In the
Dutchman's heart, I believe, there was nothing but astonishment at his
own success. Signet, on the face of it, was the typical big talker and
little doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperishable.
He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.--What we
had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus--like the taste of
blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable
Grail.
All the following day I spent on board, overseeing the hundred minor
patchings and calkings a South Sea trader will want in port. When I went
ashore that evening, after sundown, I found the Dutchman sitting in the
same chair on the veranda, blowing smoke out into the afterglow. There
was the illusion of perfect continuity with the past. Yesterday, today,
tomorrow. Life flowed like a sleeping river, it would seem.
But this was the status of affairs. The three brown music makers,
sons-in-law to an island queen, lay on a platform somewhere within the
edge of the bush, heavier by ounces with thirty-two caliber slugs,
awaiting burial. And Signet, guttersnipe, beach comber, and midnight
assassin, was lodged in the "calaboose," built stoutly in a corner of
the biggest and reddest of the Dutchman's godowns. As for the royal
dancing woman, I was presently in the trader's phrase, to "have a look
at her.
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