While David and I inspected the house and grounds, McHenry and Llewellyn sat at the wine.  Polonsky had a curious and wisely chosen household.  His butler was a Javanese, his chef a Quan-tung Chinese, his valet a Japanese, his chambermaid a Martinique negress, and his chauffeur an American expert.  These had nothing in common and could not ally themselves to cheat him, he said.

As I came back to the front veranda McHenry and Llewellyn were talking excitedly.

“I’ve had my old lady nineteen years,” said McHenry, boastfully, “and she wouldn’t speak to me if she met me on the streets of Papeete.  She wouldn’t dare to in public until I gave her the high sign.  You’re a bloody fool makin’ equals of the natives, and throwin’ away money on those cinema girls the way you do.”

This incensed Llewellyn, who was of chiefly Tahitian blood, and who claimed kings of Wales as his ancestors.  Although extremely aristocratic in his attitude toward strangers, his native strain made him resent McHenry’s rascally arrogance as a reflection upon his mother’s race.

“Shut up, Mac!” he half shouted.  “You talk too much.  If it hadn’t been for that same old lady of yours, you’d have died of delirium-tremens or fallen into the sea long ago.”

“Aye,” said the trader, meditatively, “that vahine has saved my life, but I’m not goin’ to sacrifice my dignity as a white man.  If ye let go everything, the damn’ natives’ll walk over ye, and ye’ll make nothin’ out o’ them.”

Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was the “perfec’ im’ge” of a man of that name, and that he owned a little cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived.  I walked like him, was of the same size, and had the “same kin’ funny face.”

She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked him over narrowly.  His name was Dixon,—­Lovaina never got a name right,—­an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short, solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye.  He was not good-looking.  He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.

“I’m lucky to be here at all,” he said seriously.  “I have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete.  We had eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch.  Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven o’clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning.  It was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,—­so the steersman said,—­and struck us hard.  We were swamped in a minute.  The water fell on us like your Niagara.  Christ!  We gave up for gone, all of us, the other five all kanakas.  We heeled over until the deck was under water,—­of course we’ve got no freeboard