The man with a grouch

One morning toward the end of December, Flexner came out on his veranda in pajamas. The old trader’s house which he was reoccupying stood on a bay of the groves facing the white sands of the beach and the blue water separating the beach from the reefs.

The outer sea beyond the reefs stretched like a sheet of lazulite to where above the far horizon the white trade clouds showed like a procession of ghosts born of distance and summer. On the beach were some Kanaka canoemen who had just come in with a take of fish; also a naked nut-brown child full of the joy of life and beating with a lump of coral on a tin can. It was like a scene from “Floradora”, a picture that might have been born from the brain of Basil Dean in one of his southern or eastern moods. Only Flexner did not fit the surroundings, a ginger-colored man in striped blue-and-purple pajamas sitting now drinking his coffee, smoking a cigarette and reading a letter.

The letter was a month old. It was from Lombard, Drex & Co., telling him he was fired, had come by the mail brigantine, and informed him that his successor, Mr. George Arrow, was coming to Levua by the company’s schooner, the Golden Hope.

Half an hour ago Kepi, Flexner’s personal servant and man of all work, had roused him with the news that a schooner had been sighted from the bluff. “That’s her,” said Flexner, tumbling out of bed. He tubbed and resumed his pajamas and, taking the letter from his bureau, came out to wait the arrival of the newcomer and drink his coffee. He was quite unperturbed.

He was a good-natured man, even though, as Lombard said, he was never satisfied with things as they were. A man who took disaster as the natural expression of a world that was mainly all wrong.

When his house had been blown away he just said, “Well, that’s that,” and came back to live in the old trader’s house; and now, waiting for his successor, he felt no animosity or irritation.

It was one of the things that ought to have been different, that was all.

His position was serious from a worldly point of view. He had saved scarcely any money, not more than seventy pounds all told, and what on earth he was to do for a job when he got back to San Francisco he didn’t know. Another thing that ought to have been different, that was all.

He was finishing his coffee when the fore canvas of a schooner showed beyond the reef; when the rest of her, hidden by the bluff, came into view, she revealed herself as the Golden Hope.

There are ships that seem to have been built for beauty as well as use and the Golden Hope was one of them; one of the old-time fleet that included the Mary Rose and Dancing Wave, creatures rather than things, born, like the gulls, to live in harmony with the sea and in fellowship with the wind.

She formed a pretty picture as she came in with a snow of gulls astern of her, rounding with all her canvas ashiver and dropping anchor in ten fathoms of water, a couple of cable lengths from the beach.

Flexner, pajamas and all, came down to the water’s edge to greet the boat that was pulling ashore.

Captain Bartells was steering, and Arrow, the new trader, was seated beside him, a young and pleasant-looking man for whom Flexner at once felt a liking.

They all tramped up to the house, and after soft drinks and cigarettes on the veranda, Bartells, putting back to the schooner to superintend the unloading of trade, left Flexner and his successor to get acquainted.

They went over the house, the godown where trade goods were stored, and the copra sheds. Then they had dinner, and that evening on the veranda they talked very freely of the whole position, copra trade and what not.

Old Lombard had told Arrow his opinion of Flexner, and Arrow was on the lookout for Flexner’s weak spot, but in all their conversation not one grumble was uttered by the latter. Flexner was supposed to be a man always dissatisfied, yet he showed no sign of dissatisfaction with anything. He talked quite openly of his own rather desperate financial condition, but he didn’t grumble. Was Lombard wrong?

“It’s funny to think that day after tomorrow is Christmas Day,” said Arrow. “At least to me, for I was born north of N’ York and Christmas has always meant six inches of snow ’n’ holly berries and so on. I reckon I’m an out-and-out Christmaser of the good old type, and I’m not ashamed of it.”

“Same here,” said Flexner. “I was born and brought up at Maltby in Kent --my father lives there still--and Christmas always brings me back to old times. We didn’t have much snow--haven’t had much in England of late years--but there was holly and ivy and good will all round, not to speak of presents and the old folks in the village coming up for packets of tea and so on. I reckon England is a good place and it never looks better than when you see it from twenty thousand miles away. And Christmas is the best thing in England. Last time I was there was five years ago and the old governor gave a children’s party. He’s seventy-five but seems to grow younger every year. Hasn’t lost a tooth in his head. And I bet this year he’ll be giving another party--and twenty years hence it will be the same. We’re a long-lived family, and he reckons to live to be a hundred.”

“My poor old governor died six years ago,” said Arrow. “He wasn’t more than sixty-nine. We aren’t a long-lived family by a long chalk. I’m the only one left, and it’s a pretty lonesome world when it gets to that.”

“Well, cheer up,” said Flexner, and produced a bottle of whisky.

Yes, decidedly old Lombard must have been wrong.

In the tropics, and especially among the Islands, Fortune plays strange tricks with men, and often in short time. Fifteen minutes and a sufficient hurricane will lay down a plantation of thirty thousand trees worth anything from fifteen hundred to three thousand a year, according to the price of copra--or, in the old days, a shift of the helm at sight of a distant atoll might have landed you in an uncharted pearl lagoon.

While Flexner slept tonight the sleep of the just in his blue-and-purple-striped pajamas, Fate, landing at Levua and putting on the crown of Fortune, turned up her sleeves. She had fixed on Flexner as her man and she was going to do the thing royally and with gorgeous settings in two acts. And, getting toward three in the morning, with the stage lit up by a gorgeous moon, up went the curtain to a sound like the clamor of sea gulls on the beach.

Flexner sprang from his bed and ran out on the veranda. Arrow came after him. The beach was alive with Kanakas running about and shouting and pointing to the inshore waters beyond the schooner, where, monstrous in the light of the moon, a great black bulk was dashing through the water, flinging huge arms to the air like a drowning giant or a----

Crash!

The foam shot fathoms high and the woods echoed to the concussion.

“Cachalot!” cried Flexner. “Cachalot fighting a squid! Gosh! look at them!”