TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—I RECEIVE A REWARD FOR MY PAINS

CHAPTER II—THE BLOOD RITUAL OF FRIENDSHIP

CHAPTER III—AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE LIFE

CHAPTER IV—THE VOYAGE

CHAPTER V—THE BOTTLE-GREEN PETTICOAT

CHAPTER VI—MAROONED

CHAPTER VII—“SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON’’

CHAPTER VIII—THE “MALAGA’S” BOAT

CHAPTER IX—BURDEN OF THE SEA

CHAPTER X—RESPONSIBILITIES

CHAPTER XI—CONVALESCENCE

CHAPTER XII—PRELIMINARIES

CHAPTER XIII—FEMININITY

CHAPTER XIV—THE FIRST BOARD MEETING

CHAPTER XV—SEX

CHAPTER XVI—AN INSIGHT

CHAPTER XVII—THE VENTURE BY SEA

CHAPTER XVIII—THE VENTURE BY LAND

CHAPTER XIX—THE SECOND BOARD MEETING

CHAPTER XX—THE BEGINNING OF REALIZATION

CHAPTER XXI—JONATHAN’S ADVENTURE

CHAPTER XXII—JUSTIFICATION

CHAPTER XXIII—THE APPROACH OF THE INEVITABLE

CHAPTER XXIV—MAN TO MAN

CHAPTER XXV—PUTTING IT TO THE TEST

CHAPTER XXVI—THE TEST ITSELF

CHAPTER XXVII—THE ANSWER

CHAPTER XXVIII—HOME

CHAPTER I

I RECEIVE A REWARD FOR MY PAINS

LIFE or Fate or Destiny—call it any one of the many names that happen to fit your terminology—has a subtle method of concealing its purpose. Speech and the accompanying veneer of civilization which, age by age, generation by generation, are coated over the real impulsory instincts, have succeeded in varnishing our true selves out of recognition. It is as though we were like one of those so-called old masters to be seen in picture framers’ windows. Old masters, restored, so you read on the printed card. Beneath that card is a canvas, half of which is covered by an apparently old painting, the head of a woman or man. The other half is that head restored with all the modem paint, all the modem varnish—restored, indeed, in the sense that it is made new, but no more like the original painting than a pot of paint is like a work of art.

In such a manner as this have our own real selves been restored and renovated out of recognition. Civilization, with the brushes of speech in its hand, the colours of varied manners and customs on its palette, has succeeded in concealing our real purposes, our true impulsory instincts, so that we now are scarcely conscious of the primary motives which, at the root of all, actuate us in everything we do.

Now and again in face of sudden death, so far as we can remember our sensations afterwards, we realize that the intention uppermost in our minds was the need for food, the preservation of our young, the combative instinct, which, as we regard them from a distance were actually the most important at the moment and indeed those which pulled us through. But quickly enough we forget that insight into the past, we lose all sense of the value of that vision of our primal motives, and carry on our lives in the same blind fashion, imagining that the appearances of facts, rather than the facts themselves, alone contribute to the shaping of our conduct.

This story—needing no recommendation of mine to guarantee its truth—is of one of those isolated cases in which two men, and a woman as well, were brought face to face with the absolute and eternal impulses of life, and framed their conduct, worked out their destiny as inevitably and unconsciously upon the fundamental laws of existence as though Civilization had but lightly touched them with its brush of speech, as though the pigments of habit and custom had concealed nothing of what they were.

It was all by chance I came across the story. No man who had experienced it himself could have told it to any one else or written it for the benefit of his fellow creatures. A man who had been through it would be too sensitive to see it in print, even under an assumed name, even with every detail so disguised as to make it for ever unrecognizable to any but the parties concerned.

My friend evidently had felt that about it and yet had been so obsessed with its value as regards human interest, that he had been unable to resist making a document of it up to a certain point of the story and locking it away.

I am beginning my tale this way because I feel it needs this formal announcement or introduction.

The reality of it is in no little degree the measure of its value, and the reality of it, in however slight a degree, is contained in the way in which it came into my hands.

My friend was spending a winter on the Italian Riviera when a slight attack of pneumonia forced upon him the prospect of remaining there well on into the spring. His family was with him, and, being tired of hotel life, he looked about, securing at last a charming villa for a few months on the hills just outside Bordighera.

The place fascinated him. Both he and his wife loved the Italian life, the Italian people, the Italian scenery. He woke up one spring morning with the soft winds blowing in the window across the orange trees in his garden, and felt in himself the eager desire to live there for the rest of his life.

At breakfast he broached the project to his wife and children. There was a general chorus of delight, and no sooner was the meal over than he set about securing a lease for .an indefinite period i and arranging for the furniture to be turned out with the least possible delay. His own gods—his own sticks, he insisted on having about him.

Within three days, I had received a letter from him telling me of his arrangements and the decision he had made to sell the lease of his house in Grosvenor Street.

“You can help me, ” he said blandly in his letter. “I don’t want to come home just for a household removal.”

There followed then, on a separate sheet of paper, a complete list of all the things he wanted to keep and those he wanted me to arrange to be sold in a Bond Street auction mart. The lease of his house was in the hands of agents. He did not require me to exert myself over that.

Finally he concluded, as though offering me reward—as indeed it has proved—for my trouble: “In the top drawer of that Queen Anne desk in the billiard-room, you will find a bulky package of papers. They are tied up with red tape. This is not indicative of their character. Do what you like with them.”

Such casual reference as this made no arrest upon my mind. It was not until the Queen Anne desk, with other pieces of furniture, was being packed to be sent off to Bordighera that I remembered this sentence in the letter, and before the keys were given up, took the papers away with me. One Sunday afternoon, some weeks later, when the rain was falling in cascades from the overflowing waterspouts, when the river steamed with the splash of the falling drops and the noise of it on my window-panes drowned even the distant pulse of the trams along the Embankment, I ordered the fire to be lit, filled my pipe, and took those papers out of my desk, to which I had consigned them.

It required but two moments to realize that this was no ordinary statement of facts, but a human document, set out, not with the experience of the practised story writer, nor yet with the precision of a diary, yet more intimate, more illuminating than any diary could have been; more engrossing than any tale with its introduction, its gradual development, and its climax.

Yet to have published it in the form in which I found it so absorbing would not only have been impossible by reason of the facts which it disclosed or the identities it made no effort to conceal, but its wider interest would have been lost to the outside reader. He was my friend. I had known him intimately for some years. It was because I knew him so well that the written substance of those papers was to me such an amazing revelation. But for the general reader, who was not acquainted with my friend, I knew if I were to make use of those papers as he had given me permission to, I must adopt some other form of expression.

I have transcribed it, then, into the form of a tale, with here and there actual quotations from his manuscript, where I have felt that sentences, as he had written them, with the memory of the fact vivid in his mind, were more virile and alive than my pen could ever hope to make them.

Here, then, is the story, and if it does not give the reader that impulse to reconsider the whole play of motives and emotions throughout his life, I shall be surprised. Some such impulse it gave me, and, indeed, has made me often since go back in my imagination to those days when my friend was faced with the first instincts of Nature. With that story before me, I strive to undeceive myself of those varnished and highly polished appearances of purpose with which Civilization makes us forget at times the creatures of flesh and blood we are.

I need scarcely say I have altered all names, or that I have endeavoured in every way to conceal the identity of everyone connected with the story. In a later communication, my friend expressly wished this to be done. In due time it will be seen I how natural a wish it was. So it is, I call him David.

CHAPTER II

THE BLOOD RITUAL OF FRIENDSHIP

FROM two points of view it is essential to be given a glimpse, however brief, of David Mortlake when he was a boy at school. The first is because it is important to realize his character in the period of its formation, and the second because there he met and made his friendship with John Hawkesley.

Let me take these points of view, briefly as possible, in their order. David was precocious. There is little doubt about that. His first love affair, when he was nine, was with a girl of twenty-three—the essence of womanhood to him. Th^s affection was nourished in silence and only broken when he thought he saw her laugh on an occasion when in her presence he was ordered to bed, according to custom, at half-past eight.

He quotes that incident in his papers, and writes of it with a twitch of laughter in his pen. “I must have been an abominable youth,” he writes. Later love affairs—and there were many between the ages of thirteen and sixteen—he does not allude to with derision, though apparently he does not treat them as seriously as he might. The seriousness they had for him at the time may possibly be dismissed; but as indications of the precociousness and ardent qualities of his temperament they should be considered within their proper perspective.

He became engaged to be married when he was sixteen. A Richard Feverel and Lucy love affair it was, only that in his case the Lucy was some three or four years older than himself. I refer to his papers and find that she was five years older—-a girl of twenty-one.

This affair was carried on in secret after he had left school and had gone up to Cambridge. It was only broken by the girl herself when, after two years, she found him still faithful. It became necessary then to tell him that with regard to actual marriage, she had never really entertained a serious thought of him at all. Her people hoped and indeed she herself contemplated her marriage with a man older than herself and with more solid prospects than ‘David could offer at the time.

“I happened to be going into a tobacconist’s shop just after I had received that letter, ” he has written, “and in a glass mirror I caught sight of my face. It was a pallid grey, and my eyes seemed to lie in my head like burning coals in dead ashes. I knew the man die was going to marry. I recognized it was jealousy I felt, and, looking down at the counter of the shop in some shock of realization at what I had seen in that reflection, I found my fingers had picked up one of those knives they open cigar-boxes with and were gripping it as though a current of electricity held them there.”

This, in all probability, was David’s first serious love affair. It would appear to have somewhat broken his health and impaired his nerves, since after that he suffered for some time with insomnia, finally having to be sent abroad to recuperate his strength. It was, however, by no means the first affair in which his heart was engaged. There were many young ladies, of his own age and older, with whom his affections became involved. These attachments, lasting various lengths of time, were mostly expressed by the writing of long letters conveyed by messengers pledged to secrecy.

He says himself: “I suppose other boys of that age are similarly inclined and drawn towards demonstration of their awakening affections— other boys make little fools of themselves and grow out of folly as they grow out of their knickerbockers. I have alluded to these boyish escapades only because they might be considered to have some bearing upon the events it is my intention to set forth. ”

Undoubtedly they have a great bearing as he supposes, and indeed contribute in no small way to the violent contrast of that situation in which surely no two men were ever placed before or since.

When he says that other boys of that age are similarly inclined, as was he, I fancy he suggests a greater proportion than surely can be the case. The affectionate instincts of most boys are slow in development. As a rule they have the greatest .contempt for demonstrativeness and shudder when even their mother kisses them in the presence of their schoolmates.

I have no doubt David, too, would have avoided any public exhibition of his affections, but that did not deter him from pursuing them in secret.

“If I thought I loved one girl,” he said, “I thought I loved twenty, until after I had gone up to the ’Varsity and was jilted and then really knew what the business was like.”

It is not perhaps so extraordinary that at that age if he liked one he liked twenty girls, the astonishing fact is that, between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, twenty girls of all ages should have liked him.

The girl who jilted him had apparently found no little delight in his love-making. This is the fact that seems to me of vital importance, which, indeed, should be remembered and taken into consideration when the story in the swiftness and tensity of its motion is like to sweep such memory absolutely from the mind.

I come now to the second point of view from which it has seemed necessary to me to give this brief sketch of David’s youth. It was at school and between the ages of thirteen and sixteen that he met John Hawkesley.

At first they were antagonistic. David, quicker of perception, keener in imagination, intuitive, sometimes almost to a feminine degree, outstripped this quiet, plodding boy, who came by his rewards through sheer hard work, indomitable perseverance, and a quality of intellect which, moving slowly and deliberately, attains a sure and successful end.

It was no doubt this quality of success in both their temperaments which clashed in those early days at school. Both, in all probability without realizing it, recognized that capacity in each other. Both felt the spirit of conflict it created between them; David swiftly in a first glance, John gradually as they came into opposition to each other through the daily round of school life.

They were in the same form, and there, David’s quicker intelligence left John plodding far behind, not stationary, but advancing by inevitable and unvarying stages of progression. He had in those days a supreme contempt for the way in which David did his work. Translations left to the inspiration of the moment when the class was sitting and often carried off with brilliant success, were prepared by John with laborious thoroughness. His results were those of unqualified accuracy, but literal to such a degree as never earned for them the enthusiasm of the master. They deserved their points and they got their points, and by reason of those points, John slowly but steadily rose in the form to the position he deserved.

It was more, however, in the playing field that the true essence of conflict between them was pronounced. Here, for instance, David was a half-back in the Rugby fifteen, while John was a forward. Just such positions as these they might have been expected to fill. Both were good players, invaluable to the team, yet there was no question as to who, in their separate capacities, won most applause from the school.

To any one ignorant of the game of Rugby football this comparison may somewhat miss its point, but I pursue it for a moment, because David, in those papers of his, makes much of it, and to me, at least, it is full of illumination.

David was one of those brilliant players who scores again and again by daring feats and lightning appreciation of opportunity. John Hawkesley carried the weight of the scrum on his broad shoulders, keeping the pack together when the odds were all against them.

David’s most notable feat appears to have been on the occasion of a great match when five minutes before time the scores were level. The game was pressing in the school twenty-five. The ball had come out of the scrimmage and was in the hands of the opposing three-quarters. A little careful passing and a try was certain. You may be sure the school, looking on, held its breath. It was then David made a fierce feint to tackle the three-quarters. So determined was the feint that the ball was passed to safety. This was exactly what David had anticipated. Every muscle in his body was set for the volte-face as he turned, leapt, and caught the ball in mid-air. Then followed the greatest exhibition of an individual run the school had ever seen. Alone he carried the ball out of his own twenty-five. There was no one to pass to. Alone he carried it the whole length of the field, tricking the full-back as neatly as a full-back has ever been tricked in his life and planting a try—as they say in football journalese—between the uprights.

That was David’s feat. John’s, in its way, was no less characteristic or worthy of applause. A scrimmage had broken away in their opponents’ twenty-five. It was no moment to pick up the ball and pass. A loose ball in one’s own twenty-five—but this story is not for players of Rugby football. The forwards were dribbling it at their feet. At their feet John threw himself on the ball —one cannot praise him for his duty—while his body became the butt of all their kicks. But that was not all. He held the ball; he got to his feet; he started for the goal line, and immediately there were three men like dogs at his heels. One sprang on his shoulders, two took him round the middle, yet all between them could not bring him to the ground. He carried them, all three, fifteen yards on his back and scored a try, with the school lined around the touch line shouting themselves hoarse with delight.

David tells these two stories with uncommon zest. He loved the one evidently no less than the other, and it is not only because he thought they served his purpose that I have troubled the reader with them, but because they are vivid pictures to my mind of that contrast of character which makes for this story the absorbing interest it has.

There is only need now to speak of that antagonism which existed between them for the first three terms while they were together at that school. It ended in the fourth term, when, on some schoolboy pretext, a challenge was given by John and a fight accepted by David in the comer behind the chapel. There were sides for both parties, but no doubt about the issue. /

“If you like to beg my pardon,” said John while they were taking off their coats, “that’ll be enough.”

David’s taunt to the effect that if John had lost his stomach for a fight it was his own lookout, settled matters as to that, but by no means belied his feelings about the business.

He says: “I felt as sick as a cat, and couldn’t have been better pleased if a master had come round the comer of the chapel and stopped it before it began. The fear, however, of showing fear is the most compelling fear of all. I knew John was not afraid of me. It) was really generosity on his part. He was ready to give up his first chance of scoring heavily over me. I did not regard it in that light then, and utilized the opportunity for a cheap gibe at his expense. He was not out of pocket for long.”

I somewhat like the honesty of that—“he was not out of pocket for long”—and apparently it was no less than the truth. In scarcely more than ten minutes, John Hawkesley had, as David says, “made a complete mess of him.” Half a dozen times from the force of John’s powerful blows, he had found himself sprawling on the ground. It was a moment of no little relief to him when a master did make his appearance round the comer of the chapel wall and put a stop to the encounter.

As they walked away in the crowd of boys, David, with his bleeding nose, his cut lip, and two puffy eyes, found himself by the side of John. He firmly believes, he says, that it was what John did at that moment which became the basis of their friendship.

“He was scarcely hurt at all,” says David,

“and I was bleeding like a stuck pig. As we were pushed together in the crowd of boys, he just said, ‘Want a handkerchief?’ and gave me his own to use on my bloody face. What that meant as a chance to wipe away the evidence of defeat, I can’t exactly explain but it was the soul of generosity, and I took it.”

This was the beginning of the friendship between David and John Hawkesley. Before two more terms had gone by, they had earned the nickname of David and Jonathan, and, except for the forms which at that time separated them, were never seen apart.

As introduction to the events that follow, indeed to the whole purpose of this story, these few incidents are practically the sum of all that need be said. David left school for the ’Varsity, Jonathan for a college of mining engineers. The stream of life came between their days together, but did not divide their friendship.

Neither one nor the other was given to correspondence. They met frequently, but generally at each other’s clubs; spent an evening together, mostly filled with school reminiscences, and then fell apart again. The career which Jonathan had undertaken carried him into far countries, prospecting for his company. The work suited his temperament. He had a strong vein of adventure in him combined with a proud satisfaction in the loneliness of his own company. For months he would be away in the wildest comers of the earth, then turn up unexpectedly one day in London, dropping in at David’s breakfast-hour in the Albany as though he had done little more than cross the street to get there.

At the respective ages of thirty-five and thirty-six neither of them was married. Both chaffed each other about their possible chances, but whatever chances there were, neither David nor Jonathan availed himself of them. With Jonathan perhaps ‘it was an inherent and temperamental shyness in the presence of women. It would be idle to say that he did not know or had not experienced their attractions. More it was that he was fearful of the power he knew they would have, and the influence they would exert upon his life.

With David, he confesses, it was the bitterness of that first love affair which in some sense gave him immunity. It was not so much that he lost his liking for women as that he liked too many. One would have the attraction of the woman who had jilted him; another the attraction of constancy she had never possessed; another possessed them both, and yet another possessed neither, but had an attraction of her own. He became intimate with them all, but loved none.

I

“Men,” he writes, on one of those papers he left me in that Queen Anne desk—“men only love one woman, and if they lose her, they go on loving her qualities in other women, never finding them all, for the rest of their lives. I believe, ” he says, “in the principle of mating. We pick and choose— but some of us are picking all our lives.”

CHAPTER III

AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE LIFE

IT was when David was thirty-seven and Jonathan thirty-eight, there arose that chain of events which, in the phrase with which this story begins, revealed in these two the purpose of Life, Fate, or Destiny so cunningly concealed in ninety-nine individuals out of a hundred.

David, well-to-do, with a comfortable little fortune whisch had been left him by one of those unexpected turns of generosity in a distant relative, was contemplating a three months’ big game shooting in Central Africa. Jonathan, from the wilds of South America, returned just as David was making a fuss over buying kit, his floor strewn with tropical garments, gun cases standing in corners of the room, and books of travel lying open on the table.

“What the deuce is this?” asked Jonathan, putting his head round the comer of the door, never announcing his presence, but speaking in that casual tone of voice—in the same way as he had offered the loan of his handkerchief, or as though he had just walked up from those rooms he always kept in Gray’s Inn and called his permanent hutch. So far as being a permanency, he kept them always, but if he occupied them two months out of the year, it was as much as ever he made use of them.

“What the deuce is this? ” said he, and twice over. To the repetition of that question, David explained, whereupon Jonathan sat down on the nearest chair, looking on in silence at the process of packing with a sympathetic grin of amusement on his face.

“Going to wear all those things?” he asked presently.

David referred to authorities—mostly tailors— who had assured him he would require every stitch.

“Well—put the strongest and the most durable on your back, ” said Jonathan.

David enquired why.

“Niggers, ” he was told, “have a habit of losing interest in their load, dropping it in unlikely places, and you never see them again. A wise man keeps his best on his back.”

“The man who’s arranging the trip will see to that, ” said David, with all the confidence of one who has paid his money in advance. “He’s told me what to bring, and. says I can leave all the porterage question entirely to him.”

Jonathan sat silent for some moments, and then he said: “You’re going to a part of the world where values as you understand them don’t exist. You seem to have forgotten that, or perhaps you never knew it. You’re going to a part of the world where money has only face value, and as soon as it’s in the next man’s pocket its face is out of sight. Where you’re going, human nature is human nature. In this environment one’s apt to forget what that is. But as far as all this kit’s concerned, I’ll tell you. If a man finds the load of it more irksome than he thinks the money’s worth he’s been paid to bear it, he’ll drop the whole caboose in the night and he’ll scoot. There are no symbols where you’re going. It’s the real thing—the real instinct—the real impulse. Money, in Piccadilly, is a symbol, with the law behind it to hold it up on the end of a processional staff. Out there, it’s what you can get for it, and, having got it, it means nothing to any one but you. That’s as immoral as you like, but it’s what Adam and Eve felt when they shared the apple off the tree, and if you’d knocked about as I have, you’d know there’s the old Adam and the old Eve still to be accounted for in every human beast that walks on two legs. We’re civilizing—but it’s a mistake to suppose we’re civilized. We’re growing, but it’s a mistake to suppose we’re grown up. Behind the mass that follows the symbol in the procession, there’s still the individual who only knows the value of things when they’re his.”

When Jonathan talked after a long silence, it was generally a serious effort of speech. His intelligence had not that swiftness of David’s. He never arrested attention by what he said. He forced his claim upon it.

I have transcribed the whole-of these remarks of his not only for the bearing they have upon the story which follows, but because of their value in these times of world upheaval when man is brought face to face with the elemental conditions of his nature, and politicians, despite themselves, are being made to realize what Jonathan describes as “the individual behind the mass that follows the symbol—the individual who only knows the value of things when they are his.”

I do not want to depart from my story to insist upon this point of view. I will only quote one remark of David’s at the very end of his papers.

“Politicians,” he says, “are the mountebanks, the quacks, the charlatans of modem civilization. So long as they refuse to realize the actual human being at the heart of the ballot, they will continue to be the false priests of human emotions; so long as they continue to regard the individual as merely a pawn in the game, they will lose the chivalry of their knights, the sanctity of their bishops, and all the true sense of kingdoms in their kings and queens. They will, ” he ends abruptly, “lose the very game they are playing for their own paltry and contemptible ends.”

I quote that not only because it is in his papers, but because to him it was part of the lesson he learnt under the extraordinary conditions that are to be related here. It is merely a side’ issue of what he realized, yet I could not omit it as part of the aspect of the whole case.

The next morning after his return, Jonathan attended a board meeting of his company. There he learned that it was required of him to go to some district north-west of Rhodesia, to prospect in a part of the country where reports informed them there was likelihood of copper in large quantities.

They gave him a month’s holiday, and believed him—as he was—the most valuable servant in their employment when he said that he wanted no more than a week at home. In an hour he was back at David’s chambers in the Albany.

“When are you going?’’ he asked.

David gave him the day.

‘‘Booked your passage?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m with you.”

“You?”

“Yes—you and I, who’ve never done more together than walk down Piccadilly and dine at the ‘Savoy’—who’ve seen no more together than pretty girls in painted scenes at the theatres. You and I, and we’ll lean over the taffrail of the old boat and look at things with no back-cloth to them. Then you can tell me what you’re doing with your life, and I’ll tell you what I’m doing with mine. There’s time to talk on an old boat thumping out her fourteen knots. And I expect we shall find we’re both of us missing the whole purpose of it with both hands. The half-backs are passing us the ball all the time, and all the time we’re letting it slip through our fingers. Cheer oh! ”

CHAPTER IV

THE VOYAGE

THEY sailed from Tilbury docks one Thursday afternoon on the Malaga bound for Forcados. This was as long ago as the year 1910, long before world catastrophes were thought of and Europe lay, to all appearances, asleep, dreaming gently of a permanent Civilization; sublimely unconscious of the human passions hidden in the mass of peoples, though still actuating in the private life of each separate individual, still the elemental root of all that force which now is licensed in its feast of blood throughout half the world.

The man conducting the big game shoot, in whose hands David had placed himself, was to be met at Lokoja, some four hundred miles up the Niger River, where you take off into the unknown heart of the wild world. He had gone out some two weeks ahead to make all preparations, so that they would be ready to start on David’s arrival.

Jonathan described it as a Cook’s tour, which might as well have been to catch lizards on the steps of the Roman amphitheatre at Fiesole as’ hunt lions in Central Africa.

“The fun of doing things in this world, ” he said, “lies in doing them for yourself.” To which David replied: “The fun of doing things in this world lies in doing, not labouring at them.”

At every turn in this story, you have the contrast of these men flung vividly before you. I could not help realizing as I read David’s papers, that here were two prototypes: the old civilization and the new, the one with all the force of physical nature, silent but insistent, in him, the other with all the force of nature’s increasing mentality leaping towards the unknown, just as David had leaped into the air to intercept that pass on the football field which the swift action of his mind had superimposed upon the mind of his opponent.

Leaning over the taffrail of the old boat as she drove her southern path through waters now blue, now green, now grey of lead with the mists that beat across Biscay, they talked, long whiles together, as they had said they would, of what they were doing with their lives.

David spends many pages in his papers on the full report of those conversations. They are all an illuminating part of that human document, but cannot, in the accumulating interest of the story, be quoted in their entirety.

“The conversation,” says David, “one night turned on the question of marriage. It was a couple of nights before we had reached Teneriffe. The scent of the tropics was getting into the air. We had been out some days. I can’t describe that scent of the tropics. Somewhere in the inner galleries of your mind, it knocks down the Ten Commandments like a row of ninepins. I suppose Jonathan must have felt romantic, and, as far as I am concerned, it was the scent of the air in my blood, like the perfume you catch in the wake of a woman who passes you in the street. Immediately behind her as she goes by there is a sort of vacuum created by the motion of her passage. For a moment you notice nothing. Then the atmosphere sweeps in, sweeps in to a trail of faint perfume that lingers in the air and reaches your nostrils when it is too late to see what she was like. You do not get an impression of that woman in particular. She has gone on too far ahead for that. But you get an impression of her whole sex, as of a voice calling from beyond still curtains, a voice it were unwise to listen to, a voice it would be folly to ignore.”

This is David feeling out into those realms of literature which it never really became his ambition to explore. Had it ever been so, then surely he and not I would have been, what for a better title I must call, the author of this book. Literature, indeed, he never took to, though he was a great reader of books. Yet seldom to my knowledge have I come across a nature more capable of expressing itself. His music was a joy to listen to, though impossible to capture on the printed page. He played by ear and many a half hour have I listened to him improvising gestures, phrases, impressions; meditations in music. The charm of them was irresistible, yet so long as you heard him he might never play them again.

It was the same with his painting. I have pictures of his now on my walls, pictures which in some subtle sense of truth they possess have found a lasting place on my walls and have a meaning there, a meaning, the interest of which is always fresh in my mind.

I have no hesitation in believing that the un- expected generosity of that distant relation, leaving him his comfortable fortune, deprived the world of a true artist. To me it seems his capacities were limited by the complete absence of desire for publicity, a genuine contempt for fame. His music and his painting both satisfied him, insomuch as they expressed himself and pleased his i friends. He asked no more of life or the talents which had been given him.

“What would happen if I got a name for these things?” he once said to me. “It would become more real than the things themselves. If I got a success, nothing would content me but that I should heap another on top of it. God would never have made the world if there’d been anyone to praise Him for it. He’d have lived on His reputation for the first day. ’ ’

Here anyhow was David wandering—as amiably as he wandered all through life—in the paths of literature. His description of that night on the Malaga, when he and Jonathan leant on the taff-rail, dropping the ash from their cigars into the running sea below, is worth continuing.

“A girl had been singing songs downstairs, ” he goes on. He does not mention whether he had entertained the audience himself as well he could have done. “She had that quality of voice which disarms criticism—in truth, never asks for it. It was simple, straightforward, sweet without quality, gentle without technique. The sort of voice a mother sings her kid to sleep with, when she thinks they two have got the whole house to themselves. It made me realize how many miles I was from England. It had some sort of effect of the same nature on Jonathan, though I don’t suppose for a moment he traced it. All that happened was that after she had sung three songs, an elderly gentleman who was going out to Teneriffe for his health, got up and said: ‘I’m going to tell you a few funny stories that I don’t think you’ve heard before.’ Jonathan looked down at me and said: ‘What d’you say to a stroll on deck?’

“On deck we went, hearing the voice of the elderly gentleman as we passed up the companion-way, saying, ‘I was once staying with an aunt of mine in Moreton-in-the-Marsh. ’ Then the rush of that soft air off the sea beat in our faces, the million stars washed out the sight of the cabin lights, and the swish of water swallowed up his voice.

“I suppose we must have walked a mile up and down that deck without saying a word, when Jonathan suddenly stopped under the captain’s bridge and leaning on the taffrail, he said: ’I’ve been trying ever since we started to put into two or three-short sentences—like the orders I give to foremen—what I’m doing with my life, and I’m damned if I can do it. The whole thing beats me sometimes. Men have the means of living and women have the means of life. Somehow or other that seems all wrong. It’s bad business. It’s rotten organization.’

“I laughed,” says David. “It was so plain where all that had come from. A little girl with a gentle voice, singing simple songs to the accompaniment of an upright Broadwood piano, and here was a man with a biceps like a lump of iron pyrites talking about women having the means of life and feeling that they had somehow beaten him in the bargain.

“I told him there was an obvious way out of the difficulty. ‘Rotten as the organization may be,’ I said, ‘it’s capable of adjustment on good business lines.’

