He
was waiting for the invitation. In the meantime he went aboard the
Snark and took possession of her library, delighted by the quantity
of scientific books, and shocked, as I learned afterwards, by the
inordinate amount of fiction. The Nature Man never wastes time on
fiction.
After a week or so, my conscience smote me, and I invited him to
dinner at a downtown hotel.
He arrived, looking unwontedly stiff and uncomfortable in a cotton
jacket. When invited to peel it off, he beamed his gratitude and
joy, and did so, revealing his sun-gold skin, from waist to
shoulder, covered only by a piece of fish-net of coarse twine and
large of mesh. A scarlet loin-cloth completed his costume. I began
my acquaintance with him that night, and during my long stay in
Tahiti that acquaintance ripened into friendship.
"So you write books," he said, one day when, tired and sweaty, I
finished my morning's work.
"I, too, write books," he announced.
Aha, thought I, now at last is he going to pester me with his
literary efforts. My soul was in revolt. I had not come all the
way to the South Seas to be a literary bureau.
"This is the book I write," he explained, smashing himself a
resounding blow on the chest with his clenched fist. "The gorilla
in the African jungle pounds his chest till the noise of it can be
heard half a mile away."
"A pretty good chest," quoth I, admiringly; "it would even make a
gorilla envious."
And then, and later, I learned the details of the marvellous book
Ernest Darling had written. Twelve years ago he lay close to death.
He weighed but ninety pounds, and was too weak to speak. The
doctors had given him up. His father, a practising physician, had
given him up. Consultations with other physicians had been held
upon him. There was no hope for him. Overstudy (as a school-
teacher and as a university student) and two successive attacks of
pneumonia were responsible for his breakdown. Day by day he was
losing strength. He could extract no nutrition from the heavy foods
they gave him; nor could pellets and powders help his stomach to do
the work of digestion. Not only was he a physical wreck, but he was
a mental wreck. His mind was overwrought. He was sick and tired of
medicine, and he was sick and tired of persons. Human speech jarred
upon him. Human attentions drove him frantic. The thought came to
him that since he was going to die, he might as well die in the
open, away from all the bother and irritation. And behind this idea
lurked a sneaking idea that perhaps he would not die after all if
only he could escape from the heavy foods, the medicines, and the
well-intentioned persons who made him frantic.
