THE MAN WITH A GROUCH

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

A Story of the South Seas, and of a Man Who Wanted to Spend Christmas in England

At Levua, even today there are to be found square miles of old forest. The true high woods of the tropics; trees fetched from Heaven knows where to shoulder one another and shudder in the sea wind and thrust at each other in the great storms when the coconuts of the beach palms are flying like cannon balls.

Here in this island there are redwoods, though smaller than the California giants, and mahoganies such as you see in the woods of Martinique; in the old days sandalwood was the chief export, but today it is all copra with a hint of pineapples, if they succeed with the new grounds that they are trying out beyond Mayano.

Just at the time of this story, Flexner was running the trade station at Levua and making a mess of the business. Lombard, Drex & Co., of San Francisco, owned the station. It wasn’t their fault that things were not going well; it wasn’t the fault of the market, for prices were ruling high; it wasn’t the fault of the trees that were bearing well; and it seemingly wasn’t the fault of Flexner, for he didn’t drink to excess and he was by all accounts and seeming a straight man and honest as day.

Old Reuben Lombard, puzzling over this matter, came to Levua to investigate matters for himself. He was a wise old man with a profound, and one might say appalling, knowledge of human nature.

Employees are mostly compounded of human nature. Especially on the Pacific coast and in the Islands.

Reuben had come across all varieties of it, from the stark naked and quietly drunk to the murderous and violent, from the incompetent and lazy to the competent and thriving. He spent a month at Levua making a holiday of the business and absorbing Flexner and the whole situation; then he returned to San Francisco and told his partner Drex that he was going to fire Flexner.

“He’s a bad character,” said Reuben. “I don’t mean drink, women, cards or anything of that sort; I’m talking of him as a business man. He’s never satisfied; that’s what it amounts to. I got his past history out of him in talk. He started in life with some money safely invested in high-class stuff, but wasn’t satisfied with five and a half per cent, so turned it into wildcat and went bust. At Levua he wasn’t satisfied with the old trader’s house, and built another in a better situation, with the result that the first hurricane took it and laid it all over the reefs. He wasn’t satisfied with the way Sru, the headman on the west side, was doing his work and ruling his people, so he kept butting in till Sru began to see red and went for Sipi of the east side. Flexner had pointed out Sipi as an example; Sru went for the example and laid it out with a club. Then there was hell’s shines between the two sides of the island till the missionaries stepped in and patched things up.

“That’s only a bit; there were lots of other little things.

“You know, the sort of man that messes about at home mending the window blinds, nagging the servants, and interfering with the wife’s arrangements. Never satisfied, that’s Flexner. It’s mostly an American disease, but Flexner has put English additions to it—he’s an Englishman. Sitting smoking on the veranda with him night before I left, I said to him, ‘Now, ain’t that perfect! Look at that lagoon full of stars and those lights on the reef where they’re spearing the fish. Smell of the air!’ ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but have you ever seen the Thames above Richmond on a fine summer’s night?’

“Well, I reckon he’ll see it soon.”

“But look here,” said Drex. “Dissatisfaction with things as they are ought to be the soul of progress in art and commerce.”

“Oh, gosh!” said Lombard. “I’m not talking of things as they are; I’m only getting at the mentality that’s always grousing because things aren’t what they aren’t—dissatisfaction as a matter of mind principle. If you gave this chap a ticket for Jerusalem with free drinks ’n’ hotel expenses he’d ten to one grumble that it wasn’t the New Jerusalem the booking was for. Anyhow, he’s fired. I’m writing him tonight and I’m going to send Arrow in his place.”

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!”

The sight was phenomenal, for the cachalot was in a flurry.

Now the cachalot is fond of grazing on the great squid. Sometimes he lugs one up to the surface and you see something that looks like a fight, the sixty-foot tentacles of the squid thrashing about with tremendous sound and fury; but the cachalot is not fighting, he is just eating, quietly chewing like a cow and quite regardless of the emotions of the chewed.

But this thing was different. Something was wrong with the dinner. Either it had turned out poisonous in some way or the great beak of the squid had managed to get home somehow in an unpleasant manner.

Driving through the water like a torpedo boat, the cachalot made a quarter of a mile toward the west, sank, rose, sprang, crashed in a smother of foam, and came racing back, close to the beach now, the great arms of the squid moving hilariously and the Kanakas cheering on the runner.

“They’ll foul the schooner! They’ll foul the schooner!” cried Arrow. “Look! they’re making straight for it!”

“No,” said Flexner, “there’s a sunk reef in the way. They’re too close inshore. It runs out for two hundred yards, and there’s no more than ten feet of water on it. They’ll beach—done it!”