“‘What lines?’ he asked. ‘The two capacities are opposed. A woman brings life into the world which she can’t support. A man can find the means of living and cannot, in the self-centred order of things, be expected to turn those means to any one’s account but his own. What’s the adjustment possible between functions as diametrically opposed as those?’

“‘An amalgamation of the two firms,’ said I. ‘Matrimony. That’s what you and I have failed to do with our lives.’

“‘What?’

“’ Marly. We’re a couple of bachelors. ’ “Jonathan dropped a half-inch of cigar ash into the swirl of water rushing by beneath us. In that still night I believe we both thought we heard the hiss of it.”

I must leave out some of David’s narrative here, for with his disregard for the construction of a story, much that followed in the relation of their conversation that night is superfluous. They both talked as, on such rare occasions as these when there is no counter-attraction of life, men sometimes do talk of the women who have come and gone in the gamut of their experience.

It is enough to say that Jonathan’s was a far more simple statement than that of David’s. The work upon which he was engaged had saved him on more than one occasion. Just as the situation had been drawing to a crisis, he had received his sailing orders and set off towards some obscure comer of the world where for many months black women were the only creatures of the sex with whom he came in contact.

David laughs as he reports him saying:

“The moment the old whistle blew, I used to feel, Well, I’m out of that. I’m blowed if I know whether I’m glad or sorry—but I’m out of it. By the time I get back we shall both be wondering what the dickens we saw in each other.’ ’’

Jonathan, it is plain enough to be seen, was the restless, the roving, and adventurous spirit.

“You can’t,” he said concisely—“you can’t meet the ordinary risks of life—my sort of life— you can’t meet ’em face to face when there is any one’s but your own ugly features between them and you. I like my job better than anything else in life. I like the risk of it, the freedom of it, the infinite variety of it. If I married, I should have to give up this side of it and take to the wrangling of floating companies in London board rooms. Well —women won’t give up exercising their means of life—why should I give up my capacities for the means of living, means which I choose to take in my own way?”

There is Jonathan’s case for the bachelor, while David’s, if more intricate, is much the same.

“I had never found the woman,” he says with characteristic honesty, ‘‘who I thought could bear the sight of me after a few months. The only women who were interested in me were interested because they could not find me out. I always knew the moment when they had. It was a matter of disillusion for both of us—for her because she thought she had found out all about me, for me because so long as she tried, I knew she would only find out half. It was not that I wanted to shirk the responsibilities of married life, or the bringing of children into the world. There were times when I longed for them. But over and above all those times hung the inevitable sense of jeopardy in which I was placing not so much myself as someone else. I don’t know how many times I have read that sentence of Stevenson’s in Virginibus Puerisque—a bedside book of mine—the sentence in the first essay of that name. ‘She, whose happiness you most desire,’ he writes of marriage, ‘you choose to be your victim.’ And again, ‘ God made you, but you marry yourself and for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you.’ And lastly, ‘You may think you had a conscience and believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife? ’ ”

This, then, is David’s case, and as I have said, there is little to choose between them.

In such a manner they talked that evening on the deck of the Malaga, leaning over the taffrail beneath the captain’s bridge. That conversation probably lasted for an hour or more and then the sounds of the tinldy notes of the old Broad wood piano crept up the steps of the companion-way, jingling in their ears. Another moment and the girl’s voice began singing:

“A little winding road

Goes over the hill to the plain.”

“Let’s come down below,” said Jonathan. “It’s blowing up for rain.”

CHAPTER V

THE BOTTLE-GREEN PETTICOAT

IT was on the ninth day out, after they had passed Teneriffe, there happened that which, for those whose taste is for adventure, sets this story in the swift motion of events.

The few hours they spent on shore in that port while the Malaga shipped her coal, though David gives some pages to their account, are not of real value. His descriptions of the dust of coal, the noisy rattle of the steaming winches,—“like a factory of lathes with every bolt gone loose, ” of the shrill screaming and whistling of Spanish dance music from the coaling gang as they worked like slaves under the lash of time, even Of the small brown naked boys, “shiny like otters,” crowding round the ship in their cockle-shell boats, howling for pennies—all these excursions of David’s into the realm of descriptive writing are no more than indicative of the artist he was, of the way in which the making of a picture, even in a medium as foreign to him as words, had its irresistible fascination.

Of greater interest than this is the account he gives of himself and Jonathan, taking the young girl who sang “The little winding road” to lunch at the Metropole Hotel, having already escorted her round the town to all the lace shops within range,

“We sat in the Palm Court after lunch,” says David, “and most of that time, Jonathan scarcely said a word. There was I, talking about big game shooting as though I’d been in the tropics half my life, and he, who had seen the world all sides, sat smoking his cigar and chewing a smile into it whenever I got right out of my depth with the questions she kept pitching at me.”

Only that paragraph seems to me of interest, for again it is the sidelight of contrast just flung for the moment on these two. The rest of his narrative, so far I mean as that break of the voyage at Teneriffe is concerned, is composed of a description of the town itself, which, being his first journey out of Europe, seems to have impressed him beyond the necessities of what he had to tell. Making a precis of all he has written here, I could easily sum it all up in three or four words: “Mules, dust, and English beer—according to advertisements.” I feel I am losing no value in the story when I leave it at that.

It was, as I have said, on the ninth day out and three days after they had passed Teneriffe, that David, Jonathan, and the young girl were walking up and down the deck after dinner. He does not even mention the girl’s name; therefore I take it she had made no really deep impression on him.

They were cutting in fairly close to the coast as the course had turned sou’east by east, and that morning, so they had been informed, had passed Cape Palmas. A purple cloud, settled like a butterfly on the horizon, was all they had seen of the land. Before sunset it had vanished again, though they were scarcely more than eight miles out. A wind was getting up and the prospects of a nasty spell of weather were gathering about the sky. “The sun,” says David, “had dropped down the heavens, that were a field of primroses.”

It was the girl, apparently, who first noticed the approach of danger. “She stopped as we were walking-,” he says, “and flung her head up like a young deer at the fringe of the herd, tossing its nose up into the wind. Then she just said, “Smoke!’”

David describes with compelling realism the effect upon him of that word, of the scent of burning which the next moment reached his nostrils, and of the low murmuring sound, like many voices, merged in anger very far away, that came to his ears from the bows of the ship.

“I knew that instant,” he says, “that it was my heart which pumped the blood through my arteries to my veins, which fed my brain, and recorded itself in my pulses. For that moment I felt there was nothing of my body but my heart, pounding in midair like the screw of the ship lifted out of the water and whirling in space. Jonathan looked at me, sniffing the air. Then we heard a bell go—a bell that sounded like an alarm-clock gone mad and jerking you, with a snatch at your spine, out of the midst of sleep. The next moment a tongue of flame, just like a ghost that had burst its way out of prison, leapt out of the companion-way right up for’ard, and an instant latter, the deck was black with running men. And all the time, down in the saloon, we could hear them discussing the last hand of bridge, while the next man dealt the cards for a new rubber.”

It was Jonathan who acted first. David’s description of him in that hour or so which followed is filled with an underlying enthusiasm of admiration. Somewhere down in his cabin there was a heavy automatic in one of his boxes. Without a moment’s hesitation, he had vanished down the stairway to the saloon and fetched it out, coming up on deck a moment later with the weapon, cocked, in his hand.

“For one instant,” says David here, “there flashed back through my mind the things Jonathan had said in my rooms in the Albany, that day when I was packing. ‘Where you’re going,’ he had said, ‘there are no symbols. It’s the real thing—the real instinct—the real impulse.’ And before the memory of the words had crossed my mind, there was the actual picture of it, dramatized in living fact before my eyes. Half a dozen Dagos, coal-trimmers, who had come up with that crush of men, mostly the crew, from the for’ard part of the ship, had rushed one of the boats. Frantically, like men tossed in a gale of wind, as their primitive emotions swept over them, they were tugging at the davits, climbing into the boat, and taking the salvage of their dirty lives into their own hands.

‘‘With a voice of thunder and an eye that sparkled like a piece of steel on flint”—David was stretching out for his similes here—“he told them to clear the boat. He raised his revolver and showed them what he meant, but they thought he was talking the sort of thick air you get out of the engine-room. They went on. They began lowering the boat. Then Jonathan shot the leader of them. Clean through his head the bullet went.- He crumpled up like a coat falling off a clothes-peg, and the look of surprise that came into the faces of the others would have been laughable at any other time. They nipped out of that boat, back on deck again, just like so many black beetles out of a trap. ”

That fire on board the Malaga is merely an incident in this story, a sign-post marking the road by which these two came to that situation, wherein lies the purpose of this tale. Under ordinary circumstances I would not attempt to describe it. The incident in it self is isolated, an event to be seized upon by such as have a taste for horrors in public places without knowing anything of the real tragedy awaiting some person or persons when the news is brought home. Of itself that burning of the Malaga is no more dramatic than the accidental killing of a stranger in the street, when there is blood to be seen and excitement to be felt, with no relation to the actual story of which it is a part, and ceasing to be interesting directly the ambulance has come along and carried the bleeding body away.

A current number of any newspaper of that date will give a full description of the burning of the Malaga in true and impressive journalese, laying characteristic stress upon all those incidents by which the newspaper-reading public are made acquainted from day to day with the ugliness of life from suicide, murder, and sudden death to the unsavoury details of divorce.

I am omitting, therefore, a considerable amount of the detail upon which David has exercised his literary ambitions—in whom it was to be excused, seeing how vivid those details must have remained in his mind—because the mere fact that these two were cast adrift is sufficient for my purpose. It is enough to say here that in two hours the Malaga from stem to stem was a flaming beacon upon the highway of the ocean, and that within that time not a soul was left aboard.

One point, however, of undeniable interest there was in all David’s lengthy description of it, and that, his first realization of those primitive instincts in the human animal, and how, the lower one went in the scale of civilization, the easier it became to break through the veneer to the elemental passions beneath.

“I saw people,” he says, “taking it well enough for the first hour, but whose power of control broke down at length under the strain of waiting for their release from that relentless furnace. All their civilized instincts went from them, leaking out like water from a cup that is cracked. The expression of lower and more unbridled purposes of life crept gradually into their faces. In the end they became less than human. The ideals of civilization had lost their hold. Primitive instincts took their place. You could almost tell from the look in the eyes that moment when the breaking-point had come. It was terrible to watch it, yet sturdy enough it was plain to be seen.”

Of the few illuminating instances David mentions in support of his observations, I firmly believe it best to give no details. The contention of this tale is fully borne out by the more human situation which was an outcome of that tragic disaster. There is no need to frill it with the ghastly incidents connected with the tragedy of that ill-fated ship.

The storm which had been closing about them the whole of that day, seemed to have been waiting for such a moment as this. No sooner were the boats launched than, with all its fury, it burst upon them.

• With considerable reserve, characteristic of that critical judgement he passed upon the value of all his actions, David says little of what he did himself in the stress of those terrible circumstances. Jonathan’s conduct during those two hours, until the boats were all cleared, he describes with the enthusiasm which one man must always feel for the brute strength of one physically superior to himself. Again and again, it appears, he went down into the cabins where the smoke of the burning ship was already suffocating the passengers, and brought back some woman or child unconscious in his arms.

“His strength,” says David, “seemed to be the strength of a beast at bay, and he was swearing all the time.” A sentence or two later he adds—“Hiked the sound of those oaths from him, but they were no use to me.”

That indeed, knowing David as well as I did, I can well imagine. I can see his lips grown thin and set in a firm line. Of those two, with his quicker mentality, he would have looked the facts more squarely in the face, been more conscious of danger, have had need for the greater exercise of control, and, had sharp decision of mind been needed at any given moment, would have been the more capable of the two to supply it.

There is just one incident which he mentions concerning himself I cannot omit, and from which it may be assumed—though that is far from his intention—that he himself was by no means idle while Jonathan was displaying that strength of the beast at bay. His own description of it is best.

“One woman I found,” he writes, and cannot thereby help himself in implying there were others he saved, “who was lying unconscious behind the piano in the saloon. It was pretty obvious what had happened. She had been playing the piano when the first alarm of fire came through to the saloon passengers. The shock of that alarm had bowled her over. She had fainted and then been forgotten in the general rush to the boats. Looking round the saloon, in the state of mind we were all in then, it might easily have been supposed the place was empty. I just happened to catch sight of the edge of her petticoat by the leg of the piano. ”

It was characteristic of David that he should remember the colour of that petticoat and think to describe it as “that sort of bottle-green indicating the taste of a woman who will not put up with the first shade that is handed to her. A lot of good her taste in colours was to her then! ’ ’

It is obvious from this how much better it is for me to let David tell his story whenever I can. I should never have dreamed of such a description.

“She was a woman of about twenty-five,” he continues. “I had not seen her before; not even at Teneriffe, so I presume she must have been feeling pretty rotten those first few days out. This was evidently her first appearance, and a sorry sort of one to have made. For that appearance, she had evidently considered with no little care,—I am thinking of the bottle-green petticoat,—and there she lay, unconscious on the floor, her hair and her dress all disarranged by the fall, and looking as helpless as any human being I had ever seen in my life.

“I whipped her up in my arms. There was no time to waste. Even in that unconscious condition she was a beautiful creature to look at, and I have no shame in saying it that, as she lay in my arms, the thought flashed across my mind how at any other time, my heart would have been beating somewhat the faster were I to find myself in such a predicament.

“I carried her on deck as quickly as I could. She was no light weight, and I was staggering when I reached the boats. There Jonathan saw me and gave a hand. He lifted her like a feather,—though he had been working hard for more than an hour then,—and I could not help noticing how little sensation that helpless body of a woman in his arms brought to him. He just lifted her as though she were a dead-weighted sack of flour, and passed her along to one of the sailors in the boats, never noticing her face, only concerned with the salvage of life, just as if it were no more than mere cargo.

“‘ Just drop her down in the bottom of the boat,’ he shouted. ‘She’s unconscious—she won’t feel anything. Push her along there, more for’ard, and make way for these kids. ’

“I looked over the taffrail,” says David, “as the boat was lowered, and there she lay with her white face, while some water that had somehow got into the boat swilled backwards and forwards over her bottle-green petticoat. And seeing all that, in some sort of Way, too, as though I were saying good-bye to her, I remember hearing myself mutter under my breath as I watched the boat settling into the sea: ‘Well—I’ve had you in my arms, my dear, ’ and then I laughed at thefolly of the thoughts that caper in your mind when you are standing face to face with death.”

CHAPTER VI

MAROONED

SWEPT about at the mercy of the storm on the ^ little ship’s raft to which they had lashed themselves, those two were facing death all that night, the next day, and again for another night until the dawn broke on the following morning. During the whole of that time, with the sea that was running, they saw nothing of the other boats.

“We knew,” David writes, “that there could have been but little hope of their keeping together in that storm. Nearly all of them had been overfull, for somehow or other these big companies never provide adequate boat-room for the full extent of their passenger accommodation, and the Malaga, that trip, had not one empty berth. Jonathan told me we stood a better chance of being picked up than any one of those boats if only the running of the sea kept us somewhere in route of ships making that passage to Forcados.”

But such luck as this did not come their way. Before the dawn broke on that second morning, they became conscious of a growing murmur, ever increasing in volume, in their ears until, before the light had come to show them their approaching fate, they knew they had been swept for two days towards the shore, and soon would be in the very teeth of those relentless lines of breakers rolling in, mile upon mile, upon that African coast.

Jonathan looked at David as the first muted murmur of that thunder reached their ears.

“Hear that?” said he.

David thought it was thunder out of the storm, but Jonathan shook his head. He had heard that sound too often to make any mistake about it. In those two days, they must have drifted eight or even ten miles. The coast line as last they had seen it, three days before, from the deck of the Malaga had been a violet fringe to the sea’s horizon. Doubtless since then they had made a course nearer shore than that, but it was a danger even Jonathan had not appreciated until he heard the low, ominous note, singing of almost certain death when still a hope of being picked up had kept their spirits high.

“We shall have to cut these lashings,” he said. “We can’t be shackled to this. We shall have to trust to our belts—because it’ll need the strength of something out of hell to get through those breakers.”

To David such a course sounded like madness.

“We owed our lives to that little raft,” he says. “Not all the belts in the mercantile marine would have kept me up in such a sea for two days. But when the morning broke, without a cloud in the sky, washed a pale blue after that storm, and I saw the sun shining on those fields of foam, not more than a mile away, I realized then what Jonathan meant about shackles. We were going to be battered to pieces anyway, and needed all the freedom of body we could get.”

There follows here in his papers a description of their last moments together, when they talked about their chances, and Jonathan gave David the best advice he could. Following that, and after the first wave caught them, I can quite understand he realized nothing but a roaring confusion, losing consciousness at last in those tossing waters that flung them about like matchwood as they were hurled towards the shore.

He describes his return to consciousness accompanied by the realization that he was lying on a stretch of sand, warm like bed-linen out of the hot-press with the heat of that tropical sun; solid and restful—these are his similes—like a good hard mattress after three months of a hammock. They are homely similes, no doubt, but they will convey much to the reader who still appreciates the comfort of his own bed. In addition to these facts, he became simultaneously aware that Jonathan was standing over him, watching his recovery with a broad smile of satisfaction on his face.

It may fairly easily be supposed that hunger was almost the next stage of consciousness. Jonathan, apparently, was prepared for this. He had had his own experiences; had known his own sensations when first, in possession of all his faculties, he felt the solid ground under his feet. It had been the need of something in the way of food to put in his stomach. What is more, he had found it.

They had been cast up on a stretch of sand, four, perhaps as much as six miles in length, a margin of pure gold to a belt of tropical forest. This forest began with swampy land out of which rose the spear-heads of giant rushes then growing into the dense vegetation of bamboo and mangrove trees, rising like a dense green wall, as though to shut out the mysteries of a whole continent from the eyes of a curious world. The margin of sand might have been a quarter of a mile wide in places. Its depth varied considerably. It was, however, a clear stretch and in that brilliant atmosphere about a mile from where Jonathan was washed ashore, he saw pieces of wreckage lying high and dry.

Nothing was more obvious than what it must be. A ship’s boat had shared their fate, possibly with as much good fortune as themselves. There might be some alive. He first attended to David, and then went off to see what was to be found. Bodies had been washed up, but not one had a breath of life in it. There were two boats. Both had been broken to matchwood in the grinding rollers of the surf. He came back to where David was lying, bringing two tins of biscuits, some of them untouched by salt water, and there, on the warm sand, in the fresh heat of the sun, he had his first meal for two days, thanking—whatever powers a man does thank—for his own common sense that he had slipped a flask of brandy into one of his pockets when he had gone below to get his heavy automatic.

It was to the taste of this blessed liquid that David returned to life, and after a while sat up to eat the portion which Jonathan allowed him.

“Two tins,” he said; “there may be some more —but that’s all we know of. So don’t imagine you’re dining at the ‘Ritz’ with the full prospect of supper later at the ‘Savoy.’ ”

“I wouldn’t have minded dining at the ‘Ritz,’” says David in his papers, “but it could not have brought me as great a sense of satisfaction as that feeling of solid ground and the hot sand burning through my drenched clothes and warming the deepest marrow in my bones. To get as great a sense of gratitude from dining at the ‘ Ritz ’ one would have had to have been hdd up for an hour in a fog outside Clapham Junction. I had been for two days in the grip of the sea. That hot sandy beach seemed the most appropriate satisfaction I could want. After three biscuits and another sip of brandy, I lay back on that—bed of roses, looked up at the blaze of blue, and thought of the times I’d cursed in London when there wasn’t a taxi on the rank in Piccadilly to take me down to the ‘Carlton’ for a meal.”

Of the two days which followed on that beach, when at night they slept under the stars, covered by the one blanket they had found and some of the clothes they had taken from the occupants of the wrecked ship’s boats, there is not much of interest to be told. Only one alternative lay open to them: to explore that dense forest barrier which lay between them and the mainland. The sandy beach ended, as I have indicated, after about five or six miles. Upon that strip of innocent, golden sand, they were as much prisoners as if unscalable walls surrounded them on either side. There was indeed the wall of the wide sea on the one hand and upon the other this treacherous-looking swamp, merging into tropical forest.

Here, on the first day, they found the apparent aperture of a channel through the rushes, leading into the heart of the upper-growth. With all the spurious energy that comes to a man eager for discovery, and with no experience of the dangers or difficulties entailed, David was for starting upon the expedition at once. They had got their raft ashore. If that had borne them on the open sea, he thought it surely capable of tackling a journey in still and almost sluggish water.

“All right,” said Jonathan, “but we’ll go tomorrow. If I’d got a mirror, I’d show you the look in your eyes. You want a bit of sleep. We’ll stop on the beach today and see if anything more gets washed up. Tomorrow’s time enough to start on that trip.”

So they stayed on the beach another day and night. Some reward for that the sea brought them; an oilskin and two more bodies—men. In ‘the pocket of one was a steel and flint lighter with the tinder-cord, sodden, but still capable of being ignited when dry. There was a pipe and some tobacco in a pouch, also a sovereign case containing six pounds.

Jonathan took a sovereign out and offered it to David.

“Give you a quid,” he said, “if you find another tin of biscuits.”

David looked at him.

“I wondered,” he says, “if the exertions and dangers of the past three days had for the moment dipped his reason.

‘“I’d find ’em for nothing if I could,’ said I.

“And then he laughed and told me I was coming by my first appreciation of the value of money.”

In the pockets of the other man’s coat they found cigarettes—unsmokable—a gold cigar-cutter, a gold tooth-pick, a gold nail-clipper, and a gold knife with steel blades. David held them up on the end of a gold chain and roared with laughter.

‘“These are the sort of things we carry about with us through life,—the serviceable presents they sell in Bond Street—and when you really come to living, they’re not as valuable as a packet of pins. A packet of pins would be worth twice as much to us.”

‘‘There’s the knife,” said Jonathan.

David opened it. It was the only article in the bunch which obviously had never been used.

“It was that night,” writes David, “as we lay down on the beach to go to sleep, that I first put the question which had been running in my head ever since I had wakened that morning to a full realization that it was no dream, that there we were on that desolate coast and must make the best of it.

First of all I asked Jonathan where he thought we were.

“‘Judging by the coast line,’ said he, ‘these swamps and forests, and the general look of it, somewhere on the Ivory Coast, perhaps two or three hundred miles from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.’

“We talked in a desultory fashion then for a few moments about that queer little nigger state, with its Gilbert and Sullivan Republic. Jonathan had been there and had much that was amusing to tell me about it. But I wasn’t amused just then. I was thinking of the one thing I really wanted to hear from him, with the experience he had of travelling in that part of the world. I suppose he knew I was going to ask it, because in some subconscious sort of way, I felt he was doing his best to give me no opportunity. However, I got it in at last without seeming as if I minded a twopenny cuss one way or the other.

“‘What chance,’ said I, ‘do you think there is of our getting out of this? ’

“‘ Being picked up by a boat? ’ said he.

“I grunted an affirmative.

“‘The remotest,’ he replied. ‘They don’t come in near the coast for another two or three hundred miles. The Malaga was closer in than most.’

“‘ Then what chance-? ’

“‘Through that forest?’ he interrupted.

I nodded my head.

‘“Not the chance of a dog,’ said he.” -

CHAPTER VII

“SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON’’

HERE I am taking long extracts from David’s papers for that voyage of exploration of theirs through the swamp and the heart of the forest; leaving it entirely to his words to describe what they found there. I have only edited the various passages I have chosen, where it has seemed to me that David lost the thread of narrative in too great an affection for description of their surroundings.

“The channel opened wide enough at the end of a sort of gully to the sea. The first hundred yards or so were through the swamp and that deep fringe of what I can only describe as sea-grass, but tall and strong in the stem as the toughest of young bamboo. Progress was slow, however, as we were paddling with the broken blade-end of an oar washed up with one of the ship’s boats. The further we went into the maze of that swamp, the darker, the more silent and unhealthy looking it became. The sound of the breaking sea became more and more distant. After a time the rustle of wind in the grass tops above our heads almost shut it out; another hundred yards and so dense was the vegetation about us that we heard it no more.

“We talked a good deal at first, but when I found the sound of my voice hitting as it were against that wall before me and coming back into my face with an eerie, whispered echo of what seemed its natural tone, I gave it up, and we went on in silence. Occasionally Jonathan would speak, pointing out the filthy track of a crocodile through the swamp; occasionally the silence would be broken by the oily noise of a water-snake dropping into the water before us and swimming into the dark forest of the green stems across our path.

“At last, however, the character of it all began to change. We came to bigger stuff and more interesting than that monotonous grass. Here even the colour of vegetable life became more varied. We could see above our heads the deeper green of the feathery palm, while here and there, where light crept through the higher branches, there might be caught a splash of crimson, aflame of blue from the flowering orchids finding their way out towards the sun.

“At last, when we came to the forest kings, the mahogany, and other hardwood trees, there was still more air to breathe, more light to see by. Here, up in the higher branches, we could see the troupes of monkeys following us from one tree to another, along their natural highway, as easily as motoring on the Great North Road. And not monkeys only on that broad pathway of the forest, but little tree-bears, standing on branches and gazing down at us, then hurrying on in our track lest they should lose sight of those two strange animals below, trespassing in their country, where never the face of man had been seen before.”

I was interested by the following description which David gives of his impression of that troupe of monkeys and those silently inquisitive bears.

“They were just like a crowd of street arabs,” he says, “but seeming to me to be closer to life, and more warranted in their curiosity. I did not resent them. I felt they far more had a right to resent me. And every yard we propelled that old raft further into the forest, it seemed as if we were getting nearer to the secret of all things, which they knew and were jealously afraid of our discovering. How near we were indeed getting,” he adds, “to some new knowledge of life, of the things that are and which no civilisation can destroy, perhaps they may have known. Certain it is we had not a thought of it then.”

There follows after this in his script some needless, though possibly natural, digression about the language of monkeys. I can understand the thoughts of one, seeing these creatures in their wild state for the first time, setting towards such speculations on the origin of language as seemed vitally interesting to him. It does not concern our story.

Neither shall I take any notice of his wild tales, derived from the supply of Jonathan’s information, about some sort of sea-lion, called the Mani-ton, which lives in the swampland and feeds in the dark. According to Jonathan, the female species has a kind of human-shaped head, with the shoulders and breasts of a woman, and flappers instead of arms. He told David that it was a fact—and certainly I do not see him as one given to imaginative stories—that no native looks on its face and lives. This of course gives David scope for any amount of picturesque theorizing which, interesting though it was, does not, with the exigencies of the story, permit of repetition.

I just mention it because of the circumstances which occasioned Jonathan’s reference to the existence of this strange beast whose name certainly is absolutely unfamiliar to me. The circumstances were these, and I draw from David’s script again to describe them.

“For an hour or more,” he writes, “we had made our way through the forest, where sometimes what looked like the great root of a gigantic tree became a live thing, an eight-foot crocodile, slithering down into the water and lying in the black depths to continue its sleep. Then, almost in a moment, the forest ended. We drifted into, an open swamp again, with tall elephant-grass rising high above our heads, but filtering in a greater wealth of light.”

This was the point in his narrative where Jonathan spoke of the haunt of the Maniton, and David went off at a tangent into his digression.

“As suddenly as that swamp began,” he goes on, “it suddenly ended. We came out into the bright light of the sun once more, and there was a beautiful sandy beach, about sixty feet wide, beyond which rose a rocky bluff, sheer up from the sand, at least as high as the highest mahogany tree.”

Here Jonathan apparently looked well about him, at the gradual slope on one side of that little bay where banana trees, ground nuts, and tomatoes all grew in a lavish profusion, and the evidences of orange trees and wild yams were to be seen everywhere. He went across to the foot of the rocky bluff, and there, finding water dripping from one of the fissures in meagre drops, he put his finger on the place, then laid it on his tongue.

After that, he turned round to David.

“This place,” said he, “is where you and I will have to live for the Lord knows how long.”

“After the toiling through that forest and those two nights on the sea,” says David, “I couldn’t have asked for a better prospect. Considering such experiences as we had had, the whole atmosphere of the place seemed to suggest a haven of refuge.

“I suppose I had not taken seriously either his answers to my questions of the night before, or the remark he had just made about the period of time we were likely to be compelled to make this our corner of the world. There was sunlight and warmth; such sunlight and warmth as, after an English climate, must have demanded the highest spirits.

“Perhaps it was I could never have believed we were prisoners in that place; prisoners as surely as though it had been a little island in the midst of unfrequented seas. The immediate prospect was sufficient for me. Instead of black corpses, swollen and floating on the face of the waters, we were two hearty men and strong, the sun was shining, and here was a spot, surrounded with all kinds of vegetation, which seemed to be cut out for a dwelling-place. Doubtless, notwithstanding Jonathan’s belief, I may have reckoned escape was to be found that way. But added to it all, after the circumscribed conditions of London life, there was the exhilarating freedom of adventure about every moment of it.

“I only know I looked up at Jonathan when, with somewhat of a despondent note in his voice, he had made that announcement, and I replied, ‘Well—hang it all—we’ve both read Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson and made pretence of playing at them, if I remember my youth as well as I ought. Dash it, last year in London, when that week of fogs was on, I’d have given a thousand quid to be transported to a place like this and told to shift for myself.’

