had some of that
cough mixture the American consul gave the captain
for Hay. It never did Hay a ha’porth of
service, but I thought it might do the old gentleman’s
business for him, and stood up. ‘Yorana!’
says I. ‘Yorana!’ says he.
‘Look here,’ I said, ’I’ve
got some first-rate stuff in a bottle; it’ll
fix your cough, savvy? Harry my and I’ll
measure you a tablespoonful in the palm of my hand,
for all our plate is at the bankers.’ So
I thought the old party came up, and the nearer he
came the less I took to him. But I had passed
my word, you see.”
“Wot is this bloomin’
drivel?” interrupted the clerk. “It’s
like the rot there is in tracts.”
“It’s a story; I used
to tell them to the kids at home,” said Herrick.
“If it bores you, I’ll drop it.”
“O, cut along!” returned
the sick man irritably. “It’s better
than nothing.”
“Well,” continued Herrick,
“I had no sooner given him the cough mixture
than he seemed to straighten up and change, and I saw
he wasn’t a Tahitian after all, but some kind
of Arab, and had a long beard on his chin. ‘One
good turn deserves another,’ says he. ’I
am a magician out of the “Arabian Nights,”
and this mat that I have under my arm is the original
carpet of Mohammed Ben Somebody-or-other. Say
the word, and you can have a cruise upon the carpet.’
’You don’t mean to say this is the Travelling
Carpet?’ I cried. ‘You bet I do,’
said he. ’You’ve been to America
since last I read the “Arabian Nights,"’
said I, a little suspicious. ‘I should
think so,’ said he. ’Been everywhere.
A man with a carpet like this isn’t going to
moulder in a semi-detached villa.’ Well,
that struck me as reasonable. ‘All right,’
I said; ’and do you mean to tell me I can get
on that carpet and go straight to London, England?’
I said ‘London, England,’ captain, because
he seemed to have been so long in your part of the
world. ‘In the crack of a whip,’ said
he. I figured up the time. What is the difference
between Papeete and London, captain?”
“Taking Greenwich and Point
Venus, nine hours, odd minutes and seconds,”
replied the mariner.
“Well, that’s about what
I made it,” resumed Herrick, “about nine
hours. Calling this three in the morning, I made
out I would drop into London about noon; and the idea
tickled me immensely. ’There’s only
one bother,’ I said, ’I haven’t
a copper cent. It would be a pity to go to London
and not buy the morning Standard.’
‘O!’ said he, ’you don’t realise
the conveniences of this carpet. You see this
pocket? you’ve only got to stick your hand in,
and you pull it out filled with sovereigns.’”
“Double-eagles, wasn’t it?” inquired
the captain.
“That was what it was!”
cried Herrick. “I thought they seemed unusually
big, and I remember now I had to go to the money-changers
at Charing Cross and get English silver.”
“O, you went there?” said
the clerk. “Wot did you do? Bet you
had a B.-and-S.!”
“Well, you see, it was just
as the old boy said like the cut of a whip,”
said Herrick. “The one minute I was here
on the beach at three in the morning, the next I was
in front of the Golden Cross at midday. At first
I was dazzled, and covered my eyes, and there didn’t
seem the smallest change; the roar of the Strand and
the roar of the reef were like the same: hark
to it now, and you can hear the cabs and ’buses
rolling and the streets resound! And then at last
I could look about, and there was the old place, and
no mistake! With the statues in the square, and
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and the bobbies,
and the sparrows, and the hacks; and I can’t
tell you what I felt like. I felt like crying,
I believe, or dancing, or jumping clean over the Nelson
Column. I was like a fellow caught up out of Hell
and flung down into the dandiest part of Heaven.
Then I spotted for a hansom with a spanking horse.
‘A shilling for yourself if you’re there
in twenty minutes!’ said I to the jarvey.
He went a good pace, though of course it was a trifle
to the carpet; and in nineteen minutes and a half I
was at the door.”
