Death on an Atoll

I

I HAD been reading late that evening. Sitting on my verandah, 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 spicy 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 look 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, and dressed in blue denim trousers and a coat of white drill, was standing hat in hand 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 verandah 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 late that afternoon and had walked out from Papeete, three miles distant, 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 read it at once.

TANAO
LOW ARCHIPELAGO
DEAR SIR:—
It is nearly five years since we last met, and you may have left Tahiti long since. Nevertheless I must write, even though there is little chance that my message will reach you.
The service I am about to ask of you is one that I should hesitate to ask even of an old friend; but you are the only white man whom I know in this part of the world, and circumstances have arisen which make it imperative for me to appeal to you, however reluctantly.
I am ill, and as I have grave doubts as to my recovery it is necessary that I put my affairs in order. I have no one here but an old 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 to you. and if you find it possible to come, this same cutter will bring you to the island. I quite realize that you may not be aide to come at once, on such short notice, and I have therefore given instructions to 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, far 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 as well as the message it contained convinced me of the urgency of this matter. I asked the native who had brought it how he had chanced to call at Tanao. He explained that he and two other men (all three of them inhabitants of the island of Hao) had been returning there from Mangareva, an island at the southeastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, where they had gone for the pearl-diving season, 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 Chinaman was awaiting them, who led them to the house of the white man. The popaa was very ill and had offered him ten thousand francs if he would go to Tahiti at once and try to deliver the letter he would give him.

‘There was no one with him except his Chinese servant?’ I asked.

‘No one.’

‘What did he tell you to do in case I could not be found?'

‘He asked me to return as soon as possible and carry his Chinese servant to some island where he might take passage in a trading schooner to Tahiti.'

‘Did he speak of wanting a doctor?'

‘He said there was no need for one.’

‘What do you think of his condition?

Is it serious?’

He stretched out his hand with his thumb and forefinger held slightly apart. ‘When I saw him,’ he said, ‘he was no farther than that from his grave.’

II

At one o’clock the following afternoon we were well out at sea, and as soon as we had passed the northern extremity of Tahiti the cutter was set on the course of her seven-hundredmile voyage. There were four of us aboard: Maiti, the owner of the vessel, his two companions, Nau and Mangi, and myself. The barometer bad fallen slightly and the sky looked threatening. The wind was blowing from the westward, more strongly every moment as we came out from under the shelter of the island. Westerly and southwesterly winds usually 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.

Two days later it went round to the southeast again, and, having blown freshly for several hours, died away completely; hut 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 fastened a pandanus mat to the boom and crawled under it to sleep. Presently Maiti 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 é huihui mania, a great calm. There was nothing to do but wait.

I wondered whether Crichton, as well, was waiting, or whether we were not already too late. Maiti had told me that the voyage from Tanao to Tahiti had taken sixteen days. It was more than possible that the return voyage would require three weeks, 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 February 1920, when I first met him. I had been demobilized from the army only a few months earlier, and, feeling a need of solitude after the herded life in wartime France, I sailed from San Francisco for an indefinite sojourn in the South Seas. Arriving at Tahiti, I found that island, with its European colony, its hotels, motor cars, and motion-picture theatres, not at all the retreat I had hoped for, so I took the first opportunity that presented itself for moving on. This was a small trading schooner, the Caleb Winship, bound to the Paumotu, 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 whom he called ‘Mama-Ruau’ (Grandma), a woman of sixty or thereabout, dressed in a flowered Mother Hubbard, with her white hair hanging in a single braid.

I decided at first sight that he was English and wondered in an idle way what he was doing in that part of the world. Tino, the half-caste supercargo of the Winship, was both curious and puzzled, and on that first evening at sea took me aside to speak of Crichton. Who was he, where did he come from, and what in the name of common sense did he mean to do on that God-forsaken stretch of reef called Tanao? It was a worthless island, he told me. There was scarcely enough land above sea level to stretch your legs over, and even if it were all planted to coconut palms, in full bearing, the output would n’t amount to ten tons of copra per year. And yet, here was this Englishman, or whatever he was, going out there to settle with the old Kanaka woman who owned the place! He had taken a ten years’ lease on it, with the option of purchase at the end of that time.