“Jonathan nodded his head, saying, ‘Right you are’—but the tone in his voice implied, ‘there’s such a thing as transportation for life.’ “One did not often hear that note in his voice. I know now that he was speaking from a wider knowledge of the conditions than my own. But even his knowledge did not embrace that most important condition with which we found our lives were to be so intimately concerned.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE “MALAGA’S” BOAT

DAVID’S allusion to Swiss Family Robinson was evidently made because that aspect of it appealed to his lively imagination. He follows in his narrative with page after page, descriptive of their preparations in that secluded creek to make a home for themselves—a base as it were for operations of discovery of that path to freedom whenever it might present itself.

Jonathan had said they might take it they would be there for some weeks before any chance of escape offered. The first task, therefore, to which they set themselves was to build some sort of habitation ensuring them shelter and sleep at night, as well as security from stray beasts, such as leopards amongst those rocks, or crocodiles coming up out of the swamp.

I can well understand it was a lively business, this making a home for themselves, rather than going to the nearest house agent to inquire what residential quarters he had vacant on his books. Judging by the space he gives to the account of what they did those first three days, David must have given his whole heart to it. The erection of a palisade to keep out the crocodiles from the swamp; the starting of a bonfire at dusk to drive away mosquitoes and any prowling leopard that might chance to be attracted by the sounds of life in those still places; the building of a temporary hut with a roofing of broad banana leaves, stitched together with the pins of bamboo spikes, all these performances he dilates upon with a wealth of detail which makes him a plagiarist of the very book he mentions.

It was on the third day, when, so to speak, they had established themselves in their new home and David’s hands were too blistered to do any more work, that Jonathan proclaimed the necessity for a course of action ensuring them every opportunity for securing their escape.

“We shall have to scramble through that forest again, back to the beach,” said he. “We shall have to set up a sort of distress signal in the hope of some devil putting up his glasses in this direction from a passing ship. Now we’ve got a base to work from, that’s the first precaution.”

They went, as before, on their raft, lifting it out of the water here and there, where the tangle of tree roots or the undergrowth barred their passage. With no little difficulty, marking their way as they went, they came, after about three hours’ hard going, to the beach where the breakers were rolling in on to the shore.

With the fine weather they had had during those last five days, the sea had taken a surface of azure-coloured glass; the tall grasses were listless in the still air, and the fields of surf were no longer ploughed with foam. Lazily, one after the other, the waves came rolling in, but the sting of the storm had gone out of them.

‘‘They were inviting now,” says David. ‘‘Their roar of anger had become a song. I thought of my piano at home and the key I could set their music in.”

“We had brought with us,” he continues, “a long bamboo pole. It must have been thirty or forty feet in length. This was to be used as a flagstaff for our signal of distress. A poor makeshift it was, not intended to be permanent, but Jonathan would waste no day, he said, or leave an effort unmade to attract the attention of any ship, however distant, that might be passing. He was more eager in those first few days to get away than I was, perhaps because he had less hope, or partly on account of his knowledge of what life would really mean in such a place. I can scent danger right enough, but that place in those first few days was a Garden of Eden to me after the experiences we had been through.

“Anyhow, we fixed our flagstaff firmly in the sand, with that flutter of white at the head of it— some garment we had taken from one of the bodies that had been washed ashore. Three cheers we gave, when it was up. Mine, I must confess, were in the nature of a schoolboy’s; Jonathan’s more serious, but breaking at the end into a laugh at my enthusiasm for a bit of work done. It had indeed been no easy job, lugging that forty feet of bamboo pole through the maze of those forest trees and giant grasses.

“When once the cheers were given, nothing would satisfy me, but I must swarm up it, as far as its thickness would allow, just to see what sort of an advantage it gave to that bit of white flapping up there. Up I went, halfways, Jonathan standing there below on the sandy beach, laughing at my efforts. I was laughing too, it was so confoundedly greasy, and only my bare feet could grip it. Then, as I looked out to sea, all the laughter went out of me, as though a sudden gust of wind had blown it off my lips. In a second I had slithered down to the ground and was gasping to Jonathan what I had seen.

“‘There’s a boat,’ I said, ‘there’s a boat—a ship’s boat—drifting in shore. I—I think I saw people in it. I’ll swear I did.’

“And there sure enough, from the ground, but almost concealed below the higher line of breakers, was a boat, lifting one instant into sight in a sag of the line of surf, then disappearing completely from view.

“For five minutes Jonathan never said a word, until he had made sure of the sight of it at least half a dozen times, then he turned and looked at me.

‘“It’s one of the Malaga’s boats,’ said he. ‘They’ve kept off shore all these days, hoping, I suppose, to stay in track of steamers. There can’t be a soul alive in it, or at any rate with any strength left, because the drift has caught them. They’re washing in this way sure enough. If we could save that boat-!’

“He said no more, but at once began stripping off all his clothes. It was the boat, only the boat, he was thinking of.

“‘ In the name of God—? ’ I began.

‘“I’m going to have a shot, and swim for it,’ he said.

“Well—hang it! What could I do but have my shot as well?”

CHAPTER IX

BURDEN OF THE SEA

IT was not to be expected that David should succeed, or even Jonathan either, for that matter. At least, however, he accomplished more than David’s strength allowed for him. He got out far enough to save the boat before it was capsized between the furrows of that field of foam. With almost superhuman effort he righted her as she came reeling in towards shore, all broadside on and half awash in the fret of the tumbling water. With the final help of David, her keel was grounded in the slush of the sand. They could not haul her high and dry. Had she been empty, she was one of the heaviest of the Malaga’s boats. But there, flung about in the bottom, between the thwarts, all in the helpless attitudes of death, were six bodies— four women and two men of the Malaga’s crew.

“We stood, both of us, staring at them,” writes David, now in a serious enough vein, “and there, peeping out from amongst the disordered heap of clothing, I saw the folds of a bottle-green petticoat, sodden, crushed, stained with sea-water, but sufficiently recognizable to jolt a memory, jerking into my mind.

“One by one, we lifted them out of the boat and laid them oh that same warm beach of sand I had been so thankful for only a few days before. There was not much satisfaction those poor devils could get out of the warmth of it then.

“It. struck me again during this incident, the truth of Jonathan’s remarks about the elemental instincts. Callous as it may seem, we were far more concerned with what they had brought with them in the boat which would be of use to us, even down to the contents of their pockets, than at the sight of those six lifeless bodies. That they had struggled for so many days against adversity, and failed; moreover, what all the horrible circumstances of that failure must have been—for here there were only six, whereas when she had left the Malaga’s side, the boat had been full—seemed in no way so full of tragedy as the fact that there was only one half-full box of biscuits left of all their stores. Both men had pipes and some quantity of tobacco left. They could hardly have smoked at all for those ten days or so. One can scarcely wonder at that. Every one of them had died from some form of exhaustion and sickness brought on by thirst. All the water-bottles were dry as bones. Many, no doubt, had gone mad, as they do under the strain of acute thirst, and thrown themselves overboard. So, at least, we accounted for these six bodies, remaining out of the boat-load which had set forth from the side of the burning Malaga.

“I don’t know what Jonathan felt as we went through the pockets of the clothes on those six bodies lying there on the sand in silent witness to the merciless laws of Life when it is reduced to its elemental conditions. I know I felt like a scavenger, a ghoul, stealing from the dead.

“Probably I did not realize those sensations acutely enough to record them until I came to the woman whom I had carried up myself in my arms from the saloon. As I bent over her, the sense of sacrilege to the dead came suddenly over me when I looked into her face. The next second, with the last half of the breath I was that moment breathing, I had shouted Jonathan’s name.

“He looked up from where he was kneeling, caught in a sudden tension of interest by the note in my voice.

‘“She’s breathing!’ I shouted. ‘She’s—she’s alive, man! What in the name of God can we do?’”

Though David put the question, it becomes obvious from his narrative as he continues that he was the only one of those two who knew what was best to be done. It was patently enough a case of exhaustion, of fever, brought about by the prolonged need of moisture in the system.

“I always carried my fountain-pen and a filler, ” he says, ‘‘and had laughed over the fact with Jonathan only two days before, because devil a drop of ink could I ever hope to make or find in that comer of the world. Now that filler was invaluable. Charged with brandy from Jonathan’s flask, which we had brought with us, I got some of the liquid well down her throat, past the terribly parched tongue she had. Slightly she shivered as the warmth of it found its way into her system. But it was a long time before she returned to actual consciousness.

“In a tentative and clumsy sort of way, old Jonathan helped me while I massaged her hands, arms, and feet, inducing the circulation back into her veins, and restoring that warmth of life which almost had gone out of her.

“We used nearly all the brandy. That could not be helped. There was little likelihood, except in the event of accident, that we should want it again. Water there was in plenty at the creek, where we had found the source of that leakage through the fissure in the rocks.

“It must have been half an hour or more before she opened her eyes; another hour at least before she could utter a word, and that, in a rasped, hoarse tone of voice, as though the very chords in her throat were drawn and withered with the drought in her body.

“She asked where she was. I did my best to explain, realizing how foolish any explanations must really be to her in that state of mind. After a bit I fed her with pieces of biscuit, soaked in brandy and water. Even then it was with the greatest pain and effort she could swallow it. Nevertheless, they gave her strength. There was a moment when she fastened her feverish eyes on me in gratitude. But my heavens! What a change just those few days had made in her. No one would have believed it possible, seeing her then, for there ever to have been the certain type of beauty which I had seen those few moments as I carried her up the stairs from the saloon, white and unconscious as she was, in my arms.

“In about two hours’ time she had regained sufficient strength to beat being lifted into the boat. Then, with all our new-found possessions, amongst which the boat, of course, was the most invaluable of all, we set out, up that gully from the sea, back by our path through the swamp and the forest to the creek.

“With such garments as we had collected from the other bodies, we made a bed for her in the bottom of the boat. That bed served its purpose. The whole way back she slept, a normal sleep which spoke volumes for her recuperative powers, while all the time a more healthy tone of colour crept back into the ghostly pallor of her cheeks.

“We talked about her all the time, where we should put her for the night; how we must set to work at once to increase our accommodation; how we could provide the best for her comfort; wondering, too, in a vague way, what sort of a companion she would prove to be.

“‘ She’ll just have to do what she’s told,’ said Jonathan, who was not one in those conditions of life to play with the doing of anything. Under his command, I had never done such hard manual work in the whole of my life, neither, for that matter, had I ever enjoyed anything so well.

“After about four hours, just as it was drawing to dusk, we reached home. I seem to call it home naturally enough; yet I suppose to any one reading these pages, it will appear somewhat incongruous that a shakedown of a hut with a flimsy roof of banana leaves could deserve such a name. Yet that is what it meant for many a day to all of us.

“She slept that night in the hut on the softest bed I could make for her, while we lay down by the bonfire outside. So long as that was burning, and our palisade was firm, there was no fear of being disturbed. I gave her some more food, soaked in brandy and water as before, about an hour previous to her going to sleep for the night. Then Jonathan and I turned in. We rolled ourselves in the ship’s blankets we had found and lay, staring into our bonfire, talking for another good two hours about the events of that day, before we settled ourselves to sleep.”

CHAPTER X

RESPONSIBILITIES

WHEN we awoke the next morning,” David’s narrative continues, “it was to a sense of responsibility, not unpleasantly distracting, which had been added to the mere routine of living there in that creek, until such time as a ship, coming near enough to the coast, should see our signal of distress and send a boat to rescue us.

“According to Jonathan, as I have already shown, this was a possibility as remote as it was bare. Because of those very swamps, that coast was deserted by natives from inland and disregarded by ships at sea. As a habitation, obviously it was impossible. As a speculation for traders— unless, as Jonathan was inclined to think, there might be traces of gold—it was worthless.

“But our chances of escape had increased with the possession of the Malaga’s boat. So at least it seemed to me, until Jonathan informed me that launching her in the teeth of those lines of waves from the beach, was a job that might be undertaken by a number of men capable of keeping her head to the surf, but as a workable proposition for two ordinary men might be straightway put out of the question.”

00000

David apparently was less depressed than Jonathan by this prospect. The whole aspect of the life was new to him. It was less a prison, and more of an adventurous experiment with Fate. He felt he was learning new things about himself, as it might be with one looking in a mirror for the first time, and knowing himself for what he was. The only counter-attractions which might have induced in him a fretting spirit of discontent, were those circumstances of life which he had been accustomed to in London—the daily round of an idle man with more than sufficient for his needs, and ease eating out with rust all the ambitions he had ever had.

He says in various places in that script of his, that he had grown sick of his existence in the Albany. This, indeed, had been his reason for undertaking a big game shoot in Central Africa. Yet even that, as Jonathan had remarked, had been in the nature of an organized Cook’s tour, everything cut and dried with business-like precision no sooner had he put his money down on the counter.

But such an adventure as was this, with all its uncertain issues at stake and now the added interest of a woman dependent upon them, was one which not even the most go-ahead and enterprising firm of travelling agents could ever have provided him with.

He woke, anyhow, that morning evidently in the top of his spirits. It was not this way with Jonathan. That creek indeed was a prison to him, having none of the alluring element of change with all the travelling he had done in unfrequented comers of the world. What is more, it was far greater a hindrance to his work than any wife could ever have been.

He had escaped from matrimony so far, lifting always in spirits as the whistle blew for all ashore, and the Blue Peter was hauled down from the masthead. So far as he could see, there was no escape from this, except by the fluke of chance, and now another hindrance had been added to the risks attached to their making a bid for freedom. His first glance that morning had been cast towards the hut where their new companion was lying, when, turning to David, he said:

“You’d better look after her. You’re a better hand at that sort of tricksy business than I am. When she’s able to move about, she’ll want buttoning up the back, or some sort of nonsense like that, and that’s no job of mine.”

He had said this in some sort of cynical humour, and then, in a more serious tone of voice, he added, “We can’t be hampered by her, you know. If we have to take a risk to get out of this, she’ll have to take it with us, or stay behind.”

“It was again,” writes David, “another sudden insight into the hidden mysteries of elemental impulse. The moment he had said it, I felt for an instant amazed at his callousness; but the next, as his words passed on their vibrations towards other and unawakened cells in my brain, I knew he was quite right. ”

Nevertheless, it had come into Jonathan’s mind first, and that is a point of interest which David misses in his observation of the incident. They were, these two, as I have said before, pronounced types, the old civilization and the new; the one with all the force of physical nature silent but insistent in him, the other with all the force of nature’s increasing mentality leaping towards the unknown. I have gone back in my script and copied these words exactly as I had written them before.

It is, therefore, consistent with that description of them, that Jonathan should first have formed, in his sense of the situation, this apparently callous point of view. If regarded closely, however, as David admits he regarded it on second thoughts himself, the callousness goes clean out of it. It was reasonable, the logical attitude as seen from the rights of each man to his existence in a world where the survival of the fittest is at present accepted as the predominating law. This law it is which our enemies are endeavouring to stamp ineffaceably and for ever upon that parchment whereon are written the higher hopes and nobler ideals of the civilized world.

It was this decision in any case which they naturally adopted that first morning when they awoke to the realization of what this addition to their little community must mean.

“It all depends,” replied David when he had thought about it for a moment—“it all depends upon what sort of a woman she is.” And staring straight into the ashes of their bumt-out bonfire, he repeated it again, “It all depends upon that.”

CHAPTER XI

CONVALESCENCE

IN seven or eight days, Joan—David calls her by no other name—was well enough to leave the hut for the first time, and on his arm to walk out into the sunshine. For all that time he alone, had nursed and tended to her, and, though he says no word of it, I can imagine with what consideration and thoughtfulness he must have done it. There was enough of the feminine quality in his temperament, detracting nothing from his masculinity, to enable him to sense acutely the things that mean much to women, without pretending to understand the intrinsic quality of the things themselves. “To make such pretence as this,” he says in some other part of his story, “is to destroy all the value of doing the right thing.”

To me that sounds truer than a truism and gives me much of the reason for my assumption that during the period, when she was dependent upon him for so many things, he must have been a constant surprise to her in the way he understood, and, in the way of men, which must always be clumsy in a sick-room, attended to her wants.

“I was a constant source of amusement to her,” he says, in the only description he gives of her recovery, “in the way I did things about the hut. It was when once she began to laugh—and that was pretty soon—that she began to get better.”

I am quite prepared to believe that she found him intensely amusing. I can assume also that she had no little wonder beside. And all that she knew of Jonathan for those first few days was a sound of hammering, continuing all day long, redoubled in energy and noise when David was not with her. This was the construction of the new hut for the accommodation made necessary by her arrival.

Gradually David told her all their schemes, the plans they were making for their comfort and ultimate escape, until, with the returning of her strength, she became as eager as a child to be up and helping them in the work, the benefits of which she was herself to share.

I have inferred that he pays but little attention to description of her illness and recovery, but I cannot omit a passage in his pages at this point in which he describes his first impression of her as she began to regain strength and give evidence of her more normal personality.

“This is how I saw her then,” he says. “At that time, when she had been about five days at the creek, and was beginning to take a more lively interest in our conversations. She had a fine sense of pride, shown in many things besides her spirit of independence while she was an invalid. There was, as well, a strong appreciation for the beautiful in her nature. This I gathered simply enough from her taste in literature, painting, and the fine arts generally. We disagreed on many things, but her outlook in these cases was due to temperament, and in no case to want of intelligence.

“She liked the best things in life. Witness her bottle-green petticoat. Yet at the same time there appeared an absolute contradiction to this in her almost childish delight, when once she was getting well, in the primitive conditions with which she found she was surrounded. I had expected her to chafe against discomforts at every turn—and Lord knows there were plenty of them. She simply laughed, and with a broad sense of humour you find in few women who regard their first appearance in the morning as a serious event. This certainly she did, as she gave full evidence of in her concern at meeting Jonathan for the first time.

“She was full of curiosity about him, that man who was only visualized so far to her by a constant sound of hammering. Again and again she asked me why he did not come to see her.

“‘We shall have to meet sooner or later,’ she said once, with a laugh.

“And I had to invent all sorts of excuses, the most convincing of which was the true one, that he was not first and foremost a ladies’ man, and certainly was not at his best as a conversationalist in their bedrooms.

“‘ I think I shall like him, ’ was her reply to that, and as far as I could see from their first meeting, she did. We had got on well with the new hut, which was an elaborate affair, combining a sleeping-room for us and a general room to be used by all of us for meals. For her own sleeping accommodation, it was intended she should keep to the hut we had first built, which was to be improved upon at the earliest opportunity. When she asked, with a twinkle in her eye, if we had not arranged for her to have some little private sitting-room to herself, I saw for a moment a look in Jonathan’s face as though he felt we were badly in for it. Yet somehow, instead of thinking he was a fool for that look, so wanting in a sense of humour, I realized he was the best chap in the world. He smiled, but a moment late, when he realized she was only jesting.”

It becomes necessary here for me to sketch, as briefly as possible, the type of woman she was, not, that is to say, as regards character—David has done that for me—but the class to which she belonged and the circumstances of life in which she had i been brought up. During those days when she was gradually recovering her strength, she told David without any reserve all there was to be told about herself.

Her father was prominently connected with diamond mines near Kimberley; a big and evidently a wealthy man in his way. Believing in an English education, he had sent his daughter to England to school at the age of ten, and there, in charge of friends whose leniency had given her every freedom, she had been brought up. Every year her father had come home for a month or so to see her. Her mother was dead. From all these circumstances, and receiving a generous allowance from her father, she had grown up with an unusual sense of freedom in a girl, and an uncommon spirit of independence as compared with many women one met before the War.

Asked by David, on one of those occasions when she was speaking of her upbringing, why she had never married, she replied:

“But why? Why ask that?”

“Well, I take it,” said he boldly, “you’re halfway between twenty and thirty. Most girls come to matrimony by then with less qualifications for it than you.”

By the use of that phrase, she knew apparently he was avoiding a compliment, and doubtless liked him the better for it. She did not, anyhow, press to know what sort of qualifications he implied. A sensible woman realizes the full extent of her attractions and prefers deeds for compliments rather than words. She did not, however, answer his question, but put another straight to him.

“Are you married?” she inquired.

“Neither of us is,” said he.

“Well, I take it you’re between thirty and forty, and with necessary qualifications—why haven’t you?”

For himself, David replied that there was a little matter of finding the one woman.

“Do you imply from that,” she asked him, “that there’s a superfluity of the right men?”

This was an example of the conversations they had in the hut while he was attending to her, and invariably by some turn of her wit, or twist of his sense of humour, they all ended in laughter. Hearing it, between the blows of his improvised hammer or the swing of his axe, Jonathan often chafed at the sound, when the blows with which he followed it were the heavier, though not necessarily the more effective.

These sketches, I feel inclined to think, sufficiently describe that period of time while she was recovering from the exhaustion of her adventure in the Malaga’s boat and before she took her normal and proper place in that strange ménage à trois from which so much is to be learnt of those elemental truths civilization tends to hide from us at every turn.

CHAPTER XII

PRELIMINARIES

DAVlD had found her, it will be remembered, lying by the piano in the saloon, where evidently she had been playing to amuse herself. There could have been no audience, or she would not have been missed. It had been after dinner. She was not in evening dress, but, as David had observed, her costume had been carefully considered for that occasion of her first appearance.

“The more I saw of her in those first few days at the creek,” he writes somewhere, “the more I marvelled at a woman of her independence of character toppling down in a faint at the first alarm of fire. That, however, she explained away by telling me that for the first days of the voyage she had been pretty bad and was still feeling a bit shaky. The fact that she survived the others in the Malaga’s boat proves she was constitutionally pretty strong.”

It was, anyhow, in that costume in which he had found her that she made her first appearance outside the hut. She had called out to David when she was ready, and, opening the door, he found her, pale no doubt as when first he had seen her, but reminding him, almost with a shock it would appear, of those momentary sensations he had experienced as he carried her up in his arms on deck. She had done her hair carefully, and from all accounts it was hair worth doing. Some powder she must have had in one of those receptacles women carry more zealously than rosary beads—but apparently no colour for her lips or cheeks. He assumes this by the fact that she had used none, and I have no doubt he is right.

Jonathan’s first impression of her as he saw her crossing the creek on David’s arm must have been based entirely upon his preconceived attitude of mind. She was a woman, therefore she was a hindrance to their hazardous plans of escape.

After two days in the sea, and having had no Thames-punting job to get through the forest, they were themselves in no way fashionable in their general appearance. Therefore, to see this woman, come out of Bond Street, as indeed—with some adventures not exactly calculated to improve her appearance—she had, was not an event likely to inspire him with confidence. He talked to her for a moment or so; inquired after her health in a formal sort of way; hoped they would be able to make her comfortable, and then went on with his work.

“I believe,” says David, “that she assimilated every thought he had had in his mind. I believe that with this knowledge in her possession from actual observation, she calculated accurately his reasons for not coming to see her once while she was in the hut. I believe she knew everything in both our minds that first morning when she came out from the seclusion of her room and took in the situation from beginning to end.

“Whether my beliefs are right or not—and she said nothing to me about it—she appeared the next morning in men’s garments, of which, as may be supposed, we had a fair supply from the bodies that had been washed up.

‘‘I remember I stood looking at her in amazement. Jonathan too.

“In the name of heaven—! ’ I began.,

“‘I want to help,’ she replied. ‘Petticoats are ‘ no good for this job. I’m not strong enough to do anything today—but I thought I’d begin to get accustomed to my uniform.’

“But why that rig-out? ’ I asked. ‘What’s the matter with your sex? ’

“To which she replied, ‘I don’t mind my sex alive, but if it’s got to be dead people’s clothes, I’d prefer they were men’s.’ ”

David comments upon this point of view and seems to see more significance in it than is apparent to me. He infers from it a tendency in women to escape whenever possible from their own sex; that women on the whole do not prefer to be women, whereas men are mostly satisfied as they are. What there may be in this, I do not pretend to follow. To me, it merely shows a sensitiveness which does nothing more than contribute to the general and definite outline of her character.

Whatever it was, and whether the intention was such as David supposes, the effect upon Jonathan was well within those calculations of hers which he indicated.

For the first time in their short acquaintance, Jonathan laughed without restraint, and joined in the jokes she made about herself. But after a few moments, when he found their talk was interfering with the work he had in hand, he took little more notice of her, and went on with his job.

For a little while she sat in silence and watched them both.

“And then—’’according to David’s description, for apparently he never lost consciousness of her presence, “she walked slowly away, finding a place—a flat projection of rock—on the side of the slope leading up into the forest where every day one of us went to fetch the fresh water, and there she lay in the sun. Within five minutes, I believe she was asleep. When I went to call her for her midday meal of yams, tomatoes, and bananas, she wakened with a start and said:

“How long do you think it’s likely that I’m going to enjoy life as much as I’m doing now? ’

“I felt glad, somehow, she had not said that to Jonathan.”

CHAPTER XIII

FEMININITY

SHE appears to have proved an excellent worker when—as David puts it—“her mood did not incline her to be too feminine.”

I take this to mean that there were times when she expected more attention and consideration to be shown her than was really compatible with the circumstances of their extraordinary situation. This meaning is indeed made clear in an account which David gives later, marking a stage in the development of that strange predicament in which they found themselves.

He describes at no little length the work she did for them at the creek, never once complaining of the rough life it undoubtedly must have been. He gives minute details of the construction of the hut, as they finished it in about three weeks’ time, the conditions under which they got their food, the sort of food it was, and the further precautions they took of signalling from the summit of the cliff for passing ships at sea.

All this, though I read every word of it carefully and, must admit, with interest, I still consider to be superfluous to the main issue of the story. That main issue was the expression of the immutable laws in these three and the gradual reduction of their attitudes of mind to the simplest and most vital questions of existence.

I shall therefore leave out all of what I call the Swiss Family Robinson part of David’s narrative, except where it inextricably concerns that main issue, and so sub-edit him and keep him to the important point of his story.

Here, then, is the account he gives, by which I read clear enough the meaning of his use of that phrase—inclination to femininity.

“She had told us on one occasion, that the day following was her birthday.

“‘ How old do you think I shall be?’ she asked Jonathan with a directness that reduced him to confusion. We could see him go red under the tan of his skin, and I must say I felt sorry for him. She never felt a? twinge, or if she did, concealed it with laughter that rang with real amusement.

“‘You can say just what you think,’ she said; ‘there are no other women present.’

“Jonathan hazarded twenty-three, to be on the safe side, whereupon she turned to me, ignoring him in the conversation, because she knew he had funked it.

“In this manner, as I look back on it from a distance of time, the essential nature of her began to rouse the essential nature in us. Without meaning to, and by no reason of character, but merely because of the inevitability of her sex, she sowed the first and at that time invisible seeds of antagonism. It was not a revival of that same antagonism when we were boys at school. We were then, in those days at the creek, and for many, many years had been, the best of friends in the deepest sense of the word. This antagonism, the seeds of which she planted within the first few weeks of her life with us, was, as I say, no mere recrudescence of an old quarrel. Such a thing would be inconceivable between two grown men who had fared together as we had done.

“To begin with—I am certain of this—we were all utterly unconscious of it; she no less than Jonathan, or than I was myself. It may have had the same foundation as that jealousy which had existed between us at school; but in the light of all that happened, I am confident.I am right in placing it deeper than that. It was far cruder, far more elemental; an instinct, such as, in the civilized conditions of life in which our minds had been trained, we had scarcely if ever been truly made aware of. And so thick was the veneer of civilization upon us, even in those surroundings, that long whiles passed by before ever we became consciously obedient to its impulses.

“As I look back now, however, I see in myself the first answer to that instinct on the very day when she led us by suggestion to suppose she expected some celebration of her birthday.

“It was a few hours after, she had informed us of the coming event, that I was going through the forest to fetch the day’s water from the stream we had discovered on our arrival, the existence of which, indeed, primarily had made the creek habitable. This excursion, somewhat of a laborious one, we took in turns; a regular duty every day—what in Canada they call their chores.

“On my return, with the bucket we had found on the Malaga’s boat, I heard a sound of whining in the thick undergrowth near the edge of the rough track we had cut to the stream. The sight of a little female tree-bear, scurrying away at the sound of my approach, was quite sufficient to tell me what had happened. One of her young ’uns had fallen ‘ from his perch, and not all the king’s horses, or all the king’s men, as expressed in her piteous maternal anxieties, could set the wretched little beast up again.

“I found him easily enough. He was whining his heart out at this punishment, probably for his own disobedience, but was quite unhurt. A huge patch of tropical moss, as thick as a feather-bed, had broken his fall, and though he looked a bit dazed —he must have fallen only a few moments before —I could feel no bones were broken.

“How the deuce to get him back again up those colossal trees, if it was a problem to his mother, was certainly a riddle to me. And then, in a flash of inspiration, I thought of Joan, her birthday, and the attendant celebration, the observance of which she had so cunningly or unconsciously forced upon our consideration.

“Though I did not know then, I do realize now, that the thought of presenting her with this birthday gift of the baby tree-bear brought me a sense of exaltation, because it would show her a greater appreciation from me than she was likely to get from Jonathan, my best friend in the world.

“The only impulse I was aware of at the time was the thought that she would go into ecstasies over it, if there were such an emotion as the maternal instinct in her at all. And that, I suppose, I took for granted. I had no small degree of sympathy for the poor little beggar myself.

“Having come then to this decision, I picked it up in my arms and carried it back towards the creek. Just before I reached the edge of the forest, I plaited together some strong vine tendrils, made a halter for it, and tethered it up where it would be quite safe till the next day. Then, that evening, when nothing was doing, I went back to see how it was and give it some honey, of which there was a plentiful supply, if one only had the patience to look for it.

