THE EBB-TIDE.* TIM plot of this story, if what is
rather a collection of incidents can be called a plot, is almost commonplace, but for one startling exception which we must not reveal. How
* The Ebb-Tide : a Trio and Quartette. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourn. London: William Heinemann. often before has not something like it been used in dozens of stories for boys P Three desperate men stealing a smallpox- stricken ship for the sake of its valuable cargo ; the giving way to prolonged and brutish drunken bouts, to the imminent peril of the ship ; the discovery of an unnamed pearl island; the murderous lust for treasure, and its consequences. Yet such is the wonderful alchemy of its writers that we are carried racing through it as their schooner, 'Farallone,' might have raced before the trade-winds of the South Pacific. Never for a page does the interest flag, and when it comes to an abrupt and rather tantalising conclusion we are tempted to ask, like the man who is never content to leave off at the point of a good story, " Well, and what happened then?" Why it is so enthralling it is hard to say, for it is, after all, but the history of the doings of three bad men during a month in their lives, and of a rather enigmatical fourth. It certainly does not lie in any feminine interest. Here, as in Treasure Island, that is conspicuous by its absence, nor do we once miss it. The interest lies, we suppose, chiefly in the study of the depravity of character, which is yet so ably handled that no boy, however weak-headed, would be led to think such doings either grand or manly.
Of the past lives of the four men we are told next to nothing, and of their future lives we have but the motto on the title-page, " There is a tide in the affairs of men," and the title itself, to suggest to us the hope that having reached the extreme ebb of weakness and wickedness, the tide will turn and set steadily towards a better way of life. This is our first introduction to the trio
" 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 puree 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. Ho was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing, and the dainties of the sickroom ; he lay here now, in the cold open, exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was besides infirm, the disease shook him to the vitals ; and his companions watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled them, and contended with and conquered their abhorrence. The disgust attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same time, and with more than compensating strength, shame for a feeling so inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service ; and even the evil they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least support- able when it draws near the merely sensual and selfish. Some- times they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders ; and when the poor wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life. There is no one but has some virtue : that of the clerk was courage; and he would make baste to reassure them in a pleasantry not always decent. 'I'm all right, pals,' he gasped once, this is the thing to strengthen the muscles of the larynx.' Well, you take the cake I ' cried the captain.—` 0, I'm good. plucked enough,' pursued the sufferer with a broken utterance. But it do seem bloomin' hard to me, that I should be the only party down with this form of vice, and the only one to do the funny business. I think one of you other parties might wake up. Tell a fellow something !' " (pp. 9-12.) The most original character in the book is that of this utterly vile and " bad-hearted little cockney clerk," whom men, after having associated with for a short time, pass in the street as if he had been a dog. There is about him a superfluity of wickedness and cruelty. " 'Ope you made 'em jump," he remarks, when talking of slave labour with the fourth man. He even writes to his sweetheart for nothing in the world but to cause her pain and jealousy; and so entirely is he without shame, that he is anxious to read aloud to his two companions in misery, as a "prime lark," "the sight of crammers " he has concocted for that end. The creature firers and jeers with a sinister kind of humour even at himself when anything goes wrong, and his evil vanity makes him exult in the supremacy of the wickedness that is in him. He is absolutely without any virtue, unless a depraved and devilish kind of courage, such as might still cling to a lost soul, can be called a virtue. His vulgar
cockney slang and blasphemy, for Mr. Stevenson does not spare us strong language when he wishes to enhance a strong situation, adds a last and convincing touch to a character so revolting, that even when the terrible end comes, there seems no room for any feeling but one of satis- faction that justice has been done. Very excellent too, is the hearty, disgraced sea-captain, who, through drunkenness, has lost his ship and all in her, and is yet possessed of certain
manly qualities that from time to time make us like him in spite of ourselves. Herrick, too, the refined and ineffectual University man, smarting painfully and hopelessly under the sense of the disgraceful failure of his career, is uncommonly good. There is something attractive about the man, and we watch him through his career with keen interest. We are glad when the perils of his position call out something like true manliness and resolution, and are really anxious that he shall not again fall back when the last supreme temptation overtakes him. The most baffling character is that of Attwater, the man in possession of the pearl island, whom the captain and the clerk determine instantly to murder for the sake of his treasure. A keen man of the world, with plenty of savoir-faire
and at the same time a passionate evangelical enthusiast and
fatalist, earnest and flippant by turns, asserting his dislike to men and hatred of women, and yet anxious to win souls to their Redeemer, he alternately attracts and repels the reader, just as he does Herrick. The man is possessed of a splendid courage, veiled under a somewhat languid exterior, and a power of dominating other men in spite of themselves. Sitting at dinner, alone and at night, with his would-be murderers, and quite aware of their intention, knowing that besides him- self there are only two native boys and a woman on the island, the rest of the natives having been carried off by a devastating
visitation of smallpox, it is thus that he holds one of them, at least, in check :—
"' You must not think it was always so,' replied Attwater. This was once a busy shore, although now, hark ! you can hear the solitude. I find it stimulating. And talking of the sound of bells, kindly follow a little experiment of mine in silence.' There was a silver boll at hie right hand to call the servants ; he made them a sign to stand still, struck the bell with force, and leaned eagerly forward. The note rose clear and strong ; it rang out clear and far into the night and over the deserted island ; it died into the distance until there only lingered at the porches of the ear a vibration that was sound no longer. Empty houses, empty sea, solitary beaches 1 ' said Attwater. And yet God hears the bell! And yet we sit in this verandah on a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators ! And you call that solitude?' There followed a bar of silence, during which the captain sat mesmerised. Then Attwater laughed softly. ' These are the diversions of a lonely man,' he resumed, and possibly not in good taste.' • . . . That's a queer idea of yours !' cried the captain, bursting with a sigh from the spell that had bound him. So you mean to tell me now, that you sit here
evenings and ring up well, ring on the angels
by yourself ? As a matter of historic fact, and since you put it directly, one does not,' said Attwater. Why ring a bell, when there flows out from oneself and everything about one a far more momentous silence, the least beat of my heart and the least thought in my mind tiehoinq into eternity for ever and for ever and for ever P'" (pp. 169-70.)
In carrying out any punishment that he believes to be merited, Attwater is stern even to cruelty, yet never for the sake of cruelty, as his way of dealing with one of his intended murderers will show :— "Davis had not yet moved. He stood astonished, with his back to the flgure-head, his hands clutching it behind him, his body inclined forward from the waist. Attwater turned deliberately and covered him with his rifle. ' Davis,' he cried, in a voice like a trumpet, I give you sixty seconds to make your peace with liod ' Davis looked and his mind awoke. He did not dream of self-defence, he did not reach for his pistol. He drew himself up instead to face death, with a quivering nostril.—' I guess l'll not trouble the Old Man,' be said, considering the job I was on. I guess it's better busi- ness just to shut my face.' Attwater fired ; there came a spas- modic movement of the victim, and immediately above the middle of his forehead, a. black hole marred the whiteness of the figure- head. A dreadful pause; then again the report, and the solid sound and jar of the bullet in the wood ; and this time the captain had felt the wind of it along his cheek. A third shot, and he was bleeding from one ear; and along the levelled rifle Attwater smiled like a Hod Indian. The cruel game of which he was the puppet was now clear to Davis ; three times he had drunk of death, and he must look to drink of it seven times more before he was despatched. He held up his hand. Steady I' he cried • I'll take your sixty seconds Good I ' said Attwater. The captain shut his eyes tight like a child ; he held his hand up at last with a tragic and ridiculous gesture.—' My God, for Christ's sake, look after my two kids !' he said ; and then after a pause and a falter, for Christ's sake, Amen.' And he opened his eyes and looked down the rifle with a quivering mouth. But don't keep fooling me long !' he pleaded.—' That's all your prayer ?' !mired Attwater, with a singular ring in his voice.—' Guess so,' said Davis.—` So,' said Attwater, resting the butt-end of his rifle on the ground, is that done ? Is your peace made with Heaven P Because it is with me.' " (pp. 229-31.)
Mr. Stevenson does not give us many descriptions of natural scenery, and those he does give are very brief, but so vividly and graphically drawn that the blue skies and the almost translucent water reflecting the waving palm-trees of the South Pacific instantly seem to photograph themselves on the mind's eye. It would be impossible to say where Mr. Lloyd Osbourne's part in the book comes in. We are inclined to think not in the writing, unless he has mastered Mr. Stevenson's style, as a clever copyist has sometimes been known to deceive a judge of Old Masters. Though The Ebb-Tide is certainly inferior to Treasure Island in plot, it is, we think, superior to it as a study of character. It is for this, and the beauty of
style, that the elders will enjoy it, while the youngsters will delight in the stirring scenes through which they are carried. Mr. Stevenson has added one more memorable study in wickedness to his unique gallery of bad men,—that of the "bad-hearted little cockney clerk."
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