Chapter 15

CHAPTER XV--A DISCOURSE ON MANNERS

The days passed, and Tudor seemed loath to leave the hospitality of
Berande. Everything was ready for the start, but he lingered on,
spending much time in Joan's company and thereby increasing the
dislike Sheldon had taken to him. He went swimming with her, in
point of rashness exceeding her; and dynamited fish with her,
diving among the hungry ground-sharks and contesting with them for
possession of the stunned prey, until he earned the approval of the
whole Tahitian crew. Arahu challenged him to tear a fish from a
shark's jaws, leaving half to the shark and bringing the other half
himself to the surface; and Tudor performed the feat, a flip from
the sandpaper hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches
of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted, while Sheldon,
looking on, realized that here was the hero of her adventure-dreams
coming true. She did not care for love, but he felt that if ever
she did love it would be that sort of a man--"a man who exhibited,"
was his way of putting it.

He felt himself handicapped in the presence of Tudor, who had the
gift of making a show of all his qualities. Sheldon knew himself
for a brave man, wherefore he made no advertisement of the fact.
He knew that just as readily as the other would he dive among
ground-sharks to save a life, but in that fact he could find no
sanction for the foolhardy act of diving among sharks for the half
of a fish. The difference between them was that he kept the
curtain of his shop window down. Life pulsed steadily and deep in
him, and it was not his nature needlessly to agitate the surface so
that the world could see the splash he was making. And the effect
of the other's amazing exhibitions was to make him retreat more
deeply within himself and wrap himself more thickly than ever in
the nerveless, stoical calm of his race.

"You are so stupid the last few days," Joan complained to him.
"One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something. You
don't seem to have an idea in your head above black labour and
cocoanuts. What is the matter?"

Sheldon smiled and beat a further retreat within himself, listening
the while to Joan and Tudor propounding the theory of the strong
arm by which the white man ordered life among the lesser breeds.
As he listened Sheldon realized, as by revelation, that that was
precisely what he was doing. While they philosophized about it he
was living it, placing the strong hand of his race firmly on the
shoulders of the lesser breeds that laboured on Berande or menaced
it from afar. But why talk about it? he asked himself. It was
sufficient to do it and be done with it.

He said as much, dryly and quietly, and found himself