“That Jonathan was no less anxious to celebrate this occasion was plain enough to me. He suggested we should have some sort of a feast, and had gone down in the small canoe we had built, to the beach, there spending the whole day fishing in the channel that connected our waterway through the swamp with the sea.

“In the evening he had returned well satisfied with the results. There was every prospect of what to us would be a banquet, and the more pleased I saw he was, the less inclined I felt to tell him of the present I had found for her.

“Here was the beginning of secrecy. For he too had kept his secret from me. On the way back from the beach, he had picked a collection of the most gloriously coloured orchids and had hidden them somewhere behind the hut. I saw them, by accident, standing in a wooden bowl, filled with swamp water, keeping fresh for the decoration of our table on the occasion of the feast.

“I must have thought nothing of that secrecy at the time, for there was I with something up my own sleeve as well. I never supposed he was vying with me for a place in her estimation. He knew nothing of the preparation I had made for the event. Indeed I am confident it was unconscious in both of us. Yet, there inevitably it was, and I realize well enough now how on the day of her birthday there was germinated in us a seed of jealousy, the growth of which no civilization could ignore, no gloss of speech or veneer of habits and customs could disguise.

“Truly unconscious, as I believe, of the preparations that were being made for her, she appeared that morning as usual. With some surprise she accepted our remembrance of it and the congratulations we offered her. Then she went about her work. I think she was cutting utensils—or shall I call it crockery—for the table, out of a soft white wood which Jonathan had found in the forest. All the morning she stuck to it, as though the day made no difference to her.

“It had made a difference, however, which, in a certain degree, must have been conscious enough. We told her we had prepared a special feast for the occasion. This was our common secret. She laughed at that, and called us both sentimentalists.

“‘ I come to the one comer of the world,’ said she, ‘where a woman might be excused for forgetting all about her age, and you both proceed to rub it in.’

“Jonathan straightway reminded her of the fact that but for her telling us we should have known nothing about it. She smiled at him for saying that. I can’t describe the smile. It was not exactly that she felt sorry for him for the obviousness of his remark. Neither can I describe her look at me for my silence. Whatever she meant by that look and that smile, she disappeared into her bedroom, appearing later at the feast, where the orchids were displayed on our home-made table, dressed as she had been the first day she made her appearance after her recovery.

“We both looked at her in amazement, and, I should imagine, with no little admiration, too. For the last few weeks we had seen her in nothing but an unbecoming suit of sailor’s trousers, secured, by straps over her shoulders, and, in appearance at least, had come to regard her as a creature much like ourselves. Here, however, was a woman, and all the more fascinating by contrast, just as R6jane was, if you remember it, in La Passarelle, when she first makes her appearance in beautiful clothes in the second act.

“Poor old Jonathan’s discomfort can well be imagined. He had come so much to regard her— as they say in familiar parlance ‘in those trousers’ —as one of ourselves, that he was completely bowled over by the dramatic situation of that change of dress. He forgot all about his flowers, which he had gathered with such trouble. I was none too comfortable myself.

“It was not that she was so extraordinarily well-dressed, though I remembered then how the first thing she had asked me to do for her was to make a coat-hanger on which she could hang her things, in case, as she said, ‘a ship does take us off and I have to behave demurely again.’ Well-dressed was not the description, notwithstanding the coat-hanger, for her things were badly creased. She pointed out this fact to us straightway. It was, to put it concisely, that she was a beautiful woman, the more beautiful to us, perhaps, who for nearly the last two months, had seen nothing but an able seaman whose strength we had tacitly agreed upon must not be over-taxed.

“Don’t look so amazed,’ she said as she stood there in the doorway laughing. ‘ It’s my birthday —mayn’t I dress up? ’

“We all sat down, and Jonathan and I began paying her attentions, quite unconsciously waiting on her with excess of zeal; or, if we were aware of it, telling ourselves that it was because it was her birthday. Lord! How she must have laughed in those inner recesses of her thoughts, where a woman keeps everything wholly and securely to herself!

“It was die, naturally enough, who noticed the orchids, and long before Jonathan realized how their existence had slipped out of his mind.

“‘Who got the flowers?’ she asked as she sat down. She looked from one to the other of us. There was no need for any reply. Jonathan’s face was a study, if not in scarlet, then of that expression which goes with the colour.

“‘You got them!’ she exclaimed, and we could see how surprised she was that the thought had come from him. So surprised was she, indeed, that she leant forward across the table and just touched his hand in the simplest and most unaffected expression of gratitude one could have imagined. No one on earth could have accused her of any purpose or impulse but that of gratefulness, but the moment she had done it, no one could have been so blind as not to observe the effect it had.

“It was as though in that instant she had set her choice on Jonathan. I know he felt that. I know also that at the expression which swept over his face and the sight of her hand touching his, I felt the blood in me rush like a hot spring, boiling beneath the surface of the ground. It was all I could do not to make a fool of myself; not to get up then and there, saying to myself I would leave them to their love-making in peace, if that was their inclination.

“Thank Heaven, I did nothing of the kind. She, nevertheless, saw the effect of what she had done, and the next second had taken her hand away with a quick gesture and a nervous laugh. ”

CHAPTER XIV

THE FIRST BOARD MEETING

“I WAITED until the feast was over,” goes on, “and then, as casually as I could, I said I had got a present for her. I flattered myself that the tone of my voice was most successful, but have often wondered since whether it really deceived her.

“She appeared to be deceived. In any case her excitement and curiosity was not assumed. She became like a child, wanting to know what it was. Then I brought in my little beast of a bear, tumbling about at the end of his plaited halter, like a collie pup, all hair and no shape, with a couple of eyes like the black heads of hatpins sticking a yard out of his head.

“She had often seen tree-bears in the forest, and needed no introduction to know what it was. The next instant it was in her arms, and for a couple of healthy men, during those, moments while she talked nonsense to it, I suppose we must have looked the biggest fools in creation.

“There was one second, however, when she glanced her gratitude at me over the top of its head. In sole possession of that look, I went out into the creek as satisfied as if I had shot a brace of lions off my own bat, which is a hopeless confusion of simile but conveys admirably what I felt.

“For the rest of the day, the little beast monopolized the whole of her time, and in all the affection she bestowed upon it, I felt I had some sort of proprietary share. I knew Jonathan had the sense of being right out of it. The possession of the creature had completely laid hold—as I had guessed it would—upon the hidden depths of her imagination. She had forgotten his flowers; forgotten the awkwardness of that moment when she had touched his hand. And I have no reason to deny that I was glad. I felt I had won the day which had begun so well in his favour. What is more, I seemed to sense some moments when, as he looked at that animal in her arms, he almost hated me. Strangest of all, I said to myself that he could hate me if he felt so inclined. It mattered less to me than the thought that I had pleased her.”

In this manner, David has described, the first palpable change which had come about in their friendship. I can quite understand how after a night’s sleep with doubtless not a few hours of thought over all that had happened that day, they were not a little shocked to discover the change it had wrought in them, I can quite understand, too, how, realizing it, they did all they knew to pull themselves together.

Civilization, after all, was not so far behind them in those first few weeks. To the whole situation they applied those arguments they would have used had they been in less unconventional surroundings, and then the folly of it all became apparent. By the next morning they were both laughing at themselves, when it needed but a word from one or the other for the whole thing to be thrashed out in the broad light of logic and common sense.

Jonathan was the first to speak the necessary word. He, the most completely of the two, had deceived himself with good sound reasons.

“Unless we take damned good care of ourselves,” he said, “this girl’s going to make a hopeless mess of all our plans to get away. We aren’t here for the fun of the thing, and, as far as I can help it, we’re not going to stay for the fun of it either. It’s no good working against each other. We’ve got to work together.”

For answer, David just took hold of his hand and wrung it.

“My dear old chap,” he said, with the deepest sincerity, “I’ve been wanting to say something as sensible as that ever since I got up.”

“Well—she’s nothing to us, ” said Jonathan.

“Nothing,” said David.

“We never saw her till three weeks ago.”

“That’s all—except that I’d seen her on the boat,” David added.

“For that matter, so had I,” said Jonathan.

“Well—you hadn’t noticed her.”

“No—but what the devil does that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter a damn,” said David.

“The whole point is that she’s nothing to us,” Jonathan continued, “but if we go on fooling over her and fussing about her, like we did yesterday, our little limited company of interests is going to go to blazes. We shall all be at loggerheads, when we ought to be hanging together. There’s only one way to put a stop to it. ’ ’

Not seeing it so easy a matter as that, David inquired what it was.

“Tell her,” said Jonathan—“tell her what our interests are—that they’re not in seeing who can pay her the most acceptable attentions, but in finding a way out of this beastly place as quickly as we can, and that she must co-operate in every way it’s possible for her to do so. It is no good her dancing in in a Bond Street costume when there’s work to be done all day, and every day. We must make our first shot by launching the boat, and if we get her off, we may be some days at sea, with the ultimate possibility of returning here after all. What I’ve been aiming at is to make this place as comfortable a base for operations as possible, and then, when that’s done as^a safeguard, to leave no stone unturned to get away.”

This was, as David calls it, the rock-bottom of common sense. They were all dependent the one upon the other. Without each other’s help, without each other’s co-operation, matters were almost worse than if they were individuals alone on that desolate shore. He made, however, a sensible amendment to Jonathan’s suggestions.

“Tell her,” he said—“tell her by all means. Let’s have a serious talk with her. But it’s not a bit of good putting it down to her dressing up in her Bond Street fallals. Don’t let’s say anything about that.”

It was hard to persuade Jonathan on this, especially without giving him very definite reasons. His method of dealing with women in vital issues was much that of the bull in the china shop.

“Why not tell her exactly what we mean, and have done with it? ” said he.

“Because what we mean,” replied David, “is about the weakest part of what we want to say. What we mean is that we’re afraid of her sex, and what we want to say is, that we don’t care a tu’penny cuss about it one way or another.”

The honesty of this was too subtle for Jonathan. What he wanted was, without any two ways about it, to blow the ship’s whistle for all ashore and haul down the Blue Peter from the masthead. But it was nothing like so simple as that.

“Say it your own way then,” said he, “but let’s have her in now, and get it over.”

She came at once to David’s calling, dressed as she had been for those past few weeks in her seaman’s trousers suspended with straps over her shoulders. There was not a suggestion in her appearance that she ever wanted to put on—what David called—her Bond Street fallals again.

They both of them felt a little awkward as she entered, when, divining the sense of something in the air, she stood for an instant looking from one to the other. David thrust forward the best seat— an arm-chair, scooped out of the trunk of a tree they had felled. Softened with a cushion she had made and stuffed with the feathers of some birds they had trapped, it was far from uncomfortable. She took it with a questioning look at them, and then, before David could speak, she said:

“Have I done anything wrong?”

Straightway he laughed, and even Jonathan, set upon the business in hand, allowed his mouth to relax into a anile.

“Can’t we call you in for a talk without your thinking that?” said David. “We’re a limited liability company, not yet floated—but we want to float one day, if we get the chance.”

Still she looked from one to the other, knowing they had not called her in to tell her that.

“Well—what have you got to say?” she asked in that guarded and suspicious way women have when you feel they are bristling with receptive points of instinct, ready to take the first impression that comes.

“Well, only this,” replied David, no less on guard himself, “that we want to get out of this place. That sounds like a platitude, but it needs to be said, because it entails certain things we want to talk to you about.”

“Go on, ” she said quietly.

“Well, there are two ways of escape,” he continued—“at least, two ways that lie in our compass to attempt. The chance of a passing ship we’ve provided for with signals as well as we can. That’s on the lap of the gods.”

“There are so many things in that lap,” said she.

“Exactly. We can’t leave it alone to that. And with the other two ways, there are risks— pretty considerable ones. What we want to know is, if you’re prepared, when you hear what they are, to share them.”

“What are they?”

Jonathan interposed here, telling her of the attempt they intended to make through the forest.

“So far as I can calculate,” he said, “we’re something like fifty or seventy miles—maybe more—from the nearest place of habitation. When we get to that it’ll be no more than a few huts. However, it would be in touch with the world again. But, even so, that fifty or seventy miles is through tropical forest. You can’t guess what that means by just looking about you here, where we’ve cut a track to get the water every day, and have mapped out a passage back to the beach. It’s nothing like that. Over seventy miles of forest, and not even knowing his destination, a man has about ten chances in a hundred of coming through. A mile a day is sometimes good going. We can’t carry provisions for seventy days. Our food is not in tabloid form. The other chance is the sea; launching the boat across that surf and getting out to a passing ship—a matter of twenty or thirty miles, perhaps—limited provisions again; or making down the coast till we come to one of the villages that hang on the edge of the sea. The risk is always the same—starvation. As far as the sea is concerned, I don’t think we could launch the boat, so that chance is vague. The greatest chance of all is getting through the forest, and there lies the greatest risk of all. It’ll be a cut six of one and a dried half a dozen of the other. ’ ’

All this apparently Jonathan must have said in that tone of voice—I think I have alluded to it before—as though he were giving orders to his foreman.

“Did you call me in here, ” she asked proudly, “because you thought I wasn’t prepared to share any risks that were going?”

There must have been something besides pride in the note of her voice, for David was very quick to answer that.

“No—no—no,” he said hurriedly. “We know you’re game enough for anything. It isn’t that a bit. It is that we must work together; help, not hinder each other. We must look upon the whole business, as I said in the beginning, as a limited company. Each one must be the same as the other. In this deserted place, we’re right up against it, and the ordinary civilized laws don’t exist.”

In a moment of inspiration he thought of a better way of putting it.

“It all amounts to this,” he said. “We were afraid you hadn’t got the hang of the situation, that you wanted to be treated with extra attentions because you were a woman—whereas, in this situation we find ourselves flung into, there’s no such thing as sex at all. We want to get out, and that’s all there is about it.”

He looked at Jonathan and emphatically Jonathan nodded his head. He only wished he could have wrapped it up so nicely, yet said it as plainly himself.

“David’s got it in a nutshell,” he said abruptly.

“In an affair like this everybody’s one of a company, and we’ve got to hang together.”

She listened quite quietly to all this after that first moment of pride when, as David had seen, she was certainly hurt. When Jonathan had finished, she said:

“Then I mustn’t persuade you to give me little presents on my birthday—or pay me any attentions of any kind, because that interferes with the work, and creates a sense of friction in the company. That’s right—isn’t it?” .

They looked at her. They looked at each other, but said nothing.

“That’s what you mean—isn’t it?” she repeated. “And I’m not to put on my best, because it’s my only frock, as in a situation like this, there’s no such thing as sex. I believe I’ve got your meaning, haven’t I?”

“You’ve got the gist of it,” said Jonathan.

“If you’re going to take it,” added David, “in the spirit in which it was meant.”

She looked at them, smiled, but said no more. Then, nodding her head, she went straightway out of the hut. They remained for a moment staring at each other when she had gone. David was the first to break the silence.

“We’re a couple of the most consummate fools that God ever made,” said he.

In amazement Jonathan asked why.

“She understands all right,” he said. “She told us she did. Why, she realized we were hinting about her rigging herself up in that dress yesterday. I thought that showed quite a nice sense of understanding.”

“Oh, yes—she understands,” David replied. “There wasn’t a word or a look she didn’t understand, and a good deal better than we do ourselves. You’ve travelled all over the world, and you talk about elemental laws and symbols and impulsory instincts as though they were things that had to be learnt by experience before a man Can set his life by them. That girl’s got more knowledge of them in the tip of her little finger, without going out of a London drawing-room, than you’ve collected in fifteen years’ tramping round the world. We’re a couple of consummate fools ever to have said a word,” he repeated. “Of course she guessed about the blooming dress. And, after all this jaw, she knows a damned sight more about it than we do.”

When he had said that, he just fetched his bucket, and went off across the creek to the forest.

It was his turn again to fetch the water, and he went, as he says himself, in the worst mood possible.

“As I crossed the creek,” he says, “I saw her working hard at her wood-carving. The baby tree-bear was lying asleep on the sand by her side. Apparently she didn’t see me, but as I went by at some distance, the little beggar woke up, yawned, and stretched himself, whereupon she took him up in her arms and kissed him as though he were the only friend she had on earth. I tripped up over a root, watching her, and swore as I’ve seldom done in my life before. ’ ’

CHAPTER XV

SEX

FOR the whole of the next week, she kept her distance. There was nothing small or petty about her attitude. To all appearances, she talked to them the same as usual, but in indescribable ways they were made to feel that they were outside the pale. David seems unable to describe it better than that.

“It was a sensation,” he says, “that we were, of course, inevitable to the situation. We could not be avoided, and she realized it would be foolish on her part to disassociate herself from us in any way. But there would come a look into her eyes often, as though she were miles away from us in her thoughts. She was not married, it is true, and though, as far as I was concerned, she had not told me of any love affair she had left behind in England, she seemed all that time to be thinking of one.

There is a look in a woman’s eye when she is thinking about a man. It is not necessarily sentimental at all, but is certainly different from any other. That look she often had.”

From all I can read in David’s script, Jonathan seems to have been scarcely, if at all, affected by this change of manner. He worked on, twelve and sometimes fourteen hours a day, slogging at it like a slave, to get the place really comfortable and safe before he undertook that first attempt at their escape by sea.

And during this time, day by day, Joan seemed to improve in her appearance. Scrupulously she adhered to the garments they had practically prescribed for her, but it seemed to David that she was doing her hair with greater consideration. There was as well a finer glow of colour in her cheeks and lips. Even her eyes seemed brighter. Again and again he would find himself looking at her and thinking of those few moments when he had held her in his arms as he carried her up the saloon companion-way.

She had never asked, and David had preferred not to tell her, who had saved her life on the ship. She did not, as a matter of fact, know that anyone had gone to any particular risk or trouble about it. She had found herself in the boat, and her experiences there had been such that she did not care particularly to talk about them. I am not surprised at that. Upon Jonathan, who had saved so many lives that night, the fact had made but little impression. He had not thought to inform her of the circumstances.

An impression, however, was apparently made upon him by the increasing improvement in her appearance. He mentioned it at breakfast one morning.

“This sort of life’s agreeing with you,” said he. “I thought you’d got to be yourself again three or four weeks ago. But you seem to be piling on health every day.”

This was the first time she had looked really and consciously pleased with either of them since that board meeting of the company in the hut. This was her own name for it. Jonathan had called to her one day afterwards, when she had come up, saying—

“What, another board meeting?”

After breakfast on this morning, when he had made his remark about her health, she asked Jonathan to come and inspect her wood-carving.

She kept it all in her hut and had not previously shown it to either of them until it was ready. Jonathan stayed, talking with her outside her hut for nearly an hour, while David, the other side of the creek, worked at the finishing Of the arm they were building to the Malaga’s boat to equip her for the experiment of taking the waves for which those native surf-boats are intended.

Inspecting his work later that morning, Jonathan declared it to be a slovenly performance.

“You’ve got a strand there,” said he, “that’ll snap with the first wave that puts any pressure on it.”

I can quite appreciate the fact that by this time David was not in the best of tempers.

“I felt inclined,” he says, “to let them dree their weird, only that some instinct of self-justification, pride, anything you like to call it, asserted the belief in my mind that I was, in my own way, as entitled as was Jonathan to win her approval.

“That either of us, so quickly, should have thought it necessary to win it, of course, is interesting in itself, though nothing to be so greatly surprised about. She was an attractive woman. The passing thought which had pitched through my mind on the night of the fire is enough to prove that, but it does not wholly, in my conception of it, justify our swiftly developed sense of rivalry. There are plenty of attractive women in the world. Jonathan had met them; so had I. For a woman to be attractive does not necessarily mean that one wants to harness one’s life to hers for good and all. But such a situation as this did not lead to any conclusion which could be avoided at the eleventh hour by the dropping of the Blue Peter from the masthead, or a discreet avoidance of meetings when there would be plenty of other men to take one’s place in her thoughts.

“We were at the top of that hill which is both precipitous and inevitable, yet neither of us seemed to pause for consideration of what it would involve to coast down into the valley from which there would be no more climbing to those heights where we could, as we had so far chosen, breathe the hill winds of freedom.

“I have come to the conclusion since,” he adds at the end of that chapter of his script, “that the instinct of the sexes is still far more elemental in us and more easily roused than any other and is only distracted by the thousand and various interests with which civilization occupies our minds.”

David concludes what I have called a chapter, but which would better have been named a section of his manuscript, with that remark. In reconstructing the whole story, however, I have thought it advisable to add the following description of an incident which bears upon the situation as it had developed up to the time when they made their first bid for freedom.

About three days before that which was set out for their great adventure, David was returning from the spring where they got their daily supply of water. By some accident he had kicked over the bucket and felt it incumbent upon him for his carelessness, without saying anything more about it, to go and refill it himself.

When he was about a hundred yards from the creek, he heard a commotion amongst a troop of monkeys over his head. They were scampering along the branches of the trees, swinging from one limb to another as though the devil and all were at their heels. Creeping forward as softly as he could to find out what it was, he saw Joan half way up a tree, just off the edge of their water track. Certainly it had been an easy one to climb, but that made him none the less surprised at seeing her there. What was she up to? He thought for a moment that she was trying to return her baby tree-bear to its natural environment and an instant of chagrin, almost amounting to resentment, kept him there a moment, motionless as he watched her.

It was obvious she had not seen him. Without knowledge of the accident to the bucket, that was the last place she might have expected to see either of them. The water track served no other purpose for their needs. He made out quickly enough she had not got the tree-bear with her. Her hands were empty. Then what was it she was after?

She had found a comfortable seat in the fork of the tree and from there leaned out and was picking a whole cluster of deep scarlet orchids of some climbing variety that were blooming in a lightsome gap of the trees.

David was just about to hurry forward to her assistance, when he stopped. She had thrust the blossoms into her pocket, plucked without stem or thought for preservation. It was the petals alone she was collecting. What for? Out of another pocket, she fetched a little mirror. Holding it up to her face, as she sat there, she looked at its reflection. There was no mistaking what it was. Then, taking a petal in her fingers, she crushed it and rubbed it first on her lips, then on her cheeks, regarding the operation all the time in her glass, and finally throwing the bruised petal away. That being done, she applied her puff, though heaven knows what small quantity of powder she must have had left by that time. Finally, with the completion of her purpose, she was just proceeding to descend as David moved forward and then she ‘ caught sight of him, when every movement in her body was arrested. He had seen. He must have seen. She knew it as surely as if he had shouted out his knowledge and with it all the things she knew must be in his mind about her with the discovery he had made.

No sub-editing of his script in so subtle and interesting a situation as this can serve my purpose. The whole unexpurgated account, as he gives it, is a thousand times more valuable in the first person than I could ever hope to make it.

“I came forward,” he says, “standing at the bottom of the tree, asking if I could help her down.

“‘It won’t be such a simple matter as it was getting up, ’ said I.

“She declined any assistance I could give her and began at once to descend, with considerable difficulty, as I had promised her. At last she stood on the ground beside me, brushing her clothes with flickings of her hand, for all the world like a naughty schoolboy caught in the act of robbing a farmer’s orchard. The only difference was that I did not feel at all like the farmer whose fruit has been stolen. There was no such thing as righteous indignation in my mind.

“If any word can describe my sensations, that word is—fear. I felt suddenly afraid of her; afraid of her knowledge of the power of her sex and the evident determination in her mind, which this incident proved, to make use of it.

“The attitude I assumed—the only one possible —was one of superior amusement at my discovery. It was far from what, in my deeper consciousness, I really felt. There was, moreover, no possibility of pretending I had not seen. Had it existed for a moment in my mind, she, at least, gave me no chance of it.

“Appreciating quickly enough that secrecy and a tacit understanding in silence of the matter would merely aggravate its importance in my mind, she seized, by instinct, the only logical consequence of her behaviour. She had it out with me straight away.

“‘I suppose,’ she said, and with a smile superficially full of good humour but which for that very reason seemed the more dangerous to me —‘I suppose you think it more or less silly for a woman to think about her appearance in primitive sort of surroundings like this where there are no women to notice how she looks one way or another. ’

“I felt a twitch of laughter somewhere in my mind at the clever way in which she ignored the subject of sex. I don’t think that laughter could have been seen in my eyes, for she went on imperturbably.

“‘If you want to cut a woman right off from civilization,’ she continued, ‘I expect you’d have to take her mirror away from her. If she has one ’—she produced her own little pocket affair from some receptacle in her garments—‘she’s bound to look at it, and if she looks at it, she’s bound to see that her complexion is going to the dogs unless she takes care of it. But then possibly you don’t realize what her complexion is to a woman. There was one of those scarlet orchids in that bunch of flowers Jonathan got for my birthday. That’s when I first thought of it. I tried it that evening. It squeezes out a lovely, deep, red juice. It may be bad for the skin. I don’t know. I haven’t found any—what they call—deleterious effects yet. Oh, my heavens! Are you going to stand there forever, just looking at me and saying nothing?’

“She found my silence more critical than she could bear. In all that flow of talk, her effort at passing off the situation was spent. She could do no more. Yet there was I, still uncommitted by anything I had said, facing her with a persistent silence that must have seemed too callously critical for words. It was far less critical than she supposed. The more I saw her intention to ignore that question of sex, explaining it upon grounds of mere personal vanity, the more fear I felt of what all this would come to in the end.

“‘I don’t know that there’s anything for me to say,’ I replied at last. ‘You’ve explaihed it. However odd it may have appeared for a moment to see a woman dressed in sailor’s trousers sitting half-way up a tree in an African forest and rougeing her lips with the juice of a scarlet orchid, you have taken the oddness out of it by what you’ve said. I suppose, as you say, the glass explains it. So long as a pretty woman is kept conscious of her complexion, I presume it’s her natural instinct to look after it.’

“I must have convinced her of that because, in a sudden impulse, she took my arm with a companionable movement and turned me with her in the direction of the creek.

“You’re an understanding old thing,’ she said cheerfully, and I shied at the thought that she could call me that when, more than likely, she was thinking how completely deceived I had been. Perhaps she meant it. God knows! It was, I must confess, the simple pressure of her hand on my arm that disturbed me most. In that moment I felt the pulse of my heart increase its measure. I did not know where to look—what to say. With all my knowledge that the whole situation was a battle-ground of sex and that she knew only too well the weapons she must use for victory; with all my knowledge, too, that we must be on our guard, I yet found myself on the verge of capitulating.

“It was at this very moment she stopped as we walked and turned me round so that I must look into her face, asking me if there was too much red on her lips or cheeks.

“I swear to Heaven there is no shame in my mind when I confess that it was with no little difficulty I restrained myself from taking her in my arms, and that, without waiting to know one way or another whether she would have wished it or not.

“Well?” she inquired after a moment one word, if it did not dispel the impulse, at least brought it within my control. I steadied my voice and found myself listening to the sound of it as I casually replied that as far as I could see she had not overdone it.

“I sort of feel you’d know if I had,’ she said then. “You’d understand things like that. Jonathan wouldn’t. Either he’d notice nothing, or he’d be horribly shocked at a woman—especially in this sort of place—thinking it necessary to make up at all. But you realize, I’m sure you do, how a woman must miss all the little lotions and things she has at home.’

And with that she took my arm again, apparently never realizing how in every word she said, she was disclosing the secret of her purpose, until I was forced to a conclusion. I was forced to the conclusion that women do not understand themselves or they are more cunning than the most feline beast that prowls with silent feet in search of its prey. I prefer to believe and do believe the former.

“They do not understand themselves or the motives which actuate their behaviour. It is not deceit, but sheer ignorance when they deny so vehemently the unvarnished instincts of sex.

“Most vehemently would Joan have denied then the instincts which’ had prompted her use of the scarlet juice of that flower. In effect, she was denying it all the time and that without any provocation of accusation. And I cannot believe of her that she was cunning or deceitful enough to have taken such a course, unprovoked, if the purpose in her had been conscious, to blind my eyes. For even supposing it had, would she then have been so clumsy in the methods she adopted— methods that would scarcely have blinded the eyes of a child?

“Somehow or other it seems to me to be this. Sex is subconscious in its purposes in a woman’s mind. She is not immediately aware of the spur that drives her. Yet the truth which is ineradicably in all of us pricks her conscience. It was so with Joan. The truth had pricked her. And that modesty, which is all a part of her sex’s equipment, but which is conscious and uppermost in a woman’s mind, had readily answered the challenge.

“It needed no accusing observation of mine for her to offer all these specious excuses about the urging protest of the looking-glass. In a word, it was not me she was deceiving, but herself. To have admitted that she was trying to snare our passions, would have been to stand ashamed, naked in the light of the truth. She must defend, she must deceive herself. All women must, or yield that claim to modesty they know to be the spotless garment which becomes them most of all.

“I am not pretending to say this is the way with all women. Some give up their right to the claim of modesty. Frankly and fearlessly they are out to capture by the sheer power of their attractions. ‘Chastity,’ as a friend of mine once said to me— ‘Chastity is a taste. Some people like it.’ To which one may well add: ‘Thank God that most women do!’

“I am sure that she loved nothing better in herself than that pride of modesty, so hotly accused in those moments by the subconscious instincts of her sex. I am certain that, had I given way to the impulse her sex itself had stimulated in me, and taken her, as I had wished, in my arms, none would have been fiercer than she in her contempt of my folly.

