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  Moreover, the life itself there is extremely pleasant. Though you are cut off from civilisation, you have no lack of varied and entertaining society. There are always a number of amusing people staying and passing through, and in a world where there is no strain, no hurry, you have the leisure and amplitude for talk, for the free development of personal contacts. The days pass pleasantly.

  “But what do you find to do there?” people ask. And that is a question that it is very hard to answer. One never seems to be doing anything in particular, and yet one is never bored. The air is warm and soft, and you relax to it as you relax to a hot bath. Though that is scarcely an exact simile. For you do not feel languid, but in abundantly good health. It is just that you can be happy taking a long time over everything; over dressing, over feeding pigeons, over wandering along the shore, collecting shells, sitting on a rock watching the many-coloured fish swim in and out among the coral, watching the land-crabs scurry away into their holes as you go by, sitting on a verandah listening to a Tahitian strum upon a ukulele. While all about you is the unbelievable beauty of the island; its flowered greenery and the marvel of its nights, its moonless as its moonlit nights; for when there is no moon the natives go out in their canoes to fish by torchlight, and from the verandah of your bungalow you watch the lights moving and swaying on the reef.

  The days pass, you work a little and you play a little. Life is effortless and sweet. And you wonder how you will ever find the heart to leave, and you ask yourself why you ever should. Here the best of both worlds seem to be combined. Surely here one should be able to forget all that is petty and contentious in Western life, relaxing to this tranquil atmosphere, taking root here by these gentle waters.

  §

  And yet one cannot. One by one we have found, those of us who have made the experiment, that there is something in the atmosphere of Tahiti that prevents the modern sophisticated westerner from that relaxing. He cannot forget Europe. He cannot take root. And before he has been there many weeks he is beset by the last thing that he had expected to be beset by there, a curious restlessness and irritability. His nerves are on edge. He cannot settle down to anything. He loses all sense of proportion. He embarks on the most absurd quarrels with his acquaintances. He loses the very thing he came in search of tranquillity.

  Looking back in a calm remembrance of all that happened there, I have wondered sometimes whether it is not to the monthly arrival of the mail boat as much as anything that this restlessness is due. It introduces the idea of time, whereas timelessness is the essential condition of island life. A few days before my first visit there I dropped and broke my watch. It did not matter much on board a ship, and in Papeete I would get myself another one I thought. But when I reached Tahiti I found that I had no need of a watch. Hours did not matter. When the sun rose you got up. When the sun was high you siestaed. When the sun sank you began to think of supper.

  During my six weeks there I had no watch and never missed it. And it seemed to me a fitting symbol of a return to Western life that practically my first act on my return to San Francisco should be to buy one. I was back in a world where time mattered. And it is one of those curious coincidences that make one credulous of unseen presences that on my journey back, five months later, the dollar watch that I had bought in San Francisco, that had shepherded me without failing through America, through three months of London and across the Atlantic, through the West Indies and Panama into the Pacific, should, within a day’s sail of Fakarava, have unaccountably and permanently stopped, as though it had realised that its work was finished and that I should have no further need of it in a country where time did not exist.

  Or rather where time should not exist. For time does exist there now. The year is divided into the thirteen arrivals of the mail boats, and it is hard to imagine a more irritating spacing out of time. If the mail boat came every day it would be a matter of such ordinary occurrence that no one would notice it. If it came once a year you could forget about it in the interval. But once every four weeks; no, that is too much. By the time you have ceased talking about one mail you are talking about the next. The island life is built round mail day. It is the great gala day, for which the girls prepare their brightest frocks and the hotel proprietors their dearest wine. Instinctively, you find yourself counting the days to it, counting days in a country where you should lose count of days; counting the days to that which represents everything that you are trying to forget: letters, newspapers, the rivalries, jealousies and animosities to which you are still half attached; with people who are a part still of that life exchanging ideas with you, recalling to you ambitions you had thought were dead. The three days when a boat is moored against the wharf constitute a complete uprooting of the detachment you had been cultivating. They prevent you from taking root, and it is impossible to be at peace in a place where you cannot take root.

  For a month, for two months, for three months possibly you will imagine yourself to be in Eden, but sooner or later that restlessness, that irritability, will come. Your nerves will be on edge, and suddenly you will find yourself thinking that if you have to stay there another week you will go off your head. It is an experience that is almost universal. Nearly everyone I know has sworn, a week before they left, that there was no spot in the world they hated more. And yet when the last siren goes, one and all we feel that our hearts are breaking. The first time I saw a ship sail from Papeete, a French naval officer, who was returning home by it, burst into tears. It was ridiculous, he said, “mais on s’ attache”

  That is how most of us feel when we watch the mountains of Moorea grow indistinct.

  §

  It may be, though, that that explanation is too fanciful: that I came nearer to the truth in the story that I planned and never wrote, of a young man who had decided to spend nine months in travel before taking up the partnership that his father’s death had left open for him in the motor business, on whose proceeds he had been expensively educated at Marlborough and Magdalen. He would be the average romantically unexceptional young man, and like so many others when he saw the peaks of the Diadem he would order his steward to pack his trunks. “New Zealand and Samoa can wait,” he had thought. “I’ve four months to spend. I’ll spend them here.”

