HIS thirtieth birthday! His first youth was behind him, with all its heartburnings, its failures, its manifold humiliations. What had he done these years past but drift, forlorn, penniless, and unattached, over those shallows where others had stuck and prospered—a gentle decline all the way from college in hope and fulfilment? The army and civil service had alike refused him. In the colonies he had toiled¹ unremittingly in half a hundred characters,—groom, cook, boundary rider, steamer roustabout,—always sinking, always failing. Then those last four years in the Islands, and his tumble-down store in Vaiala! Had life nothing more for him than an endless succession of hot, empty days on the farthest beach of Upolu, with scarcely more to eat than the commonest Kanaka, and no other outlet² for his energies than the bartering³ of salt beef for coprah and an occasional night’s fishing on the reef? On the other hand, he was well in body, and had times of even thinking himself happy in this fag-end of the world. The old store, rotten and leaky though it was, gave him a dryer⁵ bed than he had often found in his wandering life, and the food, if monotonous⁶ and poor, was better than the empty belly⁷ with which he had often begun an arduous⁸ day in Australia. And the place was extraordinarily[110] beautiful. Yes, he had always admitted that, even in his blackest days of depression, though the beauty of it seemed almost to oppress him at times. But beautiful or not, this was a strange place for his father’s son, a strange thirtieth birthday for one who had begun the world with every prospect⁹ of faring well and rising high in its esteem¹⁰, and the sense of his failure again seized him by the throat.

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