“But, good Heavens, what a risk she ran and how little did she realize the danger she faced, when she asked me to look at her lips and her cheeks with a calculating and critical eye. Had she really been aware that in her lips I could see nothing, but feel only the burning of my kisses on them, would she have asked me to look? Most firmly I believe she would not have dared. Yet the subconscious instincts of her sex were aware of it all the time. In those days at the creek, they were guiding, leading her in every moment, while with a sublime conviction in the depth of her own modesty, she allowed herself to be deceived at every turn.

“So I have supposed and do believe her mental attitude to have been. If I had not discovered her at her tricks with the petals of that scarlet orchid, she would never have thought to defend herself even to herself. Now, discovery had driven her to self-defence; yet even then, it was for her own benefit rather than mine. My presence regarding her in that act, had given a voice to her subconscious instincts, loud enough to be heard in her conscious mind and up in arms she came—a Joan of Arc let me call her—fighting for the troubled honour of her sex.

“In civilized life, doubtless these actions lose much of the concentration of their purpose. As she had said, with her little lotions and things, they become almost a habit. One becomes so accustomed to the different fashions of dress, the use of cosmetics and of scent, that they pass almost unnoticed and are the more easily defended were one to put such construction upon their use.

“Yet there they are, with the same underlying motive and it is for that reason, perhaps, I have thought it interesting to put all this story down up-. On paper, whereby those who ever see it,may realize how the habits and customs of civilization, while they obscure the elemental purpose in us, have by no means succeeded in altering us from the creatures of instinct that we are.

“Before we reached the edge of the forest, she took her hand from my arm and there she stopped again.

“Will you do me a favour?” she asked.

“I inquired what it was.

“‘ Will you promise to say nothing to Jonathan of what you saw this morning.’

“I knew by the tone of her voice that she had said this after long and uncomfortable hesitation. I realized that she had prepared the way for it in her comparison between Jonathan’s powers of understanding and my own. I appreciated how finally and utterly she had given herself away by the request she had made. Yet none of these thoughts was the strongest in my mind. I was caught once more in a gust of passion and this time it was the wildest and the maddest jealousy.

“She cared for Jonathan more than for me. She was more concerned with his good opinion than she was with mine. I could think more or less what I pleased. I knew; I had seen her, so that was unavoidable. But if she could still appear to Jonathan as she had done hitherto, then I was to be used as an accomplice to this end.

“Again I felt that surge of the hot spring of my blood as I stood there looking right down into the deep grey of her eyes. She must have known then, and more surely than she did at her birthday feast, when she touched Jonathan’s hand, that something was all wrong somewhere.

“An expression of fear flickered for a moment in her face as I looked at her. But she was no coward. It soon went.

“‘Why don’t you answer?’ she asked presently, in a steady tone of voice. ‘What’s the matter? ’

“‘You’re fond of Jonathan, are you?’ said I. And the moment I had said it, self-revealing as I had known her question to have been, realized my own was a thousand times more so.

“The instant she threw back her head and her voice rang with cheery laughter, I knew what a fool I had been.

‘“Fond of Jonathan!’ she exclaimed. ‘Just because I don’t want him to hear something which I know he won’t understand! You must know less about women than I thought, if you imagine I’m fond of a man because I have a little pride in myself about him. You know. You saw. You caught me. I shouldn’t have let you see if I’d known. I certainly shouldn’t have volunteered to tell you. I suppose men think a woman, in a situation like this, is bound to get fond of one or the other of the two men she finds herself cast adrift with. My goodness! What conceit! ’

“She laughed again and looked at me humorously as I stood there before her, feeling, I will admit it, a most consummate fool.

“I had wilfully given her that opportunity and for a woman, alone with two men in that predicament, what other course could she have taken? All her instincts were there, alive and alert to protect herself. She could have done no otherwise.

“But how I longed to tell her what a liar she was; to show her that that very deed, in the act of which I had caught her, was the proof positive that she wanted to enslave the one or the other of us, and that with the request she had just made what other assumption could I make but that Jonathan was the one.

“If Jonathan had seen as much as I, probably he would have said as much as I felt. I am sure I don’t know whether he would or not. I am only certain that it was impossible for me to say it then myself. She disarmed me with her laughter, the very turn of her head, the merriment in her voice. I was not sure of her, and the man who speaks or acts at hazard before he is sure is thirty times a fool.

“‘You may call it conceit if you like,’ said I, ‘it has at least the recommendation of not being self-conceit. I asked you if you were fond of another man—not of me.’

“She became serious at once and for a moment confused. It was a parry to her thrust which she had not expected. In the tone of my voice as well, she realized I was feeling deeply and had been hurt by what she had said, for she came forward and, with a simple ingenuous movement, laid her hand on my shoulder.

“‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she said gently—a gentleness which, instead of calming me only made my heart beat the faster. ‘I wasn’t really accusing you of conceit. Only men in general.

That’s their common attitude of mind. They think they’re irresistible.’

“I shook my head.

“‘You make a big mistake about us when you think that,’ said I. ‘There are conceited men and vain women. Vanity or conceit has little or nothing to do with it. All that a normal man thinks is that the laws are irresistible, not himself. It’s the common attitude of women to deny that. The Suffragettes most vehemently deny it in their Suffrage Papers and there are thousands of timid, well-brought-up women who hug themselves in secret because some of their sex have the courage to say what they all of them drive themselves to believe. That’s all it is, and in a civilized world, where there are four o’clock tea-parties, and if you want to see a certain lady in whom you are interested, you can call on her every second Thursday, when she will be at home with her mother to all the family acquaintances, that belief is all right. It ‘holds good. It is the only sort of belief you could express in becoming language on a second Thursday in the month. But it isn’t the sort of language in a place like this. You ask me not to tell Jonathan that you’ve been rougeing your lips and putting colour in your cheeks. Well—that’s not the sort of favour you’d ask of me on a second Thursday in the month. On the second Thursday in the month, if I had the audacity to ask you during a buzz of the conversation if you were fond of my friend, you’d be well within your rights if you snubbed me straight away. That might be conceit on my part, if not for myself, then for the attractions of my sex. But here—’ I looked up at a noise in the upper branches of the forest trees, where there were two monkeys fighting for dear life with a whole crowd of others gathered round in amiable curiosity to watch the outcome. ‘ Look at that,’ said I.

“She turned and looked, then turned away.

“‘I shall never like monkeys,’ she said.

“‘No, ’ said I, ‘they’re abominably like men.’ ”

Before they separated, David had given her his promise that he would say nothing to Jonathan of the incident that morning.

“I don’t quite see,” he had added, “why you should expect I would tell him.”

“Doesn’t it generally amuse men to talk about that kind of things?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to reconstruct your ideas about men,” he replied. “Wouldn’t it occur to you that I might like to keep it all to myself— a possession shall we say, I might like to call my very own, or shared at best between us two?

Couldn’t you admit of that point of view in men?”

‘‘It sounds more like a woman,” said she.

He laughed at that. It is the cruellest thing a woman thinks she can say of a man.

“Well—do you despise that? ” he asked.

“I don’t know. There isn’t a trace of it in Jonathan, anyhow—is there?”

“Not a trace,” said he, and she walked away to her hut. It would have been impossible to say in » that moment whether she hated him or not.

CHAPTER XVI

AN INSIGHT

IT MUST now refer to two events following swiftly in succession one after the other in a few days. In detail their interest is mainly in that quality of adventure from which standpoint, for those whose taste lies in its direction, this story might solely be regarded. As I have said before, it is not from this view I take it. It was not David’s, though he gives a wealth of detail to the description of these two events.

I shall, however, content myself with a brief statement of what happened, with the sole intention of showing how a new aspect was brought to those three living their life in that solitary creek.

The first event in its order was their attempt to launch the boat and put out to sea, either to get into the track of ships, or to make their way down close to the shore, until they came to some signs of coastal habitation.

There is one incident, however, before I continue, which I must record from David’s manuscript. At first I thought it to be superfluous but on second reading have decided to include it, because I think it has its definite value in the light of events that are to come.

The day before starting, Joan had come to Jonathan with her tree-bear in her arms. The little beggar had become mightily attached to her. It followed her wherever she went—came obediently to her call. She fed it and fed it well. There was no other secret to it than this. Women have discovered that same secret about men, since the days in the Garden of Eden; for I take it that the symbol of the apple was drawn from the Patriarch’s simple knowledge of the world as he saw it then and as it may well be considered to be to this day.

“There was,” writes David, “a suspicious glitter in her eyes as she came up to where Jonathan and I were putting the finishing touches to the Malaga’s boat. I could see at once the tremendous problem it really was in her mind, for what a woman gives in affection, seems to become a part of herself. I could see by the expression in her face that she actually did not know how the parting was to be made.

“To what happened, I was a silent witness. There was nothing for me to say. It was tacitly agreed by all of us that Jonathan should have the deciding voice in any question arising for discussion. I did not envy him his authority then.

“She held the little beggar in her two hands and, as Jonathan turned round at her approach, she said, ‘What am I to do with Sam when we go to-morrow V

“Sam looked superlatively indifferent to what the answer might be. He rolled his eyes over the two of us and licked his chops, where there still were lingering traces of honey, with a tongue the colour of a chow’s and as rough as a steel file.

“‘What do you mean, what are you to do?’ replied Jonathan. There was only one aspect of it to him. For a moment he was puzzled by the reason for her question. They were about to set out on a quest not unfraught with a certain amount of danger and she, already, was an addition to their party he had never calculated on. Where, then, lay any doubt as to what she was to do with a little beast like that, which would only have to be fed from their provisions, would hamper them at every turn, probably have to be chucked overboard in three days and, above all, which was eminently capable of looking after itself in its own natural environment. He frowned as he looked at her, puzzled by what she meant.

“‘ What did you think you were going to do with him?’ he added.

“She screwed her lips up, rather than let him see the moment’s quiver in them.

“‘I thought I might be able to take him home,’ said she.

‘“Take him home!’Jonathan echoed. ‘Hang it, this is his home—isn’t it? D’you imagine he won’t fare better here, than with you looking after him in an open boat for six days or more? Good heavens! He doesn’t want your help to get along in life. He’s living on the fat of the land now with all the honey you give him, but he’ll soon wish he’d never been born when he finds himself out at sea. It’s amazing you should consider it for a moment. We’ve got to think of feeding ourselves—not a menagerie.’

“Every word he said was pure and unadulterated common sense. It was a preposterous question on her part from every point of view, but one; from the point of view of our own necessities, a consideration of the little beast itself, but not from the point of view of her own emotions about it. It was just this very point of view which Jonathan overlooked.

“Yet I felt certain she would have been just as amenable to reason, had he been able to take that aspect of it into consideration.

“It was the care and affection she had given it which she was finding difficult to leave behind. Probably it needed a certain amount of looking after still, and, having given so much, she was to be allowed to give no more. And she wanted to give. Deprived of the power of giving, she was being robbed of the power of self-expression. Reason would easily have overridden all those emotions, had it been applied with understanding. The plain reason and nothing else was all Jonathan had to give her. I saw the quick light in her eye when he said: ‘We’ve got to think of feeding ourselves—not a menagerie.’

“‘I’ll be entirely responsible for it,’ she declared quickly.

“‘ Oh—that’s all stuff and nonsense! ’ he replied, as equably as he could. ‘You’ll find you’ve got more than enough to do to look after yourself. That little beast’ll be best off of the whole lot of us.’

‘“It can’t climb a tree yet,’ she retorted.

“‘No,’ said he, ‘but it will. Nature’ll teach it that quicker than you can.’

“‘Yes—and when we’ve gone, one of those leopards will get it. I saw the mark of one of their paws in the sand outside the palisade—only yesterday.’

“‘Well—it’ll be a quick death,’ replied Jonathan. ‘Quicker than ours if we make a mess of things to-morrow.’

“And with that he turned away to his work, too impatient with the whole subject to waste more words upon it. She went back to the hut with Sam in her arms. It was so abominably obvious he was right, that she too could say no more. It seemed to me, however, by the curve of her shoulders as she walked away that she was sobbing her heart out, though so long as she had been facing us there was never a tear in her eyes.

“That evening she did not appear at our supper-meal. Half-way through, I suggested one of us should call her, intending that one to be myself.

“‘Better let her alone,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s no good trying to understand women. If she likes to sulk-’

“‘She’s not going to sulk,’ said I.

“‘Well—whatever she’s doing, let her have it out with herself. We can’t do any good. That’s just the sort of thing which makes me thank God I’m not married. Do you remember that night on the Malaga—what I said? Women have got the means of life—men the means of living. She’s treating that little beast as if it were a baby of her own and then she comes up against us with our means of living, as expressed in our chance of getting away, and the two things won’t stick together. In this case it’s the woman who has to knuckle under.’

“‘And that’s the exception,’ said I.

“He said he had his doubts about that and went on with his meal. As soon as I had finished, I went out to see what had become of her. The door of her hut was locked. I knocked and knocked again. At last she answered. I told her who it was and a moment later the door slowly opened. She appeared in front of me, her eyes red with weeping.

‘“What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you come into supper?’

“There must have been a tone in my voice touching sympathy with her. Anyhow, for answer, she just opened the door a little wider and there on the floor I saw the body of Sam lying still in all that looseness of death.

“‘What have you done? ’ I asked.

“‘Killed him,’ she replied.

“I looked at her, I must confess, with wonder.

“‘He would have been killed,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t have escaped from those leopards. They would have mauled and tortured him, just like cats do. I know what brutes they are. And of course Jonathan was right. I knew all the time I couldn’t take him—so I—so I-’

“She broke down, when it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to put my hands round her shoulders and let her cry her heart out in my arms. But, my heavens! It was hard to do no more.

“Twice she had been in my arms and each time I had been powerless to do more than hold her there. The first time—there was no counting that. But now! I swore then it should come about once more and that the next time, whether it were opportune or not, I would tell her what she meant to me.

“As she disengaged herself from me, I looked back with a sudden instinct to the other hut, and there was Jonathan in the act of turning back through the door. He had seen us, and he had wished to see no more.”

CHAPTER XVII

THE VENTURE BY SEA

AT sunrise the next morning they started in the boat for the beach. With constant fishing expeditions in the canoe they had from time to time made a fair clearing. On that day the journey took them only three hours.

All the way down,.they discussed their chances of success. One cannot be surprised they should think and talk of nothing else. From what I read in David’s manuscript, he was frankly optimistic; Joan either cared little or too much, for she gave no definite expression of her feelings. Jonathan apparently was the only pessimist of the party. This certainly was not because it was his nature, but undoubtedly because he knew the difficulties standing in their way.

They had brought provisions for five or six days; water for more. Once launched, of course they would stand a good chance. The Malaga’s boat was seaworthy enough. If in two days they did not get in sight of a passing ship—naturally their greatest hope—there would still be time, if there were wind at all, to make a dash down the coast.

They had chosen a fine, calm day. The rollers of surf were tumbling \n, one after another, gleaming white. Half a mile beyond, the sea was a polished turquoise, still and heavy beneath the burning sun..

Their hearts must have been beating, all three of them, as, when once the arm they had built to take the surf was fitted at right angles to the boat, they started her off down that channel towards the foam of the countless waves.

Joan showed no trace of fear at the prospect, though there was risk enough. Once in the midst of his labours, David Snatched a glance at her. She was watching Jonathan, the sheer brute strength of him and the mighty muscles of his arms as he fought with those ceaseless waves to keep the boat moving with her head out to sea.

Not more than ten fines of waves they weathered, before the end came. The arm they had built to support her on one side and give purchase for keeping her ahead, snapped beneath a wash of water like a slate pencil. In a second she was gone out of control, turned broadside on and before they knew where they were the waves were over them and the boat had capsized.

“The luck,” says David here, “came Jonathan’s way. He had been pitched out closer to her than I was, and by the time I had recovered from the shock of it, sufficient to know what I was doing, he had got her in his arms and was keeping her up as we were borne in, boat and all, towards the shore.”

When Jonathan helped her up out of the water on to the beach, she was breathless but none the worse for her ducking. Before she could speak, she began to laugh; for which reason I suppose that David’s suggestion that she was indifferent about their chances, was more or less right.

In that moment, as he heard her, Jonathan forgot his chagrin at their failure, and just wrung her hand, calling her a brick.

“She looked up at him and smiled,” says David, “and I could see she liked that better than if we had been picked up by twenty ships.”

And the result of all this was Jonathan’s expressed conviction that their escape did not lie in the direction of the sea.

“The boat,” he said, “is too heavy for that auxiliary arm—too heavy for those seas. If we made a thousand arms, she’d break every damned one of ’em. I knew that would be it. Two men could never launch her in that. Those native boats they get through that sort of surf with are light as feathers. There’s not an ounce of weight in ’em. And if we made one of those, which ’ud take some months with the tools we have, it might possibly get us down the coast. We could never risk it six or eight days out to sea. We’d better chuck up all hope of this.” Having said that, he stood despondently looking out to the dim horizon where the smoke of a passing steamer, hull-down, could be seen on the ocean highway.

“Look at that!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Five hundred souls aboard, all going to England; all with their work to do in the world and probably grousing because she’s only making her fourteen knots! Blast them! ’ ’ and he turned away.

“I glanced at Joan,” David writes, “and I’d almost swear I saw a smile, if not in her eyes or on her lips, then somewhere in that comer of her heart where a woman keeps things for her own odd conceptions of amusement. As far as I was concerned, I never felt more sorry for a man in all my life. ’ ’

CHAPTER XVIII

THE VENTURE BY LAND

I MUST presume, from David’s silence about it, that the incident of the tree-bear, if not forgotten, had tacitly been put aside.

The only thing that occurred of any importance to the story was in the interval of the few days between their adventure by sea and that day when they set off into the heart of the unknown forest.

Jonathan’s manner to David had changed since their failure in the Malaga’s boat. Partly this may have been accounted for by the depression which came over him, as expressed in those exclamations of his when he stood on the beach and saw the smoke of that steamer, hull-down and homeward bound, with never the ghost of a chance of their attracting her attention. In a considerable degree, no doubt, it was this. He was, as they say, like a bear with a sore head. But it was not this entirely.

On the evening before they started on their second and more adventurous journey, when Joan had retired to her hut, Jonathan turned suddenly on David as though he could keep the matter to himself no longer.

“Are you in love with that girl?” he asked.

“Why?” said David.

“Because the evening before we started that day for the beach and made such a howling mess of it, I saw you at the door of her hut. You’d— you’d got her in your arms.”

Once that had been said, neither of them looked at each other again. They spoke in strained and disjointed sentences, Jonathan taking one of the wooden bowls she had made and scraping the surface of it to a better polish; David cutting his nails with the gold nail-clipper they had found, and absorbing himself with interest over the process.

“I was quite aware you’d seen us,” he said, after a moment’s pause.

“Well?” said Jonathan.

“I can’t say that I see any necessity to explain to you why—why—well—what you saw.”

“Was there any necessity other than what I suggested?” Jonathan inquired.

“Only that she was crying her eyes out. You’d just told her she would have to leave Sam behind. She knew the leopards ’ud get him. There’s no doubt they would, as soon as we’d gone. So she’d killed him.”

“Good God!”

‘‘Yes—I don’t suppose you thought her capable of it.”

David admits, for that matter, he would not have believed it himself.

“Anyhow, that’s what had happened. I don’t know how she managed it. I didn’t ask. She must have had the pluck of her emotions about the little beast. And then her pluck had given out. She was sobbing like a child in there, with the door locked, and Sam lying on the floor at her feet. It didn’t seem unnatural to me that she should find herself in my arms, as you saw us. Have you any objections that she did?”

David repeats this conversation without comment. But in it, myself, I see a degree of mental superiority to which Jonathan could never have made a claim. He would have sworn and said he did love her; and who knows that might have been the best way out of it? But with David there was apparently a sense of romance, forbidding any such discussion, or making impossible so bare a statement, amounting to little more than a confession of desire.

“If, as I supposed,” he says in another part of his papers, “for it seemed to me by that time any fool might have known it, we were both in love with her, then it was as well to keep it to ourselves until the little matter of her own choice had been decided on.”

So at least matters stood between them when they started out that day to make their second adventure towards freedom through the unbeaten tracks of the forest. As far as I can gather, the incident of Sam’s death was never mentioned between any of them again, or for that matter can I see any signs in David’s narrative of the suggestion that he felt any further excuse for intimacy because Joan had come to him that moment in her troubles.

He confines himself here, as I have intimated before, to the minutest detail of that hazardous journey, of which I shall content myself with a’ mere precis of what he has written.

Here, travelling through the forest, the matter of provisioning themselves was of secondary importance, which should not imply that it had not to be carefully considered. They could be fairly certain of all kinds of fruit, but the chance of trapping birds or catching fish had almost entirely to be discounted. In the depths of those forests, scarcely a bird was to be seen, and so many parrots as there were kept only in the highest branches of the trees.

With no little difficulty the boat had been set to rights again and brought back to the creek, and there she was left, moored to the palisade. They. were to take with them the apology for a canoe in which they did their fishing. It was an odd looking craft, but with the tools they had in their workshop—a portion of the residential part of the hut—its construction was really nothing to be ashamed of. Its advantage lay in its lightness and portability. One of them, with difficulty no doubt, could shift it in and out of the water and lift it over ✓ obstacles by himself. It was just capable of taking the three of them, and I can well believe there was almost an art in keeping it trim.

Preparatory to setting out this time, Jonathan suggested a farewell meal at the creek. On the first occasion he had said nothing about farewells, as though he had known the quest was a hopeless one. This time, however, his spirits were high, and it was evident he believed they stood a good chance.

An hour or so before leaving, Joan took them to her hut and showed them the interior, just completed, which she had not allowed them to see before. The construction had been strengthened considerably directly after her convalescence. It was no longer the ramshackle affair they had rigged up when first they arrived at the creek, but had a substantial roof and walls, with a window facing south. For this she had made a patchwork sort of curtain out of the various garments at their disposal, stitching the pieces together with a coarse thread David had discovered could be made from the strands of vine tendrils. But it was the walls upon which she had spent all her care and her delight in colour. They were covered from floor to ceiling—not a great amount of space—with the feathers of birds which had been trapped from time to time.

“Such a glory and a confusion of colour,” writes David, “certainly I have seldom seen. For not only were there parrots and parroquets, the predominating colours of which were yellow and green, but there were the most amazing blues and reds, the richest of warm browns. Strange as it may seem, it gave an air of comfort I can scarcely describe, and that being the case, no one could have called it ugly. Indeed, as a mural decoration in those barbaric surroundings, it would have had a sense of gorgeousness on a grander scale.

“‘ When we get back to England,’ said I, ‘you’d better sell this idea to a Bond Street decorator.’ “She laughed and turned to Jonathan, asking him what he thought of it, and wasn’t it a shame to be leaving it just when it was finished?

“‘ I hope you cleaned those quills well,’ said he. ‘It’ll stink like anything in a week or two if you haven’t.’”

They looked all round the room before they went out, at the comfortable couch she had made of her bed; at the clothes-hanger, with the frock on it which she had never worn again since that day. And on the window-sill, in a wooden bowl of her own making, was a bunch of scarlet orchids, standing in water. They caught David’s eye when, turning quickly, he found her looking at him.

‘‘What was there to do then,” says he, as he tells that part of the story, ‘‘but for the pair of us to burst out laughing, and when Jonathan asked us what the devil we were laughing at, I knew she must have realized then the delight I had in keeping the secret all to myself. ’ ’

So they started, saying farewell to their creek, and when David records there was that look in Joan’s face as she glanced back at the edge of the forest, that look which is tender more than sentimental, and has no relation whatsoever to tears, I fancy, even sitting here in my arm-chair with the trams rumbling along the Embankment, I can appreciate what she must have felt.

There is no home on earth like the home you have made for yourself out of nothing. Labour is the joy of living—but I am telling David’s story and have no right to make comments on my own.

The course of the river—emptying itself through the creek and by their channel into the sea—served them apparently for two days. In that space of time Jonathan calculated they had covered twelve to fourteen miles.

“One thinks of a few thousand of acres of forest here at home,” David writes in his description of their surroundings, “but this was like a continent, a world of mighty trees and tangled undergrowth—a never-ending darkness and silence, beside which the darkness beneath the trees of an English forest was a lighted chamber, and its silence almost a song.”

At the end of two days they had to leave the canoe and take to cutting a way through on land. With every mile Jonathan’s spirits, however, had been rising. Hope was lifting in him at every turn of the path.

“If we can find the food all right,” he said over and over again, “we shall get through. It won’t be fifty miles before we get out of it. I can tell that by the vegetation. It’s changing every mile we go. Once we get out into some sort of open country we’re free as birds.”

David seems unable to explain the effect this hopefulness of Jonathan’s had on them. They trusted him implicitly. It can be understood well enough how they felt like children in his hands. The passage in which David tries to give account of his sensations is interesting. I am going to quote it word for word.

“The more he talked like this, the further I began to feel from that period at the creek, the more I began to sense the life in England again, knowing the hopeless mistakes I had made and the follies I had pursued, blind with the thought that because others were pursuing them, I, therefore, was getting the best out of life. But most of all, the more Jonathan talked like this, the more did my hope rise at the thought that in civilized conditions once more, I should stand a better chance with Joan. At every turn he had the pull of me. At every turn I felt her moving towards him, the strong man of our little company, the one who had knowledge, experience, ability, courage too, and all those qualities which must have appealed to a woman situated as she was. Yet, notwithstanding all these advantages, somehow I felt in the egotism of my spirit that I deserved her as much as he did.

“He had saved her, however, that day in the sea, and, even taking into account his want of understanding of her over the matter of Sam, I knew she had felt the steady strength of his arm as he had helped her to shore; that she had thrilled to the note in his voice when for her good humour at it all, he had called her a brick.

“What I knew most of all was that she did not understand me, and in that environment had no need or desire to try and find me out. The man who could do things in that situation in life was far more the man for her. I knew it as well as I knew my own name; therefore the thought that we were nearing every hour to the approach of civilization once more, filled me, too, with a terrific zest of hope. What she felt herself, I cannot pretend to say. She echoed our spirits, that is all I feel justified in recording of her.”

Increasing in the temper of this mood, they went on for some days, till they came to a belt of swamp land, with the forest continuing beyond. They were living now on what they could find to eat, and though there was plenty of fruit, it seemed impossible to secure anything more substantial. This, however, did not damp their spirits. Jonathan was talking almost in hours now of their release. It proved to promise longer than hours, for without their canoe there was no way through that swamp. For two days they travelled up and down, trying to find an end to it, but apparently it was endless.

And then the catastrophe they never had dared to speak of overcame them. Joan fell sick with fever. For half a day she tried to struggle on, but / was too weak at the end of it to move another step.

David saw Jonathan go away by himself into the forest, and realized that he was cursing all the words he knew in his vocabulary. But obviously it was not because of her they had to give up. Fever was there for all of them if they had stayed another twenty-four hours by that swamp. They could scent it in the air, that damp, rotting smell of decaying vegetation, a wall of death between them and the world beyond.

They had taken the precaution of carefully marking the way they had come, and by the time Jonathan had returned from the easing of his mood, David had taken her up in his arms and was starting for home, those many days’ journey to the creek. To get her back there was the only hope that remained of saving her life as well as safeguarding their own.

He had not gone a quarter of a mile before he was out of breath. Here Jonathan stopped him.

“Give her to me,” he said sternly, “I’ll carry her,” and through the track made easier by their passage, he carried her till the sweat was pouring from his forehead in heavy drops.

Whereas they had taken something like seven days in cutting their way through the forest, they must have taken more than ten in that same more open track to return to the creek. How near she went to death in that time, David fully describes. But that her life was saved, is all that is needed for the purpose of our tale.

In another fortnight she was well again; coming out into the sunshine and sitting near them, watching them as they set to the making of a mattress of strong vine tendrils, laced and interlaced, for the greater comfort of her bed.

CHAPTER XIX

THE SECOND BOARD MEETING

SHE had grown pale again and for some time ^ was weak as well with the sickness of her fever, arising out of which David makes humorous reference to an amusing little incident.

“There was no climbing of trees for her,” he writes, “in that delicate condition of convalescence, so one morning, coming back from fetching the water, I had a mind of her needs and picked her a bunch of her scarlet orchids. She was out in the creek, talking to Jonathan as he worked, when I returned. They had not seen me come back, so I just slipped into her hut and put them on the window-sill in a bowl of water.”

“She was making her appearance at meals then, and when she came back to supper there was just one look in her eyes she gave me, worth much for the suppression of her laughter, and still more for the open confession of gratitude.

“I would not,” he adds on a human note—“I would not have given up that little secret to Jonathan for anything in the world.”

It was some three or four days after this incident, as far as I can gather from David’s script, that Jonathan, making use of Joan’s simile, called a board meeting.

He had been intensely serious of mood ever since their return to the creek; had spoken little of his mind to David, and indeed, had not been the best of companions. When they came, however, to his appointment in the living-room of the large hut, his spirits apparently had risen somewhat. There was a determined attitude of cheerfulness in the way he spoke. There was a fixed light of good humour in his eye.

I feel somehow, as I re-read these last few chapters, that I have done scant justice to the indication of Jonathan’s character throughout this period of their life at the creek. David, in his script, speaks far more of him than he does of himself. But David was, after all, my friend, and taking the whole matter from David’s account of it, perhaps I may have been biassed in my interest of the issue. I may have sought out, without knowing it, every opportunity of putting him in the light in which I felt he deserved to be. i I will just, therefore, take one passage from David’s record, in which he gives a description of Jonathan after their return from the failure of the forest expedition.