  I had pictured him that evening leaning over the balcony of the Hotel Minerva watching the sun set behind Moorea. Beside him there would be Demster, an English tourist, of a month’s standing, whom all that afternoon the young man would have been cross-examining with an eager curiosity. Which is how usually it happens. For one arrives a stranger without introductions, and it is from a fellow tourist that one receives one’s first and invariably inaccurate information on the island’s customs.

  “I wonder what you’ll make of it,” the older man was saying. “I suppose it’ll end in your taking a house in the country somewhere and that’ll mean an island marriage. It’s the only way, I’m told, of getting a girl to cook for you. No one bothers about money here. And a girl would consider herself insulted if a bachelor asked her to work for him without living with him. They’re simple folk. Frocks and motor rides and love. That’s their whole life. I don’t suppose that if you took a house you’d be allowed to remain long in it alone.”

  But the young man, Ray Girling, would be scarcely listening. Curiosity would be at rest. The velvet of the night would be soft with the scent of jasmine, and down the lamplit avenue under the tent of the flamboyants, arm in arm the flower-haired girls are walking. The air is fragrant with a sense of love, sensual and tender love, such as the acuter and bitter passions of the north are alien to.

  “I expect,” he said, “I shall leave life to decide that for me.

  It would be the typical opening to the conventional South Sea story, and indeed it is difficult to write otherwise than conventionally of Polynesia. It is as hard not to echo Loti as it is for the writer of detective stories to avoid parallels with Sherlock Holmes. But Rarahu is fifty years away; the death of Lovaina during the influenza epi
demic marked the close of a régime as definitely as did for England the death of Queen Victoria. The issue is not the same now as it was for Maugham and Loti. And it was not merely the need for variety that made me plan the story about a white girl rather than a brown.

  For that evening as the two men were walking along the water-front a voice hailed them, and two young women who had been riding towards them jumped off their bicycles.

  “What, still here and still alone, and on a Tahitian evening?”

  It was the elder who spoke, an American, gay-eyed and mischievous, married for ten years to a French official; much wooed by the younger Frenchmen and by none of them, rumour had it, with success, she was held to be the most attractive woman in Papeete. But it was the younger that Ray Girling noticed. Never had he seen anyone to whom the trite simile of flower-like could be more appropriate. She was small and slight, with pale yellowish hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Her body in its pale green sheath of muslin seemed in truth to sway like a stem beneath the weight of the blossom that was her face.

  Introductions followed.

  “I don’t think,” said Demster, “that either of you know Mr. Girling. He arrived this morning on the Makura, and he fell in love with Tahiti so much that he’s decided to stay on.”

  The American raised her eyebrows meaningly.

  “In love, why, sure, but with an island!”

  They laughed together.

  “I can’t think,” said Girling, “how I shall find the heart to leave.”

  “That’s what you all say at the beginning,” said the girl whom he had noticed first.

  “And do they all go away?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Some stay, of course; most go. To most people Papeete is a port of call. There’re the tourists who stop for a month or two, and the officials who’ve come for three or four years, sometimes for half a lifetime. And the naval officers who are stationed on and off for a couple of years. Then there’re a few Americans who spend their summers here. But in the end they go, nearly all of them. If you live here, you have rather a sad feeling of being—oh, how shall I put it? …. like a station through which trains are passing. People come into your life and go out of it. It’s like living in an hotel rather than in a home.”

  “But you’re happy here?”

  She pouted.

  “It grows monotonous, you know.”

  “To me it seems like the Garden of Eden.”

  Again the cornflower-blue eyes smiled softly.

  “I wonder if you’ll be saying that in four months’ time. You know what they say about Tahiti? That a year’s too little a time to stay here and a month too long. They may be right. But when I was a child I always used to wonder whether Adam and Eve were really sorry to be cast out of Eden. I always wondered what they found to do there; didn’t you, sometimes?”

  She spoke half whimsically, half wistfully, in a voice that was lightly cadenced and with that particular purity of accent that is to be found only in those to whom English has come as a “taught language,” a purity that seemed in its peculiar way symbolic of her charm.

  “Perhaps,” Ray Girling answered her. “But I’m very sure that I shall be heartbroken when the time comes for me to go.”

  At that point the American interrupted him.

  “Heartbroken,” she cried, “it won’t be so much Mr. Girling who’ll be heartbroken.”

  Again there was a general laugh.

  “At any rate,” she concluded, “I hope you won’t get too domesticated to come and see us sometimes.”

  The invitation was made friendlily and genuinely enough, but it was of her companion that he was thinking as he accepted it, and it was about Colette that he sought information of Demster the moment they were alone.

  “Who is that girl?” he asked. “You haven’t met her before, I gather?”

  Demster shook his head.