There was more than ten feet of water on the reef, for it was high tide. All the same, the reef did the business: for a moment the great bulk of the whale seemed to roll on it in a storm of foam, next it was free and making away for the reef opening and a life on the ocean wave.

The gallery gods on the beach hooted, howled and whistled—prematurely, for the first act was not over.

“Look!” said Arrow. “What’s that?”

Something showed on the water this side of the reef, something like a half deflated balloon. It was the squid.

The tentacles were no longer thrashing the air, they were submerged and otherwise engaged. But the form was not idly drifting, it was moving here and there with a steady trend toward the shore, so close now that two great luminous disks in it showed, disks paling and glowing like lamps now fully lit, now fading. They were the eyes.

“What on earth is the matter with it?” asked Arrow, a chill at his heart.

“Tiger sharks,” said Flexner. “They’re driving it ashore and eating it.”

The Kanakas, drawn back a bit, were dead silent in full enjoyment of the spectacle. Just as you may see a bit of bread pushed about on the surface of the water by struggling fish, so the great form of the squid was driven here and there. It vanished to bob up again like a wet balloon; but now only one luminous disk showed, the other was gone. Then it slowly submerged to appear no more; but the water was troubled by the struggle still going on and the little waves breaking on the salt white sands left a stain dark as ink.

Flexner and his companion turned back to the house.

“Do you often have that sort of thing here?” said Arrow after he had asked for and received a tot of whisky.

“I have never seen a cachalot in the lagoon waters before,” said Flexner. “The boys often catch big squids, but nothing to compare with that one. Interesting, wasn’t it?”

Arrow went back to his couch for another couple of hours’ sleep—risking nightmare.

The cheeriness of Flexner over this three o’clock in the morning interruption of an honest and decent man’s sleep crowned everything.

“Interesting, wasn’t it?”

Decidedly, old Lombard had mismeasured his man. Arrow did not know that Flexner’s main intellectual support at Levua had been nature study. Not a scientific naturalist, he was still one of those men—and there are many of them—to whom wild life makes an intense appeal; and, though the Thames above Richmond on a fine summer’s evening might hold more attraction for him than a star-shot lagoon, the land of colored coral and the perfumed wilderness of the woods had saved him time and again from the ennui that leads to drink.

Fortune, who often uses men’s better qualities just as Fate often uses their worse, depended on this fact in staging the second act of that little play which might have been entitled, “How Good Luck Came to Christopher Flexner.”

The curtain rose again on the veranda of the old trader’s house with Flexner and Arrow sitting at breakfast.

The inshore waters, emerald deepening into blue, showed no trace of the tragedy of a few hours ago—of the squid that was being digested by half a dozen tiger sharks, or the cachalot safely escaped into the violet ocean beyond the purple reefs. The schooner, swinging bow to the shore, made a ripple marking the outgoing tide, and on her deck was the burly form of Captain Bartells, busy superintending the unloading of some boxes.

“Cap said he’d be ready to start tomorrow,” said Flexner. “Looks like it —the trade stuff will be loaded today, and it won’t take more than a couple of hours to get the water on board.”

“Christmas Day tomorrow,” said Arrow, “but that won’t hold him. Anyhow, I have time to write the couple of letters I want taken back to be posted at San Francisco—I forget whether you said you were going east from Frisco or sticking on the Pacific coast.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Flexner; “it just depends how things turn out.”

“Poor devil,” thought Arrow. He did not pursue the subject of Flexner’s immediate future and indeed he had business enough of his own to talk of, for in taking up or dropping a trade station there are a hundred little things to be discussed, so that it was getting on for ten and the sun of a perfect morning high above the bluff before they had finished.

Leaving the new trader to go over the accounts and make himself familiar with the store book and papers, Flexner came down to the water’s edge, where the station boat was lying beside some beached canoes.

She was a white-painted, carvel-built twelve-footer. He had often taken her out for fishing, and there was still in the bows a tub of line, also the grains he had used the other day when he had gone after a school of small rays that had come into the shore waters.

Helped by one of the Kanakas he got her half afloat, stepped in, and pushed out alone.

He wanted to look at Levua from the sea for the last time. He would see it from the schooner tomorrow when they were putting out, but that would not be the same. He would not be alone and able to think and reflect and measure up things and reminisce.

He passed the schooner anchored over her own shadow on the coral floor. The hands had knocked off work for a spell and she lay like a thing deserted, the tide rippling at her anchor chain and the gulls flighting round her on the lookout for scraps. Beyond, and halfway to the reefs, he paused rowing and looked down at what perhaps he would never see again—down through the water clear as air at the colored parterres of coral and the sand patches where great shells crawled, the home of the Haliotis, the branch coral and sea fan.