“His whole mind,” he says, “was wrapped up in the energy of work, of doing things, if only with his hands, and certainly with the full activities of his body. ‘The fun of doing things,’ he had once said to me, if it can be remembered, ‘lies in doing them for yourself.’ That was characteristic of him. I suppose it was no less characteristic of me when I had added: ‘The fun of doing things lies in doing, not labouring at them.’

“To this he would never have agreed, for, good heavens, I never saw a man labour so hard or so vigorously as he did those days when he was making the small canoe, or building the big hut. Even with his fishing expeditions, he made no amusement, but a definite business of them, wasting no time, and returning to the creek with his catch, as if there were a train due to take them by express to the London market.

“Under his influence, as I think I have said somewhere else, I had never worked so hard in my life before, or do I wish to deny it, had ever enjoyed anything so much. I shall never look back upon those days but with the clearest sense of happiness.

”But it was not happy for him. Hard labour, the risk and adventure of life, the work of the pioneer, these were the only ways in which he could express himself. There, however, in that creek, behind the palisade he had himself erected, he was like a caged lion, padding it with his spirit up and down, up and down, up and down.

“Again and again I felt intensely sorry for him, for, as it can easily be understood, I came to know him then better than I had ever known him before. The stress of circumstance does not change a man, it only brings out a clearer expression of the truth that is in him. Jonathan was clearer to me then than ever he had been before. So I came the more to feel sorry for him, because there was no resource in his mind to which he could turn. He worked until he was physically exhausted, and then he went to sleep. I do not mean to suggest by this that there were no ideas in his mind. The ideas he had suggested about the symbols of life, that day when I was packing up in the Albany, are sufficient to disprove that. Those ideas were full of truth. But, if I make myself clear, they were the immediate expression in speech of his physical energies. In his way, he was well-educated. Silence cannot be the invariable habit of a man. All I want to convey is the impression that thought, for itself, was not the natural expression of his spirit. He was only happy when he was doing something capable of definite and ultimate results which he himself could appreciate. I can quite believe he was excellent at his job. I have no hesitation also in thinking that, compared with my own mode of living, his life was worth a thousand of mine. It seems almost foolish to write that, so obvious must it seem.”

Having quoted this, I feel I can return to the account of that board meeting—with more conviction that I have done justice to those who took part at it; for without such justice being given, it would have been impossible to appreciate the full significance it possessed in the development of our tale.

Jonathan, as I have already indicated, was in a more cheerful mood, however forced it may have been. He laughed as he alluded to it as their board meeting. He complained that there was no shorthand clerk to take notes of the minutes.

He took the chair at the head of the table, saying: “Gentlemen—lean only speak what I see”—this was his reference to Joan’s garments—“I have the honour to call you to this special meeting of the company to discuss certain matters connected with the handsome dividends I think you will all agree-

“Oh—shut up!” said David, laughing—and then a very different expression settled on Jonathan’s face. He began to speak seriously and in deep earnestness.

“All right—that’s all rot,” said he. “It’s no good playing about with it. I don’t know whether you two have realized what these two failures of ours have meant. Vaguely, I suppose you have. Vaguely, you’ve said to yourselves—well—sooner or later we shall have to have another shot, and in the meantime there’s this place, free of fever, to live in. That’s what I imagine you’ve thought. I’ve tried to think it myself, ever since we came back out of the forest. But it’s no good. I know a damn sight better than that—I’m not going to apologize for language.

“I know what we’re up against, and I’ve called this blessed board meeting to tell you what it is. We’ve tried the only two means of escape I know of, and now it’s up to a remote chance that we aren’t here for the rest of our natural lives.”

He stopped for a moment and looked at them; first at David, lastly at Joan. And his last was no mere glance. It was a long, long look that would have become embarrassing only that he presently went on.

“I want to say straight out, and first of all,that I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. It just happened that Joan was the first to knock under to the fever. We ought really to be grateful to her. She acted as a warning. If we hadn’t turned back then, I haven’t the slightest doubt we should both have been down with it ourselves, and then there’d have been hell to pay. I’m not chucking compliments about, but I should never have thought a woman could be so plucky as she’s been.”

“Hear, hear!” said David.

“Or that you, David,” he continued, “could have worked like you’ve done. I never thought you had it in you.”

David says he felt like a schoolboy taking a prize from the Lord Mayor and not knowing what the devil to say.

“That’s enough of that, anyhow,” Jonathan went on. “Those are the facts. Unless a ship outside sees our signals—and you can guess how likely that is—I see small chance, if any, of our getting away. That chance might come tomorrow, it might come when we’re doddering old creatures and some enterprising company is opening up the coast of Liberia for trading purposes. Pray God I’m under this sand before then.

“Well, that’s what I’ve called you in here for, because I think it’s only fair you should face it and set your minds out to what it really means. It means that we’ve got no other—what David would call—expression for our lives outside this hundred square yards or so of creek; that here we are to make of ourselves the best we can, and get the best we can out of it. Personally, I must admit my ambitions are not hugely stimulated. That’s not to be wondered at. Once this place is as comfortably habitable as we can make it, there’s not much \ left for me to do, and it is with me that I must be doing something. Now, if either of you have got anything to say, let’s have it all out while we’re here, and then take the gifts the Gods have given us without saying anything more about it. Certainly I don’t feel inclined to thank ’em for what they’ve given me.”

I have given this speech of Jonathan’s word for word as David recorded it, because I think, under the circumstances, knowing what the man who made it was suffering, and the despair he felt, it is a fine, manly effort with no nonsense about it one way or another. And now I return to David’s account.

“Having asked us to say something,” David writes, “I looked at Joan, giving her preference; she looked at me, waiting as well. The fact of the matter was, we neither of us wanted to speak at all. I knew what I might have had to say couldn’t be said there. Somehow or other, I felt it was exactly the same with her, only that being one woman, and alone with us two, hers’ could not have been said anywhere.

“I ventured to remark that there did not seem to be anything further to add. Joan rose from her chair, saying: ‘I’ve got nothing to say. You know more about it than we do, Jonathan. I’m sure I’m quite ready to place myself in your hands with anything you choose to do. You know best. And that’s all there is to be said—isn’t it? ’

“So that was the breaking-up of the board meeting. She went back to her hut. It was in the full heat of the day, when it was more or less impossible to work. I just got out the canoe and said I was going down to the beach to catch some fish. It was fairly cool down that channel through the forest. There were only patches where the sun penetrated. What is more, I wanted to be alone.

“It was quite true what Jonathan had said—true for me, anyhow. I had only vaguely thought what those two failures meant. Now I was face to face with the facts, or rather the fact, for there was only one to me. If the rest of our life was to be in that creek, then there was no concealing my love, or my passion, for that girl with the subterfuges which civilization offers in handfuls to those who need to be quit of an awkward predicament where a woman is concerned.

“She, as Jonathan had quoted me, would have been a great purpose in the expression of my life under any circumstances. In that creek, she became the sole purpose. That was all I could have said at our board meeting. No wonder I refused to speak.

“To the casual reader, that may sound simple enough, but far from being simple, I saw in it the looming dangers of as pretty a tragedy as our fretted novelists, out for sensation, could possibly hope to find.

“For in that little limited community there was no possibility of one thinking for himself without inevitably concerning the others. I might want her with all my heart; she might be wholly necessary to the one single purpose of my life, but that might not be to her desire; and, for the one remaining purpose of his life, this might tragically fail to coincide with Jonathan’s view of it all.

“I felt sure of one thing. No—it is more exact to say I felt sure of two. I felt sure that as yet Jonathan had not realized it as deeply as this, or he could not have spoken as candidly as he did to us. It was the loss of the ambition of his work he was so far despairing of; the thing most immediate in his mind that he had lost. But that there was at the back of his mind a great admiration for her—as evidenced if only in the compliment he had paid her—and that inevitably this would ripen with the circumstances into a strong passion with him, I knew as well as I knew the common and natural instincts of any man.

“The second thing of which I felt sure, was that Joan had not spoken because she, too, had sensed all the difficulties, and possibly the dangers as well, which lay ahead. With her I am more inclined to think it was only the difficulties.

“She liked both of us, but in my heart I felt that she liked Jonathan best. His appeal, especially in a place like that, I felt sure must be greater than my own. And there were other difficulties besides that of choice. There were the difficulties which she only, as a woman, could appreciate. That she had the mother-instinct strong in her, I knew well enough by her emotions over Sam. That she had the mother-courage there was plenty of proof in the way she had killed the wretched little beggar before we left the creek for the first time.

“A woman who had the courage to kill a living thing with her own hands rather than leave it to its fate, had certainly the courage to bring a live thing into the world for her nursing. Besides which, if the mother-instinct were there, was not that the highest purpose of the expression of her spirit? I may be foolish on that subject, but I cannot conceive a woman wishing to express herself more completely than by that.

“Here, anyhow, was the problem as I saw it, while I fished idly from the canoe that afternoon, and the more I considered it, the less dispassionate I became; the more I realized that I could not live there without her; that I could not live there for one moment if Jonathan possessed her and not I.”

CHAPTER XX

THE BEGINNING OF REALIZATION

SO the situation had been shaped and moulded in the hand of circumstance after some months of their life at the creek.

Every day after that board meeting, Jonathan went alone down to the beach, ostensibly to fish in the channel, but really, as Joan and David well knew, to look out at those passing steamers, which regularly every week went by, dim spirits of his discontent, half-hidden behind the far line of that horizon.

On these occasions David and Joan saw much of each other, and if it should be wondered why he did not seize one of the many opportunities he must have had to tell her what was in his mind about her, let me give his own explanation.

“We were sitting out one morning,’’ he says, “on a flat projection of rock in the face of the cliff, where an overhanging tree gave its welcome shade. So delightful a shelter from the sun was it, that from time to time in those few months we had cut out a small stairway of steps in the rock, making it the more accessible.

“Jonathan was away at the beach. We were completely alone; sitting there looking down over the palisade, across the creek into the forest below. A tremendous specimen of a crocodile was moving about sluggishly in the water beyond the palisade. I knew she was watching him. I was watching him myself. The same train of thought must have been in both our minds at the same time, for presently she said:

“‘I wonder do these animals in the forest ever feel the sense of their own utter desolation? ’

“‘Do you?’ said I.

“She seemed to wake from her contemplation of ‘ that old beast with a start, as though I had stirred her out of sleep from an unpleasant dream into the consciousness of a still more unpleasant reality.

“‘I suppose I do sometimes,’ she replied, and there was almost a tragic note in her voice. ‘ Splendid and cheerful as you both are—you—you couldn’t expect me to feel otherwise.’

What do you miss most of all? ’ I asked, and I knew when I had said this, that before our conversation that morning was over, the chances were I should have put all my hopes to the test and told her that I loved her. I did not know all the chances when I thought that.

“‘What do you miss most?’ I repeated—fully determined now to see it out.

“She stared for a long while down into the forest before she answered, and then she said: ‘I miss the purpose of it all.’

“Of our being cast adrift here?’

“‘Yes—and—and of the whole of life. One would have imagined that in a place like this everything would have been absurdly simple— well, foolishly enough perhaps, it seems to me absurdly the reverse. I can’t see the meaning; I can’t see the end of it all. Are we just going to— to die here and bury each other in the sand of that creek—one after the other, till the last one’s left alone to just lie down when his turn comes and let the leopards eat him, or the sand blow over him? Can you understand what I mean? I’m all confused. It’s like a riddle, or a maze, with no way out—a senseless business, where you chafe and chafe against the conditions, but can do nothing to alter them.’

“She was herself talking in riddles, but simpler ones than those she had propounded herself. Who really could have failed to understand? Her missing of the purpose of life; her confusion of thought about what the end of it all was going to be —these sentences were only a combination of words concealing the very things I had thought of myself that day in the canoe after our board meeting.

“She was thinking just as I was. Was she to miss the purpose of hers or every woman’s life? And if not, then in which of us two did her fate lie? There was her confusion of thought. And how, indeed, was it all going to end?

” ‘May I say something,’ said I presently, ‘without incurring anything in the way of critical scorn from you? ’

” ‘ For a moment she looked afraid. What woman would not have looked the same? I might have been going to say something which would drive her to some definite action. For, strangely enough, the more simple our environment had become, the more necessity did there appear to be for secretive measures. I know it was as obvious to her as it was to me that we feared to tell each other the truth. Her fear was natural enough. It was that I was going to break through that safeguarding palisade of secrecy with which we had fenced ourselves in, and that then at once—inevitable as it must be in the end—we would be fighting for our lives.

“‘I won’t say it if you don’t want me to,’ said I.

“‘Jonathan would have said it without asking,’ she remarked, showing me unintentionally the invariable comparison she was always making between us.

“‘ Jonathan and I are two different types,’ said I.

“‘I know that,’ said she.

“‘Well—am I to say it, or not?’

“‘Say it,’ she replied.

“‘I’m going to say what I said once before— the laws, not us, are irresistible. Over in England they are written on parchment and are at your service if you are ready to pay a lawyer’s fees and the costs of litigation. Here you’re the slave of the law—we’re all the same—all of us. Force dictates—sheer brute force, in the end. Does that make it any simpler?’

“She looked straight into my eyes after a few moments, and she replied, quite steadily: ‘No— it only makes it worse.’

“‘Worse, perhaps,’ said I, ‘but not less simple. You had to kill Sam. That was force—brute force, however gentle in the heart of it the motive may have been. Jonathan’s was the force that compelled you to use your own. A common law of self-protection, stronger than him, drove Jonathan.’

“‘I’ve never hated him for it,’ she replied, quickly. ‘I know he had to do it, ’ and it was this answer which, rightly or wrongly, in that moment seemed to me to be the answer to it all. My hopes of winning her then, all my intentions of saying what was in my mind, dropped from me on the instant. I could do no more than sit there with my chin on my knees, staring down into the forest, hearing all the time those words revolving in my head: ‘I’ve never hated him for it. I know he had to do it.’

“She must, I suppose intuitively, have known a greater part of that which was in my mind, because after a moment she suddenly put out her hand. It was a frank and generous movement. There was no mistaking its impulse, and I took it in my own.

‘“We’re all the best of friends—aren’t we?’ said she openly. ‘I know you two are—and—’ then she laughed—‘I promise you I’m not going to be left out in the cold. Good heavens! What else could we be in a place like this? ’

“And that was the sum of all we said that morning, having spoken in nothing but riddles, yet I believe no two people had ever made their meanings more clear to one another than we. I had told her of the irresistible and inevitable fact that we were both in love with her. For if Jonathan was not aware of it, I knew from a thousand little incidents, besides those I have already mentioned, that he soon would be.

“And what had her reply amounted to? That she feared the issue when I spoke of brute force being the determining factor. This was natural enough. She saw us two at each other’s throats, and rather than that, she would have us all be friends. She was indeed, so far as her nature was concerned, at that same stage through which we had passed soon after her arrival at the creek, when Jonathan and I had discussed the folly of letting her interfere with our plans of escape. Then the inevitable sex instinct in her, finding we had determined to put her in her placet-even to the point of insinuating how she was to dress —had determined it should not be ignored. But now, holding no counsel as we had done, except with her own heart, she was all for dictating to us the amicable attitude of friendship.

“I wonder how many women have not passed through those very phases with a man, trying the volte-face, and spurred by fear when it was too late?

“Somehow or other, judging at least by myself, I knew it to be too late now. Friendship would not content me. I had been in love before and had no mistaking of my emotions now. Besides all of which, there Was what she called the meaning of life, and in her it was as clear as daylight to me. The world had started somewhere; if not in the Garden of Eden, then in the waste places into which first man and first woman were driven by the angels of the Lord.

“And whatever had driven us there, on to that lonely coast, I thought no more of consequences than did they. This was my life, and I knew that Jonathan in time would come as well to realize it his. And here was a woman who, apart from all these exigencies of Fate, I loved, no less then than when we were living in the hope of escape.

“If any man can declare he would have conceived differently from me that ultimate issue, I should only feel assured that his imagination was unable to carry, him into the real conditions of that situation, or that civilization, as with so many of us, had blinded him to the deeper and compelling purposes of his existence.

“This, as I say, was the sum of all we said that morning. I took her hand, more I confess for the pleasure of feeling it touch my own than for any outward symbol of a pact. I knew there was none. As I held it firmly I said: ‘Friendship is one of the most perfect affections under the sun— but do you think it contains the meaning of life you spoke about just now?’

“She let her hand stay in mine a moment longer; then, silently, she took it away, rose to her feet, and climbed down the steps to the creek.”

CHAPTER XXI

JONATHAN’S ADVENTURE

TIME is somewhat difficult to estimate from David’s manuscript. They had begun by keeping a calendar, a long fine bamboo cane, with notches for every day, which, when the hut was erected, they transferred to one of the supports, making, as Joan suggested, a sort of ornamental carving which in a few years—she had said this in jest, before their failures at escape—would become one of the features of the place.

At least on three occasions they were not quite sure whether the notch had been made. Finally, those seventeen days or so in the forest, when they had kept no count of time, deprived it of all accuracy it might have had. None of them were in certain agreement as to the length of time they had been away.

I assume it, then, to have been about a week after this conversation between Joan and David that there befell an incident which, as I see it from my distance, brought about the swift hastening of events.

Jonathan had been down, as had almost become his habit, to the creek. David and Joan were awaiting his return, seated as before on that ledge of rock, but talking of subjects less intimate than upon that former occasion. Indeed, I rather gather that after their previous conversation they tacitly avoided any reference to it. She must have known by then that David was in love with her, yet so long as his declaration had not been made, felt herself safe, while matters remained as they were. It proves to me how skillful her treatment of those two men must have been, that she kept her hands upon the reins of circumstance so long. Powerful, in that feminine sense, those hands must have been. This was just the type of woman I can imagine David giving his heart to. There was mind as well, and of fine quality to go with it. She was no creature to be won for the asking. To have flung the importunate passion of desire at her feet would have been to lose all chance of winning her.

Doubtless, David knew this well enough. Never had he been slow to sense a woman’s mind.

So it seems to me he kept silence all that while, knowing that any declaration of love, in such circumstances as those, must have savoured of passionate importunity. The declaration that was wanted must be in deeds, not in words.

But of Joan herself, throughout the whole of this period, when the fate of all of them was swinging in the scales, it is hard to make any certain analysis. There is little doubt she knew everything—everything passing in David’s mind, everything likely at any moment to become urgent in Jonathan’s. Yet how far that knowledge was conscious, I for one, and a mere outsider at that, should not attempt to say.

So far as I feel justified in hazarding a guess, it would be that, at that time, swayed between the attractions of one and the qualities of the other, she was too much in two minds to be in love with either. Her evident interest in David’s powers of understanding, her obvious admiration of Jonathan’s abilities in those surroundings, seem to have been sufficient to put any woman in such a quandary of mind as would totally incapacitate her for any certainty of subtle emotions.

Love, when it really does come to a woman, is no uncertain thing. She accepts wholly, absolutely, questioning nothing, or would it be better said, accepting all. To such a state of mind it would appear to me well-nigh impossible for a woman to arrive in those extraordinary conditions. She could not choose; for to choose one was utterly to eliminate the other. In calling for friendship she knew she was asking for a negative condition, merely as a safeguard to herself; a postponing influence, giving her that time to think, to understand it all. How she must have coveted every hour she won!

As David had conceived, so doubtless she knew as well. It was deeds that would win her, not words. More and more, as the time went by and the precedents of civilization were gradually broken down between them, she must have been convinced of the truth of what he told her. Brute force would be the deciding factor. She must have recognized the fact that in the end she had no choice. Automatically, she would choose in answer to that—in favour of it if it swept her with it—against it, if, in the expression it took, it repulsed. But which ever way it was, some force would be the master of her, if not the force of Jonathan’s arms, which had carried her so tirelessly through the forest and borne her so safely out of the turmoil of that sea, then it would be the force of David’s mind, which, at every juncture, had engaged hers and kept a sure ascendancy she scarcely would have been unable to deny.

I have tried to put her problem clearly, because, as with the character of Jonathan, so I felt with her, that I was rather leaving that aspect of it alone. This, then, I have ventured far more with my own initiative, for David, though he may have understood her considerably better than I, maintains a by no means surprising reticence. One does not care to dissect the things one really loves. At least, I appreciate his silence about her in that light.

It was therefore, as I have said, about a week after their intimate conversation, that they were waiting for Jonathan’s return from the beach. Their talk for an hour and more had been of books, of pictures, of music, of the many tastes they shared sufficiently in common to be interested in each other’s disagreements.

They had begun by discussing what interests could be added to their life at the creek to bring it greater variety. David had already, with no little ingenuity, carved out a set of chessmen of simple design and made a board with squares of different coloured woods. He and Jonathan had played often together at first, but latterly the board had been idle.

“If I could get some different pigments out of those orchids,” said David, “I could make some futurist decorations for the interior of the hut.”

He had said it quite thoughtlessly, but when he turned to look at her, her eyes were alive with laughter. He had for the moment forgotten their secret, and swore to her most earnestly that it had utterly gone out of his mind.

“Has it seemed to you as natural as all that, then?” she asked.

He admitted it had. “And why not?” he added. “The laws are the laws. It’s only when some damned ignorant person sees them undisguised in operation that he thinks what preposterous and improper things they are. ”

She nodded her head interestedly. “Do you know, I like the way you look at things,” she said. “You don’t haggle with life. So many people do that, and it always seems to me such a contemptible waste of time. Things that are— are. There’s no changing them till the next time. ’ ’

“Let’s collaborate and write a book of philosophy while we’re here, ” said he. “I’ve got a fountain-pen. Her mind was a good mate for his. For all her subterfuges in that situation, she saw things clear behind the follies of convention. He knew well enough she enjoyed those talks of theirs, if only by the way he enjoyed them himself.

And then, when after a while they had discussed music and painting and she had heard, perhaps more intimately than ever before, the real and genuine emotions he had about them, she suddenly dropped her voice to a tone of great gentleness, saying: “You poor old thing—what a prison it must be to you here.”

“Not so much as it is to Jonathan, ” he replied. “His world must be in the reach of his arm—he must feel things with his hands, touch them and break them or make them. There’s nothing left to make here with your hands. A bed to sleep on and a roof over your head—what’s that? Only the beginning of life. He wants more than that to do.”

“The moment I had said that,” says David, with real honesty, ‘ I wished I had left it unsaid. It was the .case for Jonathan with her. Had she been the impersonation of a British jury and I a barrister appealing to their sense of pity, I could not have said more for his case than that.”

It was soon after this, either because she was hungry and he was bringing the meal, or because of what David had said, her thoughts began to turn more persistently upon Jonathan. Gradually David was finding that he could not be eliminated from the conversation. Back she came to him again and again, till at last, as the sun was dropping in its swift descent below the topmost line of the trees, she proposed they should go down and look for him.

Down the steps to the creek they went, and to the verge of the forest, the sensation overtaking them at every step that something had happened to keep him so late. When suddenly and unexpectedly she raised her voice, calling his name loudly three separate times, David declared that he felt not only a thrill of fear at what might have happened, but, far deeper than that, a hot sense of jealousy she could be so concerned.

At the sound of his voice in reply, shouting: “Hallo! Hallo!” he went so far as to laugh at the perturbation of her mind. And when she heard his laugh, she as quickly answered it as though it were an accusation.

“I didn’t know,” she said, “whether anything had happened to him or not.”

They were so close in touch in their minds as that.

And then Jonathan appeared out of the thick growth of elephant grass, walking unsteadily, as though he soon must fall, either from some weakness that had overcome him, or the weight of the thing he carried on his shoulder.

They stood a moment, arrested by surprise at the unsteadiness of his steps. The first thing they realized was that it was the body of a leopard, a huge specimen, slung over his back. As he came nearer, they saw his face was bleeding and those thick, tanned arms of his tom with great bleeding gashes from which the blood was dripping in a stream and falling in big drops from his finger-tips.

In an instant, Joan had hurried through the gate in the palisade, and was at his side, freeing the load from his shoulders. The next, and David had joined her. Together, they helped him into the hut. He was weak from loss of blood. All the clothes on his body were drenched with it. He laughed at their efforts to help him, and then, strong man though he was, he dropped off into unconsciousness.

When he came to, in about five or ten minutes, they heard from him what had happened, though it was patent enough. He had come across a leopard on his way back. Three cartridges he had left in his heavy automatic, which he had always saved for such a moment as that, and, seeing the excellent mark she made, knowing, too, that leopard’s flesh was good eating, he had used one of them, without a thought of consequences. The bullet had gone home, but leopards are tough beasts. He had had to fight out the end of it with his naked hands. The advantages had been on his side. She was dying all the time, but it had been from all accounts a fierce struggle.

“We’ve got a bit of meat, though,” said he, with a grin.

David adds bitterly to this: “The way he said that, with the blood still rolling down his cheeks and his arms all ribbands of flesh, was worth more than all the finest thoughts the best of philosophers could put into a dozen trenchant sentences. With a quick little laugh, Joan answered to it, a short laugh, half of amusement, half sympathy, needing no words at all.”

CHAPTER XXII

JUSTIFICATION

JOAN nursed him and attended to his bandages for ten days, and there is no reason to suggest but that this was a job well to her liking. She ruled him like a child, except over one matter. He insisted on skinning his beast the next morning. This was no job of which David was capable. He offered, but there was a skin to be saved, and Jonathan, being the only one to do it, would take no orders from her.

“You’d like the skin—wouldn’t you?” said he, and when she could not deny it, added, “then don’t let’s have any more nurse’s talk.”

Beyond this matter, however, he was as obedient as a child, putting up with pleasure with all the pain she gave him by her unskilled bandaging. It was due greatly to her care, nevertheless, that he recovered as quickly as he did. But whether he knew that or not, makes little difference. The matter of chief importance was that he could no longer go down with his moods of chafing impotence to the beach. Whether he liked it or not, he had to content himself with her company.

During all those ten days, during which he never saw her alone and only shared her company at meal times, David was left to fret his soul out with the best grace he could. What is more, the finding of the supply of food devolved entirely on him, and, though he may have succeeded well enough, there was a noticeable difference in his catering to that of Jonathan’s. One evening he returned from the beach without any fish at all. They had to content themselves solely with fruit. His traps were not so successfully set as when Jonathan was responsible for them.

“All those ten days,” he says, “I felt as though I were passing through a qualifying examination and failing miserably at every turn. And there that leopard skin used to hang, drying in the sun, a constant witness of Jonathan’s strength to set against my own incompetence.”

It seems to have been in those ten days, left so much to himself, robbed of her company and feeling by instinct how every moment she was endearing herself to Jonathan, that David came by the first real impulse of hatred for his friend. Yet it cannot be described so much as hatred of him, as hatred of those qualities which he knew must be appealing, the more by their present quiescence in Jonathan, to Joan.

It would be false psychology to deny that by now his passions as well as his sentiments were deeply roused. And the more he was left to himself, the more fierce the hold they took upon him.

It was, as it had ever been between those two, that David moved more impulsively and swiftly to the situations of his mind. While Jonathan was only slowly realizing through his senses, David had leaped to the conclusion in his thoughts. Long before, as indeed he had said to Joan herself, he had realized this bitter antagonism would be the outcome of it all, and, well though he knew it, found himself unable in those days alone to allay its progress.

It was inevitable. He felt it a law stronger than himself. Fight as he might against it, there always came some moment at night, when lying awake, listening to Jonathan’s peaceful breathing, it returned as master of all his thoughts.

What had they said to each other that day, he wondered. How had their friendship progressed?

Whenever he saw her examining that leopard skin with pleasure at the thought of her ultimate possession of it, he cursed the luck that had brought it within range of Jonathan’s weapon. What is more, he felt every day that Jonathan was growing to understand and to like her better. Weak though he was from loss of blood, and more than ever a prisoner in that bed to which she kept him, his moodiness steadily disappeared.

The first night, as he lay there, smarting with his wounds, he swore again and again at the chance that had brought him to this state of imprisonment. That discontent gradually decreased, until after five days of it, he was more of a cheerful companion than he had been for many weeks. The more, however, he expressed this cheerfulness, the more David’s spirits fell; the more the canker of hatred and jealousy spread in his heart. There was no outlet for it. It had to rankle where it was, bringing with it too, a hatred of himself making life almost unbearable.

‘’ Had it continued for another day beyond those ten,” he writes, “I must have spoken out my mind to her; must have forced her into that invidious position of choosing between us two, when she had shown me so plainly by her proffer of friendship that she would do anything to avoid it. The issue lay between myself and Jonathan. I still believed that. Her choice in the matter made very little difference to us. She was the justification of our lives there on that God-forsaken coast, and for that justification I know that I was quite ready to take whatever risks there might be. •

“If what I thought was happening in Jonathan’s mind in those ten days had taken place, then I knew that neither of us could rest content with her choosing. Besides, could she choose? Was there such a gulf fixed between us two as all that? We both must have our claims in her mind. It was no conceit in my estimation to think that my chances, or rather my rights, were as good as his. I would have said that with any man; though I doubt if a better could have been found than him whom I hated then with all my heart.

“For at the back of my mind was the knowledge, always repressed in my thoughts, that in that place he was a better mate for her than I. In those conditions of life, well though we might have been able to face contingencies together, he was the better equipped, the fittest- of us two to carry out the elemental preservation of his kind.