This much Tino had gathered from the old woman. Her family had owned Tanao time out of mind, but they had all died off. Her husband had long been dead, and her two sons, her only remaining children, had been drowned at sea while fishing. After this she had lived alone for nearly two years until a passing schooner had given her an opportunity to go to Tahiti, where she had relatives.

‘She stayed there for some time; 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 sand bank with half a dozen coconut palms on it, a thousand miles from nowhere, but they’ll never be happy away from it. She tried to persuade some of her relatives to go back there with her. They said no, of course. Tahiti was home to them, and they were n’t such fools as to leave a high island for a place where there is 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 talking with her, although he has n’t said yes or no or how-do-you-do to me since he came aboard. Where did he pick it up? He must have been living somewhere in this part of the Pacific for a long time. Tanao! Wait till he sees it! Tell you what I ’ll do — I ’ll bet you a five-gallon demijohn of the best, rum in Tahiti that he’ll be coming back with us. He don’t know what he’s let himself in for — that’s my opinion.’

Apparently he did know, however; at any rate he failed to return with us. We remained one day at the island, unloading supplies for him, and although he was courteous enough, I felt that he was impatient for us to be gone. He treated the Mama-Ruau with invariable kindness and consideration, but it seemed to me 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 longing to be, like Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed? Or had he, perhaps, as Tino suggested later, 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 possibility 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 my oath that he was incapable of a dishonorable act.

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 an appetite as fundamental as hunger or thirst, but unlike these in that he had never yet been able to satisfy it. I gathered from one or two remarks of his that he had long been searching for just such an island as Tanao. He told me on the day we landed there that it more than fulfilled his expectations, and when I asked how long he meant to stay he said, ‘Always. As long as I live.’ I had never met a man who seemed so detached from life, so lacking in dependence upon any sort of companionship, brute or human. Nevertheless, as I sat on the rail aft, watching the atoll dwindling and blurring far in the distance, I doubted whether any man could be happy for long in a place so inconceivably lonely.

III

Four years passed. Meanwhile, like many another ex-soldier, I had been wandering here and there, looking on at life in an unfamiliar world, but having little desire to take an active part in it again. I seemed to have lost the faculty for living in a settled, purposeful way. After a year 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 the guest bedrooms in the houses of old friends, but never staying long in any one place. I went to Iceland and spent a winter there, traveling on horseback through that beautiful, sparsely populated country and gazing at the northern lights from vantage points along the arctic circle. Then I went to the Faroe Islands and from there to Norway. Then home again, via New York, and 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 these years. I could not account for the deepness of the impression he had made upon me in the course of our brief voyage on the Caleb Winship. We had, to be sure, been thrown much together during that voyage, but our companionship had rested on very slight foundations. That was his fault, rather than mine. He was very reserved at all times and seemed to have an instinctive distrust of any relationship approaching intimacy. I knew nothing of his serious thoughts and interests, and he nothing of mine; and yet, ever since I had left the island, in the strangest places and at the most unlikely moments a picture of the place would float into consciousness and focus itself at once, and I would see Crichton sitting in the shade at the inner border of a glaring white beach, looking out over the empty sea. I wondered about him, and for some reason was disturbed about him. It was an unusual thing for a man of his age — he was only twenty-eight — to bury himself as he had done. Even for an authentic lover of solitude such a procedure seemed more than a little dangerous. However, I took comfort in the thought that he himself must have realized this long since and have gone to a more habitable spot.

I returned to Tahiti in 1924, having decided in the future to make my home there for a part of each year; and on the day of my arrival I set out along the water front in the hope that I might gather some news of Crichton. After many fruitless inquiries I learned that he was still on Tanao. Not only that: he had never once left the island since the day he landed there.

A Chinaman, Chan Lee, owner of the schooner Toafa, gave me this information. He, apparently, was the only man on Tahiti who knew anything of Crichton, and he knew little. He told me that he chanced to pass the atoll in 1920 — it must have been only two or three months after my visit — and had sent his ship’s boat ashore for some drinking coconuts and a supply of firewood for the galley stove. He had not known there was anyone living on the island. Crichton had come out to the schooner and had then arranged with him to call once yearly to bring him supplies. He had also arranged to have Chan bring him some more lumber and half a dozen natives from another island to clear his land and help build his house. As soon as the work was finished these men returned home, since which time Crichton had lived alone on the island except for the old native woman and one Chinese servant whom he, Chan, had engaged for Crichton in Papeete.

