Twining, when he found me existing, tourist fashion, in the best hotel on the island, to ask me to come up to the Mission and pay him a visit. Pure Kingsborough clannishness made it possible for me to accept; for, though we had plenty of common acquaintance, we had never known each other, and missionaries are not my tipple. They are like ginger-ale, neither intoxicating nor refreshing. I had been in twenty minds about accepting, and finally I went up to see for myself. Having seen, I stayed. The scene got me. I was new to the South Seas. I shall never forget how I found Twining, that first day, when I went to return his visits. He was sitting on a palmwreathed eminence, gazing fixedly down a forty-five-degree slant of vegetation, at the huddle of roofs whence I had climbed to his hill. Behind him, the wooden buildings of his new compound gashed the dense, illimitable green of the jungle. In a year or two the compound would be assimilated to the landscape; it would be caressed, covered, crept over, by innumerable vegetable parasites. But now it was a raw wound in the beauty of the forest. The town lay a few hundred feet below. Beyond the roofs were docks of a sort, and enough corrugated iron to prove that this paradise existed commercially. Then the boats, the reef, and the ocean which took up the tale of infinity where the jungle left it off. Twining sat there on his volcanic headland, staring; and as I approached, a little pile of cocoanuts toppled over on his left foot as he jerked it nervously. The Chinese boy who had guided me to his retreat disappeared with the merest grunt of announcement. Twining nodded, then picked up a cocoanut and flung it petulantly down the slant of vegetation, in the direction of the town. It grazed the green tree-tops for a second or two, then dipped through the branches of a breadfruit and fell, no doubt, to earth somewhere. "A perfectly good cocoanut wasted," I remarked, as I sat down beside him. "I'd like to waste a few thousands," he groaned. "It would be a darned good thing for these dwellers in Eden if they had to rustle a little more for a living. On my word, I sometimes envy Sherry Spencer over in China-riceChristians and all. Sherry groans over the Oriental mind. Heavens! It's something you can get your teeth into, anyhow, even if it bites back. These folk aren't anything. They're a law unto themselves. No, they're not; they're just a set of privileges unto themselves. Nature cockers them as if they were worth it. . . . Man, you can't teach the Gospel to a bunch of people who don't want anything they haven't got. They don't even regret the good old days of long pig.' "Dying out, aren't they?" "Oh yes, and they'll be Presbyterians when they're dead, I shouldn't wonder." And he kicked the ruins of the cocoanutheap with a white-canvas toe. That was Twining's state of mind when I first envisaged him and his situation. I did not reply; I leaned back and looked, taking my ease; for on this occasion I should have to decide whether or not to accept his invitation. He did not interrupt my contemplation, even by shying another cocoanut. I filled my eyes with the scene, my lungs with the air, my heart with all that uncomprehended exotic implication. The beauty was overpowering. Nothing that you could reasonably ask for was omitted from the landscape. Mountain, gorge, and valley were assembled in a hundred romantic contours; unseen torrents tinkled softly in my ears; the trees and flowers were those of an emperor's dream. A cool, sweet trade-wind ruffled all that gorgeousness into life. And for the last fillip, the thatched roofs below, constant hint that you were on the threshold of something you could never hope to understand. hope to understand. . . . Down in the town were officials, commercial travelers, beach-combers, men "from Sydney' (sinister appellation), natives in corduroy trousers-dramatic, full of plot for comic opera or a shilling shocker. But I would eschew drama; I would live for a time on the unspoiled heights. Had I but known it, I was like a man with weak nerves refusing Stevenson and taking to Sophocles. But I did not know.. "I'll stay, thank you," I said at last, and waved my hand inclusively to suggest that it was to Nature I succumbed. "Ripping, isn't it? I'm so glad you will," was Twining's rejoinder. His tone told me that he was glad, but the tribute to the scenery was merely conventional. So I came up and stayed with Twining and his aunt Miriam at the Mission. I have, as well as I can, given you some inkling of Twining. You will know more about him later. I must not, I suppose, take time to expound Aunt Miriam, though I succumbed at once to her peculiarly American charm. It is enough here to define her externally a woman of sixty-odd, with iron-gray hair, and a vast serenity which veiled her executive type. She was not Roger's aunt; she and her husband had adopted Roger, who was an orphan, and it was her late husband, "Uncle Ephraim" (he, too, in his time, a Kingsborough man), who had destined Roger to the "foreign field." Roger's vocation was not spontaneous, you see; it was a form of gratitude, an earnest of devotion; and that is important. Aunt Miriam was there to see that he did his job; but she was especially and chiefly there to help him through the months of his novitiate, to keep his house until he got a wife ("helpmeet" was often Aunt Miriam's word). Then she would go back to her sisters in Illinois, to whom she wrote long journalletters. Aunt Miriam never went down the Mission hill to the town. She knitted endlessly, and made calico clothes for those native children whom the grim wolf with privy paw had not vet devoured. And she would sit for hours, her writing-pad on her lap, gazing at the summit of the volcanic headland where I had first found Roger and had made my earth-shaking decision. We had people to dinner now and then, and I explored passes and ravines and caves while Roger was busy below us with dark souls that matched the dark skins. unreality of that island and its beauty. It was out of the world as I conceived and knew the world; I hung, suspended in time, over the landscape of a dream. There was no past or future; no relation, no claim, no human plot. I might (as in childhood one dreams of doing) have been floating on cirrhus clouds or treading the Milky Way. That is why this story will