HE three men reached the landing in their usual "steamer day" order—Zwarg, impressive, punctual, perspiring; Cobb, quick of step, eager, virile; Chisholm, slow-moving, amiably nonchalant.
They stood in silence for a while, shading their eyes from the glare and watching a trim white launch slip through the passage in the barrier reef.
Zwarg was the first to speak.
"I do not onderstand," he complained to the sun-bathed universe. "Dree days overdue—dree—und now a launch!"
"We shall soon know, anyway," muttered Cobb.
Chisholm yawned.
"Und I haf two ton dis trip," added the German, with a sidelong glance at Chisholm—"two ton."
He had never forgotten that on three separate and surprising occasions the Englishman had beaten him in copra shipments. But Chisholm refused to bite. For one thing, he considered it too hot to talk, and for another, he was not going to let Zwarg know of his defeat on the present occasion until absolutely necessary.
It was this attitude in Chisholm that particularly annoyed Zwarg. With an appearance of utter indifference, the Englishman sometimes made a shipment of copra that would have sent the German into a perspiration of delight. It was a pose, of course, but none the less aggravating for that. Moreover, by all the canons of South Sea commerce, which Zwarg had absorbed with Teutonic thoroughness, Chisholm should never have succeeded in getting any copra at all. His stock of trade goods was beneath contempt, and, as for the man himself, twice a week he closed his store and took the entire day off to play some absurd game of bat and ball with a neighbouring Bull and his copper-coloured team, to spear fish with the natives on the reef, or attend a kava ceremony.
To Zwarg, this behaviour was so opposed to commercial success that for a time he strongly suspected Chisholm of supplying "grog" to the natives, an unpardonable offence; but when, after painstaking research, he failed to discover either a drunken nigger or a bottle of whisky on the island, he was forced to abandon even this solution to the mystery, and attribute his rival's occasional successes to a distressing element known as Anglo-Saxon lack.
He was not to know, and there was no one to tell him, that in reality Chisholm entertained a tremendous respect for his rival's business ability, often wished that he had it himself, and fought it tooth and nail with the only weapons he possessed—the power of making friends. It was not for the sake of his health that he coached the Bull's wooden-headed team when the thermometer read a hundred in the shade, nor when he tore his boots and temper to ribbons on the reef, spearing fish. He had long since passed the new-comer's joy in such things, but they brought copra.
Apart from this healthy business rivalry, the two traders on Miatu mingled uncommonly well. This was mostly due to Cobb, an American planter. Every evening they met on his spacious verandah, and, lying in cane chairs, smoked or talked with the easy intermittance of old acquaintances. Socially, Zwarg regarded Chisholm as one of the least obnoxious Englishmen he had ever met. Chisholm considered Zwarg "quite a decent sort, for a German." Herein lay the humour, or the tragedy, of the situation; they thought they understood one another, and now the launch that chugged alongside the landing-steps bore proof of their mistake.
In it were a somewhat soiled engineer and a post-office official from Suva.
"Well, well, well?" chirped Cobb, by way of greeting, but there was no response. The usually communicative official seemed hardly to notice the three expectant white figures on the landing.
"Mail!" he snapped, and, flinging ashore a bulky sack, signed to the engineer to get under way.
"Here, what's the game?" bleated Cobb, as the launch slowly drew away from the landing, churning the indigo waters into white froth with its reversed propeller.
"Find it all in there," shouted the official, waving his hand at the mail sack, "and enough, too. Sorry, can't stop. Got to make Mago to-night. S-long!"
The three men on the landing stared at the mail sack, then at one another.
"Well, I'm darned!" muttered Cobb.
"Seems in a deuce of a hurry," commented Chisholm.
Zwarg was stricken into silence.
"All in here, eh?" resumed the American, picking up the sack. "Guess we'd better look into it."
They passed up the beach in a strange silence, and stood round a wicker table on Cobb's verandah while he sorted the mail. It was mostly newspapers, and they gave letters preference, tearing them open and devouring their contents with an avidity only possible to those cut off from the outside world for months on end.