Chan also told me of carrying out a load of household furnishings which had arrived for Crichton from England, and of the enormous difficulty they had in taking them ashore over the reef. Once Crichton had spoken of me, and had asked him, in case he chanced to see me, to invite me to come out with the Toafa the next time she called. This was three years before, but as Chan was about to leave for his annual visit I decided to consider the invitation still open and go with him.

It was at this time that I became convinced, intuitively, that Crichton’s destiny was, or would be, a tragic one — that he was, somehow, doomed. During the voyage with Chan Lee, I considered the situation from every point of view; took myself in hand, so to speak, as though trying to convince another man of the absurdity of his apprehensions. What was there to be concerned about? What ground had I for supposing that anything was amiss with Crichton? Here was a young Englishman. of cultivated tastes, evidently of good family, who happened to be not socially inclined, 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 character and temperament had cut themselves off from the world and had found happiness in doing so. Why not this one? Self-confidence in such a man usually meant self-knowledge. This was not the case of one foolishly enamored of a form 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 this.

So I tried, uselessly, to reason myself out of my misgivings; nevertheless when we reached the island, late of a fine afternoon, it did seem, at first, that l had been indulging in a great deal of gratuitous anxiety. Crichton and the old woman were awaiting us at the landing place; it seemed only yesterday that I bade them good-bye. Mama-Ruau, with tears of welcome in her eyes, kissed me on both cheeks, in the native fashion. She looked much frailer than when I had last seen her, — a natural change in a woman of her advanced years, — but Crichton was the same deeply tanned, healthy-looking man I remembered, except that he now wore dark glasses, a precaution against the glare of the sun. He greeted me in his quiet, reserved manner, and was, I thought, really glad to see me.

Tanao, like many another atoll in the Paumotu Archipelago, has no entrance into the lagoon. One goes ashore through the surf, in a ship’s boat, and a schooner visiting the island must stand off and on. There were supplies to land, and as we should not. be leaving till the following day I accepted with pleasure Crichton’s invitation that I spend the night ashore.

We walked across the island to his house, which stood on the lagoon beach, a quarter of a mile from the ocean beach. After a few perfunctory remarks he fell silent. Apparently he had nothing more to say, and his preoccupied manner made me feel a little uncomfortable. When we reached the steps leading to the verandah he stopped, and for a long moment stared at the ground as though deep in thought. Then he excused himself; he said that he had some business matters to arrange with Chan Lee before the schooner stood out to sea for the night. ‘Please make yourself comfortable,’ he added. ‘You might look over my house if you care to.’

That was the last I saw of him. I waited for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. Then a gong was sounded, and. walking through the passageway to the lagoon-side verandah, I found dinner awaiting me, served by Ling Foo, his servant, a weird, gnomelike little man who might have stepped out of some centuries-old book of Chinese fairy tales. He moved as soundlessly as a shadow, and although I tried several times to persuade him to speak, he merely regarded me with a detached, contemplative expression as one might look at a rock or a tree while thinking of something else. As soon as dinner was over he placed a lighted lamp on the front verandah and another in the room where I was to sleep; then he too vanished as though he had conjured himself away with the napkin he carried over his arm, and I was left alone in the midst of a silence that seemed as wide as space, as old as the beginning of the world — a silence accentuated by a ship’s-bell clock ticking away with self-important industry as though convinced that, if it should stop, time itself would be no more.

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. Common sense should have warned me that a man who had chosen the loneliest coral island in the Pacific as a home had not done so because he craved companionship. Nevertheless, taking this into account and putting my unheralded arrival in the most unfavorable light possible, I felt that he was lacking in courtesy, to say the least, to abandon me as he had. I had come ashore at his invitation, and the obligations of hospitality demanded that he should not shame me. It would have been easy for him to plead illness;almost any excuse would have been better than no excuse.

I returned to the front verandah and gave myself up to disquieting reflections. It was impossible to account for Crichton’s actions except on the hypothesis that four years of complete isolation 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. Many a man before his time had gone mad through loneliness.

