The Ebb-Tide Chapter 1 - Night on the Beach

Mark Smith (0:01)

CHAPTER I. THE EBB-TIDE.

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This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina.

The Ebb-Tide. A TRIO AND QUARTET by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne.

CHAPTER I. Night on the Beach.

THROUGHOUT the island world of the Pacific scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted the steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must marry for a livelihood. A strapping, merry, chocolate-colored dame supports them in sheer idleness, and, dressed like natives, but still retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some relic, such as a single eyeglass, of the officer and gentleman, they sprawl in palm-leaf verandas and entertain an island audience with memoirs of the music hall. And there are still others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of plenty, to lack bread.

At the far end of the town of Papite, three such men were seated on the beach, under a pirarro tree. It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home, a motley troupe of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers, dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands. Long ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house about the tiny pagan city. Only the street lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in the umbrageous alleys or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the government pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottom schooners, where they lay moored close in like dinghies, and their crews were stretched upon the deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude tent amidst the disorder of merchandise.

But the men under the Pirao had no thought of sleep. The same temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer, but it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and the bottle of coconut oil stood frozen in every birdcage house about the island, and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton clothes, the same they had sweated in by day, and run the gauntlet of the tropic showers. And to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast to mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.

In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were ON THE BEACH. Common calamity had brought them acquainted as the three most miserable English-speaking creatures in Tahiti, and beyond their misery they knew next to nothing of each other, not even their true names. For each had made a long apprenticeship in going downward, and each, at some stage of the descent, had been shamed into the adoption of an alias. And yet not one of them had figured in a court of justice. Two were men of kindly virtues, and one, as he sat and shivered under the pirau, had a tattered Virgil in his pocket.

Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick would long ago have sacrificed that last possession, but the demand for literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues, and the Virgil, which he could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger. He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the old calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. Or he would pause on random country walks, sit on the pathside, gazing over the sea on the mountains of Aimeo, and dip into the Aeneid, seeking sorts.

And if the oracle, as is the way of oracles, replied with no very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England at least would throng upon the exile's memory, the busy schoolroom, the green playing fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and the fireside and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of those grave, restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and become native in the memory, so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student's own irrevocable youth.

Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent, active and ambitious man, small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived of the boy, he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With all his talent and taste, and he had much of both, Robert was deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in by-paths of study, worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house was disastrously wound up. Mr. Herrick must begin the world again as a clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquished his ambitions and except with gratitude a career that he detested and despised. He had no head for figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint of ours, and despised the aims and the success of merchants. To grow rich was none of his ambitions, rather to do well. A worse or more bold young man would have refused the destiny, perhaps tried his future with his pen, perhaps enlisted. Robert, more prudent, possibly more timid, consented to embrace that way of life in which he could most readily assist his family. But he did so with a mind divided, fled the neighbourhood of former comrades, and chose, out of several positions placed at his disposal, a clerkship in New York.