At last he got out of his chair, a little unsteadily.
'Well, I'll be getting along home,' he said. 'See you before dinner.'
'Missus all right?' said Chaplin.
'Yes.'
He went out. There was a peculiar note in the monosyllable of his answer which made me look up.
'Good chap,' said Chaplin flatly, as Lawson went out of the door into the sunshine. 'One of the best. Pity he drinks.'
This from Chaplin was an observation not without humour.
'And when he's drunk he wants to fight people.'
'Is he often drunk?'
'Dead drunk, three or four days a week. It's the island done it, and Ethel.'
'Who's Ethel?'
'Ethel's his wife. Married a half-caste. Old Brevald's daughter. Took her away from here. Only thing to do. But she couldn't stand it, and now they're back again. He'll hang himself one of these days, if he don't drink himself to death before. Good chap. Nasty when he's drunk.'
Chaplin belched loudly.
'I'll go and put my head under the shower. I oughtn't to have had that last cocktail. It's always the last one that does you in.'
He looked uncertainly at the staircase as he made up his mind to go to the cubby hole in which was the shower, and then with unnatural seriousness got up.
'Pay you to cultivate Lawson,' he said. 'A well read chap. You'd be surprised when he's sober. Clever too. Worth talking to.'
Chaplin had told me the whole story in these few speeches.
When I came in towards evening from a ride along the seashore Lawson was again in the hotel. He was heavily sunk in one of the cane chairs in the lounge and he looked at me with glassy eyes. It was plain that he had been drinking all the afternoon. He was torpid, and the look on his face was sullen and vindictive. His glance rested on me for a moment, but I could see that he did not recognise me. Two or three other men were sitting there, shaking dice, and they took no notice of him. His condition was evidently too usual to attract attention. I sat down and began to play.
'You're a damned sociable lot,' said Lawson suddenly.
He got out of his chair and waddled with bent knees towards the door. I do not know whether the spectacle was more ridiculous than revolting. When he had gone one of the men sniggered.
'Lawson's fairly soused to-day,' he said.
'If I couldn't carry my liquor better than that,' said another, 'I'd climb on the waggon and stay there.'
Who would have thought that this wretched object was in his way a romantic figure or that his life had in it those elements of pity and terror which the theorist tells us are necessary to achieve the effect of tragedy?
I did not see him again for two or three days.
I was sitting one evening on the first floor of the hotel on a verandah that overlooked the street when Lawson came up and sank into a chair beside me. He was quite sober. He made a casual remark and then, when I had replied somewhat indifferently, added with a laugh which had in it an apologetic tone:
'I was devilish soused the other day.'
I did not answer. There was really nothing to say. I pulled away at my pipe in the vain hope of keeping the mosquitoes away, and looked at the natives going home from their work. They walked with long steps, slowly, with care and dignity, and the soft patter of their naked feet was strange to hear. Their dark hair, curling or straight, was often white with lime, and then they had a look of extraordinary distinction. They were tall and finely built. Then a gang of Solomon Islanders, indentured labourers, passed by, singing; they were shorter and slighter than the Samoans, coal black with great heads of fuzzy hair dyed red. Now and then a white man drove past in his buggy or rode into the hotel yard. In the lagoon two or three schooners reflected their grace in the tranquil water.
'I don't know what there is to do in a place like this except to get soused,' said Lawson at last.
'Don't you like Samoa?' I asked casually, for something to say.
'It's pretty, isn't it?'
The word he chose seemed so inadequate to describe the unimaginable beauty of the island, that I smiled, and smiling I turned to look at him. I was startled by the expression in those fine sombre eyes of his, an expression of intolerable anguish; they betrayed a tragic depth of emotion of which I should never have thought him capable. But the expression passed away and he smiled. His smile was simple and a little naive. It changed his face so that I wavered in my first feeling of aversion from him.
'I was all over the place when I first came out,' he said.
He was silent for a moment.
'I went away for good about three years ago, but I came back.' He hesitated. 'My wife wanted to come back. She was born here, you know.'
'Oh, yes.'
He was silent again, and then hazarded a remark about Robert Louis Stevenson. He asked me if I had been up to Vailima. For some reason he was making an effort to be agreeable to me. He began to talk of Stevenson's books, and presently the conversation drifted to London.
