olomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they
go away from them. A man needs only to be careful--and lucky--to live
a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort.
He must have the hallmark of the inevitable white man stamped upon his
soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand carelessness
of odds, a certain colossal self-satisfaction, and a racial egotism that
convinces him that one white is better than a thousand niggers every
day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able to clean out two
thousand niggers. For such are the things that have made the white man
inevitable. Oh, and one other thing--the white man who wishes to be
inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot
of himself; he must also fail to be too long on imagination. He must not
understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes of the
blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that
the white race has tramped its royal road around the world.

Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely
strung, and he possessed too much imagination. The world was too much
with him. He projected himself too quiveringly into his environment.
Therefore, the last place in the world for him to come was the Solomons.
He did not come, expecting to stay. A five weeks' stop-over between
steamers, he decided, would satisfy the call of the primitive he felt
thrumming the strings of his being. At least, so he told the lady
tourists on the MAKEMBO, though in different terms; and they worshipped
him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they would know only
the safety of the steamer's deck as she threaded her way through the
Solomons.

There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He
was a little shriveled wisp of a man, with a withered skin the color of
mahogany. His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his other
name, Captain Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to
scare naughty pickaninnies to righteousness from New Hanover to the
New Hebrides. He had farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and
hardship, the crack of Sniders and the lash of the overseers, had
wrested five millions of money in the form of beche-de-mer, sandalwood,
pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and copra, grasslands, trading
stations, and plantations. Captain Malu's little finger, which was
broken, had more inevitableness