Sheldon obeyed her instructions, rushed hot-water
bottles along to her, and then sat on the veranda
vainly trying to interest himself in a two-months-old
file of Sydney newspapers. He kept glancing up
and across the compound to the grass house.
Yes, he decided, the contention of every white man
in the islands was right; the Solomons was no place
for a woman.
He clapped his hands, and Lalaperu came running.
“Here, you!” he ordered; “go along
barracks, bring ’m black fella Mary, plenty
too much, altogether.”
A few minutes later the dozen black women of Berande
were ranged before him. He looked them over
critically, finally selecting one that was young,
comely as such creatures went, and whose body bore
no signs of skin-disease.
“What name, you?” he demanded. “Sangui?”
“Me Mahua,” was the answer.
“All right, you fella Mahua. You finish
cook along boys. You stop along white Mary.
All the time you stop along. You savvee?”
“Me savvee,” she grunted, and obeyed his
gesture to go to the grass house immediately.
“What name?” he asked Viaburi, who had
just come out of the grass house.
“Big fella sick,” was the answer.
“White fella Mary talk ’m too much allee
time. Allee time talk ’m big fella schooner.”
Sheldon nodded. He understood. It was
the loss of the Martha that had brought on
the fever. The fever would have come sooner or
later, he knew; but her disappointment had precipitated
it. He lighted a cigarette, and in the curling
smoke of it caught visions of his English mother,
and wondered if she would understand how her son could
love a woman who cried because she could not be skipper
of a schooner in the cannibal isles.
The most patient man in the world is prone to impatience
in love—and Sheldon was in love.
He called himself an ass a score of times a day, and
strove to contain himself by directing his mind in
other channels, but more than a score of times each
day his thoughts roved back and dwelt on Joan.
It was a pretty problem she presented, and he was
continually debating with himself as to what was the
best way to approach her.
He was not an adept at love-making. He had had
but one experience in the gentle art (in which he
had been more wooed than wooing), and the affair had
profited him little. This was another affair,
and he assured himself continually that it was a uniquely
different and difficult affair. Not only was
here a woman who was not bent on finding a husband,
but it was a woman who wasn’t a woman at all;
who was genuinely appalled by the thought of a husband;
who joyed in boys’ games, and sentimentalized
over such things as adventure; who was healthy and
normal and wholesome, and who was so immature that
a husband stood for nothing more than an encumbrance
in her cherished scheme of existence.
