________________________________________________
_ HAD not been in Tahiti long before I met Captain Nichols.
He came in one morning when I was having breakfast on the terrace
of the hotel and introduced himself. He had heard that I was
interested in Charles Strickland, and announced that he was
come to have a talk about him. They are as fond of gossip in
Tahiti as in an English village, and one or two enquiries I
had made for pictures by Strickland had been quickly spread.
I asked the stranger if he had breakfasted.
"Yes; I have my coffee early," he answered, "but I don't mind
having a drop of whisky."
I called the Chinese boy.
"You don't think it's too early?" said the Captain.
"You and your liver must decide that between you," I replied.
"I'm practically a teetotaller," he said, as he poured himself
out a good half-tumbler of Canadian Club.
When he smiled he showed broken and discoloured teeth. He was
a very lean man, of no more than average height, with gray
hair cut short and a stubbly gray moustache. He had not
shaved for a couple of days. His face was deeply lined,
burned brown by long exposure to the sun, and he had a pair of
small blue eyes which were astonishingly shifty. They moved
quickly, following my smallest gesture, and they gave him the
look of a very thorough rogue. But at the moment he was all
heartiness and good-fellowship. He was dressed in a
bedraggled suit of khaki, and his hands would have been all
the better for a wash.
"I knew Strickland well," he said, as he leaned back in his
chair and lit the cigar I had offered him. "It's through me
he came out to the islands."
"Where did you meet him?" I asked.
"In Marseilles."
"What were you doing there?"
He gave me an ingratiating smile.
"Well, I guess I was on the beach."
My friend's appearance suggested that he was now in the
same predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an
agreeable acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always
repays the small pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are
easy of approach and affable in conversation. They seldom put
on airs, and the offer of a drink is a sure way to their hearts.
You need no laborious steps to enter upon familiarity with
them, and you can earn not only their confidence, but their
gratitude, by turning an attentive ear to their discourse.
They look upon conversation as the great pleasure of life,
thereby proving the excellence of their civilisation, and for
the most part they are entertaining talkers. The extent of
their experience is pleasantly balanced by the fertility of
their imagination. It cannot be said that they are without guile,
but they have a tolerant respect for the law, when the
law is supported by strength. It is hazardous to play poker
with them, but their ingenuity adds a peculiar excitement to
the best game in the world. I came to know Captain Nichols
very well before I left Tahiti, and I am the richer for his
acquaintance. I do not consider that the cigars and whisky he
consumed at my expense (he always refused cocktails, since he
was practically a teetotaller), and the few dollars, borrowed
with a civil air of conferring a favour upon me, that passed
from my pocket to his, were in any way equivalent to the
entertainment he afforded me. I remained his debtor.
I should be sorry if my conscience, insisting on a rigid
attention to the matter in hand, forced me to dismiss him in a
couple of lines.
I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England. It was
a matter upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his
kind a direct question is never very discreet. He hinted at
undeserved misfortune, and there is no doubt that he looked
upon himself as the victim of injustice. My fancy played with
the various forms of fraud and violence, and I agreed with him
sympathetically when he remarked that the authorities in the
old country were so damned technical. But it was nice to see
that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land had
not impaired his ardent patriotism. He frequently declared
that England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he
felt a lively superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos,
Dutchmen, and Kanakas.
But I do not think he was a happy man. He suffered from
dyspepsia, and he might often be seen sucking a tablet of
pepsin; in the morning his appetite was poor; but this
affliction alone would hardly have impaired his spirits.
He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this.
Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men
whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single
life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they
could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees.
There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.
Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was
a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type
whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked
different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no
older. She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness.
Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was
stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her
hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill
she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not
imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having
married her why he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had,
often, and his melancholy arose from the fact that he could
never succeed. However far he went and in howsoever secret a
place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs. Nichols,
inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would
presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the
cause can escape the effect.
The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs
to no class. He is not embarrassed by the sans gene of
the hobo, nor put out of countenance by the etiquette of the
prince. But Mrs. Nichols belonged to the well-defined class,
of late become vocal, which is known as the lower-middle.
Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am certain that he was
an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was on the
Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her speak,
but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation.
At any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her.
Sometimes, sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel,
he would become conscious that she was walking in the road outside.
She did not call him; she gave no sign that she was aware
of his existence; she merely walked up and down composedly.
Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain;
he would look at his watch and sigh.
"Well, I must be off," he said.
Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a
man who had faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would
not have hesitated to fight a dozen unarmed niggers with
nothing but a revolver to help him. Sometimes Mrs. Nichols
would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen child of seven,
to the hotel.
"Mother wants you," she said, in a whining tone.
"Very well, my dear," said Captain Nichols.
He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter
along the road. I suppose it was a very pretty example of the
triumph of spirit over matter, and so my digression has at
least the advantage of a moral. _
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