The cold, the brutal policemen and guards, the venial justice, the crystallized charity in the name of a statistical Christ, arrested my hand.  I had known it all at first hand, asking no favor.  I believed that he would be worse off than in his chicken-coop.  He could wear anything or nearly nothing in Tahiti, and his old Prince Albert comforted him; but he would have to conform to dress rules in a stricter civilization.  Nature was a loving mother here and a shrewish hag there, at least toward the poor.  And yet I was uneasy at my own argument.

For a month or two he had led the talk between us and any others in the parc to new discoveries in medicine.  From his Fa’a seclusion he followed these very closely through European publications, for which his slender funds went.  He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such abject materialism as haunting the bishop’s palace for the cigar-stubs.

He would say that the purest joy in life is that which lifts us out of our daily existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it.

“This divine release from the common ways of men can be found only through art,” Stroganoff would apostrophize.  “The final and only true solution of life is to be found in the life of the saint.  True morality passes through virtue, which is rooted in sympathy into asceticism.  Renunciation only offers a complete release from the evils and terrors of existence.”

Kelly was on the bench one day when the Russian uttered this rule of the cenobite school.  They were good friends, but differed.  They agreed that the world was sick and needed a radical medicine.  Kelly was for a complete cure by ending private business through the workers seizing it when the time was ripe, which he believed would be soon.  Stroganoff was for an empery of wise men, of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who would kick out the statesmen and politicians, and manage things by enlightened pragmatism.  For the individual man who sought happiness his formula was as above—­retirement to an aery.

When Kelly was gone to practise on his accordion,—­he had opened a dancing academy at Fa’a,—­the octogenarian asked me if I had read of the recent achievements of the scientists who were making the old young.  He elaborated on the discoveries and experiments of Professor Leonard Huxley in England with thyroid gland injections, of Voronoff in France with the grafting of interstitial glands of monkeys, and of Eugen Steinach in Austria and Roux in Germany, with germ glands and X-rays.  Steinach, especially, he discoursed on, and drew a magazine picture of him from his Prince Albert.  The Vienna savant had a cordon of whiskers that made him resemble Stroganoff, and his eyes in the photograph peered through all one’s disguises.

“That is what grates me,” said Stroganoff.  “I am far from all these worth-while things, these men of brain.  I knew Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff before he became director of the Pasteur Institute.  Here I am a rotting hulk.  In the Caucasus I had kephir, and I used to carry kephir grains, and in America I, at least, could have kumiss or Ilya Ilich’s lait caille.  Look!  I came here as Ponce de Leon to Florida to find youth, or to keep from growing older; in a word to escape anno Domini.”