"I looked at it again, and I said: `Who would have thought that the overseer (监工) of my plantation on the peninsula (半岛), to whom I lent two hundred francs, had genius? Do you see anything in the picture?'
"`No,' she said, `it does not resemble (像) the plantation and I have never seen cocoa-nuts with blue leaves; but they are mad in Paris, and it may be that your brother will be able to sell it for the two hundred francs you lent Strickland.'
"Well, we packed it up and we sent it to my brother. And at last I received a letter from him. What do you think he said?
"`I received your picture,' he said, `and I confess I thought it was a joke that you had played on me. I would not have given the cost of postage for the picture.
"`I was half afraid to show it to the gentleman who had spoken to me about it. Imagine my surprise when he said it was a masterpiece, and offered me thirty thousand francs.
"`I dare say he would have paid more, but frankly I was so taken aback that I lost my head; I accepted the offer before I was able to collect myself.'"
Then Monsieur Cohen said an admirable thing.
"I wish that poor Strickland had been still alive. I wonder what he would have said when I gave him twenty-nine thousand eight hundred francs for his picture." {1}
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I lived at the Hotel de la Fleur, and Mrs. Johnson, the proprietress (女业主), had a sad story to tell of lost opportunity.
After Strickland's death certain of his effects (所有物) were sold by auction in the market-place at Papeete (帕皮提，塔希提首府), and she went to it herself because there was among the truck an American stove (火炉) she wanted. She paid twenty-seven francs for it.
"There were a dozen pictures," she told me, "but they were unframed, and nobody wanted them. Some of them sold for as much as ten francs, but mostly they went for five or six.
"Just think, if I had bought them I should be a rich woman now."
But Tiare Johnson would never under any circumstances have been rich. She could not keep money.
The daughter of a native (土著) and an English sea-captain settled in Tahiti, when I knew her she was a woman of fifty, who looked older, and of enormous proportions.
Tall and extremely stout (结实的), she would have been of imposing presence if the great good-nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express anything but kindliness. {2}
Her arms were like legs of mutton, her breasts like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression of almost indecent nakedness, and vast chin succeeded to vast chin.
I do not know how many of them there were. They fell away voluminously into the capaciousness of her bosom.
She was dressed usually in a pink Mother Hubbard (宽大长罩衣), and she wore all day long a large straw hat.
But when she let down her hair, which she did now and then, for she was vain of it, you saw that it was long and dark and curly; and her eyes had remained young and vivacious.
Her laughter was the most catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat, and would grow louder and louder till her whole vast body shook.
She loved three things -- a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man. To have known her is a privilege.
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She was the best cook on the island, and she adored good food.
From morning till night you saw her sitting on a low chair in the kitchen, surrounded by a Chinese cook and two or three native girls, giving her orders, chatting sociably with all and sundry, and tasting the savoury messes she devised.
When she wished to do honour to a friend she cooked the dinner with her own hands.
Hospitality was a passion with her, and there was no one on the island who need go without a dinner when there was anything to eat at the Hotel de la Fleur.
She never turned her customers out of her house because they did not pay their bills. She always hoped they would pay when they could.
There was one man there who had fallen on adversity (窘境), and to him she had given board and lodging for several months.
When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him without payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers.
She could not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said, and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a franc a day for cigarettes.
She used him with the same affability (亲切) as those of her clients who paid their bills once a week.
Age and obesity had made her inapt (不合适的) for love, but she took a keen interest in the amatory affairs of the young.
She looked upon venery (性欲) as the natural occupation for men and women, and was ever ready with precept and example from her own wide experience.
"I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover," she said. "He was third mate (mate 为大副，third mate 指"三副") on the Tropic Bird. A good-looking boy."
She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
"My father was a sensible man."
"What did he do?" I asked.
"He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me marry Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older, of course, but he was good-looking too."
Tiare -- her father had called her by the name of the white, scented flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt, will always draw you back to Tahiti in the end, however far you may have roamed -- Tiare remembered Strickland very well. {3}
"He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking about Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he never had any money.
"When I heard he was in town, I used to send a boy to find him and make him come to dinner with me. I got him a job once or twice, but he couldn't stick to anything.
"After a little while he wanted to get back to the bush, and one morning he would be gone."
Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left Marseilles.
He worked his passage on a sailing vessel (船) that was making the trip from Auckland to San Francisco, and he arrived with a box of paints, an easel, and a dozen canvases.
He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he had found work in Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house outside the town.
I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself at home. Tiare told me that he said to her once:
"I'd been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me: `Why, there it is.' And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island.
"I knew right away that there was the place I'd been looking for all my life.
"Then we came near, and I seemed to recognise it. Sometimes when I walk about it all seems familiar. I could swear I've lived here before."
"Sometimes it takes them like that," said Tiare. "I've known men come on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking in cargo, and never go back.
"And I've known men who came here to be in an office for a year, and they cursed the place, and when they went away they took their dying oath they'd hang themselves before they came back again,
"and in six months you'd see them land once more, and they'd tell you they couldn't live anywhere else."
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.
Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia (乡愁) for a home they know not. {4}
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They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage.
They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.
Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent (永久的), to which they may attach themselves.
