who dwell in exile along these forgotten seaboards long for
news from Home. After dinner they would cluster about me on the club
verandah and clamor for those odds-and-ends of English gossip which are
not important enough for inclusion in the laconic cable despatches
posted daily on the club bulletin-board and which the two-months-old
newspapers seldom mention. They insisted that I repeat the jokes which
were being cracked by the comedians at the Criterion and the
Shaftesbury. They wanted to know if toppers and tailcoats were again
being worn in The Row. They pleaded for the gossip of the clubs in Pall
Mall and Piccadilly. They begged me to tell them about the latest books
and plays and songs. But after a time I persuaded them to do the
talking, while I lounged in a deep cane chair, a tall, thin glass, with
ice tinkling in it, at my elbow, and listened spellbound to strange
dramas of "the Islands" recited by men who had themselves played the
leading roles. At first they were shy, as well-bred English often are,
but after much urging an officer of constabulary, the glow from his
cigar lighting up his sun-bronzed face and the rows of campaign ribbons
on his white jacket, was persuaded into telling how he had trailed a
marauding band of head-hunters right across Borneo, from coast to
coast, his only companions a handful of Dyak police, themselves but a
degree removed in savagery from those they were pursuing. A
bespectacled, studious-looking man, whom I had taken for a scientist or
a college professor, but who, I learned, had made a fortune buying
bird-of-paradise plumes for the European market, described the strange
and revolting customs practised by the cannibals of New Guinea. Then a
broad-shouldered, bearded Dutchman, a very Hercules of a man, with a
voice like a bass drum, told, between meditative puffs at his pipe, of
hair-raising adventures in capturing wild animals, so that those smug
and sheltered folk at home who visit the zoological gardens of a Sunday
afternoon might see for themselves the crocodile and the
boa-constrictor, the orang-utan and the clouded tiger. When, after the
last tale had been told and the last glass had been drained, we
strolled out into the fragrant tropic night, with the Cross swinging
low to the morn, I felt as though, in the space of a single evening, I
had lived through a whole library of adventure.

* * * * *

I once wrote--in _The Last Frontier_, if I r