never seem to me morbid. From this fourth-dimensional world in which I moved and breathed I was awakened, after many weeks, by the entrance of the heroine. Even then I did not wake all at once, for the manner of her entrance was in keeping with the scene. We were dining that night, Roger and I, with the British consul, and we took a short cut through the jungle, instead of going round by road. The trail was well marked and well used, but even so, the wild guava clipped us close and we tripped over the offspring of the patriarchal bamboos. As we tore down the last slant, she rose-materialized, you might say-before our eyes: a white figure, rounding a huge palm-trunk and standing suddenly before us. She was laughing, under her wreath of orchids, and the juice of a half-eaten mango rippled lusciously over her right hand. She made no pretence of not knowing us, or of introducing herself. She did not even say, "You are Mr. Twining and Mr. Malcolm, and I am Letitia Quayle, whom you are to meet at dinner." She merely greeted and joined us. Nor did she apologize for the mango (which is a fruit without social virtues), though she threw it away. I did not know, just at first, how it affected Twining, for I was busy feeling the pleasant shock of it to the full. She was artless and exquisite as a dryad or as Virginia on the sands of Mauritius. She came forward as if she belonged to us, as if we all belonged together in some naïf legend. She did not break the dream. She was natural as the mango that she flung away to rot beneath the bamboos. Perhaps I can describe better the effect of her apparition if I say that my mind suddenly became a reminiscent welter of Atala, Typee, and the like I stayed with them, as retrospectively it seems to me, an unconscionably long time. I was a loafer, with my hands in my pockets, and I had never seen anything I liked so much as this. I sketched a little; I dipped into Twining's folk-lore books; I bathed in cold mountain pools; I held Aunt Miriam's wool for her to wind. The place en--though she was fair as a lily. chanted me in no metaphorical sense. I can never hope to reproduce for you the It was I who made foolish talk until we turned into the consular garden. "Constantly." And the least shade. of formality, of Europeanism, crept over her face. "I thought so." He turned away and walked up to the consul. My thoughts veered sharply to Aunt Miriam, above. Perhaps the "helpmeet" was nearer than she thought. Roger was pale, his dark eyes had recaptured their lost fervor, and an immortal curiosity sharpened his fine features. Mentally I withdrew on the spot. I devoted myself to that eminent scientist, Professor Quayle, fellow of every society that exists for the purpose of discovering the skeleton in the racial closet. It was worth while. He was eclectic, as the great scientists are; he knew a lot about anthropology, and could see the humor of a dinosaur. His talk was delightful; negligently challenged by our host, he became the Scheherazade of the Stone Age. Also he had been everywhere-scientists are the pampered children of our generation— and his metaphors were as good as his facts. If this be "shop," I thought, let me never hear anything else. Letitia Letitia had accompanied him to many places far from trade centres, and joined in with eager anecdotes. A curious education, I reflected, as I listened to her. She had never been to Paris or Rome, but she was intimate with sharks and fruiteating bats, and the Falls of the Zambesi were to her a more familiar name than Niagara. Fair, very fair, her blond hair growing in a widow's peak; young with the very essence of youth; a child not of cosmopolis, but of the planet. I let my eyes dwell on her in sheer pleasure, this girl of strictly Saxon featuring, whose familiar allusions were to places, people, food, and customs that I had never heard of. The only drawback to my irresponsible delight (for, remember, I had withdrawn while yet there was time—had taken a great backward leap before I reached the threshold) was Roger's silence. Though I had never witnessed the phenomenon before, I knew what it was and what it meant: the stored experience of the race had taught me this thing which I had never seen as you would recognize an earthquake the first time you felt it. Love at first sight was its name; even before we reached the consular garden Roger had handed over the key. So much beauty lies buried for me in that South Sea isle to which I shall never return, and the most beautiful of all things in that isolated dream, I now feel, was the suddenness and completeness of Roger Twining's surrender to the miracle. They step through the pages of the great fairy-tales-the Dantes, the Romeos, the Siegfrieds-and we watch and listen, and are moved to tears, and go away disbelieving. But once in a thousand moons Life makes the incomparable gesture for herself; and I shall always thank God, in spite of everything, that I have seen love burst into complete flower in a single instant. Letitia? Well, she was a woman; she had her part to play; and, that evening, after his hoarse question ("Do you ever wear blue?" How it rings, sinister in my ears, but sweet!) she played it. But he saw her first stepping out of the forest as Virginia. Letitia Quayle was complicated, yes. But what is more complicated than a flower? We prate of the simplicity of nature by way of disparaging the ing the poor little nursery subtleties of civilization. We are great fools. Letitia Quayle was simple as a rose; and let the botanists say how simple that is. Now you see what I mean. She was idyIlically natural-and very complex. She bloomed and glowed with perfect fitness at the heart of that tropic jungle; she surprised us no more than a butterfly. But-simple? I stick to my own theory. In spite of her initial_playing of the part, Letitia came to Roger Twining very naturally. Professor Quayle was due to stay for a month, investigating coral formations. Aunt Miriam lifted Letitia bodily from the hospitalities below and carried her up to the Mission headland. I do not know how else to put it, though of course Mrs. Twining never stirred from the compound. There seemed to be no formal invitations; simply, Aunt Miriam expected her, and she came. Roger and I would take her back, late in the evening, after dinner. Mrs. Twining had seen, as I had seen, |