Later in the evening I became convinced that he was there in the house with me — in his own room, and this conviction so disturbed me that I tiptoed across the verandah and down the steps and spent the rest of the night walking up and down the lonely outer beach longing for daylight anti the return of the schooner. When she came in, at dawn, I went aboard with the first boatload of copra, and, being tired after my all-night vigil, I lay down in my bunk and went to sleep at once. When I awoke we were headed westward again, and Tanao was only a faint bluish haze far to windward.

During the years that followed, although I often thought of Tanao and its lonely white inhabitant, I hoard nothing of either until the evening when Maiti walked into the circle of lamplight on my verandah and gave me the letter telling of Crichton’s illness.

IV

This third voyage seemed interminable — calms, head winds, calms, head winds, day after day after day. I was beginning to fear that Maiti, who depended upon the stars and instinct for guidance, had mistaken his course; but on the morning of the twenty-fifth day we sighted the atoll. With a faint breeze we approached slowly, and toward noon were within a quarter of a mile of the landing place. The cutter was brought to, my luggage was loaded into the ship’s boat, and Nau and Maiti rowed me ashore. As we approached I examined the shore line carefully, but saw no sign of life excepting a Hock of white terns floating aimlessly over the scrub at the far end of the main island. We might have been the first men ever to view that lonely place.

Fortunately the sea was calm and we got over 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 beach. I soon made it out to be an umbrella almost completely hiding the person beneath it. Maiti and Nau jumped out into waist-deep water and guided the boat across the shallows. The umbrella moved away as we approached, up the beach to the roadway leading across the island. Ling Too was the man carrying it. He kept some twenty paces ahead of us, tilting up his sunshade now and then to see that we were following, and running on again. I called out to him, but his only reply was to glance back, without stopping, and make a quick beckoning gesture.

Crichton was lying, propped up with pillows, on a sofa on the verandah. He was shockingly altered, so pale and emaciated that I should never have recognized him elsewhere. Indeed, I thought for a moment that we had arrived just too late, for his eyes were closed in their cavernous hollows, his hands folded on his breast, and his face wore the expression of peace and indifference one sees on the faces of the dead. Ling Foo ran noiselessly across the verandah and stood beside him, looking from Crichton to me and back again. Marti 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 engaged in measuring eternity by seconds. It struck half-past twelve.

Crichton opened his eyes at the sound and stared vacantly before him; then he turned his head wearily on the pillow.

‘Ling Foo? Are you there?’ he said.

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. ‘Don’t you know me, Crichton?’

His worn face lighted up. ‘You’re here?’ he exclaimed. ‘Is it possible? Please forgive me! I must have been asleep.’ He held out his hand gropingly. ‘I can’t tell you how — howgrateful I am.’

I could think of nothing to say. A sudden feeling of compassion came over me at the thought of this man’s friendlessness. The fact that he had 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. The imagination in this case lagged behind the senses, was reluctant to accept their evidence.

For all my sympathy I was conscious of a feeling of dull anger against him. What possible reason or excuse could he, a young man with the best of life before him, have had for throw ing 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 the faintest hope,’ he went on. ‘I knew that there was not one chance in a thousand of my letter reaching you. And yet I clung to that hope.’

‘I’ve been living at Tahiti for some time past,’ I said. ‘Fortunately your letter found me at home.'

‘You have? Living there? I wish I had known, earlier. In that case — No matter. You’ve come. I should have written before, but there was no opportunity to send a letter.’

‘Doesn’t the Toafa call here now?'

‘Yes, she still comes once a year, but she is not due again until September. When she was last here Chan Lee told me that he would be trading in the Marquesas most of this year. I suppose he’s there now. But you must be tired after your long voyage. Ling Foo has lunch ready for you. 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, for he was very weak and I could see that it tired him to talk. After lunch I returned with Maiti to the beach. 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. Maiti had eaten sparingly of Ling Foo’s luncheon. He joined Nail in his meal and the two men ate with enormous appetite, squatting on a slab of coral in the shallows beside a pool of still water that reflected their faces and the sky. Behind them was the reef where the surf spouted up in fountains of spume, luminous in the sunlight, and beyond that the sea, ru filed to the deepest blue by the breeze and empty save for the cutter half a mile offshore.