“Whenever I looked at it in this light, I despaired most of all; for there was reason, good enough for any man who prided himself on that quality, to stand aside. Yet the preservation of my kind had as much right upon insistence as had his. It was as dear, if not dearer to me in definite and conscious sensation than his could be to him. And then, coming to that moment of my reason, another thought would fling itself uninvited into my mind. In those environments, was mine the kind that would survive in obedience to the common and primal laws with which it was surrounded?

“So I argued it back and forth, as though it were a mere dispassionate problem in eugenics But there was the crux of it all. It was not dispassionate. Try as I would, I could not make it so. If ever a problem was quivering with the existence of passion, this was one. How could I yield claim for myself? I lived. In my body was the breath, in my mind the same spark of life as in Jonathan’s.

“And then suddenly—it was on that tenth day —it all became clear. I had the right of my own entity. I had the justification to claim her if I could. This was the test of life—not to give in, but to struggle; not to surrender, but to fight.

It was due to myself to prove what strength I had. It was due to Jonathan to test and prove his own.

“How else could it be proved which was the fitter mate for her, unless, indeed, we put it to the test? How else, unless proved in such a fashion, could she, in her deepest heart, realize she had gained the better man? It was due, then, to myself. It was due to Jonathan, and most of all, seeing that I loved her, I knew it was due to her.

“The night on which I had come to these final decisions, I went to my bed in a more cheerful frame of mind, hating Jonathan less, if hating him at all. Against all his good humour, I matched my own, feeling somehow that the fight between us was not with fists alone.

“He realized quickly enough the return of my spirits. He must have felt them battling up against his own, for he half sat up in his bed and watched me in surprise as I flung my clothes off, whistling as I did so.

“‘ You seem in a mighty good temper,’ said he, and I almost laughed as I heard the note of suspicion in his voice.

“‘ Oh—well enough,’ I replied. ‘As good as your own.’

“‘ Anything happened to buck you up?’

“I knew well what he meant. I knew only too well then that the spark of jealousy at last was lit in him; was lit and that he was aware of the flame of it too. There was even an ugly look in his eyes as I turned round laughing to answer his question. For that one second I felt sorry for him. I knew the tortures of mind he was just entering upon, tortures that would last as mine had lasted, till, in the knowledge that he could bear them no longer, our moment of the test would be reached.

“I am not going to deny that that moment of pity was short-lived, one of the ephemera of our better thoughts that hover for an instant on the surface of our minds and then are gone. The next second, I was playing with his jealousy, talking in riddles that had no foundation, but too deep for him to reason out. For then, in his hatred, my own was back again and I drove my wits against his to spur him on. He was as well that night as he had ever been, and I think I would not have been sorry to have had our battle then with no more delay to it than the mere ceremony of selecting a convenient place where she should hear nothing of what was going on.

“That, however, was not to be. After a while Jonathan relapsed under my humour into a sulky silence. He did not know what had happened. I had not done so much injustice to Joan as to suggest that anything had happened at all. It was only that the more I saw the effect of my high spirits on him and the more I knew the thoughts that were set racing in his mind, the more I kept them up, until, at last, beaten in that encounter, he withdrew, without even knowing of the contest in which he had been engaged.

“But all was certain now to me, and I lay awake long hours through that night, while he was sleeping soundly, wondering how I should fare when the issue came about. On the face of it, I knew I had little more chance than a dog. On the face of it, as he had beaten me at school, so he would beat me here, and with less mercy than in that schoolboy quarrel.

“Still, I had my wits, and, as I thought of Joan, I felt in myself a strength which only the elemental force of my purpose could have given me. My heart, it seemed then, was as strong as ten men, as strong as a hundred of those I knew in the old life who had thought themselves in love.

“I was in truth in love, and before my heart had ceased to beat that message to my brain, it appeared to me, while I lay awake, as if some greater strength than the mere power of Jonathan’s blows would be needed to defeat my will.

“There was the faint tinge of dawn in the sky before I fell asleep. Against it I saw the feathered edges of the palm trees pricking into the light; I heard the faint, muffled cry of a bird, and I just murmured her name to myself as I closed my eyes.”

CHAPTER XXIII

THE APPROACH OF THE INEVITABLE

FROM that day of Jonathan’s recovery from his wounds, the strain upon them appears to have increased with a steady and inevitable precision. Once having confessed to himself his belief in the ultimate issue, David’s thoughts seem to have permeated all their minds. He and Jonathan were watching each other now, quick-eyed to notice the development of each other’s relations with Joan, yet, doubtless, striving in their several ways to avoid or postpone the unavoidable.

Little wonder is it that David describes those days at the creek as unbearable. He writes of them as if, full of psychological interest though they must have been, he could not allude to them but with reserve. Neither one nor the other dared pay any noticeable attention to her, not from fear, but knowledge of how it would hasten the climax and bring about that issue they both would have shirked if they could, yet knew must be.

To any one surrounded with all the distractions of civilization, it cannot but be hard to realize the atmosphere which must have closed about them during that time. Thunder in the air, it was, and all the heavy pressage of the inevitable storm. They tried to occupy themselves with things to do about the creek, but neither would leave the other alone, or give each other opportunity of seeing Joan by herself.

This may sound childish and ridiculous. There is little doubt it was; yet all of it was done in such spirit of cunning, amounting sometimes to deceit in both of them, that, as David says in his script: “I look back upon it now in the full perspective of time and marvel to think men could so descend in their natures to such pettiness and contemptibility of thought, word, and deed.”

It was obvious that such a state of affairs could not last for long. That it lasted as long as it did, seems only explicable to me in the fact that they were both endeavouring to ward it off for her sake. Had it been any other issue than this, without question the matter would have been settled by word or blow long before. But there, in those surroundings, not an action of theirs could for any length of time escape her notice. There was no hiding from her the issue when it came to be decided. There was no concealing from her the purpose that had brought it about, or how, whether she willed it or not, she was herself directly responsible.

This, I can conceive, as some substantial ground for the impossible situation in which they found themselves, and, for all I know, that condition of affairs might have continued for some time, had not Joan herself unwittingly put an end to it.

With what David had said about brute force running constantly, as no doubt it did, in her mind, she was an apprehensive spectator of this palpable change in their manner to each other. Here were two friends, the best in the world, playing at some game which at least, if she did not understand, must have thrilled some function of her consciousness with a sense of fear. She found herself dreading the night when they were alone together, relieved in the morning when they both appeared at breakfast and nothing apparently had happened.

But as with them, so also with her, the strain of the situation came at last to be unbearable. I take it that still, even in that eleventh hour, she did not know the absolute dictation of her heart. Jonathan, certainly, as David had known, had endeared himself to her during those days of his helplessness, no less than by the circumstances which had placed her at his service.

Yet there cannot but have been times, during those ten days and after, when her pity went out to David, weighed down with his conviction that he was unequally handicapped in his chances against such a man as Jonathan.

That both loved and wanted her then, she was well aware. David gives proof of this in his description of the way she strove to ignore then-present moods and suggest they were, so far as she could see, the same friends as ever.

All these efforts of hers, however, apparently failed, for there came a day when she felt she must speak her thoughts to one of them, and it appears to me inevitable she should have chosen David for her confidant. Whatever there was to be understood, she turned involuntarily to him.

It was one morning after their breakfast meal that she taunted Jonathan with laziness.

“Ever since you got well,” said she, with a laugh, “you’ve been as idle as you can be.”

Perhaps th,e truth of that touched him. Idleness brought no pleasure to his day. Perhaps he felt he was earning her contempt as well as his own. When a man sets out to please a woman, it is more the best in himself he does than the things he might realize would please her most. For those last few days, set in his watch upon David, he knew he had done far from the best in himself, and suddenly believing he was thus losing her respect, was eager to perform anything she asked of him.

But when she told him they had had no fish those seven days and more, because he had never been down to the beach, his face fell so obviously that in any other situation the fall of it would have been humorous.

“David might as well go,” said he. “I’ve caught most of the fish we’ve ever eaten here.”

She had the wit to laugh at him as though he were a child.

“That’s just why you ought to go,” said she. “Don’t you remember one of the days when you were laid up, David came back without catching anything. And can’t I say I should like some?”

He laughed with her, feeling that as far as David was concerned, the issue of that was to him. He could not, however, understand why David laughed as well against himself. For David’s laughter was because he knew she had won her point. He knew well enough she sought some reason to see him alone, and, good or ill, whatever it might bring, the thought of speaking to her, as they had so often talked by the hour together without fear of interruption, was a thing he had desired again and again.

At David’s laughter, Jonathan lost his sense of victory in suspicion. Still he went, shouldering his tackle in none the best of spirits, and saying he thought some measure of the division of labour ought to be arrived at.

“If David’s not a skilled labourer,” said he, “we shan’t be able to give him a vote at the board of directors,” and he went off laughing at his thrust, which had its subtlety of point, piercing through the chinks of David’s armour and making the blood sting hot in his face.

That, as he knew well enough, was the crux of it all. Because of that, when it came to the test between them, he felt in his despondent moments that of a certainty he would fail.

But once Jonathan had gone, there they were alone in the creek. Feeling in those moments that the world belonged to them two, his spirits rose no sooner had the sound of Jonathan’s paddle died away in the distance.

For a while, curbing his eagerness with all the power of will he possessed, he stood gazing down into the forest as though following the uncertain course of the canoe with his eyes, when, in reality he was seeing nothing, but listening with every sense in his body to those sounds of her footsteps when she would approach him.

She came at last, slowly, expecting him every minute to turn. But he never moved a muscle of his body until she was there beside him. Had he turned, and turned eagerly, as perhaps she counted he would, some degree of the issue would have gone in Jonathan’s favour then. Jonathan had gone at her behest. Not too graciously it may have been, but he had gone. And then, with the opportunity that was left him, David knew had he shown her his eagerness to make swift use of it, he would have dropped in the estimation of her mind.

With the slowness of her approach, it was almost as though she were putting him to the test. In some subtle way he felt the presence of her will there in close conflict with his own. He wanted to turn, to even take her in his arms, as many a man less sensitive of her thoughts might have imagined she had sought out that opportunity for; but he knew himself and her too well.

“The man,” he has said somewhere else in his script, “who acts before he is sure is thirty times a fool.”

In another place—indeed when describing this very moment—he writes:. “The man who can wait when the instant comes for waiting, knows as much about the heart of a woman as it is good or possible for him to know.”

So he never tinned. Until her hand was laid on his elbow he continued to stare absorbedly into the tangle of the forest trees, while all that time a haze was hanging before his eyes in which he could see nothing but her.

“A penny,” she said, and when he asked her what he could buy with it, she forced a laugh to go with his words.

It was his intention, he says, to let her know nothing of his expectation that she had something to tell him. Whether he thinks it deceived her or not, he does not say, but try as he would, he could not conceal his pleasure when she suggested they should climb those steps to the ledge of rock and sit there and talk.

For a long time after they had settled themselves there, neither of them spoke. Both stared down into the forest. Both were as silent as though never a thought existed between them. To that purpose of waiting, he kept till the last, though his tongue was eager with words to say, and his heart was beating at the close presence of her sitting beside him in that silent place.

“Never,” he says, “have I had to exert more control upon my impulses than in those few moments before she spoke. I hope to God I shall never have to exert as much again.”

For at last she did break the silence. Never looking at him, but keeping her eyes fixed before her, she asked him straightly whether anything had happened between himself and Jonathan.

“What makes you think that?” he inquired, guardedly.

“Well—your manner to each other has changed so much in the last few days. Hearing you talk, seeing you in each other’s company, no one would ever suppose you had been friends, certainly not the very close friends I know you really are.

“What do you imagine could have happened in a deserted place like this?” he asked her, determined it should be she of them two who first should speak the meaning of their minds.

“I have tried so hard to think, ” she replied. “Well—with what result?”

“Sometimes I’ve thought you have both been fretting so terribly at being kept here, prisoners on this coast, that you’ve lost the sense of friendship, lost the sense of everything in the bitterness of the shackles you find all tied about you.”

“And at other times?” he prompted her.

“Yes—then at other times—” and here, stammering a word or two, almost incoherently, at last she broke down. Her lips were quivering as she turned to him pathetically, reduced at length to the utmost simplicity of her mind.

“You know what I’m thinking, David. I know you know. And I want you to say it’s been no fault of mine. I—I haven’t meant it to be. I—I couldn’t help it.” With an absurdly simple and almost childish gurgling in her throat, she said then: “I haven’t used those—those petals at all for quite a long, long time.”

He covered his face fiercely with his hands.

“‘ My God! ” he exclaimed wildly. “For heaven’s sake don’t talk like that! Don’t say ridiculous things like that—that sort of regard of it would bowl me right out. Let’s be hard and matter-of-fact if we’re going to be anything at all. That’s the only way I could stand it.”

So it was again they sat for another while in silence, David with his knuckles against his teeth, listening to the sound of her quick, indrawn breaths and not daring to look at her while she struggled with her tears; scarcely daring to move lest even in the relaxation of his tension, emotions’ should get the better of him and leap beyond his control.

There was apparently in his conception of it all, an odd sense of honour attached. Weeping as she was, and in that stress of mind when she might have found some sense of comfort in his arms, he yet could not bring himself to touch even her hand, because he felt it due to Jonathan, until by the test it was proved which of them had the right. At that juncture, surely enough, she belonged to neither. Yet each had his claim and nothing within the power of his control would have tempted David to violate the unwritten law by which those claims were definitely established in his mind.

He waited, therefore, until she spoke again, trusting no sound of words on his own lips, listening with fear to the sound of his own breathing.

Presently she was quieter, and he knew she had got her tears in check. Then she said:

“What are you both going to do?”

It was pathetic almost to realize how she knew by now the matter was not in her hands, but theirs. So indeed had she been somehow brought to the elemental attitude of mind, that passive acquiescence to the right of some might greater than her own. To her then it seemed she could only sit by to watch and wait, and the whole essence of it was expressed in that simple question: “What are you both going to do?”

Simple as it was, however, it was too direct to be straightly answered. David paused before he replied, and then he said:

“What is there to do? What can we do? I suppose—he hasn’t told me so—that Jonathan’s hit as hard as I am. I might answer that question by asking what you’re going to do. But I expect you know well enough by this time that whatever you said wouldn’t make much difference to the one who was cut out—there’s no chance for him to fling out into life and go to the devil if his inclinations took him that way. There’s not even the devil to go to here. We’re up against life without any of the alluring alternatives of good or evil. The good is for the man who can get it, the evil, what’s left for the other man to take. That’s the gist of it all. Besides, even if we could, do you think we’d put you in the invidious position of damning one or the other? If the hope I’ve got in my heart is a true one, you’re not really in love with either of us.”

“How did you know that?” she muttered, as though he had stolen something from her she scarcely knew she possessed.

“I didn’t know it,” he admitted candidly. “That’s what I’ve hoped; what, despite all those moments when you’ve shown preference for Jonathan, I’ve forced myself to believe. What is more, I hoped for your sake as well as ours that you won’t know till such a moment as when there is no question of choice.”

So swiftly did she seize upon this that he realized, but when it was too late, how he had committed himself.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, and said it again before she had given him time to reply. “What do you mean by that? ’’

“No particular meaning one way or another,” he replied evasively. But she would not let it go at that, pressing him with nervous determination for an answer.

“I had no meaning, ” he said at last in a tone of voice strained with the persistence of her questioning.

And then it was her mind leapt with its intuition to the truth.

“You’re going to fight,” she said hoarsely. “What you said that day in the forest—brute force—that was the deciding factor. You’re going to fight. Oh, my God! This is horrible. It’s— it’s so degrading. This is making life hideous, and it can’t be as hideous as all that!”

“There isn’t anything hideous about it, ” David replied quietly. “In the back of our hearts, I believe we’re both longing for the moment to come, to get at it, and settle it once and for all. We fought when we were kids at school. Why shouldn’t we fight now? ”

“Yes—you were boys then. You’re men now. Oh!—I think it’s horrible! Why can’t we all be friends, as we were at first?”

At that moment David felt he could take her hand. He laid his own upon it and pressed his fingers firmly round her own.

“You know that’s impossible,” saidhe. “Don’t you remember? The meaning of life? There’s only meaning in friendship when you’ve known what love is. For God’s sake, don’t let’s talk about it. It’s talking about it makes it horrible. There are thousands of other things we can speak about, my dear, besides that. These are the first moments I’ve had alone with you for days. Don’t spoil them for me. You don’t know what they’re worth.”

“Well, then, if you care for me as much as all that, ” she cried, “that you covet even a moment alone with me, promise me—promise me you won’t fight.”

She was clinging to him then, both hands on his shoulders and her head bent in weeping on her breast.

Failing in being able to make that promise, he evaded the difficulty of denying her anything by asking her why she should want to extract it from him.

“Don’t you realize,” he said, taking her hands from his shoulders and forcing her to look at him that she might get the full meaning of what he said —“Don’t you realize that it will make it easier for you in the long run? You can’t get merely friendship from either of us. You’ve got to put that out of your head. You can’t shield yourself behind all the social palisades civilization erects for such a purpose at home. You’re at the mercy of life, and so are we. It’ll be much easier for you when it’s all over. You’re not in love with either of us; but—” he paused.

“But what?” said she.

“Are you going to hate me for saying this?”

“I’m not in the mood to hate anybody or any-

% _ thing. I feel numbed. Say it—say it. What is it?”

“Well—you are in love,” said he.

She stared at him, almost frightened at his perception. “What do you mean?” she muttered.

“You are in love,” he repeated. “It’s in the air, and the air’s full of it. Do you imagine people’s thoughts and passions and emotions, as concentrated and uninterrupted as ours, don’t carry contagion with them? Ideas can rise to the temperature of fever, and when they’re strong enough, and free enough, without all the counter-irritants of little social habits and customs, do you imagine there is any mind can stand against them without falling a victim? Did your constitution stand up against the fever in that atmosphere all about the swamp? Can your mind stand up against this? War is a fever, the fever of a predominating idea. It’s an epidemic, and whole nations get swept by its contagion. And this—this is more virulent and stronger even than war. If England were at war, wouldn’t you wish us, both strong men, to go out and fight for our country? Why then should you so hate the idea of our fighting for something which, in a, situation such as this, is dearer even than his country is to a man?”

“I hate war and I hate this,” she replied fiercely. “Every woman hates war. Every woman would hate this, who was not infatuated with her own conceit.”

“But until civilization, like the Gospel, has been preached to all the world, you must have war—the war of aggression from those who are not civilized and the war of defence from those who are. Whole nations can be infatuated with their own conceit and they won’t hate war.”

“But surely to God! ’’ she cried, “we are civilized; you and Jonathan and I. We—we don’t want to settle this by brutal methods like that! ”

“You admit it needs settlement, ’ ’ he said quickly; “you admit that and so you admit the truth of what I said. You are in love, and only some form of settlement will show you the right of one of us to claim you. He’s the one you’ll love, the one who’s master—master of you as well as master of the situation as it stands.”

“Yes—but how—how will you fight—just— just with your fists—like—like they do in the prizefights?”

He could not help laughing at her feminine anxieties, and with them all, the still more feminine curiosity that lay beneath. But she caught no infection from his laughter, and when he suggested they should not discuss that aspect of it, with a fierce retaliation, she declared they must.

“I will know—I must know!” she exclaimed passionately. “What are you going to do? Isn’t that the very first question I asked you— what are you going to do?”

He sat silent, refusing to answer her, and then, with a sudden impulse of fear, she seized his hand.

“He’ll kill you, David,” she whispered, and then he realized how well she must have learnt in those ten days of his sickness the depth of Jonathan’s passion for her. But more than this he realized, which, in that moment, came as a sickness of fear into his mind. She counted upon the certainty of Jonathan’s success. If for an

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instant it could have entered her thoughts, she made nothing of that strength of will, purpose, and passion which David had reckoned in his favour. She knew Jonathan would kill him in his passion to win her. She thought he had not the faintest chance. And that stung him. He dropped her hand from his.

“Have you any reason to be as certain as all that?” said he.

She looked at him, and in her eyes was not merely a fullness of pity, but that expression, though she never took them from his own, as if she were looking him up and down, conveying the comparison between the slightness of his figure and that strength of the brute in every sinew of Jonathan’s body. But he would not take that look as an answer. Undeterred by it, he asked his question again.

“Do you mean to say you don’t realize it? ” she replied softly, as though he were a child and she were teaching him a lesson it was expedient he should know. “David—that leopard the other day. He killed it with his hands—with his hands —that thing which had no thought but to kill him, and with weapons in its talons and strength in its body that you—David—can’t you see?

He killed it. He’s as strong as a lion, that man. Haven’t you seen the muscles in his arms as he works. And—and there’s nothing he can’t do with his hands. I sometimes think it’s wonderful, all the things he can do and the pains and the care he takes over them. One of these days he’ll build a surf-boat that’ll be able to take us out into the track of steamers. It seems utterly impossible to us after that day we tried. But I believe he’ll do it. Over and over again he talked about it when he was ill., Said it might take him two or three years, but he’d do it in the end. I don’t believe there’s anything he couldn’t do. And what chance have you got against a man like that. Oh —can’t you see?—you haven’t got a chance. For God’s sake, don’t fight, David. Think, if he killed you what we should feel, here alone; what he’d feel most of all, because he’d killed the best friend he had in the world.”

He did think, indeed had long ago thought, of all of these things. He knew the odds were against him. But it was not the thought uppermost in ids mind just then. Undeniably, unmistakably, she had shown, him the trend, of her judgement, however much it might yet be hidden in uncertainty from herself. Jonathan was her man of those two in the desolateness of that life of theirs. Jonathan was the man, the whole tendency of circumstances was leading or forcing her to choose.

If Jonathan indeed killed him, then instinctively he knew that pity for him, the weaker of those two, would make a canker in h$r life, and Jonathan’s as well. Yet still it was Jonathan her instinct, if not her heart, was set upon.

Suddenly he left her sitting there and stood to ‘ his feet with a thought that was a reckless hope on the instant in his mind. If he were victorious in that fight of theirs, then there could he no pity in her mind for Jonathan. He, whom she had supposed the weaker of body, would have triumphed over the stronger. If- that could be the issue, willingly enough then, and with no more than a passing regret, would she not be at his feet.

It was a hope that lasted only a moment, but long enough to give him further impetus to his purpose. No doubt she was right, and in all she had said, she had shown him plainly enough the track in which her thoughts must run, but there was that vague and slender chance for any man to cling to. With all the fierce bitterness which the revelation of her mind had brought him, he fastened his hope upon it.

“Let’s get back to the beach,” said he. “It’s not a bit of good sitting on here and talking. Supposing he did kill that leopard the other day, the instincts of life it fought with are governed to a certain extent by fear. There’s not a question of fear in this. I’m not afraid of losing you. I haven’t got you yet. But, my God, I’m going to have a damned good try.”

CHAPTER XXIV

MAN TO MAN

I HAVE said that Joan unwittingly put an end to the conditions of affairs as it had then developed since Jonathan’s illness towards its crisis. She put an end to it by no other means than this contrivance of hers to discuss the whole matter in confidence with David.

The satisfaction of his parting thrust at David’s incompetency, it can be well believed, did not last Jonathan for long. The further he got away from the creek, the more he fell to wondering what they were doing; what advantage David was taking of his opportunities; to what extent she was being swayed by those attractions of David’s mind which Jonathan knew must be greater than his own.

In that uninterrupted company of his own thoughts, I can conceive jealousy growing at a rapid pace. He wasted no time with his fishing-tackle on that beach. As soon as he had caught sufficient for the meal she had asked for, he returned, increasing the speed of his journey with the spur of suspicion the nearer he came to home.

With the first sight he had of the creek, his eyes were swift to seek them out. At that moment, far from expecting him back so soon, they were standing by the Malaga’s boat. She had followed David down the steps into the creek, and, using other methods than pleading, was still trying to win from him the promise she needed. Her hand was on his shoulder. She was looking up earnestly into his face. This was what Jonathan saw. Small wonder was it that there sped across his mind the memory of that day when, after the death of Sam, he had seen her in David’s arms.

What control he must have used to force the casual note into his voice as he shouted out, “Hallo—there! Here’s your supper for you!” can easily be imagined. What he felt when he saw their surprise and observed her hand being swiftly withdrawn from David’s shoulder, needs little imagination either.

His eyes were flaming as they came towards him, and Joan must have known in that moment there was little hope but in the issue as David had drawn it for her. She could hear every effort of restraint in his voice. There was no mistaking, even for the meanest intelligence, that glitter of emotion in his eyes.

That night at. supper she kept up with amazing courage this farce of behaving as though not a thought of tragedy were hanging over them.

For the amusement and distraction of their minds, she persuaded them to play a game of chess. It was some weeks since they had played, and, as though in some sense in both their minds it was like a consulting of the oracle, they consented to her persuasions. In David’s mind at least was the sure understanding of why she stayed with them for so long an hour after her usual time.

In Jonathan there could have been no such comprehension as this, yet he consented to play willingly enough, feeling perhaps, as I have suggested, that this was the battle in miniature, the foreshadowing of their fate, yet having no superstition about it, whichever way the issue might turn out.

It was a long game. With all the concentration he possessed, Jonathan gave his mind to it, but he was no match for David’s intuitive impulses and clearer vision of thought. Again and again he violently attacked, and after each onslaught with the most powerful pieces, found he had lost, if not in men then in position. Gradually and inevitably David wore him down to sure defeat. Jonathan at last was left with his king, knight, and three pawns; David with king, castle, bishop, and a single pawn.

For one moment, with the exchange of pieces forced by David which had brought this situation about, they looked up from the board into each other’s eyes, and there was no mistaking the quiet expression of triumph in David’s face.

“Like to chuck it up now?” said he, using, all unconsciously, the very words Jonathan had used to him those days long ago at school as they went out to their fighting-ground behind the chapel wall.

“Chuck it up!” Jonathan exclaimed. “Good God! What for? I’ve got three pawns! ”

“Right oh,” said David amiably. “Your move.”

But from that moment, as even Joan could see, who knew no more of the game than from watching them play it, it was a hopeless and one-sided business. Step by step, move by move, David pressed his opponent into disadvantage. One by one his pawns were taken, yet, even when he was left with his knight alone, he almost foolishly, and certainly with obstinacy, held on. To any chess-player, the game was over. He played on indeed in the hope that Joan would go to bed and not be present to witness his defeat.

Once he looked up, asking her if it was not past her time for clearing off, and almost thought she must be sitting there to watch for the moment of his discomfiture. He did not know she had deeper purpose for her delay than that.

At last David made a queen of his pawn, and in three moves the game was ended.

“Thanks,” said Jonathan, and said no more.

It was beyond the power of her invention to find excuse for staying after that, and slowly Joan rose to her feet. They returned her good-night, but at the door, as she went out, she looked back, saying, “God bless you,” with the old suspicion of a catch in her voice, which neither of them could have failed to notice. It was as though she needed in her thoughts to leave that sentiment behind her in her place, standing between them throughout the night until she could keep her watch upon them once more in the morning.

For a while after she had gone, Jonathan sat there doing nothing, while David in silence put away the chessmen. Having done this, he was just about to go into their bedroom, when Jonathan spoke.

“Do you remember a question I put to you some time ago? ” he asked.

For a moment David warded off the inevitable.

“What question?” he asked.

With a faint sense of irritation, Jonathan reminded him and David admitted a clear memory of it.

“Well—I want to ask it again. Are you in love with her now?”

“I didn’t deny it then,” said David quietly.

“And you admit it now?”

“Certainly.”

“Well—so am I,” said Jonathan.

“I’m quite aware of that,” said David.

“Yes, you always fancied you knew what was passing in people’s minds,” Jonathan exclaimed sarcastically.

David returned from the bedroom door and sat down at the table.

“Look here, Jonathan,” be began slowly, “that’s the second time today you’ve hit at me with words.”

“What was the first?”

“When you said that damned bitter thing about my being merely an unskilled labourer with no right to a voice in what it amused you to call our board of directors. That was the first time. That hurt more than this, and before we go an inch further in the whole of this business I’m going to remind you that we’ve been the best of friends and that words won’t settle the matter one way or another. What’s more, you know they won’t, even better than I. And it seems to me that words like that are dirty things between us two, so let’s keep ’em out. If anything makes it worth while to keep it clean, she does.”

“Well, you’re so blastedly superior with your subtleties and your understanding, ’ ’ said Jonathan hotly. “It’s as much as I can do to put up with it.”

“I have to put up with your superiority of ability,” David answered him. “You may not fling it in my face, but I fling nothing in yours. It’s how we see each other, and isn’t that, or what we actually are, the crux of the whole thing? ” Jonathan went to the door and flung it open, as though the atmosphere in that room were suffocating him.

“I’m in no fit state of mind to argue about it,” he said presently, looking round. “You’re always ready for an argument. I suppose you think you could argue me out of my state of mind; just as I expect you fancied winning at that game of chess was a symbol of your rights. But, if you remember, I told you once when you were starting out on this trip, that there were no symbols where you were going. Gosh! I little knew how true that was going to be. That game of chess was no symbol—”

“I never thought it was,” interposed David.

“And no more,” continued Jonathan, without listening to his interruption—“And no more will argument settle the business for us now. You can’t talk round a thing like this. Talk! Good God! Talk and tears! That’s a woman’s job.”

David rose quickly to his feet. The whole issue hung upon a thread just then, and had not Joan’s blessing, with that quaint catch in her voice, sounded in his mind, recalling all her pleading for that promise he had never given, he must have brought it to its crisis then. Even Jonathan turned to the look in his eyes, ready for the blow, then laughed when he heard it was still to be words.