  “I know all about her, though. It’s rather a sad story. Her father was a Canadian who came over here to direct a store; her mother was a young French girl who fell in love with him and married him. Four years later, when the time came for the man to return to Montreal, he calmly informed her that he had a wife in America; that if she wished to have him arrested as a bigamist she could; but that if she did, his income and means of supporting her would cease; that the best thing would be for her to say nothing and to accept the allowance he would continue to send her, provided she made no attempt to leave the island. For Colette’s sake she decided to accept. But everyone knows, of course, as everyone knows everything in Papeete. It’s a sad story.”

  Girling nodded. He could understand now the wistful expression of those pale cornflower-blue eyes; he could understand why she had spoken wistfully of the station through which trains hurried, and he could imagine with what weight even in this free-est of free countries the knowledge of her parentage must press on her. “She must always feel,” he thought, “apart from others. Never able to mix wholeheartedly among them.” Yet in spite of it all her nature had not soured. “I hope,” he thought, “that that isn’t the last I’m going to see of her.”

  That was how the story was to have begun. The next scene was to have been at the cinema, three weeks later.

  §

  Four times a week there is a cinema performance in Papeete, and on those evenings the streets and cafés of the town are empty. And as Ray Girling stood on the steps of the long tin building during the ten minutes’ interval, it was to seem to him that there were clustered in the street below, round the naphtha-lighted stalls where the little Chinese proprietors were making busy trade with ices and coconuts and water melons, every single person with whom he had been brought in contact during his stay in the hotel.

  There was Tania, one of the last direct descendants of the old royal family of the Pomaris, her black hair dressed high upon her head, a rose silk Spanish shawl about her shoulders, chattering to the half-dozen or so girls with whom he would idle most afternoons away over ice creams in the Mariposa Café. There was the Australian trader with whom he would discuss the relative merits of Woodfull and Macartney. A couple of French officials he had met at the Cercle Coloniale and others whom he knew by sight, the girls from the post office, the assistants from the three big stores, the skipper of the Saint Antoine; all that numerous crowd that he had watched from the balcony of his hotel, strolling lazily along the harbour-side. He had learnt to recognise most of the people in the town by sight during that three weeks’ stay.

  And he had done most of the things that one does do at Tahiti during one’s first three weeks there. He had driven out round the island, through Mataiea, past the short wooden pier on which during the last spring of the world’s peace a doomed poet wrote lines for Mamua. He had spanned the narrow isthmus of Taravao; he had lunched at Keane’s off a sweet shrimp curry; he had bathed on the dark sands at Arue, and in the cool waters of the Papeno River. He had chartered a glass-bottomed boat and, sailing out towards the reef, had watched the fish swimming in and out of the many-coloured coral. And day after day the sun had shone out of a blue sky ceaselessly and night after night moonshine and starlight had brooded over the scented darkness, and Ray Girling was beginning to feel just ever such a little bored.

  “It may be,” he thought, “that that girl was right about a year being too little a time and a month too long.”

  And gazing a little despondently at the thronged roadway, he wondered how he should employ the fourteen or so weeks that must pass before the sailing of the Louqsor, the French cargo boat, by which he had planned to return to Europe.

  “Well,” a voice was asking at his elbow, “and is it still the Eden that you expected?”

  The question was so appropriate to his mood that he could not resist laughing as he turned to meet the smiling flower-like features of Colette Garonne.

  “At that precise moment,” he said, “I was just wondering whether you weren’t right about Adam and Eve finding it a little dull in Eden.”

&nb
sp; “You too, then, and so soon.”

  “I was just feeling …” But she was so divinely pretty, even under the harsh glare of the electric lights, that he could not retain his temper of despondency. “I was just feeling,” he said instead, “what an enormous pity it was that we couldn’t go on to supper and a cabaret after this, as we would if we were in New York or London.”

  “So you’ve come ail this way to regret New York.”

  “To regret that there’s nothing to do after eleven; for there isn’t, is there?”

  “Not in the way of cabarets.”

  “In any way, then?”

  She pouted.

  “The Bright Spirits drive off now and again in cars”.

  “In cars, where?”

  “Oh, anywhere. To bathe, or out to Keane’s, or just to sing. That’s the island idea of cabaret.”

  “Well, then …” He hesitated. Often as he had sal before going to bed on the hotel verandah he had envied the crowded cars that had driven singing through the night below him. It had seemed so care-free and light-hearted with a light-heartedness with which he was not in tune. But he had felt always shy of suggesting such an expedition to any of his friends. On this occasion, however, the impelling influence of pale blue eyes emboldened him. “Wouldn’t it be rather fun,” he said, “to have an impromptu cabaret this evening?”

  It was her turn to hesitate. “Well,” she said, pausing doubtfully.

  He could tell what was passing in her mind. Though he had seen her often enough, smiling greetings at her, they had not talked together since the night when Demster had introduced them. And she was uncertain, he could guess that, as to the types of companion that he would be selecting for her. He made no effort, however, to persuade her. He had the intuition to realise that at such moments it is the wiser plan not to urge the reluctant to say “Yes,” but to make it difficult for them to say “No.” Less than a yard away Tania was chattering noisily in the centre of a crowd of friends, and stretching out his hand, Ray Girling touched her on the arm.