The Ebb-Tide | Page 5

to more open charity upon the wayside; as time went
on, good nature became weary, and after a repulse or two, Herrick
became shy. There were women enough who would have supported a
far worse and a far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them:
or if he did both, some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred
starvation. Drenched with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a
disused and ruinous prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered
out of rubbish heaps, his associates two creatures equally outcast with
himself, he had drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known
what it was to be resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury
of rebellion against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of
despair. The time had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of
an easy and perhaps agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise;
he had proved himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by
experience that he could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely
pride or strength, that was perhaps only refinement, withheld him from
capitulation; but he looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing
rage, and sometimes wondered at his patience.
It was now the fourth month completed, and still there was no change
or sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds
of every size and shape and density, some black as ink stains, some
delicate as lawn, threw the marvel of her Southern brightness over the
same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the
perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the
masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of
the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,
with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the

American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master
mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and
toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was
society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he
had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution; he was one whose
hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace
about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes
Tomkins, and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in
every store in Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had
been discharged from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had
alienated all his old employers so that they passed him in the street as if
he were a dog, and all his old comrades so that they shunned him as
they would a creditor.
Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now
raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the
purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling as
they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a
touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool and, squatting
on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.
Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from
farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in the
distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel
ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If a
man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that
infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers,
perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the
London clerk. He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing,
and the dainties of the sickroom; he lay there now, in the cold open,
exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was
besides infirm; the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions
watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled
them, and contended with and conquered their abhorrence. The disgust
attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same time,
and with more than compensating strength, shame for a sentiment so
inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil
they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is

always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual
and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken