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Still undecided, he walked on to take his place among the crowd gathered upon the beach.

It was a homely scene; the long row of men hauling at the nets, shouting and encouraging each other, and the women seated upon the sand, clapping their hands with pleasure as the fish were poured, a leaping, throbbing mass, into the large, flat-bottomed boats. Girling had not been standing there long before a hand had been laid upon his arm and a
laughing voice was asking him: “Well, you not sleepy now?”

She had seemed attractive enough to him on the truck, but now hatless, with her dark hair flung wide about her shoulders, there was added a compelling softness to her power. And as he looked into her eyes, bright and shining through the dusk, her lips parted in a smile over the shining whiteness of her teeth, he felt that already the problem and his perplexity had been taken from him: that life had found his answer.

They sat side by side together on the bottom of an upturned boat: very close so that her shoulder touched him: so that it seemed natural for him to pass his arm about her waist, for his fingers to stroke gently the firm, soft flesh of her upper arm. Afterwards, when the nets had been hauled in and the division of the fish arranged, they strolled arm in arm along the beach. From the centre of the village there came a sound of singing. In front of a Chinese store Gustave's truck had been arranged as a form of orchestral stand, the drivers had brought out their banjos, and on the wooden verandah of the store a number of young natives were dancing. They would sing and shout and clap their hands, then a couple would slither out into the centre and standing opposite each other would begin to dance. They would never dance more than a few steps, however. In less than a minute they had burst into a paroxysm of laughter, would cover their faces with their hands and run round to the back of the circling crowd.

“Come,” said the girl, and taking Girling by the hand, she led him up into the truck. It was a low seat and they were in the shadow; then the moment they were seated, without affectation, she turned her face to his, expressing in a kiss, as such sentiments were meant to be expressed, the peace and happiness of a Tahitian evening. And the moon rose high above the palm trees, lighting grotesquely the jagged peaks of the hills across the bay. The breeze from the lagoon blew quietly. Through the sound of the singing voices he could hear the undertone of the Pacific on the reef. Slowly, wooingly, the sights and scents and sounds that have
for centuries in this fringe of Eden stripped the doubter of all thoughts of consequences, lulled Girling's doubts to rest. For a long while they sat there in the shadow of the car, her chin resting against his shoulder, his fingers caressing gently the soft surface of her cheek and arm.

“Tired?” she asked, at length.

He nodded. “A little.”

“Then we go. You come with me?”

The question was put without any artifice or coquetry, as though it were only natural that thus should such an evening end.

His heart was thudding fiercely as they walked, quickly now, and in silence, down the path between low hedges towards her home. When they reached the verandah she lifted her finger to her lips. “Sh!” she said. “Wait.”

There was a rustle, and a sound of whispers; the turning of a handle, the noise of something soft being pulled along the floor, then a whispered “Come,” and a hand held out to him.

It was very dark. From the verandah beyond came the sound of movement. As he stepped into the room his toe caught on something, so that but for her hand he would have fallen. He stumbled forward on to the broad, deep mattress. For a moment he felt an acute revulsion of feeling. But two arms, cool and bare, had been flung about his neck, dark masses of hair scented faintly with coconut were beneath his cheek; against his mouth, soft and tender were her lips. His arm tightened about the firm, full shoulders, the tenderness of his kisses deepened, grew deep and fierce.

§

That people is happy which has no history. There are no details to a Tahitian idyll.

There was a bungalow, half-way towards Ventura. It was small enough, two rooms and a verandah, with little furniture; a table, a few chairs, a long, low mattress-bed, but there was a stream running just below it from the mountains; cool and sweet. Here at any hour of the day
you could bathe at will. And there was green grass running down towards the sand; from the verandah you looked outwards towards Moorea, over the roof were twined and intertwined the purple of the bougain-villea, and the red and white and orange of the hibiscus, across the door was the gold and scarlet of the flamboyant, and when you have these things, you do not need furniture or pictures or large houses.

During the three months that he lived there Ray Girling went but rarely into Papeete, and during them he came as near as perhaps any sojourner can to understanding the spirit of Tahiti. It was a lazy life he led. When he was not bathing, he would lie out reading on the verandah; he ate little but what came from within a mile of his own house. Bread and butter came certainly from the town, but that was all. Once or twice a week he and Pepire would go up the valleys to collect enough lemons and bread-fruit and bananas to last for days. And her brother and cousin would always be coming from Papeete or Tautira, so that it was rare for Girling to wake in the morning without finding some visitors stretched out asleep on the verandah. They were profitable guests, however, for in the evening they would sail towards the reef and spear fish by torchlight or else they would go shrimping up the valleys, and afterwards, while Pepire would prepare the food, they would sit round with their banjos, singing.

And he was happy; happier than he had ever been. Had he not known that he was leaving in three months he would have probably looked forward with apprehension to the time when Pepire would have begun to weary him. As it was, he could accept without fear of consequences the day's good things. As Europe understands love he did not love her. He cared for her in the same way that he might have cared for some animal. And indeed, as she strode bare-footed about the house and garden she reminded him in many ways of a cumbersome Newfoundland puppy. Her behaviour when she had transgressed authority was extraordinarily like that of a dog that has filched the cutlets. On one occasion she went into Papeete with a hundred-franc note to buy some
twenty-five francs' worth of stores. When Girling came in from his bathe, he found her standing with her hands behind her back, gazing shamefacedly at the pile of groceries on the table beside which she had laid a ten-franc note.

“Well, what's that?” he asked.

“The change,” she told him.

“But how much did all that cost?”

“Twenty-seven francs.”

“And ten makes thirty-seven, and fifteen for the truck, that's fifty-two. What's happened to the other forty-eight?”