It was a lonely picture, full of harmony and beauty with those natives in the foreground. Maiti and Nau belonged in such a setting. They were as much a part of it as the sea birds skimming along the slopes of the combers rising to break on the reef; but I had only to close my eyes and to imagine Crichton in their place, and immediately the beauty seemed to become hostile beauty and mid-sea silence the measure of Nature’s disapproval of the incongruous element. As I sat there with that silence flowing over and around me I again tried, ineffectually, to assign some reason for his ten years’ exile. Why, why, why? The question kept reiterating itself in my mind, and I could find no answer, nor so much as a clue to one.

When the two 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 anchorage for the cutter. Therefore I arranged with them that they should go to their own island of Hao, two hundred and fifty miles distant, and return within ten days’ time, if possible. The wind was favorable for their voyage, and as soon as they had gathered a supply of green drinking coconuts they rowed out to the cutter, hauled in their boat, and stood off to the northwest. I sat in the shade watching the little vessel creep up the long slope of the sea until she was lost to view.

V

It was getting on toward mid-afternoon when I returned to the house. Crichton was sleeping; at least I thought he was asleep. A low table stood beside his couch, with a tumbler and a pitcher of water on it, and a hand bell for summoning Ling Foo. I went through to the kitchen, a spacious, airy building connected with the main house by a covered passageway. Here, as elsewhere, everything was in scrupulous order. Pots and pans, burnished and shining, hung from hooks along the wall. The stove was brightly polished, and sticks of firewood, each of them cut at precisely the same length, were neatly corded up in a bin against the wall. Ling Foo was not there. I returned to the front verandah and, taking a book from a shelf, seated myself near Crichton’s couch. Looking up presently, I found that he was awake, regarding me with a vacant and, at the same time, a thoughtful expression. I waited, surprised that he did n’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,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I did n’t know you were back. You must have come in very quietly.’

‘ Crichton! You ’re not — Have n’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 told me then what I had quite forgotten until that moment, of the trouble he had had with his eyes at the time of my last visit, caused by the glare of the sun reflected from the lagoon and the beaches of white sand.

‘I didn’t realize that it was at all serious,’ he went on, ‘and at first I took no precautions. It was very unwise. Unfortunately I had no dark glasses, and by the time I was able to get them it was too late; the damage was done.’

‘How long have you been like this?'

‘Nearly four years. I can still see the faint outline of objects close by, directly in front of me, but that’s all.’

There was nothing one could say in the face of such a calamity as that. I admired him for his stoicism. He spoke quietly of his loss, as though it were a matter of no great consequence.

‘I know the place so well, every foot of beach, nearly every tree and shrub on it, that I’ve not been hampered as much as you might think; and Ling Foo has been a faithful old servant, one in a thousand. Without him, of course, 1 should have had a hard time of it this past six months. You remember Mama-Ruau, don’t you? She died two years ago. I’ve missed her more than I can say; 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’s an extraordinary old servant of yours,’ I remarked. ‘ Is he always so silent? I’ve never yet heard him utter so much as a word.’

‘That’s because of an impediment in his speech. Poor Ling! It’s pathetic to hear him try to talk. He’s almost given up trying. How old would you say he is?’

‘I’ve often wondered. At least sixty.’

‘He tells me that he was seventy-five his last birthday. He’s a truly remarkable old chap, full of energy despite his age and never for a moment idle. He’s been with me now for eight years. Fortunately he seems perfectly contented here. I used to urge him to go back to Tahiti with Chan Lee’s schooner, to visit his friends, but he’s never wanted to go.’

‘And you, Crichton? Have you never left Tanao in all these years?’

‘Never,’ he said, and fell silent. For a moment the expression on his face grew sombre. I was sorry I had spoken.

‘Do you know, I feel much better,’ he went on. ‘Your coming has done me good.’

‘ I ’m delighted to hear you say that. 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 what you’ve done. When will they be coming back?’

‘In ten days, or perhaps two weeks, depending on the weather. Now what I have in mind is this: supposing they return two weeks from to-day; do you think you might be strong enough by that time to make the voyage to Tahiti? If not, then we can hold the cutter here until you are. You need a change, Crichton. It will do you a world of good. Will you come?’

