The Ebb-Tide | Page 4

on the floor
of the old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones
only less beautiful because they lacked the coinsecration of
remembrance. Or he would pause on random country walks; sit on the
path side, gazing over the sea on the mountains of Eimeo; and dip into
the Aeneid, seeking sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way of oracles)
replied with no very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England
at least would throng upon the exile's memory: the busy schoolroom,
the green playing-fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of
London, and the fireside, and the white head of his father. For it is the
destiny of those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom we
make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass
into the blood and become native in the memory; so that a phrase of
Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English
places and the student's own irrevocable youth.
Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent, active, and ambitious man,
small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived
of the boy; he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford
scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With
all his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient

in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study,
worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek,
and took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London
house was disastrously wound up; Mr Herrick must begin the world
again as a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions
and accept with gratitude a career that he detested and despised. He had
no head for figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint of
hours, and despised the aims and the success of merchants. To grow
rich was none of his ambitions; rather to do well. A worse or a more
bold young man would have refused the destiny; perhaps tried his
future with his pen; perhaps enlisted. Robert, more prudent, possibly
more timid, consented to embrace that way of life in which he could
most readily assist his family. But he did so with a mind divided; fled
the neighbourhood of former comrades; and chose, out of several
positions placed at his disposal, a clerkship in New York.
His career thenceforth was one of unbroken shame. He did not drink,
he was exactly honest, he was never rude to his employers, yet was
everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought
no attention; his day was a tissue of things neglected and things done
amiss; and from place to place and from town to town, he carried the
character of one thoroughly incompetent. No man can bear the word
applied to him without some flush of colour, as indeed there is none
other that so emphatically slams in a man's face the door of self-
respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious of talents and
acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in which he
was found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite. Early in his fall,
he had ceased to be able to make remittances; shortly after, having
nothing but failure to communicate, he ceased writing home; and about
a year before this tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San
Francisco by a vulgar and infuriated German Jew, he had broken the
last bonds of self-respect, and upon a sudden Impulse, changed his
name and invested his last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine,
the City of Papeete. With what expectation he had trimmed his flight
for the South Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there
were fortunes to be made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not more
gifted than himself had climbed in the island world to be queen's
consorts and king's ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with any

manful purpose, he would have kept his father's name; the alias
betrayed his moral bankruptcy; he bad struck his flag; he entertained no
hope to reinstate himself or help his straitened family; and he came to
the islands (where he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and
manners easy) a skulker from life's battle and his own immediate duty.
Failure, he had said, was his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.
It is fortunately not enough to say 'I will be base.' Herrick continued in
the islands his career of failure; but in the new scene and under the new
name, he suffered no less sharply than before. A place was got, it was
lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the keepers of
restaurants he fell