The Red One

wonderful.Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal. She _was_ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and modest as a violet, asfragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender,were as asphodels on the sward of heaven. She was all flower, and fire,and dew. Hers was the sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness ofthe dove. And she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout inher belief in her mother’s worship, which was the worship introduced byEbenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. But make no mistake. She wasno mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham. All of exquisitedeliciousness of woman was she. She was woman, all woman, to the lastsensitive quivering atom of her—

  “And I? I was a wastrel of the beach. The wildest was not so wild as I,the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd. It wasesteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. I was the only living man,white, brown, or black, who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark.And on a black night I have done it under reefs in a gale of wind. Well,anyway, I had a bad reputation on a beach where there were no goodreputations. I was reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight orfrolic; and the trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigiesfrom the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under thetable. I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides. Itwas a great drinking. He died of it, and we laded him aboard ship,pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own place. Asample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach ofManatomana.

  “And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but lookupon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her. It wasthe real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got onlymadder. I reformed. Think of that! Think of what a slip of a woman cando to a busy, roving man!—By the Lord Harry, it’s true. I reformed. Iwent to church. Hear me! I became converted. I cleared my soul beforeGod and kept my hands—I had two then—off the ribald crew of the beachwhen it laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was mygame.

  “I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to areligious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion eversince. I discharged my best captain for immorality. So did I my cook,and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the same reason Idischarged my chief clerk. And for the first time in the history oftrading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. Ibuilt a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined streetsquarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith. And Imade him my pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey pot ofsweetnesses and goodnesses. And he was a man, through and through a man.And he died long after like a man, which I would like to tell you about,were the tale of it not so deservedly long.

  “It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible formy expressing my faith in works, and especially in that crowning work,the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother’s church.

  “‘Our poor church,’ she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting. Ihad been converted only a fortnight. ‘It is so small its congregationcan never grow. And the roof leaks. And King John, my hard-heartedfather, will not contribute a penny. Yet he has a big balance in thetreasury. And Manatomana is not poor. Much money is made andsquandered, I know. I hear the gossip of the wild ways of the beach.Less than a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling at cards, thanthe cost of the upkeep of our poor church for a year.’

  “And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the light.(I’d had an infernal run of bad luck.) I told her I had not tastedliquor since, nor turned a card. I told her that the roof would berepaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by her from thecongregation. But she was filled with the thought of a great revivalthat Ebenezer Naismith could preach—she was a dear saint—and she spoke ofa great church, saying:

  “‘You are rich. You have many schooners, and traders in far islands, andI have heard of a great contract you have signed to recruit labour forthe German plantations of Upolu. They say, next to Sweitzer, you are therichest trader here. I should love to see some use of all this moneyplaced to the glory of God. It would be a noble thing to do, and Ishould be proud to know the man who would do it.’

  “I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and that Iwould build a church great enough in which to house it.

  “‘As big as the Catholic church?’ she asked.

  “This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entirepopulation was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire withlove, and I told her that the church I would build would be even bigger.

  “‘But it will take money,’ I explained. ‘And it takes time to makemoney.’

  “‘You have much,’ she said. ‘Some say you have more money than myfather, the King.

  “‘I have more credit,’ I explained. ‘But you do not understand money.It takes money to have credit. So, with the money I have, and the creditI have, I will work to make more money and credit, and the church shallbe built.’

  “Work! I was a surprise to myself. It is an amazement, the amount oftime a man finds on his hands after he’s given up carousing, andgambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach. And I didn’twaste a second of all my new-found time. Instead I worked it overtime.I did the work of half a dozen men. I became a driver. My captains madefaster runs than ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes,who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf and dawdle along the way.And I saw to it that my supercargoes did see to it.

  “And good! By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt. My conscience gotso expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry itaround with me. Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzerfifty quid I’d jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before.And I compounded the interest as well.

  “Work! I planted sugar cane—the first commercial planting on Manatomana.I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons,till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane. And I senta schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and aGerman who said he knew the field-end of cane. And he did, and hecharged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold of themill-end. I installed the mill myself, with the help of severalmechanics I brought up from Queensland.

  “Of course there was a rival. His name was Motomoe. He was the veryhighest chief blood next to King John’s. He was full native, astrapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes.He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace. Hewent back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me. Theworst of it was that most of them were true. He even made a voyage toApia to find things out—as if he couldn’t find a plenty right there onthe beach of Manatomana! And he sneered at my failing for religion, andat my going to prayer-meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting.He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him. He threatened me, andI learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head.You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted hermore.

  “She used to play the piano. So did I, once. But I never let her knowafter I’d heard her play the first time. And she thought her playing waswonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the mechanicalone-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now I’ll tell yousomething funnier. Her playing _was_ wonderful to me. The gates ofheaven opened to me when she played. I can see myself now, worn out anddog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda andgazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. Why,this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in herdeliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it. It kind of broughther within my human reach. Why, when she played her one-two-three,tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss. My weariness fellfrom me. I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, cle
an asmy love for God. And do you know, into my fond lover’s fancy continuallyintruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her.

  “—That’s right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like. But I tellyou that’s love that I’ve been describing. That’s all. It’s love. It’sthe realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man. And I knowwhat I’m talking about. It happened to me.”

  Whiskers, his beady squirrel’s eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrowlike a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down asedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.

  “The cane,” he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with theback of his hand. “It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and Iwas ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding.Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in suchsuccession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more wasbeing planted and the ratoons were springing up.

  “I had my troubles the