'You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the bridge, but this spot is generally considered rather pretty.'
'It's a cute little house you've got here.'
'Ah, that wasn't here when I first came. There was a native hut, with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers; and the croton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden, made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees, as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water's edge and spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then--Good Heavens, it's a quarter of a century ago--and I wanted to enjoy all the loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was afraid I was going to cry. I wasn't more than twenty-five, and though I put the best face I could on it, I didn't want to die. And somehow it seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality which our doctors of philosophy--I am one myself, you know--had discussed so much. 'A year,' I cried to myself. 'I have a year. I will spend it here and then I am content to die.''
'We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren't perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.'
'Now drink, my friend. Don't let the nonsense I talk interfere with you.'
He waved his thin hand towards the bottle, and the skipper finished what remained in his glass.
'You ain't drinking nothin,' he said, reaching for the whisky.
'I am of a sober habit,' smiled the Swede. 'I intoxicate myself in ways which I fancy are more subtle. But perhaps that is only vanity. Anyhow, the effects are more lasting and the results less deleterious.'
'They say there's a deal of cocaine taken in the States now,' said the captain.
Neilson chuckled.
'But I do not see a white man often,' he continued, 'and for once I don't think a drop of whisky can do me any harm.'
He poured himself out a little, added some soda, and took a sip.
'And presently I found out why the spot had such an unearthly loveliness. Here love had tarried for a moment like a migrant bird that happens on a ship in mid-ocean and for a little while folds its tired wings. The fragrance of a beautiful passion hovered over it like the fragrance of hawthorn in May in the meadows of my home. It seems to me that the places where men have loved or suffered keep about them always some faint aroma of something that has not wholly died. It is as though they had acquired a spiritual significance which mysteriously affects those who pass. I wish I could make myself clear.' He smiled a little. 'Though I cannot imagine that if I did you would understand.'
He paused.
'I think this place was beautiful because here I had been loved beautifully.' And now he shrugged his shoulders. 'But perhaps it is only that my ?sthetic sense is gratified by the happy conjunction of young love and a suitable setting.'
Even a man less thick-witted than the skipper might have been forgiven if he were bewildered by Neilson's words. For he seemed faintly to laugh at what he said. It was as though he spoke from emotion which his intellect found ridiculous. He had said himself that he was a sentimentalist, and when sentimentality is joined with scepticism there is often the devil to pay.
He was silent for an instant and looked at the captain with eyes in which there was a sudden perplexity.
'You know, I can't help thinking that I've seen you before somewhere or other,' he said.
'I couldn't say as I remember you,' returned the skipper.
'I have a curious feeling as though your face were familiar to me. It's been puzzling me for some time. But I can't situate my recollection in any place or at any time.'
The skipper massively shrugged his heavy shoulders.
'It's thirty years since I first come to the islands. A man can't figure on remembering all the folk he meets in a while like that.'
The Swede shook his head.
'You know how one sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never been to before is strangely familiar. That's how I seem to see you.' He gave a whimsical smile. 'Perhaps I knew you in some past existence. Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I was a slave at the oar. Thirty years have you been here?'
'Every bit of thirty years.'
'I wonder if you knew a man called Red?'
'Red?'
'That is the only name I've ever known him by. I never knew him personally. I never even set eyes on him. And yet I seem to see him more clearly than many men, my brothers, for instance, with whom I passed my daily life for many years. He lives in my imagination with the distinctness of a Paolo Malatesta or a Romeo. But I daresay you have never read Dante or Shakespeare?'
'I can't say as I have,' said the captain.
Neilson, smoking a cigar, leaned back in his chair and looked vacantly at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air. A smile played on his lips, but his eyes were grave. Then he looked at the captain. There was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent. He had the plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat. It was an outrage. It set Neilson's nerves on edge. But the contrast between the man before him and the man he had in mind was pleasant.
'It appears that Red was the most comely thing you ever saw. I've talked to quite a number of people who