He smiled faintly and shook his head.

‘ My dear chap, I’m at the end of my rope. I know that. I shall be dead before the cutter returns.’

I was about to speak when he interrupted me: ‘Tahiti? No, I have a longer journey than that to make. Don’t imagine that 1 regret it. On the contrary. But let’s not talk of this. Let’s not discuss my affairs this afternoon. There will be ample time for that to-morrow. Do you know what I’d like, now, if it is n’t too much of an imposition? I said just now that I had n’t minded so much losing my sight, but I have minded in one respect. I’m awfully book-hungry. Would you be willing to read to me for an hour or two?’

I read all through the afternoon until dinner time. He was a great admirer of Thoreau, and we began with his favorite chapters in Walden and passages from the Journals. Then he asked for Comus and, after that, the first part of Henry the Fourth. Ling Foo brought our food 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 great animation; he seemed as starved for conversation as he was for reading. We discussed books, chiefly, and as we proceeded from one to another his eyes lighted up with interest and enthusiasm, and a faint touch of color suffused itself over his checks. This was a Crichton I had never seen before, a delightful companion, urbane, wholly at his ease, almost light-hearted in manner.

Afterward, when the lamps had been lit, I continued reading: from Keats, Walt Whitman, Charles Lamb’s Letters, Montaigne’s Essays — whatever he asked for. We forgot time and place and circumstance, and it was not until the clock struck eleven that he said, ‘Good Lord! Can it be as late as that?’

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

‘No, not another word! You must be worn out. Thanks ever so much. I can’t tell you what a treat this has been for me.’

We chatted for a moment; then I called Ling Foo, who was dozing in a chair by the kitchen table. He brought his sleeping mat and a pillow and lay down on the floor beside Crichton’s couch in case he should be wanted in 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.

VI

We spent the forenoon of that day in settling up his affairs. He had made his will years ago, before coming out to Tanao, and a copy of this 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. He had a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds invested in securities in England, together with real estate inherited from a maternal uncle. All of his property in England was to be divided equally between two nephews and a niece, his only surviving relatives. What he particularly wished me to do was to send to his attorney — together 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 a thousand pounds on deposit in the Banque de L’lndoChine, in Papeete, and this money was to go to Ling Foo, who had served him so faithfully all these years. In order to avoid legal complicat ions I suggested that he make out a check for this amount, payable to Ling Foo. I knew the president of the bank and promised to explain matters to him so that the old Chinaman would have no difficulty in securing the money.

It was a problem to decide what to do with his household possessions. He wanted me to accept them, but I explained what he already knew, that I had a great dislike for accumulating possessions and preferred not to encumber myself with more than the bare minimum necessary for comfort, which I already had. I confess that I was sorely tempted to accept his library; but I had no room for it in my own small house, and therefore suggested that all of his books as well as his fine collection of Polynesian curios be given to the colonial museum and library at Papeete. As for his other household furnishings, they could only be removed with great difficulty, owing to the fact that they would have to be carried aboard a schooner over the reef, in a ship’s boat. Therefore it was decided to leave them where they were, for the benefit of Mama-Ruau’s relatives, if ever they should visit Tanao. The island had come to them at her death, although Crichton’s ten-year lease had still some months to run.

It seemed very strange to me to be discussing these matters with Crichton. He was businesslike, methodical, painstaking. Death was in the background, and yet, because of his quiet, matterof-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, I imagine, contained a record of his life at Tanao until the loss of his eyesight had made writing no longer possible. There was a legacy I should have been glad to accept, but it was not offered. ‘Will you please burn all this?’ he said. ‘It contains matter of purely personal interest. 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 couch to the open verandah built out over the water on the opposite side of the house. It was a glorious night, perfectly still, without a cloud in the sky. The air was cool and Crichton was covered with a rug. I stretched out in a long chair near by. As darkness came on we seemed to be suspended betwoen an upper and a nether firmament, so bright and clear were the reflections of the stars in the lagoon. I felt uneasy about Crichton; he was much weaker than he had been the previous day. The business of settling up his affairs had exhausted his little reserve of strength, and he was running a temperature which 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. A few moments later 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!’

