O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 Part 26

"Man, but that's fine!" cried the captain. "I've been looking for you--you, you know--_just you_--for the last two years! And when Pierson told me about you ... why, it's luck, I say!"

It was luck for Harber, too. Farringdon, you see, knew precisely where he wanted to go, and he had his schooner, and he knew that part of the world, as we say, like a man knows his own b.u.t.tons.

Harber, then, was to manage the plantation; they were going to set out rubber, both Para and native, and try hemp and maybe coffee while they waited for the Haevia and the Ficus to yield. And Farringdon was ready to put the earnings from his schooner against Harber's wage as manager. The arrangement, you see, was ideal.

Skip seven years with me, please. Consider the plantation affair launched, carried, and consummated. Farringdon and Harber have sold the rubber-trees as they neared bearing, and have sold them well.

They're out of that now. In all likelihood, Harber thinks, permanently. For that seven years has seen other projects blossom.

Harber, says Farringdon, has "the golden touch." There has been trading in the islands, and a short and fortunate little campaign on the stock-market through Sydney brokers, and there has been, more profitable than anything else, the salvaging of the Brent Interisland Company's steamer _Pailula_ by Farringdon's schooner, in which Harber had purchased a half-interest; so the partners are, on the whole, rather well fixed. Harber might be rated at, perhaps, some forty thousand pounds, not counting his interest in the schooner.

One of Janet Spencer's argosies, then, its cargo laden, is ready to set sail for the hills of home. In short, Harber is now in one of the island ports of call, waiting for the steamer from Fiji. In six weeks he will be in Tawnleytown if all goes well.

It isn't, and yet it is, the same Harber. He's thirty now, lean and bronzed and very fit. He can turn a hundred tricks now where then he could turn one. The tropics have agreed with him. There seems to have been some subtle affinity between them, and he almost wishes that he weren't leaving them. He certainly wouldn't be, if it were not for Janet.

Yes, that slender thread has held him. Through ten years it has kept him faithful. He has eyed askance, ignored, even rebuffed, women.

The letters, that still come, have turned the trick, perhaps, or some clinging to a faith that is inherent in him. Or sheer obstinacy?

Forgive the cynicism. A little of each, no doubt. And then he hadn't often seen the right sort of women. I say that deliberately, because:

The night before the steamer was due there was a ball--yes, poor island exiles, they called it that!--and Harber, one of some thirty "Europeans" there, went to it, and on the very eve of safety ...

The glare and the oily smell of the lanterns, the odour of jasmine, frangipanni, vanilla, and human beings sickeningly mingled in the heat, the jangling, out-of-tune music, the wearisome island gossip and chatter, drove him at length out into the night, down a black-shadowed pathway to the sea. The beach lay before him presently, gleaming like silver in the soft blue radiance of the jewelled night.

As he stood there, lost in far memories, the mellow, lemon-coloured lights from the commissioner's residence shone beautifully from the fronded palms and the faint wave of the waltzes of yesteryear became poignant and lovely, and the light trade-wind, clean here from the reek of lamps and clothing and human beings, vaguely tanged with the sea, blew upon him with a light, insistent pressure. Half dreaming, he heard the sharp sputter of a launch--bearing belated comers to the ball, no doubt--but he paid no attention to it. He may have been on the beach an hour before he turned to ascend to the town.

And just at the top of the slope he came upon a girl.

She hadn't perceived him, and she stood there, slim and graceful, the moonlight bright upon her rapt face, with her arms outstretched and her head flung back, in an att.i.tude of utter abandonment. Harber felt his heart stir swiftly. He knew what she was feeling, as she looked out over the s.h.i.+mmering half-moon of harbour, across the moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it.

There would be no voicing that feeling; it must ever remain inarticulate. Nor was the girl trying to voice it. Her exquisite pantomime alone spelled her delight in it and her surrender to it.

He saw at a glance that he didn't know her. She was "new" to the islands. Her clothes were evidence enough for that. There was a certain verve to them that spoke of a more sophisticated land. She might have been twenty-five though she seemed younger. She was in filmy white from slipper to throat, and over her slender shoulders there drifted a gossamer banner of scarf, fluttering in the soft trade-wind. Harber was very close to see this, and still she hadn't observed him.

