himself to the surface; and Tudor performed the feat, a flip from
the sandpaper hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches
of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted, while Sheldon,
looking on, realized that here was the hero of her adventure-dreams
coming true. She did not care for love, but he felt that if ever
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she did love it would be that sort of a man–“a man who exhibited,”
was his way of putting it.
He felt himself handicapped in the presence of Tudor, who had the
gift of making a show of all his qualities. Sheldon knew himself
for a brave man, wherefore he made no advertisement of the fact.
He knew that just as readily as the other would he dive among
ground-sharks to save a life, but in that fact he could find no
sanction for the foolhardy act of diving among sharks for the half
of a fish. The difference between them was that he kept the
curtain of his shop window down. Life pulsed steadily and deep in
him, and it was not his nature needlessly to agitate the surface so
that the world could see the splash he was making. And the effect
of the other’s amazing exhibitions was to make him retreat more
deeply within himself and wrap himself more thickly than ever in
the nerveless, stoical calm of his race.
“You are so stupid the last few days,” Joan complained to him.
“One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something. You
don’t seem to have an idea in your head above black labour and
cocoanuts. What is the matter?”
Sheldon smiled and beat a further retreat within himself, listening
the while to Joan and Tudor propounding the theory of the strong
arm by which the white man ordered life among the lesser breeds.
As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was
precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he
was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the
shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced
it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. It was
sufficient to do it and be done with it.
He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself involved in a
discussion, with Joan and Tudor siding against him, in which a more
astounding charge than ever he had dreamed of was made against the
very English control and reserve of which he was secretly proud.
“The Yankees talk a lot about what they do and have done,” Tudor
said, “and are looked down upon by the English as braggarts. But
the Yankee is only a child. He does not know effectually how to
brag. He talks about it, you see. But the Englishman goes him one
better by not talking about it. The Englishman’s proverbial lack
of bragging is a subtler form of brag after all. It is really
clever, as you will agree.”
“I never thought of it before,” Joan cried. “Of course. An
Englishman performs some terrifically heroic exploit, and is very
modest and reserved–refuses to talk about it at all–and the
effect is that by his silence he as much as says, ‘I do things like
this every day. It is as easy as rolling off a log. You ought to
see the really heroic things I could do if they ever came my way.
But this little thing, this little episode–really, don’t you know,
I fail to see anything in it remarkable or unusual.’ As for me, if
I went up in a powder explosion, or saved a hundred lives, I’d want
all my friends to hear about it, and their friends as well. I’d be
prouder than Lucifer over the affair. Confess, Mr. Sheldon, don’t
you feel proud down inside when you’ve done something daring or
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77
courageous?”
Sheldon nodded.
“Then,” she pressed home the point, “isn’t disguising that pride
under a mask of careless indifference equivalent to telling a lie?”
“Yes, it is,” he admitted. “But we tell similar lies every day.
It is a matter of training, and the English are better trained,
that is all. Your countrymen will be trained as well in time. As
Mr. Tudor said, the Yankees are young.”
“Thank goodness we haven’t begun to tell such lies yet!” was Joan’s
ejaculation.
“Oh, but you have,” Sheldon said quickly. “You were telling me a
lie of that order only the other day. You remember when you were
going up the lantern-halyards hand over hand? Your face was the
personification of duplicity.”
“It was no such thing.”
“Pardon me a moment,” he went on. “Your face was as calm and
peaceful as though you were reclining in a steamer-chair. To look
at your face one would have inferred that carrying the weight of
your body up a rope hand over hand was a very commonplace
accomplishment–as easy as rolling off a log. And you needn’t tell
me, Miss Lackland, that you didn’t make faces the first time you
tried to climb a rope. But, like any circus athlete, you trained
yourself out of the face-making period. You trained your face to
hide your feelings, to hide the exhausting effort your muscles were
making. It was, to quote Mr. Tudor, a subtler exhibition of
physical prowess. And that is all our English reserve is–a mere
matter of training. Certainly we are proud inside of the things we
do and have done, proud as Lucifer–yes, and prouder. But we have
grown up, and no longer talk about such things.”
“I surrender,” Joan cried. “You are not so stupid after all.”
“Yes, you have us there,” Tudor admitted. “But you wouldn’t have
had us if you hadn’t broken your training rules.”
“How do you mean?”
“By talking about it.”
Joan clapped her hands in approval. Tudor lighted a fresh
cigarette, while Sheldon sat on, imperturbably silent.
“He got you there,” Joan challenged. “Why don’t you crush him?”
“Really, I can’t think of anything to say,” Sheldon said. “I know
my position is sound, and that is satisfactory enough.”
“You might retort,” she suggested, “that when an adult is with
kindergarten children he must descend to kindergarten idioms in
order to make himself intelligible. That was why you broke
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training rules. It was the only way to make us children
understand.”
“You’ve deserted in the heat of the battle, Miss Lackland, and gone
over to the enemy,” Tudor said plaintively.
But she was not listening. Instead, she was looking intently
across the compound and out to sea. They followed her gaze, and
saw a green light and the loom of a vessel’s sails.
“I wonder if it’s the Martha come back,” Tudor hazarded.
“No, the sidelight is too low,” Joan answered. “Besides, they’ve
got the sweeps out. Don’t you hear them? They wouldn’t be
sweeping a big vessel like the Martha.”
“Besides, the Martha has a gasoline engine–twenty-five horse-
power,” Tudor added.
“Just the sort of a craft for us,” Joan said wistfully to Sheldon.
“I really must see if I can’t get a schooner with an engine. I
might get a second-hand engine put in.”
“That would mean the additional expense of an engineer’s wages,” he
objected.
“But it would pay for itself by quicker passages,” she argued; “and
it would be as good as insurance. I know. I’ve knocked about
amongst reefs myself. Besides, if you weren’t so mediaeval, I
could be skipper and save more than the engineer’s wages.”
He did not reply to her thrust, and she glanced at him. He was
looking out over the water, and in the lantern light she noted the
lines of his face–strong, stern, dogged, the mouth almost chaste
but firmer and thinner-lipped than Tudor’s. For the first time she
realized the quality of his strength, the calm and quiet of it, its
simple integrity and reposeful determination. She glanced quickly
at Tudor on the other side of her. It was a handsomer face, one
that was more immediately pleasing. But she did not like the
mouth. It was made for kissing, and she abhorred kisses. This was
not a deliberately achieved concept; it came to her in the form of
a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the moment she knew
a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right in his
judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her
little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of
the sea were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the
next moment she was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the
loom of the sails and the steady green of the moving sidelight, and
listening eagerly to the click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In
her mind’s eye she could see the straining naked forms of black men
bending rhythmically to the work, and somewhere on that strange
deck she knew was the inevitable master-man, conning the vessel in