‘My dear Crichton! Don’t speak of it. If apologies are in order, let mine come first. I barged in upon you without — ’

‘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 . . . Would you mind very much if I were to tell you something that I have never before spoken of to anyone?’

‘No, not if you want to tell me.’

‘I do want to; but whether it will be possible ... I have kept this matter a secret for so many years that it will be hard to break silence now. Let me ask you a question: have you ever wondered why I came out 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 with me? You don’t know why I have hidden myself away here?’

‘I have n’t the slightest idea.’

‘I believe you. Well, let me get this out, if I can. It will explain so much; and for some reason I feel a great need to speak — for the first and last time.

‘I am one of those men—’ He broke off and was long silent. Then he began again. ‘I am one of those men who — who are — mistakes of Nature.

‘Does this mean anything to you?’ he said, after another silence. ‘Do you understand what I am trying to say? Mistakes of Nature — tragic, irremediable mistakes. Or experiments, perhaps — who can say? How many there are, of how many kinds! There is one — the fate of a victim of that blunder in creation is the saddest, surely, that can befall a human being. That was my fate.

‘This sounds maudlin. I am aware of the fact; but I ask you to believe that I am not indulging here in selfpity. I have long since given up that habit. If you like, in this darkness think of me only as a disembodied voice, speaking of a man who no longer exists. That is not far from the truth.

‘It was many years before I knew. My people never knew. They are all dead now. My father and mother died while I was at the university, within six months of each other. The war wiped out the rest of my family — three brothers, two older and one younger than myself. I was the one to be spared. The irony of that fact has given me some bitter moments.

‘My boyhood at home was all that boyhood at its best can be. My father and mother made comrades of their children, and they had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss with one of them. Their great desire was to make our childhood happy, and, as we grew older, to help us shape our destinies 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, ancient and modern, and mathematics. Thanks to his guidance and my own inclinations I went to school with the keenest desire to acquire mastery in the use of these tools, realizing beforehand 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 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. At school I lived a healthy Spartan life, devoted to hard play and hard study. I 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 more importance than sport; otherwise I was not eccentric in any way.

‘At seventeen I went up to the university where my father and grandfather and great-grandfather had gone before me. The freedom there, after public school, was like the breath of life to me. I could live as austerely as I chose, without attracting comment, favorable or otherwise; and some of the drudgery of education was past. I now began to know a few, at least, of its pure delights. And what can equal them? Or what joy is keener 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 life work was to be. I had a scholarship in chemistry, and with the confidence and the arrogance of youth I determined to be the greatest chemist in England.

‘In my second year at the university I discovered — what had to be discovered. It was a gradual revelation, but, in the end, complete and — terrible. My case may have been exceptional, and from what I know now I think it was. The fact remains that I was unaware even of the existence of such — of such abnormality until I discovered it in myself.

‘Imagine, if you can, the desolation of spirit I suffered as a result of that discovery. No one else knew of it — not even my friend who unconsciously brought it about. He never suspected that my feeling toward him was other than that of a devoted comrade. I had the pride and the strength of will necessary to spare him and to save myself — but I left the university.

‘I went to Germany to continue my studies. 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! Don’t go on,’ I said, ‘Believe me, I — ’

‘Wait — I beg your pardon.’ He raised himself to a sitting posture and his voice became hard and cold as ice.

‘Don’t misunderstand me. I was not on the point of making any sordid confessions. There is nothing of that nature to confess. Allow me to finish. I have little more to say.’

He sank back on the pillow and Jay still.

‘Have you ever visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado? Once, in boyhood, I passed that way with my father. Imagine a chasm wider, infinitely deeper, and filled with shadow, with black night. In Germany I found myself on the brink of such an abyss — so at least I conceived of it. I looked down. I saw unfortunate creatures like myself moving about in those depths — both men and women, and neither the one nor the other. 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 did n’t trust myself. I did n’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.’

VII

He died very peacefully three days later. I had been sitting with him, and we had talked a little of common things; then he fell into a quiet sleep. About an hour later 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 ancient cemetery at the far end of the island, but near the lagoon beach at the head of a small mirrorlike cove. 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.

A lonely end to an appallingly lonely life.