"Don't let me startle you, please!" he said, as he stepped from the shadow of the trumpet-flower bush that had hitherto concealed him.

Her arms came down slowly, her chin lowered; her pose, if you will, melted away. Her voice when she spoke was low and round and thrilled, and it sent an answering thrill through Harber.

"I'm mad!" she said. "Moon-mad--or tropic-mad. I didn't hear you. I was wors.h.i.+pping the night!"

"As I have been," said Harber, feeling a sudden pagan kins.h.i.+p with her mood.

She smiled, and her smile seemed the most precious thing in the world.

"You, too? But it isn't new to you ... and when the newness is gone every one--here at least--seems dead to it!"

"Sometimes I think it's always new," replied Harber. "And yet I've had years of it ... but how did you know?"

"You're Mr. Harber, aren't you?"

"Yes. But---"

"Only that I knew you were here, having heard of you from the Tretheways, and I'd accounted for every one else. I couldn't stay inside because it seemed to me that it was wicked when I had come so far for just this, to be inside stuffily dancing. One can dance all the rest of one's life in Michigan, you know! So----"

"It's the better place to be--out here," said Harber abruptly.

"Need we go in?"

"I don't know," she said doubtfully. "Maybe you can tell me. You see, I've promised some dances. What's the usage here? Dare I run away from them?"

"Oh, it might prove a three-day scandal if you did," said Harber.

"But I know a bench off to the right, where it isn't likely you'll be found by any questing partner, and you needn't confess to having had a companion. Will you come and talk to me?"

"I'm a bird of pa.s.sage," she answered, smiling, "and I've only to unfold my wings and fly away from the smoke of scandal. Yes, I'll come--if you won't talk--too much. You see, after all, I won't flatter you. It's the night I want, not talk ... the wonderful night!"

But, of course, they did talk. She was an American girl, she told him, and had studied art a little, but would never be much of a painter.

She had been teaching cla.s.ses in a city high school in the Middle West, when suddenly life there seemed to have gone humdrum and stale.

She had a little money saved, not much, but enough if she managed well, and she'd boldly resigned and determined, once at least before she was too old, to follow spring around the world. She had almost given up the idea of painting now, but thought presently she might go in for writing, where, after all, perhaps, her real talent lay.

She had gotten a letter of introduction in Suva to the Tretheways and she would be here until the next steamer after the morrow's.

These were the bare facts. Harber gave a good many more than he got, he told me, upon the theory that nothing so provoked confidence as giving it. He was a little mad himself that night, he admits, or else very, very sane. As you will about that. But, from the moment she began to talk, the thought started running through his head that there was fate in this meeting.

There was a sort of pa.s.sionate fineness about her that caught and answered some instinct in Harber ... and I'm afraid they talked more warmly than the length of their acquaintance justified, that they made one another half-promises, not definite, perhaps, but implied; promises that....

"I _must_ go in," she said at last, reluctantly.

He knew that she must, and he made no attempt to gainsay her.

"You are going to America," she went on. "If you should----"

And just at that moment, Harber says, anything seemed possible to him, and he said eagerly: "Yes--if you will--I should like----"

How well they understood one another is evident from that. Neither had said it definitely, but each knew.

"Have you a piece of paper?" she asked.

Harber produced a pencil, and groped for something to write upon.

All that his pockets yielded was a sealed envelope. He gave it to her.

She looked at it closely, and saw in the brilliant moons.h.i.+ne that it was sealed and stamped and addressed.

"I'll spoil it for mailing," she said.

"It doesn't matter," Harber told her ineptly. "Or you can write it lightly, and I'll erase it later."

There was a little silence. Then suddenly she laughed softly, and there was a tiny catch in the voice. "So that you can forget?" she said bravely. "No! I'll write it fast and hard ... so that you can ...

never ... forget!"

And she gave him first his pencil and envelope, and afterward her hand, which Harber held for a moment that seemed like an eternity and then let go. She went into the house, but Harber didn't follow her. He went off to his so-called hotel.

In his room, by the light of the kerosene-lamp, he took out the envelope and reed what she had written. It was:

Vanessa Simola, Claridon, Michigan.

He turned over the envelope and looked at the address on the other side, in his own handwriting: