Miles and miles of coral reef, foam-dashed, and flown about bygulls—beyond the reef the hills and highlands of Paradise engraved ona sky of azure; a tall white lighthouse like a ghost in the smoky blueof the sea.
That is New Caledonia as you see it coming up from Sydney or Brisbane,and the lighthouse marks the entry to the harbor of Noumea.
For long years France exported to this Paradise all the evil passionsof man done up in the form of convicts; and though the exportation hasstopped, though the only prisoners now are those left over from the oldrégime and the libérés who may not return to France, the passionsremain.
Some of the descendants of the old deportees are good citizens, someare not. Monsieur Roche, who kept and maybe still keeps a restaurant inthe Rue Marengo, which opens off Coconut Square, was quite open with meon this point. His father, so he told me, had been exported unjustly.He had been a clock-maker and had made the clockwork that worked a bombthat blew up a deputy, or something of that sort—it was all a matterof politics; his father would not have hurt a fly in the ordinary wayof life, whereas Chauvin, the keeper of an opposition restaurant roundthe corner, his father had been an assassin. “Yes, monsieur, a brigand,and ’tis easy to see how the blood has come out in the son.”
Monsieur Roche knew everything about everybody in Noumea.
He told me some strange stories and one of the strangest had to do witha woman; one of the strangest-looking women I have ever seen.
A half-breed of extraordinary but faded beauty, gay as a wasp in yellowand black striped foulard, but with something about her that would haverepelled the mind, even if her beauty had been as fresh as the dew onthe tamarisk blossoms.
She was mad.
As she passed the café door where we were talking she glanced atMonsieur Roche, laughed and went on.
“That is Marianne Ribot,” said the old fellow, craning his neck to lookafter her, “daughter of Jacques Ribot, who came here a great many yearsago, served his sentence and settled down, marrying a Malay woman. Hesold tobacco in the Rue Austerlitz; he had two daughters by the woman:Marianne, whom you have seen, and Cerise. Twins and like as twocherries. They were beauties. There is a curious thing about races, ifyou have ever noticed it, monsieur. To a Frenchman or an Englishmantwo, shall we say, Japanese women will look pretty much alike; but ifthere exists a real likeness between two eastern women, even though itis not very strong to their fellows, a Westerner will be unable todistinguish between them; he will be unable to distinguish the littledifferences that count so much. It was so with the Ribot girls. WouldMonsieur like to hear their story?”
This is the story in my own words.
Some fifteen years ago the Hawk, a seven-hundred-ton brig, came intothe harbor of Noumea with a general cargo from Brisbane; the secondofficer was a young fellow named Carstairs, an exceedingly good-lookingindividual with a taking manner and a way with him where women wereconcerned.
Monsieur Roche, who was a philosopher, or at least a restaurant keeperwho had always kept his eyes open, gave it as his opinion that it werebetter for a man to be born ugly than very good-looking, and a boorthan a fascinator; better for himself and for others. Ho