It was hardly to be expected that they would ever quite understand why a man who could "blot out a cove's blinker as easy wiv his fist as wiv his gun" (as I was told that "Reefer" Ogiston, penal absentee and pearler, put it one day) and who "'peared mo' than comfitabl' heeled fo' coin," should be "light an' looney enuf tu go roun' smearin' smashed barnculs on sail cloth"; and yet it was on that very score--or at least to their quick comprehension of what I was driving at in my pictures--that the "beach" of Kai rendered me a priceless service. Almost from the outset they began to "twig" my marines, to feel the living atmosphere I was striving to paint into them. They were all men who had lived by the sea, on the sea; yes, and not a few of them had worked under the sea. Well, when I began to see those deep-set, wrinkle-clutched eyes squint to a focus of concentration, and, presently, the quick heave of a hairy chest as the message of the canvas flashed home, I knew that I was on the right track. Nothing less than that would have given me the courage to go on working, as I had set myself to do, on a steadily decreasing allowance of absinthe, a certain supply of which, of course, I had brought with me from Noumea.
So much for me and my relations to Kai at the time of which I am writing. Now as to Bell....
"Who is that tall, square-jawed chap who looks as though he was not quite sober?" I had asked a day or two after I landed.
"Yank--calls himself Bell," Jackson replied laconically; adding that he was "not quite sober" when he tried to take a cross-cut over Tuka-tuva Reef with the _Flying Scud_, that he was "not quite sober" when he hit the beach in a busted whaleboat, that he had been "not quite sober" all the time since, and that there was no doubt that he would still be "not quite sober" when the time came for him to leave the island, whether he went out with the tide in an outrigger canoe or shuffled off up the Golden Stairs. "Allus been pickled and allus goin' to be pickled," Jackson continued; then, qualifyingly: "Course I don't know he was pickled when he kum int' the world, but I'm willin' to lay any odds that he'll be pickled when he shuffles out of it."
Just about all of which was, or proved to be, "stryght dope."