The Ebb-Tide | Page 3

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THE EBB-TIDE
A TRIO AND QUARTETTE

'There is a tide in the affairs of men.'



Chapter 1.
NIGHT ON THE BEACH
Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many
European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity
and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have
mounted the steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others
again must marry for a livelihood; a strapping, merry,
chocolate-coloured dame supports them in sheer idleness; and, dressed
like natives, but still retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude,
still perhaps with some relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer
and gentleman, they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an
island audience with memoirs of the music-hall. And there are still
others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who
continue, even in these isles of plenty, to lack bread.
At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on
the beach under a purao tree.
It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically
home, a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy
officers, dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with
garlands. Long ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house
about the tiny pagan city. Only the street lamps shone on, making a
glow-worm halo in the umbrageous alleys or drawing a tremulous
image on the waters of the port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles
of lumber by the Government pier. It was wafted ashore from the
graceful clipper-bottomed schooners, where they lay moored close in
like dinghies, and their crews were stretched upon the deck under the
open sky or huddled in a rude tent amidst the disorder of merchandise.
But the men under the purao had no thought of sleep. The same
temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer;
but it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and
the bottle of cocoanut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about
the island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton

clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the
tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast to
mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.
In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were ON THE BEACH.
Common calamity had brought them acquainted, as the three most
miserable English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their
misery, they knew next to nothing of each other, not even their true
names. For each had made a long apprenticeship in going downward;
and each, at some stage of the descent, had been shamed into the
adoption of an alias. And yet not one of them had figured in a court of
justice; two were men of kindly virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered
under the purao, had a tattered Virgil in his pocket.
Certainly, if money,could have been raised upon the book, Robert
Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession; but the
demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the
South Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil,
which he could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in
his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt