“Some dozen years ago,” he said, “I made a visit of a few weeks to the Marquesas Islands.  Hallman had kept a store there then for more than ten years, and had a good part of the business of buying and shipping copra and selling supplies to the natives and a few whites.  He lived in a shack back of his little store, with his native woman and four or five half-naked children.  They told me queer stories about his madness for women.  They said he would go out of his house and into the jungle near the trails and would lie in wait.  If a woman he coveted passed, he would seize her, and even if her husband or consort was ahead of her, in the custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and make her call out that she was delaying a minute, that her companion was to go along, and she would catch up in a minute.  He had some funny power over those women.  Anyhow, that’s the story they told me in those cannibal islands.  And yet, you know, there’s something different in him, because he sent two of his sons to school, and afterward to a university in Europe.  To make it queerer yet, one of them is here on this ship, in the second class, and wouldn’t dare to speak to his father without being asked.  Of course he’s a half-Marquesan—­the son—­and looks it.  I know them all, and only yesterday I heard Hallman call his son on the main-deck, away from where any one could see him, and threaten him with ’putting him back in the jungle, where he came from,’ if he appeared again near the first-class space.  I tell you, I’d hate to be in his hands if I was in his way.”

Fictionists who take the South Seas for their scenery too often paint their characters in one tone—­black, brown, or yellow, or even white.  Their bad men are super-villains, and yet there are no men all bad.  I know there are no supermen at all, bad or good, but only that some men do super acts now and then; none has the grand gesture at all times.  Napoleon had a disgraceful affliction at Waterloo, which rid him of strength, mental and physical; the thief on the cross became wistful for an unknown delight.

Hallman had said to me in the smoking-room that he never drank alcohol or smoked tobacco, because “it took the edge off the game.”  Now, a poet might say that, or even a moralist, but he was neither.

That night I walked through the waist of the ship and on to the promenade-deck of the third-class passengers, where a huddle of stores, coiled ropes, and riff-raff prevented these poor from taking any pleasurable exercise.  I stood at the taffrail and peered down at the welter of white water, the foam of the buffets of the whirling screws, and then at the wide wake, which in imagination went on and on in a luminous path to the place we had departed from, to the dock where we had left the debarred lover of nature.  The deep was lit with the play of phosphorescent animalculae whom our passage awoke in their homes beneath the surface and sent questing with lights for the cause.  A sheet of pale, green-gold brilliancy marked the route of the Noa-Noa on the brine, and perhaps far back the corpse of the celestial philosopher floated in radiancy, with his face toward those skies, so brazen to his desires.