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_ "I wish I knew whether you are merely headstrong, or whether you
really intend to be a Solomon planter," Sheldon said in the
morning, at breakfast.
"I wish you were more adaptable," Joan retorted. "You have more
preconceived notions than any man I ever met. Why in the name of
common sense, in the name of . . . fair play, can't you get it into
your head that I am different from the women you have known, and
treat me accordingly? You surely ought to know I am different. I
sailed my own schooner here--skipper, if you please. I came here
to make my living. You know that; I've told you often enough. It
was Dad's plan, and I'm carrying it out, just as you are trying to
carry out your Hughie's plan. Dad started to sail and sail until
he could find the proper islands for planting. He died, and I
sailed and sailed until I arrived here. Well,"--she shrugged her
shoulders--"the schooner is at the bottom of the sea. I can't sail
any farther, therefore I remain here. And a planter I shall
certainly be."
"You see--" he began.
"I haven't got to the point," she interrupted. "Looking back on my
conduct from the moment I first set foot on your beach, I can see
no false pretence that I have made about myself or my intentions.
I was my natural self to you from the first. I told you my plans;
and yet you sit there and calmly tell me that you don't know
whether I really intend to become a planter, or whether it is all
obstinacy and pretence. Now let me assure you, for the last time,
that I really and truly shall become a planter, thanks to you, or
in spite of you. Do you want me for a partner?"
"But do you realize that I would be looked upon as the most foolish
jackanapes in the South Seas if I took a young girl like you in
with me here on Berande?" he asked.
"No; decidedly not. But there you are again, worrying about what
idiots and the generally evil-minded will think of you. I should
have thought you had learned self-reliance on Berande, instead of
needing to lean upon the moral support of every whisky-guzzling
worthless South Sea vagabond."
He smiled, and said, -
"Yes, that is the worst of it. You are unanswerable. Yours is the
logic of youth, and no man can answer that. The facts of life can,
but they have no place in the logic of youth. Youth must try to
live according to its logic. That is the only way to learn
better."
"There is no harm in trying?" she interjected.
"But there is. That is the very point. The facts always smash
youth's logic, and they usually smash youth's heart, too. It's
like platonic friendships and . . . and all such things; they are
all right in theory, but they won't work in practice. I used to
believe in such things once. That is why I am here in the Solomons
at present."
Joan was impatient. He saw that she could not understand. Life
was too clearly simple to her. It was only the youth who was
arguing with him, the youth with youth's pure-minded and invincible
reasoning. Hers was only the boy's soul in a woman's body. He
looked at her flushed, eager face, at the great ropes of hair
coiled on the small head, at the rounded lines of the figure
showing plainly through the home-made gown, and at the eyes--boy's
eyes, under cool, level brows--and he wondered why a being that was
so much beautiful woman should be no woman at all. Why in the
deuce was she not carroty-haired, or cross-eyed, or hare-lipped?
"Suppose we do become partners on Berande," he said, at the same
time experiencing a feeling of fright at the prospect that was
tangled with a contradictory feeling of charm, "either I'll fall in
love with you, or you with me. Propinquity is dangerous, you know.
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
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.
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
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.
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. Discussion was useless--he
had learned that; and he was resolved to keep his temper. And
before the day was out she capitulated. She was to go to Sydney on
the first steamer, purchase the schooner, and sail back with an
island skipper on board. And then she inveigled Sheldon into
agreeing that she could take occasional cruises in the islands,
though he was adamant when it came to a recruiting trip on Malaita.
That was the one thing barred.
And after it was all over, and a terse and business-like agreement
(by her urging) drawn up and signed, Sheldon paced up and down for
a full hour, meditating upon how many different kinds of a fool he
had made of himself. It was an impossible situation, and yet no
more impossible than the previous one, and no more impossible than
the one that would have obtained had she gone off on her own and
bought Pari-Sulay. He had never seen a more independent woman who
stood more in need of a protector than this boy-minded girl who had
landed on his beach with eight picturesque savages, a long-
barrelled revolver, a bag of gold, and a gaudy merchandise of
imagined romance and adventure.
He had never read of anything to compare with it. The fictionists,
as usual, were exceeded by fact. The whole thing was too
preposterous to be true. He gnawed his moustache and smoked
cigarette after cigarette. Satan, back from a prowl around the
compound, ran up to him and touched his hand with a cold, damp
nose. Sheldon caressed the animal's ears, then threw himself into
a chair and laughed heartily. What would the Commissioner of the
Solomons think? What would his people at home think? And in the
one breath he was glad that the partnership had been effected and
sorry that Joan Lackland had ever come to the Solomons. Then he
went inside and looked at himself in a hand-mirror. He studied the
reflection long and thoughtfully and wonderingly. _
Read next: CHAPTER XIV - THE MARTHA
Read previous: CHAPTER XII - MR. MORGAN AND MR. RAFF
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