It was extraordinary to think that this submarine land of brilliancy and color existed in a world that at the same moment held London, fogbound perhaps, and Maltby with its leafless trees and sure-to-be-clouded skies; a submarine world that knew nothing of Father Christmas or the delights of the season that appealed to the exiled soul of Flexner.

Flexner was thinking something like this—he was a man whose reflections were, if not cheap, sometimes secondhand. Having brooded for a while and drifted fifty yards or so, he took to his sculls again and, turning the boat’s nose, pushed out through the reefs to the open sea.

It was from here that he could see the island properly, and as he had so often seen it when fishing for palu or sailing for pleasure. A wonderful sight, either by the light of the moon or the full light of day, as now.

Broad-based, beyond the foaming reefs it lay, rising from the beach palms in a tempest of trees all blown by the wind to the heights where once the sandalwood grew, and showing clear from out here the cliff fall where a torrent tumbled, a white plume against the green. Ceiba, breadfruit palm, tree fern and lesser redwood all blowing and tossing to the trade wind; and there, a mushroom brown break in the foliage, the village of Sru, headman of the west side—the same who had laid out Sipi with a club in the good old island fashion.

The tide was still on the ebb, and out here the southward-running current was strengthened by the tide. Flexner, drifting and dreaming and fighting his trade battles over again, had let the boat go as it wished and as a result the break in the reefs was no longer visible. He might have drifted farther had not his eye been caught by something away on the water to starboard.

He thought at first that it was a dead fish floating just awash. Then he knew it wasn’t, for there were no gulls about. Besides, sharks don’t allow dead fish to float for long. He turned the boat and pulled toward the thing, urged not so much by simple curiosity as by the instinct of the naturalist, for something told him that this was not wreckage or driftwood from some island. Close to it now, it showed to be a great mass of some whitish substance, lumpy and mottled and veined with red. Gruesome, somehow, and repellent to the eye, but striking. No one could see that piece of flotsam without pausing to ask, “What on earth is it?”

The boat’s nose came up against it with a gentle dunch, and Flexner, who had drawn in his sculls, leaned over and handled the stuff. It was as big as a big man and its shape was roughly that of a man wrapped in sacking. The end he had hold of was rounded like a head; there was a neck; then the mass swelled to the form of shoulders and tapered gently to the other extremity.

Just as a potato or flint takes a human or other form, so had this thing obeyed the law which rules over the world of freaks.

He tried its weight and found that, though he could raise the head a bit from the water, it would be impossible to get the thing on board. He desisted, and, kneeling on the grating in the bow, wiped the sweat from his forehead. His lips had gone dry as pumice stone, and his heart was now cleaving to his ribs like a bat to a wall, and now fluttering, batlike, before making another cleave.

He thought for a moment he would die, for the smashing news had come to him from the void that he had struck ambergris.

What settled the business was a thing like a tiger’s claw sticking on the mass. It was one of the hooks from the suckers of a great squid’s immense and powerful tentacles.

He had never seen ambergris before, but he knew it by description; and now as his heart recovered itself and he could think before taking action, he saw clearly that this was no chance business but had to do with the drama of the night before.

The cachalot, evidently wounded either by the squid or the reef, had got clear and made north, swimming against the Kiro Shiwo. Up north it had spat out the ambergris, which had floated down on the current. A mathematician might have told from the flow of the current and the speed of the cachalot in its flight exactly where the stuff had been voided, but this was a matter of indifference to Flexner.

He had to salvage the stuff. How? He had heard enough from Pacific men’s talk to know that it was worth many thousands of pounds; the breaking away of any part of it would be a heavy loss. He had the grains and a bucket half full of line. The grains were useless ; it was impossible to tell the result of digging a fish spear into that mass of stuff—it might mean cleavage. Difficult enough to deal with as it was, it would be impossible to salvage it altogether if it were in two parts.

He brought the line from the bow to the stern, fastened a bight round the “neck” of the thing and the line to the after-thwart, then he tested the pull, took the sculls, and started.

He was south of the island a good way.

The Kiro Shiwo had carried him along with it and the tremendous question arose as to how he would be able to make enough way against it with the heavy tow?

Would the thing that had brought him fortune deny him fortune?

Every now and then he turned his head to see how Levua lay and if he were making progress; between whiles the towrope held his eye. He could see whether it was taut or not, but a towrope is never uniformly taut—a movement of the water, a slight diminution of the speed of the towing craft will slacken it; there is no uniformity of pull.

