第88章 VII THE DOCTOR'S DECISION(2)

Out of the darkness at my elbow Polynesia rose and quietly moved down to his side.

"Now Doctor," said she in a soft persuasive voice as though she were talking to a wayward child, "you know this king business is not your real work in life. These natives will be able to get along without you--not so well as they do with you of course-- but they'll manage--the same as they did before you came. Nobody can say you haven't done your duty by them. It was their fault: they made you king. Why not accept the snail's offer; and just drop everything now, and go? The work you'll do, the information you'll carry home, will be of far more value than what you're doing here."

"Good friend," said the Doctor turning to her sadly, "I cannot.

They would go back to their old unsanitary ways: bad water, uncooked fish, no drainage, enteric fever and the rest. . . . No.

I must think of their health, their welfare. I began life as a people's doctor: I seem to have come back to it in the end. I cannot desert them. Later perhaps something will turn up. But I cannot leave them now."

"That's where you're wrong, Doctor," said she. "Now is when you should go. Nothing will 'turn up.' The longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave-- Go now. Go to-night."

"What, steal away without even saying good-bye to them! Why, Polynesia, what a thing to suggest!"

"A fat chance they would give you to say good-bye!" snorted Polynesia growing impatient at last. "I tell you, Doctor, if you go back to that palace tonight, for goodbys or anything else, you will stay there. Now--this moment-- is the time for you to go."

The truth of the old parrot's words seemed to be striking home; for the Doctor stood silent a minute, thinking.

"But there are the note-books," he said presently: "I would have to go back to fetch them."

"I have them here, Doctor," said I, speaking up--" all of them."

Again he pondered.

"And Long Arrow's collection," he said. "I would have to take that also with me."

"It is here, Oh Kindly One," came the Indian's deep voice from the shadow beneath the palm.

"But what about provisions," asked the Doctor--" food for the journey?"

"We have a week's supply with us, for our holiday," said Polynesia--"that's more than we will need."

For a third time the Doctor was silent and thoughtful.

"And then there's my hat," he said fretfully at last. "That settles it: I'll HAVE to go back to the palace. I can't leave without my hat. How could I appear in Puddleby with this crown on my head?"

"Here it is, Doctor," said Bumpo producing the hat, old, battered and beloved, from under his coat. Polynesia had indeed thought of everything.

Yet even now we could see the Doctor was still trying to think up further excuses.

"Oh Kindly One," said Long Arrow, "why tempt ill fortune? Your way is clear. Your future and your work beckon you back to your foreign home beyond the sea. With you will go also what lore I too have gathered for mankind-- to lands where it will be of wider use than it can ever here. I see the glimmerings of dawn in the eastern heaven. Day is at hand. Go before your subjects are abroad. Go before your project is discovered. For truly I believe that if you go not now you will linger the remainder of your days a captive king in Popsipetel."

Great decisions often take no more than a moment in the making.

Against the now paling sky I saw the Doctor's figure suddenly stiffen. Slowly he lifted the Sacred Crown from off his head and laid it on the sands.

And when he spoke his voice was choked with tears.

"They will find it here," he murmured, "when they come to search for me. And they will know that I have gone. . . . My children, my poor children!-- I wonder will they ever understand why it was I left them. . . . I wonder will they ever understand--and forgive."

He took his old hat from Bumpo; then facing Long Arrow, gripped his outstretched hand in silence.

"You decide aright, oh Kindly One," said the Indian--"though none will miss and mourn you more than Long Arrow, the son of Golden Arrow--Farewell, and may good fortune ever lead you by the hand!"

It was the first and only time I ever saw the Doctor weep.

Without a word to any of us, he turned and moved down the beach into the shallow water of the sea.

The snail humped up its back and made an opening between its shoulders and the edge of its shell. The Doctor clambered up and passed within. We followed him, after handing up the baggage.

The opening shut tight with a whistling suction noise.

Then turning in the direction of the East, the great creature began moving smoothly forward, down the slope into the deeper waters.

Just as the swirling dark green surf was closing in above our heads, the big morning sun popped his rim up over the edge of the ocean. And through our transparent walls of pearl we saw the watery world about us suddenly light up with that most wondrously colorful of visions, a daybreak beneath the sea.

The rest of the story of our homeward voyage is soon told.