第90章

The time for my departure from Tahiti.According to the gracious custom of the island, presents were given me by the persons with whom I had been thrown in contact -- baskets made of the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, mats of pandanus, fans; and Tiare gave me three little pearls and three jars of guava-jelly made with her own plump hands.When the mail-boat, stopping for twenty-four hours on its way from Wellington to San Francisco, blew the whistle that warned the passengers to get on board, Tiare clasped me to her vast bosom, so that I seemed to sink into a billowy sea, and pressed her red lips to mine.Tears glistened in her eyes.And when we steamed slowly out of the lagoon, making our way gingerly through the opening in the reef, and then steered for the open sea, a certain melancholy fell upon me.The breeze was laden still with the pleasant odours of the land.Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again.A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.

Not much more than a month later I was in London; and after I had arranged certain matters which claimed my immediate attention, thinking Mrs.Strickland might like to hear what I knew of her husband's last years, I wrote to her.I had not seen her since long before the war, and I had to look out her address in the telephone-book.She made an appointment, and I went to the trim little house on Campden Hill which she now inhabited.She was by this time a woman of hard on sixty, but she bore her years well, and no one would have taken her for more than fifty.Her face, thin and not much lined, was of the sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in youth she must have been a much handsomer woman than in fact she was.Her hair, not yet very gray, was becomingly arranged, and her black gown was modish.I remembered having heard that her sister, Mrs.MacAndrew, outliving her husband but a couple of years, had left money to Mrs.Strickland; and by the look of the house and the trim maid who opened the door I judged that it was a sum adequate to keep the widow in modest comfort.

When I was ushered into the drawing-room I found that Mrs.

Strickland had a visitor, and when I discovered who he was, I guessed that I had been asked to come at just that time not without intention.The caller was Mr.Van Busche Taylor, an American, and Mrs.Strickland gave me particulars with a charming smile of apology to him.

"You know, we English are so dreadfully ignorant.You must forgive me if it's necessary to explain." Then she turned to me."Mr.Van Busche Taylor is the distinguished American critic.If you haven't read his book your education has been shamefully neglected, and you must repair the omission at once.He's writing something about dear Charlie, and he's come to ask me if I can help him."Mr.Van Busche Taylor was a very thin man with a large, bald head, bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small.He was quiet and exceedingly polite.He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland.I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs.Strickland put into her mention of her husband's name, and while the pair conversed I took stock of the room in which we sat.Mrs.Strickland had moved with the times.Gone were the Morris papers and gone the severe cretonnes, gone were the Arundel prints that had adorned the walls of her drawingroom in Ashley Gardens; the room blazed with fantastic colour, and I wondered if she knew that those varied hues, which fashion had imposed upon her, were due to the dreams of a poor painter in a South Sea island.She gave me the answer herself.

"What wonderful cushions you have," said Mr.Van Busche Taylor."Do you like them?" she said, smiling."Bakst, you know."And yet on the walls were coloured reproductions of several of Strickland's best pictures, due to the enterprise of a publisher in Berlin.

"You're looking at my pictures," she said, following my eyes."Of course, the originals are out of my reach, but it's a comfort to have these.The publisher sent them to me himself.They're a great consolation to me." "They must be very pleasant to live with," said Mr.Van Busche Taylor.