“What door?” asked the captain.
“O, a house I know of,” returned Herrick.
“Bet it was a public-house!”
cried the clerk, only these were not his
words. “And w’y didn’t you take
the carpet there instead of trundling in a growler?”
“I didn’t want to startle
a quiet street,” said the narrator. “Bad
form. And besides, it was a hansom.”
“Well, and what did you do next?” inquired
the captain.
“O, I went in,” said Herrick.
“The old folks?” asked the captain.
“That’s about it,” said the other,
chewing a grass.
“Well, I think you are about
the poorest ’and at a yarn!” cried the
clerk. “Crikey, it’s like ‘Ministering
Children!’ I can tell you there would be more
beer and skittles about my little jaunt. I would
go and have a B.-and-S. for luck. Then I would
get a big ulster with astrakhan fur, and take my cane
and do the la-de-da down Piccadilly.
Then I would go to a slap-up restaurant, and have
green peas, and a bottle of fizz, and a chump chop O!
and I forgot, I’d ’ave some devilled
whitebait first and green gooseberry tart,
and ’ot coffee, and some of that form of vice
in big bottles with a seal Benedictine that’s
the bloomin’ nyme! Then I’d drop
into a theatre, and pal on with some chappies, and
do the dancing rooms and bars, and that, and wouldn’t
go ’ome till morning, till daylight doth appear.
And the next day I’d have water-cresses, ’am,
muffin, and fresh butter; wouldn’t I just, O
my!”
The clerk was interrupted by a fresh attack of coughing.
“Well, now, I’ll tell
you what I would do,” said the captain:
“I would have none of your fancy rigs with the
man driving from the mizzen cross-trees, but a plain
fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered tonnage.
First of all, I would bring up at the market and get
a turkey and a sucking-pig. Then I’d go
to a wine-merchant’s and get a dozen of champagne,
and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and
strong, something in the port or madeira line, the
best in the store. Then I’d bear up for
a toy-store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted
toys for the pickaninnies; and then to a confectioner’s
and take in cakes and pies and fancy bread, and that
stuff with the plums in it; and then to a newsagency
and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the
kids, and all the story papers for the old girl about
the Earl discovering himself to Anna-Mariar and the
escape of the Lady Maude from the private madhouse;
and then I’d tell the fellow to drive home.”
“There ought to be some syrup
for the kids,” suggested Herrick; “they
like syrup.”
“Yes, syrup for the kids, red
syrup at that!” said the captain. “And
those things they pull at, and go pop, and have measly
poetry inside. And then I tell you we’d
have a thanksgiving-day and Christmas-tree combined.
Great Scott, but I would like to see the kids!
I guess they would light right out of the house when
they saw daddy driving up. My little Adar ”
The captain stopped sharply.
“Well, keep it up!” said the clerk.
“The damned thing is, I don’t
know if they ain’t starving!” cried the
captain.
“They can’t be worse off
than we are, and that’s one comfort,” returned
the clerk. “I defy the devil to make me
worse off.”
It seemed as if the devil heard him.
The light of the moon had been some time cut off and
they had talked in darkness. Now there was heard
a roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of
the lagoon was seen to whiten; and before they had
staggered to their feet, a squall burst in rain upon
the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche
one must have lived in the tropics to conceive; a
man panted in its assault as he might pant under a
shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night
and water.
They fled, groping for their usual
shelter it might be almost called their
home in the old calaboose; came drenched
into its empty chambers; and lay down, three sops
of humanity, on the cold coral floors, and presently,
when the squall was overpast, the others could hear
in the darkness the chattering of the clerk’s
teeth.
“I say, you fellows,”
he wailed, “for God’s sake, lie up and
try to warm me. I’m blymed if I don’t
think I’ll die else!”
So the three crept together into one
wet mass, and lay until day came, shivering and dozing
off, and continually re-awakened to wretchedness by
the coughing of the clerk.