w the fourth month completed, and still there was no change
or sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds
of every size and shape and density, some black as ink stains, some
delicate as lawn, threw the marvel of her Southern brightness over the
same lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the
perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the
masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of
the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,
with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the
American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master
mariner in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes
and toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was
society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he
had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution; he was one whose
hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace
about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,
and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in
Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged
from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old
employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and
all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.

Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now
raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the
purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling
as they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a
touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool and, squatting
on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.
Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from
farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in
the distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel
ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If
a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that
infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers,
perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the
London clerk.