Sometimes he stopped rowing and, getting to the stern, hauled the tow closer to see how the rope held. After one of these examinations and with infinite difficulty he shifted the rope from the neck-shaped depression to below the bulge of the shoulders and did it so well that the pull of the rope was still fore and aft with the thing; had it been otherwise the mass would have been towed sidewise and would have made progress impossible.

But all this took time, and as he stood up from the job and looked toward Levua his heart half sank. He had made very little way. Fortunately the wind had died with noon and slack tide was due, but one could never tell in these seas what was coming from moment to moment, and if a squall were to rise or even if the wind were to wake up and blow from the north—well, good-by to Fortune. He took up the sculls again.

A burgomaster gull passed him with a cry that cut his nerves like a steel whip, and now from the sea to starboard pop-pop-pop, breaking from the water in one particular spot as if fired from a machine gun, came silver arrowheads, flying fish with black, staring, sightless eyes, flittering into the water to starboard and right athwart the course of the boat. If some great fish were following them close to the surface and were to foul the ambergris——

He drove the thought away and pulled.

Yes, he was making way; the change from slack had occurred and the tide was now running into the lagoon of Levua.

An hour later he was inside the reefs. The fellows on board the Golden Hope were getting the last of the trade stuff and provisions over into the boat alongside, and Bartells, superintending the business, came to the rail as Flexner drew alongside.

“Hello!” cried Bartells. “What are you towin’?”

“Shy us a rope,” said Flexner.

He brought the boat alongside just aft of the provision boat, which was loading from the fore hatch.

Bartells, leaning on the rail, looked over down at the stuff that was now lifting to the swell of the incoming tide and duddering against the boat side.

“Ambergris,” said Flexner.

“Gosh Almighty!” said Bartells. He had been in the whaling business and could measure the full size of the business at a glance.

Bartells was a friend of Flexner’s, liked him, and regretted his having been fired. Bartells had his own opinion of old Lombard, who, according to Bartells, would skin the devil and sell the hoofs for glue—if he could get the chance.

“A moment,” said Bartells. “You ain’t in the company’s employ no longer. Was your discharge dating from when?”

“From yesterday, when Mr. Arrow took over,” replied Flexner, vaguely wondering but somehow guessing what the other was driving at.

“But it’s on the contract you are to get a free passage home if so be you want it?”

“Yes.”

“You found that stuff outside the three-mile limit,” went on the captain, “for I was watching you. Consequentially it’s yours.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’re open to take cargo for private owners; that’s my instructions. You, being no longer in the company’s employ, come to me asking me to take your stuff to Frisco at ordinary freight rates—is that your meaning?”

“Yes,” said Flexner.

Here was a man thinking of his interests and safeguarding him from the rapacity of the company, so that there would be no bother at all about landing and disposing of his treasure. It is good to have a friend like that. He wanted to speak, but words failed him and indeed Bartells gave him no time.

The captain, with a pull of his whiskers and another glance at the floating gray mass, turned to Jarvis, the mate.

“Rig a tackle and get that stuff on board for Mr. Flexner,” he said.

An hour later in the cabin, he said, “I’m a judge of weights, and that stuff weighs all two hundred pounds and a bit more, and amber-grease is worth twenty-five dollars an ounce in the market. That’s five pounds of your money. You can add it up; it’s a tidy fortune. Well, here’s luck and chin-chin.”

That night on the veranda of the old trader’s house Flexner and Arrow sat smoking and talking. Flexner would sleep ashore that night, as the Golden Hope was not due to start till noon.

In the few tremendous hours since morning Flexner had been changed from a man without prospects to a man of substance, and he had risen to the business and the enjoyment of it. The whisky in the bottle on the cane table was several inches lower. Not that either man had exceeded; they were quite sober—and because of this, perhaps, it was that a reaction came in Flexner’s mood.

He fell suddenly silent and sad. He seemed contemplating something at a long distance from the old trader’s house, then he made a noise in his throat that meant recognition of a fact and disapproval of it.

“What’s wrong with you now?” asked Arrow, pausing in the act of pouring himself out some more whisky.

“Nothing,” said Flexner, “only I was thinking that all the ambergris in the world wouldn’t get me home for Christmas Day.”

He spoke with an edge to his voice—an edge that indicated a distinct grouch.

“My God!” said Arrow to himself, putting down the bottle. “Old Lombard was right.”

He went into the house to fetch his tobacco pouch. A cane chair got in his way and he kicked it viciously.

He felt like that.