“I’ve said all that a little while ago,” said David, with an effort. “I ’ve said that words won’t settle it. Your repetitions only add more words. I’m merely supposing that we’re not just animals with nothing more than appetites to gratify. We’re sufficiently civilized to observe a few formalities. You asked me a question in the first instance. I presume you expected it to be answered with words. If I’d spat in your face, I suppose you’d have considered I’d lost some sense of the fitness of things. By what you say, you wouldn’t; but I’m not taking much notice of that.”

Jonathan dropped his hand, from the door and strode with three steps to David’s side.

“Look here, you’re not going to talk to me like that,” he shouted, “with your damned superior intelligence!”

David’s eyes met his with a straightness no man could have utterly ignored.

“You’ll listen to every word I have to say,” he said clearly, “because you know well enough I’m not going to deny you your chance with your fists. I shan’t cheat you of that, and you won’t be such a cad as to cheat me.”

One lone moment they stared as they looked into each other’s eyes, and then Jonathan sat down.

“What have you got to say?” he asked.

David closed the door and came back to the table.

“I had my opportunity today,” he began. “All the time you’ve been away, we’ve been talking. I’m not going to tell you what we said. That’s my affair. I can claim that much. But what I want you to recognize is this. It’s a damnable position for her. You can’t think she likes it. You can guess well enough she knows the pass we’ve got to. There’s scarcely a woman is a fool in these matters.”

“What a hell of a lot you know about women!” exclaimed Jonathan ironically, and David laughed.

“Not so much as you do about fish,” said he. “‘ Come on, don’t let’s get childish over it. That’s the case. That’s what I want to say. She hates the position she’s in. I can tell you that much. Well—I’ve had my chance with her, and I can’t alter it. Before we come to this”—he shrugged his shoulders with a smile—“settlement of it, you take your chance. I’ll go down to the beach tomorrow and leave you two alone. There were no restrictions upon. me when you went this morning. I don’t propose any restrictions upon you. You’re free to act as you think best, and if that doesn’t settle it, then anywhere or any time you like. I don’t care. The sooner the better. I can’t stand this odour of hatred between us any more than you can. Now, you needn’t worry yourself any more about my damned superiority. That’s all the talk you’ll get from me.”

Jonathan looked at him across the table, and I can almost believe he felt an admiration for David then, for he rose to his feet saying, ‘‘All right—that seems fair,” and held out his hand.

For an instant David looked at it, then back into Jonathan’s eyes.

‘‘I don’t want your hand,” said he. “You’ve got your chance, and it can’t take much to make you believe I don’t love you for it. Let’s get to bed.”.

CHAPTER XXV

PUTTING IT TO THE TEST

JOAN was up and out early the next morning. When David heard her calling outside their window, he knew well what apprehension was in her mind.

“Getting up now,” he called back, conscious that it was his voice she wanted to hear, and that only because she feared for his safety. Still, there was his voice, and he gave it her, smiling to himself as he heard her set about the preparation for the breakfast with the humming of a song of gratitude in her throat.

That must indeed have been an anxious night for her. She looked, when they came in to breakfast, as though she had never closed her eyes for one minute of it. But with the reaction from her fears, once she had looked from one to the other, her spirits were high. She talked incessantly and laughed as she had done in the best of the times since they had all been together.

David, perhaps, was the least cheerful of the three of them. Before Jonathan were the hopes and prospects of that day with her alone. Her spirits, as has been said, were reactionary. But as for David, his own words best describe the mood which hung about him.

“I was leaving them alone all that day,” he says, “and poor though my chances may have been in a fight with Jonathan, I was in that frame of mind to believe they were poorer still with her. She was in love with neither of us. I had told her that the day before. But she was in love with love. Yet I knew well enough that if it were possible for either one or the other of us to shape ourselves into the expression of her emotions, it would be Jonathan. She believed Jonathan would kill me, and that because, in her deepest conviction, she knew he could. Her dread of it was only by reason of her feminine hatred of the brutality of force. In a word then, though she might not know it in the surface consciousness of her mind, I was convinced that it was Jonathan she loved. The enthusiasm of her admiration for his powers of contributing to the necessities of our life there, no less than the protecting value of his strength as evidenced by his victory over the leopard, these were the proofs she gave me. It seemed I could not in reason ask for any more. And to all the contemplative functions of my mind —as merciless as any cross-examining barrister in a court of law—I was to be left alone for the rest of that day.”

No words of mine could better describe this mood in which David found himself that morning. If further conviction of his beliefs had been necessary, he heard it in the unregretful way in which she accepted his announcement that he was going down to the beach.

“‘ I believe my little sermon on idleness has done some good,” she said, with a laugh. It did not enter his thoughts she might be glad of every moment when those two were apart.

So he went, without a word of good-bye to either of them, taking the fishing-tackle to make excusable his reason for going, and never once looking back to see them standing there on the other side of the palisade.

He took his time in going. All the jealousy he had suffered, he says, seemed to have been blunted of its edge then. The choice was not with her. He still believed she would not choose. But her convictions were his convictions. In those hours when he was working the canoe down the creek he believed but little in his chance. Already she loved the man she knew must win, but could not bring her mind to realize it, until the test had proved it to the hilt. It was the test that mattered, as he had always known it did, and in those hours, going down to the beach, he had somehow lost faith in his fate. It was Joan who had robbed him of it. He could not argue then that expediency was the dictator of her heart. By all the laws of average and comparison, he knew as well as she that Jonathan was the master of that situation. In the depression which had fallen upon him, he could see little beside.

He conveys a depth of despondency in his description of that lonely journey down to the beach, which, natural though it may have been, scarcely does him justice.

“Few all I might have argued with her,” he says, “that inferred declaration of her choice did make a difference to me. It took the heart out of me. I had no more fear about my meeting with Jonathan. But I had less hope, because it seemed I had less right; less right of challenge because of my little hope of success. As I look back on it now, it seems the more amazing how completely obsessed I had become by the virtue of physical force in that contingency.

“So I was weighed down in spirit,” he continues, “until, as I drove the canoe out of those tall sea-grasses that separated the forest from the beach and came into the open channel, my eyes were fixed with the sight of something which for the moment washed every other thought out of my mind. About a couple of miles out there lay a British gunboat, flying that flag it seemed I had not seen for a whole lifetime.

“How can I describe my first sensations? For even the necessity of signalling to her had no cause to occupy my thoughts. I could see a boat putting off from her side, the glitter of the line of oars in the sunshine as they dipped in and out of the water, the white figures of British bluejackets bending to them as they rowed. There was nothing to do then but wait for them, and words almost fail me to describe what I felt.

“The thought, I imagine which seized upon me first of all, seeing how near it was to my mind, was that this was the solution to all our difficulties. Swift upon that came the return of those sensations I had had when we had made our attempt at escape through the forest and Jonathan had talked in hours of the moment of our release. Then I had felt that my chance, in the normal surroundings of civilization, would be triumphantly established. So I felt then, seeing that gunboat lying out there; watching those oars glittering and vanishing, glittering and vanishing in the sunshine. Fate, luck, whatever it was, had turned the balance of events richly in my favour. For Jonathan, once he was released, would inevitably return to his roving habits once more. The opportunities would all be mine, and the prospect of wooing her, as I knew I could, was one which thrilled me in the joy of its promise.

“I see no reason to deny that these were my first sensations. The Lord knows they were human enough. But then, there fell upon my mind the pledge I had given to Jonathan that he should have his chance of the day alone with her. In addition to that there was his still greater chance in the test which, only a few moments before, had seemed the inevitable outcome of the whole affair. And here, a stroke of luck had robbed him of it.

In civilized environments again, it was ridiculous to suppose it could be settled that way. In civilized environments, the choice again would be with her. The whole rights of custom gave it to her, and in what light would she regard Jonathan then? How would his qualities,.so much in evidence in that creek, show to advantage in a London drawing-room? Last of all, if I had only the evening before to convince me, I knew that Jonathan was hit just as hard as I, and, but for this trick of fortune turning up on the board of chance, would have won her. Irrevocably she would have been his.

“So came that second phase of my sensations, as the little boat came dancing over the blue waters towards the edge of the surf. The tide was low. With all those sailors manning her, I knew she could be beached somehow or other, and that she could be launched again, no matter what sort of a drenching we got from the breaking waves.

“These second thoughts were the hardest of all to argue with. Certainly the fortune was not of my seeking, glad though I may have been it had come our way. But, had it been in my power, would I have chosen it? That was a tricksy question. I tried to put it to myself as straight as I could. Would I have taken the chance of solving our problem, the odds of which were accumulated heavily against me, by such easy means as these? Without any false sentiment about it, would I have slipped out of the prospect of that fight had it been in the power of my will to avoid it? I had to admit this much. I had to admit that I should have despised myself for ever if I had.

“Yet how could this be helped? It was not of my seeking. The turn of the dice had come my way. Obviously it would be insane to refuse that opportunity of escape. I must break into the promise I had given Jonathan that he should be alone with her all that day. I must snatch from him his overwhelming chances to beat me in a fair fight. I had accepted that fight. In refusing to shake hands with him the night before, I had proudly accepted it, asking for nothing but hatred and enmity between us both.

“J^ow the ship’s boat had reached the surf, and they were gallantly struggling with the wash of the tumbling waves. I stood there watching her.

They had seen me now. But none of my thoughts % were with their efforts. I knew they would come in safe enough. I knew they would get back again to the ship. All those moments, as they came sweeping in towards the shore, I was wrestling with a new thought which, like a bolt out of that blue above me, had pierced into my mind.

“Supposing I went alone, leaving them to the unhampered decision of Fate? It was an honest way out of it. In some respects it was better for Jonathan, since he would not have been responsible for my elimination from the tangle of it all. Then indeed, and doubtless in a mighty short time, she would know if she really loved him. In just as short a time, giving advice at the first port we stopped at, I could have chartered a boat to go and take them off.

“Whatever the result, would not that be a clean decision of the issue as Fate had begun it, as Fate would have determined it too, without the intervention of this stroke of luck? The more I thought about it, the more I came to the honest belief it was so. In the environment in which that problem had been set, there, by every right of the law of sequence, it should be solved. It was with the deepest reluctance I came to that decision, yet there appeared to me no other alternative. It was not as if I were deserting them; indeed it was merely as though, in an effort to secure their release, I was setting out, only for a week or so, indeed for less, and that with the certain prospect of success.

“By the time the boat had come near enough for me to wade in and give a hand, my mind was made up to it. Without the sense that one has acted honestly in the light of one’s own principles, the greatest passion has a taste about it that can be evil in the mind. I was giving Jonathan his chance, as I made no doubt he would have given me mine if he had found me at a disadvantage in our fight. And God knows, I should have been at many before we reached the inevitable end.

“If any man, ever reading this, can say my decision was not fair, it must be an assumption based upon the logical sequences of his mind to which by temperament mine could not subscribe.

“As the boat came in and I felt the touch of her, felt also the grip of the officer’s hand in mine, I reckoned the decision I had brought myself to was not wholly without its compensations.

“‘My God! You’ve had a thick time of it,’ he said. ‘How long have you been here?’

“I shook my head. I did not know, and besides that, I felt too excited, emotional too, perhaps, to be able to speak.

“‘ What^hip was it? ’

“‘The Malaga,’ I managed to stammer out.

‘“Lord! That’s what we thought. Getting on eight months.’

“‘Eight months!’ I muttered. I could not be sure in my mind whether it seemed short or a lifetime.

“‘ Do you mean to say you’ve been here all alone —no others?’

“I shook my head. I could not trust my voice.

“‘ Where have you lived? ’

“‘ Up there in the forest. ’

“‘Made that canoe yourself?’

“‘Yes.’

“I felt justified in that lie.

“‘Have you got any things you want to bring? ’

“I laughed quickly, asking him what sort of things he imagined I could have collected in that deserted spot.

“‘Well, this’ll make a fine tale when you get home,’ said he; ‘you’ll be the modem Robinson Crusoe.’

“He little thought what sort of a tale it was, and how, not more than a few miles away, it was going on, in the most crucial moments of its development, even as we stood there.

“He explained how they had been cruising in near shore, on the lookout for water, and, having got it, about six miles farther down the coast, were sheering out to sea again when they saw the signal on the top of the cliff. In all that conversation I felt it a terrific strain to keep to the singular of the personal pronoun, saying ‘I,’ not ‘we’—‘mine,’ not ‘ours,’ and the fact that Jonathan had been responsible for most of the conveniences of our life there, made it all the harder.

“I took refuge in saying as little as I could, and doubtless my silence seemed natural enough to him. According to the tale I had pitched, I had not had a soul to talk to for nearly eight months.

“I was given a change of clothing as soon as we got aboard. I was provided with the means to shave my beard and feel myself again. I think that sensation was the strangest and most gratifying of all. And the first meal they gave me of English food, cooked in the English way—my heavens! That was good. The officers sat and watched me wolf it down, while I kept telling them they did not know what a damned fine life they had of it.

“The officer in command sent for me as soon as I had got through these preliminaries. It was a British gunboat, and there was a certain amount of formality about all these proceedings which only made me laugh inside myself. It was coming back to civilization with such a rush, like blood flowing back to its unaccustomed channels, that it almost hurt, it seemed so foolish just then.

“Once we were alone together, that sort of nonsense all disappeared, especially under the influence of the fact of our discovering that we had mutual friends at home, and he had often heard about me. Then we both remarked how small a place the world was, and with a jerk I realized how easy it was to drift back into the commonplace and conventional remarks that go to make civilized conversation.

“I sat and talked with him for an hour or more, when at one point of the conversation, which had become as natural as that between old friends, he said: ‘How did you manage for water?’

“‘ Oh—we found that easily enough, ’ said I, and then I saw my pitfall, but only when I had fallen in.

“‘We?’ said he. ‘I thought you were alone?’ “There was one second when I asked myself was it too late to excuse it. The next, I knew by his eye it was. Having arrived at that decision, I told him the truth, and thank God, when I had finished explaining to him my motives, he got up from the table in his saloon, and he stalked to the port-hole, standing a full moment and looking out; then turning round to me and saying: ‘“Well—I call that damned quixotic! The luck had come your way without asking for it. Why the devil didn’t you take it?’

“I drew a deep breath of relief. I asked for no better justification than that. He drove the fear of God into me, however, when he continued saying that by rights he supposed he ought to go back straight away.

“‘For the Lord’s sake don’t do that!’ I begged him. ‘ I can charter some sort of a craft at Teneriffe and you’ve got the exact latitude and longitude. They can’t fail to be found.’

“‘Oh, they’ll be found right enough,’ he replied, ‘ there’s no fear of that.’ And then, reluctantly, he consented to go ahead. They expected to reach Teneriffe next morning, so the concession he made was not such a great one after all. I think, in fact, it was just official pride in his power to interfere with my plans which made him suggest it.”

‘‘During those three days, I composed a letter to Joan, intending it to be delivered to her by the rescue party in whatever ship I could arrange to go.

“This is the letter. I have no compunction in transcribing it here. She might, if she wished, have shown it to the whole world.

“‘My dear, ’ I wrote,

“‘I am sure you have wondered much and thought often, perhaps, that I shirked at the last moment that issue which was to have decided so much in my life, if not, perhaps, in yours. You will realize by now that I have not just merely slipped out of it, but have intended rather to leave it all to the unaltered conditions of that same Fate which brought us all together, and threatened so nearly to divide us in the end.

“‘I had had all and more than all my chances with you. I am given to talking my mind. Jonathan is not. And I had had many opportunities, yet had not won you. In these few days, therefore, while you have been alone with him, and he has, no doubt, said what is in his heart, you will have been free to learn much of what I have strongly suspected was in your heart all the time, though you could not know it.

“‘Do you remember saying God’s blessing to us that night before I went away? Well—here I repeat it to you, knowing that unless you want me you will not send for me or write to me again, David.”’

CHAPTER XXVI

THE TEST ITSELF

THIS brings me to the end of David’s manuscript. So much he must have written immediately on his return to England, while the whole affair was fresh and vivid in his memory. There is certainly no smell of the lamp about it. He wrote just as he felt, and probably completed the whole account in less than a month. Reading it through, as carefully as I have done, it gives me that impression; as if he needed to occupy his mind, though not to distract it, from the sense of loss which he conveys in that last letter to Joan.

It becomes, accordingly, no easy task for me to complete the story, drawing certainly upon my imagination in no little degree, but with that margin of knowledge which I possess from the things I have heard, little remarks of David’s and actual inquiries I have made since I determined to give the tale in this form to the public.

The accuracy of my account of what happened in the creek after David’s departure, naturally I cannot vouch for; though I profess no slight pretension to its authenticity by reason of circumstances which will be divulged later.

Jonathan, it seems, made no bones about admitting the fact that it was by David’s suggestion they were left alone that day. It probably helped him in breaking down that reserve he felt in speaking to her on any other than the most ordinary topics.

In a stilted but honest and genuine fashion he told her that he loved her, to which Joan listened, never answering by so much as a touch of the hand, and employing far more restraint than ever she had shown with David.

He seem? to have taken that silence in the light of submission. Somewhere in the early part of his script David says: “Jonathan believed all women to be intensely clever until the moment of surrender, and that then they became creatures of devouring emotion, externally passive, but inwardly making such demands upon a man as, unless his passion for them absorbed all his interests in life, made a slave of him before he knew where he was.”

This, without doubt, is a clue to all his actions from that moment when he found himself alone with her at the creek, and after David’s disappearance. This silence and restraint he must have taken as the expression of that passivity in a woman which, according to his view of the sex, was indicative of her surrender. Some such mental process it certainly was, for, quickened with the passion he felt himself, he acted, and before he was sure. Suddenly he put his arms about her, and in the contact of her body with his own, was, for the moment, lost to everything but the whirlwind of his emotions.

Easily it can be imagined she was startled, numbed even, in her surprise. More easily still can it be realized, she was powerless to move in those arms of his. And there for a moment she lay, while he spent his kisses on her face and neck.

It must be remembered David had put no restraint upon him. He had told him of no one word they had said while they were alone together the day before.

“You are free to act as you think best, and, if that doesn’t settle it, then anywhere or any time you like. I don’t care.’’

And this had been the best, indeed, the only way of acting, as Jonathan had conceived it. A moment later, he set her free and, breathless, she pushed the hair from off her forehead, staring in front of her and saying no word at all, much as they say an animal stares into the hypnotic eyes of the boa constrictor when she has chosen her prey.

It was circumstance, however, she was gazing at, not at Jonathan. Not one word of reproof did she utter, but slowly, after a moment, she rose to her feet.

All the time he had watched her, groping with his mind to reach hers. Now, in this silence, he found himself hopelessly in the confusion of an utter darkness.

He did not know whether he had offended her or not. On that impulse of doubt he overwhelmed her with his apologies.

“You’re not hurt—you’re not offended, are you?” he cried. “I love you. I told you that. Can I help what I feel? Good God! I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. ‘ I wouldn’t do that for the world. I thought from the way you listened, saying nothing—that you understood, would know I must be longing—to have you in my arms. Joan—are you offended? ’ ’

She turned and faced him, pleading there like a child in his remorse for what he had done, and it must have been inevitable in her mind to make comparison between him and David then. All of a sudden, he was as Samson, shorn of his locks. So it seemed to her, with full intent, must Delilah have stolen tlje secret of that man of strength. In that moment she knew she could tell him to do for her whatever she wished and he would straightway have done it.

But more profoundly than this, it was never he whom she looked at. Even when he began to realize the possibility that he had mistaken her from the beginning, asking her whether it were David she cared for most, and she answered: “Don’t you realize I have no choice?” it was circumstance she was answering, not he.

“David’s been telling you that sort of nonsense as well, has he? ” he replied. “He said that to me last night—that you had no choice—but it’s all rot. However, he likes to think he understands women, and if you wish to agree with it, I can’t help that. But it’s futile to me. You’ve only to lift your little finger and I’d-”

She stopped him quickly.

“You’d give me David?” said she.

At the mere sound of David’s name on her lips, all expression of apology vanished from his face.

“No,” said he. “Do you imagine I would? Do you think I could go on calmly here, you two living together, and I labouring, slave to both of you and your happiness? Is that the way out of it which David suggested? If it is, it’s not surprising that he failed.”

“David didn’t suggest anything of,the kind,” she replied. “He knew you would neither of you consent to that. There was only one alternative that he could see.”

“What was that?”

“That you must fight.”

Jonathan nodded his head. Obviously over that matter there was nothing to be said. It was all to do.

“Would you suppose from that, then,” she suggested, ‘‘ that it leaves me with much choice ?”

His silence was his answer.

“So David was right after all?” she persisted.

He waited a moment, smarting under a sense of impotence.

“Oh, I suppose David’s always right,” he said at length. “At every turn I come up against that superior intelligence of his—but I doubt whether the circumstances call for it here.”

My imagination may be all at fault, but it seems to me then she must have felt the existence of that superior intelligence dominating the situation, even with David miles away. We are now looking at this story, unbiassed by David’s point of view of it, and in all the facts of information I have collected I find how true the judgement must have been that she was in love with neither of them. Prom the moment, however, when Jonathan gave way to the impulse of his emotion, that must have made a turning-point in her mind, however it may have been hidden from her consciousness by the omnipresent facts of circumstance.

She began at this juncture to examine Jonathan as to his point of view upon his friendship with David; what they had felt for each other before ever that, voyage on the Malaga had been undertaken; how their friendship had withstood the test of close companionship before she had arrived on the Malaga’s boat.

“And how soon,” she asked him, “did you begin to know that something was coming between that friendship which had lasted all those years? ”

“Oh—I don’t know,” said he. “I suppose David recognized it first. There’s no need my saying he’s more impulsive than I am.”

“I think we could argue about that,” she replied. “He’s longer-sighted—that’s what it seems to me. I don’t think you can deny that you’re impulsive.”

After what had just happened, he could say nothing to that. Still he tried to defend his point.

“You can call it long-sightedness in him if you like,” he replied, “but he couldn’t have seen so far as this when he was carrying you up the saloon companion-way on the Malaga, and admits—as he did to me when you were lying on the beach unconscious—that he felt a sort of emotion about you then.”

“On the Malaga,” she demanded, “on the Malaga—when did he do that? ”

He told her then what he imagined David must have told her long before.

“Fancy his never telling me,” she murmured when he had finished, and leaving Jonathan wishing to heaven he had never mentioned it. For now it seemed to him he was coming to learn, as David thought he himself had learnt, the direction of her choice.

The Test Itself

267

So, as an outsider, it appears to me they were both bound to believe in each other’s chances with her, while swayed first from one and then from the other, always in reverse to the one she was with, I conceive she would have remained in doubt. Each, in his absence, seemed to dominate the situation in her mind. When David was not there she felt his thought permeating everything that happened; when Jonathan was not there she was conscious of his physical abilities and strength asserting their predominance over the situation.

It may be thought she was an opportunist. It must be wondered what woman is not. Does not the whole of her training and experience induce her to this? Until civilisation has won for her the independence she desires, will she not remain so? An opportunist handicapped by emotion.

The test was needed, as David had said, to prove to her which was master of their destinies, and automatically, without any of the fears she had entertained, that test was applied. When after waiting overlong for David’s return to the creek, they both made their way down to the beach, found the canoe and found it empty, there was only one conclusion remaining for them to draw. David had acknowledged his defeat in the trial of strength. He had fulfilled her wishes. There would be no conflict between them. He had decided the issue himself.

The tide had come in, washing out all signs of the footprints they had left upon the sand. There was the empty canoe. She needed no further proof of the course he had taken—and then, as I see it, she must have known but not actually till then.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE ANSWER

MANY women run in the opportunist’s race, and, with all the handicap of their emotions, they find a place. Some, by reason of that handicap, are left behind.

For the next few days at the creek, both Joan and Jonathan were too oppressed with the loss of David, to speak at all of those circumstances which, so far as they knew, had brought that loss about. Jonathan pursued his duties, Joan hers, with a cloud upon their spirits, the meaning of which in her he could have been under no misapprehension.

In all honesty, he must have admitted himself, he felt the absence of his friend. To whatever straits of circumstance they may have been driven that night before his disappearance, there still had been the sure foundation of their friendship.

Nothing could have altered that; nor could anything detract from that spirit of what in moments of anger he had chosen to call David’s damned superior intelligence.

Both of them missed it, as one would miss a season were it stolen from the fullness of the year. A thousand times over Jonathan thanked his God that he had not been the instrument of that rift of absence in their little community. Had David heard those thanksgivings, notwithstanding all the misapprehensions on which they were based, he would have known he had done right.

The test of it all had been made and, without any of the remorse he must inevitably have felt, Jonathan must sometimes have been of the mind that David, in losing, had won. Yet, as the days went by and David’s absence became an accepted fact with which they must make the best of life as it was, the ultimate resolution of fate must have appeared inevitable to both of them. And then, a bolt out of the blue, as it had been with David, there came their release.

With a leaping of their hearts, one morning as they sat at breakfast, they heard the shouting of voices, English voices, in the forest. As if a meteor out of heaven had fallen between them, they jumped to their feet. They were saved.

The first complete realization of their escape which came to Joan was David’s letter, handed to her, as he had desired, no sooner than the explanation of that relief party was given. She kept it, unopened in her hand, all the while until she was on board, and then, in the silence and seclusion of her own cabin, she opened it, and read its contents.

That evening, walking up and down the deck, she talked it all out with Jonathan. There must have been—even at this distance I can conceive it —some complete upheaval in her mind at the realization that David had not made way for Jonathan, but had himself escaped. She could not blame him. But the remorse she had felt about his death was no longer there. A great gap had suddenly been rent in her mind, while as yet there was nothing to fill it. She had conceived the whole Romance as she had thought it was, and now, all in a swift moment, it had become, as it seemed to her, a different matter altogether.

“‘Well, we’re all free now, ’ ’ said she, meditatively, as she leant on the taffrail. “And what’s going to happen now, I wonder?”

She had told him the substance of David’s letter. There was no call upon her to tell him the last words with which it ended. In reply to that half-implied question of hers, Jonathan said nothing. He was thinking eagerly of the new life in front of him, when she wrenched him from his thoughts.

“Do you still feel the same about me now, Jonathan?” she asked.

The pause before he answered was as slight as to the bricklayer must be the thickness of a hair; but to the architect working his drawings to a scale, the sixteenth of an inch made all the difference in the world. In such a situation, she was that architect, dealing with inflexions and expressions on the minutest scale.

When he answered quickly and emphatically that he had not changed one whit, it was that pause she heard more deeply than the genuine admission in his voice. She changed the subject, and half an hour later went below to her cabin.

At Teneriffe, she secured a berth on a steamer going south.

“I am going to finish my voyage,” she said to Jonathan. - “My father will think I’ve gone down with the Malaga. I’ve cabled him I’m coming by the next boat.”

She held out her hand and once more in his life the Blue Peter fluttered down from the masthead.

It was no formal parting. How could it have been? Ostensibly and justifiably she was returning to her father at the first opportunity. They did not say: “Then this is the end.” But the ships of their destinies were leaving their moorings and both of them knew they were bound for different harbours.

CHAPTER XXVIII

HOME

ABOUT five months later, in the late spring, when the two friends had long since met, finding, as it seemed to them then, that such friendship as theirs was after all greater than the love of women; when Jonathan had gone abroad again for his mining company and David was drifting back once more into London life, there arrived a letter at the Albany, brought to David with his morning tea.

The reader must suppose it was from Joan. But the handwriting was wholly unfamiliar to David. He tore it open casually. Her name at the foot of the page drew his eyes to it at once.

“My father,” he read, “retired from his business in South Africa and returned to England.

We have bought a house here in the heart of the real country. All this has happened in five months, and if nothing prevents you, we should like to see you here for a few days. I shall quite understand if you find it impossible to get away and, supposing that may be very likely, I take this opportunity of thanking you for all your kindness and understanding,.”

David leapt out of bed. In half an hour he was eating breakfast. In another hour he was in the train with a telegram preceding him. That afternoon, he found himself driving down a long drive, cut through a wood, grass banks on either side freckled with cowslips, and a cuckoo calling its first April note through the green tracery of the trees.

They had tea on the lawn. The first day hot enough in the year. To all her father’s inquiries and her joggings of his memory, they went through most of that story again. Then, when they were left alone, after the meal was over, she took David through the garden.

“To show you,” said she, “what I call a home—an English home.”

It was all cut out, a clearing in the heart of the wood, with grass-green alleys leading through the high beech trees just broken in leaf, to kitchen gardens, tennis lawns, and rose and herbaceous borders.

They talked of commonplaces: of what each one of them had done during those five months; of how Jonathan had set off on his travels again and what part of the world he was then faring in.

It seemed almost as though in those surroundings, and with those days in the creek so far behind them, they were merely strangers, met formally for the first time.

This, however, was not David’s way of thought when his mind was not in doubt. In one of those alleys hidden from the house, he stopped her as they walked.

“This is not us,” he said. “I always say the man who acts before he’s sure is thirty times a fool. And the man who dallies when his heart is certain, how many times a fool do you imagine he must be?”

She tried to laugh, as though she did not follow the line of his thought. She tried to ask him what he meant by suddenly saying that.

“I suppose you’ve waited these five months,” he replied, “to see how far circumstances would alter cases. Well, mine was a bad case. It. doesn’t alter those.”

Slowly upon that, he took her face in his hands, and he added: “Thousands of times I’ve kissed you in my mind. And what a poor thing imagination is.”

THE END.