one of the few white men settled in Talua at the time of the German
occupation and had then already some influence with the natives. The
Germans made him administrator, a position which he occupied for twenty
years, and when the island was seized by the British he was confirmed in
his post. He ruled the island despotically, but with complete success.
The prestige of this success was another reason for the interest that
Mackintosh took in him.

But the two men were not made to get on. Mackintosh was an ugly man,
with ungainly gestures, a tall thin fellow, with a narrow chest and
bowed shoulders. He had sallow, sunken cheeks, and his eyes were large
and sombre. He was a great reader, and when his books arrived and were
unpacked Walker came over to his quarters and looked at them. Then he
turned to Mackintosh with a coarse laugh.

"What in Hell have you brought all this muck for?" he asked.

Mackintosh flushed darkly.

"I'm sorry you think it muck. I brought my books because I want to read
them."

"When you said you'd got a lot of books coming I thought there'd be
something for me to read. Haven't you got any detective stories?"

"Detective stories don't interest me."

"You're a damned fool then."

"I'm content that you should think so."

Every mail brought Walker a mass of periodical literature, papers from
New Zealand and magazines from America, and it exasperated him that
Mackintosh showed his contempt for these ephemeral publications. He had
no patience with the books that absorbed Mackintosh's leisure and
thought it only a pose that he read Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ or
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. And since he had never learned to put
any restraint on his tongue, he expressed his opinion of his assistant
freely. Mackintosh began to see the real man, and under the boisterous
good-humour he discerned a vulgar cunning which was hateful; he was vain
and domineering, and it was strange that he had notwithstanding a
shyness which made him dislike people who were not quite of his kidney.
He judged others, naively, by their language, and if it was free from
the oaths and the obscenity which made up the greater part of his own
conversation, he looked upon them with suspicion. In the evening the two
men played piquet. He played badly but vaingloriously, crowing over his
opponent when he won and losing his temper when he lost. On rare
occasions a couple of planters or traders would drive over to play
bridge, an