In fact, it is propinquity that usually gives the facer to the
logic of youth.”
“If you think I came to the Solomons to get married–” she began
wrathfully. “Well, there are better men in Hawaii, that’s all.
Really, you know, the way you harp on that one string would lead an
unprejudiced listener to conclude that you are prurient-minded–”
She stopped, appalled. His face had gone red and white with such
abruptness as to startle her. He was patently very angry. She
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sipped the last of her coffee, and arose, saying, –
“I’ll wait until you are in a better temper before taking up the
discussion again. That is what’s the matter with you. You get
angry too easily. Will you come swimming? The tide is just
right.”
“If she were a man I’d bundle her off the plantation root and crop,
whale-boat, Tahitian sailors, sovereigns, and all,” he muttered to
himself after she had left the room.
But that was the trouble. She was not a man, and where would she
go, and what would happen to her?
He got to his feet, lighted a cigarette, and her Stetson hat,
hanging on the wall over her revolver-belt, caught his eye. That
was the devil of it, too. He did not want her to go. After all,
she had not grown up yet. That was why her logic hurt. It was
only the logic of youth, but it could hurt damnably at times. At
any rate, he would resolve upon one thing: never again would he
lose his temper with her. She was a child; he must remember that.
He sighed heavily. But why in reasonableness had such a child been
incorporated in such a woman’s form?
And as he continued to stare at her hat and think, the hurt he had
received passed away, and he found himself cudgelling his brains
for some way out of the muddle–for some method by which she could
remain on Berande. A chaperone! Why not? He could send to Sydney
on the first steamer for one. He could –
Her trilling laughter smote upon his reverie, and he stepped to the
screen-door, through which he could see her running down the path
to the beach. At her heels ran two of her sailors, Papehara and
Mahameme, in scarlet lava-lavas, with naked sheath-knives gleaming
in their belts. It was another sample of her wilfulness. Despite
entreaties and commands, and warnings of the danger from sharks,
she persisted in swimming at any and all times, and by special
preference, it seemed to him, immediately after eating.
He watched her take the water, diving cleanly, like a boy, from the
end of the little pier; and he watched her strike out with single
overhand stroke, her henchmen swimming a dozen feet on either side.
He did not have much faith in their ability to beat off a hungry
man-eater, though he did believe, implicitly, that their lives
would go bravely before hers in case of an attack.
Straight out they swam, their heads growing smaller and smaller.
There was a slight, restless heave to the sea, and soon the three
heads were disappearing behind it with greater frequency. He
strained his eyes to keep them in sight, and finally fetched the
telescope on to the veranda. A squall was making over from the
direction of Florida; but then, she and her men laughed at squalls
and the white choppy sea at such times. She certainly could swim,
he had long since concluded. That came of her training in Hawaii.
But sharks were sharks, and he had known of more than one good
swimmer drowned in a tide-rip.
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The squall blackened the sky, beat the ocean white where he had
last seen the three heads, and then blotted out sea and sky and
everything with its deluge of rain. It passed on, and Berande
emerged in the bright sunshine as the three swimmers emerged from
the sea. Sheldon slipped inside with the telescope, and through
the screen-door watched her run up the path, shaking down her hair
as she ran, to the fresh-water shower under the house.
On the veranda that afternoon he broached the proposition of a
chaperone as delicately as he could, explaining the necessity at
Berande for such a body, a housekeeper to run the boys and the
storeroom, and perform divers other useful functions. When he had
finished, he waited anxiously for what Joan would say.
“Then you don’t like the way I’ve been managing the house?” was her
first objection. And next, brushing his attempted explanations
aside, “One of two things would happen. Either I should cancel our
partnership agreement and go away, leaving you to get another
chaperone to chaperone your chaperone; or else I’d take the old hen
out in the whale-boat and drown her. Do you imagine for one moment
that I sailed my schooner down here to this raw edge of the earth
in order to put myself under a chaperone?”
“But really . . . er . . . you know a chaperone is a necessary
evil,” he objected.
“We’ve got along very nicely so far without one. Did I have one on
the Miele? And yet I was the only woman on board. There are only
three things I am afraid of–bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and
chaperones. Ugh! the clucking, evil-minded monsters, finding wrong
in everything, seeing sin in the most innocent actions, and
suggesting sin–yes, causing sin–by their diseased imaginings.”
“Phew!” Sheldon leaned back from the table in mock fear.
“You needn’t worry about your bread and butter,” he ventured. “If
you fail at planting, you would be sure to succeed as a writer–
novels with a purpose, you know.”
“I didn’t think there were persons in the Solomons who needed such
books,” she retaliated. “But you are certainly one–you and your
custodians of virtue.”
He winced, but Joan rattled on with the platitudinous originality
of youth.
“As if anything good were worth while when it has to be guarded and
put in leg-irons and handcuffs in order to keep it good. Your
desire for a chaperone as much as implies that I am that sort of
creature. I prefer to be good because it is good to be good,
rather than because I can’t be bad because some argus-eyed old
frump won’t let me have a chance to be bad.”
“But it–it is not that,” he put in. “It is what others will
think.”
“Let them think, the nasty-minded wretches! It is because men like
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you are afraid of the nasty-minded that you allow their opinions to
rule you.”
“I am afraid you are a female Shelley,” he replied; “and as such,
you really drive me to become your partner in order to protect
you.”
“If you take me as a partner in order to protect me . . . I . . . I
shan’t be your partner, that’s all. You’ll drive me into buying
Pari-Sulay yet.”
“All the more reason–” he attempted.
“Do you know what I’ll do?” she demanded. “I’ll find some man in
the Solomons who won’t want to protect me.”
Sheldon could not conceal the shock her words gave him.
“You don’t mean that, you know,” he pleaded.
“I do; I really do. I am sick and tired of this protection dodge.
Don’t forget for a moment that I am perfectly able to take care of
myself. Besides, I have eight of the best protectors in the world-
-my sailors.”
“You should have lived a thousand years ago,” he laughed, “or a
thousand years hence. You are very primitive, and equally super-
modern. The twentieth century is no place for you.”
“But the Solomon Islands are. You were living like a savage when I
came along and found you–eating nothing but tinned meat and scones
that would have ruined the digestion of a camel. Anyway, I’ve
remedied that; and since we are to be partners, it will stay
remedied. You won’t die of malnutrition, be sure of that.”
“If we enter into partnership,” he announced, “it must be
thoroughly understood that you are not allowed to run the schooner.
You can go down to Sydney and buy her, but a skipper we must have–
”
“At so much additional expense, and most likely a whisky-drinking,
irresponsible, and incapable man to boot. Besides, I’d have the
business more at heart than any man we could hire. As for
capability, I tell you I can sail all around the average broken
captain or promoted able seaman you find in the South Seas. And
you know I am a navigator.”
“But being my partner,” he said coolly, “makes you none the less a
lady.”
“Thank you for telling me that my contemplated conduct is
unladylike.”
She arose, tears of anger and mortification in her eyes, and went
over to the phonograph.
“I wonder if all men are as ridiculous as you?” she said.
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He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Discussion was useless–he