She made no reply, but sheepishly and reluctantly she drew her hands from behind her back and produced the four metres of coloured prints with which she proposed to make a frock.

She was always surprising him in delightful ways. There was the occasion when he returned from Papeete with a rather pleasant Indian shawl. She surveyed it with rapture, but before she had thanked him she asked the price. And whenever any visitor came the first thing she would do would be to run and fetch the shawl and display it proudly with the words: “Look. He gave me. Five hundred francs!”

“I wonder,” thought Girling, “whether the only difference between an English and a native girl is that what an English girl thinks a Tahitian says, and what an English girl says a Tahitian does?”

It was only on occasions that he would wonder that. In the deeper things he realised how profound was the difference between Brown and White. Had they been English lovers, loving under the shadow of separation, their love-making would have been greedy, fierce and passionate. But passion is a thing that the Islanders do not know, The Tahitians are not passionate. They are sensual and they are tender, but they are not passionate. Passion, though it may not be tragic, is at least potential tragedy, and tragedy is the twin child of sophistication. For Pepire, kisses were something simple and joyous and sincere. And yet during the long nights when she lay beside him Girling would wonder whether he would ever know in life anything sweeter than this love,
so uncomplicated and direct. Intenser moments certainly awaited him, but sweeter …? He did not know.

Once only during those weeks did he see Colette. A brief, pathetic little meeting. He had gone into the library at Papeete to change a book, and as he stood before the shelves, turning the pages of a novel, she came into the shop. It would have been impossible for them not to see each other.

“What ages since we met!” she said, and she, as well as he, was blushing.

“I don't come in often now,” he said. “I'm living in the country.”

“I know.”

In those two syllables were conveyed all that his living in the districts meant.

“You're still going by the
Louqsor?”

And in that question was implied that other question. How seriously was he taking his new establishment?

“Oh, yes, in another three weeks now.”

“Then I'll see you then if not before.”

With a bright smile she turned away, that, and no more than that.

And so the days went by.

Wistfully for him now and then.

For the closer that Ray Girling grew to the Tahitian life, the wider, he realised, was the chasm between him and it. He would never find the key to Tahiti's magic. And soon there would be no mystery left to find. A few years and Tahiti would be a second Honolulu. She was self-condemned. Somehow she had not had the strength to withstand the invader. And, looking back, it seemed to him symbolic that it should have been by the spirit of Tahiti that his determination to settle in Tahiti had been foiled. For it was the spirit of Tahiti expressed momentarily in Pepire that had entrapped him into the weakness that had made a permanent settlement there impossible. The fatal gift of beauty. It was by her own loveliness, her own sweetness, her own gentleness, that Tahiti had been betrayed. And yet it was
back to the sweetness that it had destroyed, that ultimately the course of progress must return.

§

The monthly arrival of the American courier is the big event in the island life.

But, for all that, it is only on the departure of those rarer visitants, the
Louqsor
and the
Antinous,
that you get the spirit of an island leave-taking. For Tahiti is a French possession, and it is from the taffrail of the Messageries Maritimes boats that the French, who are the real Tahitians, who by long sojourning have identified themselves with the island life, wave their farewells to the nestling waterside,

For beauty and pathos there is little comparable with those last minutes of leave-taking. When the great liners sail from Sydney the passengers fling paper streamers to the waving crowds upon the wharf; but in Papeete there is no such attempt to prolong to the last instant the sundering tie. For those that were your friends upon the island have hung upon your neck the white wreath of the
tiare
and the stiff yellow petal of the pandanus, so that your nostrils may for all time retain the sweet perfume of Tahiti; and over your shoulders they have hung long strings of shells, so that you will retain for ever the soft murmur of the breakers on the reef, and it is not till you have forgotten those that you will forget Tahiti.

No ship has looked more like a garden than did the
Louqsor
in the January of 1927. There were many old friends to wave farewell from its crowded decks, some who were saying good-bye for ever, if anyone can ever be said to say good-bye for ever, since for all time the memory of that green island will linger green. There were others who were going to France on leave for a few months. The Governor of the Island was returning to Paris for promotion. There were a number of officials; three or four naval officers; and on the lower decks a large group of sailors from the
Casiope
returning to Marseilles. It was a gay sight. A squad of soldiers had lined up to salute the Governor, a band was playing, the
sailors were singing farewell to their five days' sweethearts.

Ave, Ave, te vahini upipi
E patia tona, e pareo repo.

A few yards from Ray Girling, Colette, frail and dainty, was smiling wistfully at him from beneath the shadow of her parasol. As he saw her he turned away from the crowd with whom he was gossiping—Pepire, Tania, and the rest—and came across to her.

She received him with a smile.

“Do you remember saying four months ago that you'd be heartbroken when the time came for you to leave?”

“I remember.”

“And are you?”

He hesitated, for as he looked down into the flower-like face he knew the measure of his loss, knew what he had missed, what there had been for finding; knew also how impossible it would have been to find it, since certain things precluded other things, since that which he had been looking for bore no relation to the practical ordering of life. When he answered, though it was in terms of Tahiti that he spoke, it was of himself and her that he was speaking.

“As long as I live I shall remember,” he said, and his voice was faltering. “And there'll be a great many times, I know, when I shall regret bitterly that I ever came away. But I shall know, too, that it would have been madness for me to have stayed. I came at the wrong time. If I'd come as a boy of twenty, before I'd begun European life, I could have stayed. Or I might have stayed if I'd come as a middle-aged man, a man of fifty, who'd lived through all that. But I came at the half-way stage. I've taken root over there. I've identified myself with too many things. I've got to work to the end of them.”

She nodded her head slowly. “I understand,” she said. “I think I always did understand.” Then, after a pause and with eyes that narrowed, and in a voice that trembled: