Sailor and beachcomber. A. Safroni-Middleton

      Coconut Palm in full fruit

      At night I would steal up the steep shore hills under the mangroves and coco-palms and creep into the tiny dome-shaped dens, which were the homesteads of the native men and women of those South Sea isles. They all got to know me and trust me, and I often would share their meals as they sat squatting around their big earthen steaming pots wherein they cooked fish and peculiar-smelling vegetables. The heat of those dens was terribly stifling to me with my clothes on, and I would very soon make tracks and get outside, and from those steeps I would gaze out seaward at the vast calm Pacific trembling into silver under the South Sea moon, as the phosphorus-sparkling waters at intervals curled and broke to silvery waves up the shore, by the mirroring palm-sheltered lagoons. On the beach through patches of moonlight passed the loafing half-caste traders and huddled groups of Samoan women with their tiny black children running round and round them like big black rats.

      Laoleo, a Marquesan, was my special comrade on those nights out. He was the son of one of the South Sea queens who had seen her day—far away on one of the lonely Atolls, her beauty faded and mouth mumbling and toothless, she sat dreaming of her glorious past, and found life still sweet in living over the memories of all that had been. Laoleo’s father was in my time a dethroned king. I saw him once as he sat by his den. He was fat and squatty, only had one big yellow tooth, a large head, cute twinkling eyes and fearfully wrinkled brows, and when he wrinkled them up, as he thought of his past, he looked like some grim personification of the dark ages cast into human frame.

      I shall never forget the great prayer-chanting night. Laoleo took me into the inland scrub one night, and there, in the forest by their dens, chanting to their ancient gods, sat the old naked chief and his big brown wives and daughters, some with their ridis on, but most of them attired only in their hair and modest smiles.

      It was a beautifully calm night. Overhead from seaward crept cooling winds, drifting damp odours from wild flowers and orange-tree scents from the shore lagoons and palm-forest glooms. Round and round whirled the nude maidens of that strange world, swaying their bodies in lyrical beauty and over their heads in rhythmic movement their long curved brown arms. The men squatting around slowly moved their big brown bodies to and fro, chanting weirdly all the time. By his big domed den sat the dethroned king, Laoleo’s father. There he sat rehearsing his grand past, his large thin feet on a little mat, his chin pointing towards heaven, his face once more alive with revived majesty as his warrior chiefs around him swayed their clubs, calling down the spirits of the mighty dead to bless that old king and their own brave selves. Young Laoleo and I stood in the shadows watching them all. As for me, I felt a bit nervous—they all looked so different sitting round there with inspired eyes bright with memories of their glorious past, wondrous battles and beautiful cannibalistic feasts, memories of the bygone days when they nibbled their choice old friends, found them of sweet dispositions and wept over tender memories.

      Through the spread tree-tops gleamed pale stars, and peeping through the hut doors hard by, among the coco-palms, through big leaves gazed the wistful eyes of their small brown naked babies—like tiny shadows of unborn children peeping from infinity into the dim regions of moonlit reality.

      How the memories return to me as I write on. It was on that very night which I have just described that I, the son of a proud English gentleman of ancient family, fell in love with a South Sea Island woman, ten years older than myself. You shall hear something of my downfall. I loved and lost, and cried in my heart as I lay alone in my hut on a lone Pacific isle over the grief, the breakdown that has stricken men since the days of our first grief-stricken parents, old Adam and sad Eve. I have not told you before, but several days preceding the events which I have just spoken of, Laoleo and I were down in one of the shore grog shanties, talking and yarning to the batches of beachcombers, as they loafed in the sultry glooms by the coco-palms, smoking and spitting and playing cards—some of them the black sheep of the civilised world, who were never known to be really sober—when an exceedingly beautiful Samoan girl of twenty-six years of age came in and sat just by my seat as I played the fiddle. She was accompanied by her father, an old chief. She had an attractive, insinuating face, and as she sat there, half-leaning against a post, her brown naked soft velvet figure looked like some beautiful sculptural work of art. Silently she sat as I played on, her shining eyes gazing astonished at my white sunburnt face, and not till I had finished the fiddling, and the drunken old half-caste trader had finished his jig and swaggered up to the bar for another dose of stuff called brandy, did her eyes blink and her lips part in a smile of pleasure that revealed her white teeth. She gave me such a look as she sat there, dressed only in a narrow tappa loin-strip, that I quickly riveted all my attention on an attempt to tune up my violin, so as to hide the hot blush that flamed to my ear tips.

VI

       Table of Contents

      Contrasts—A South Sea Bar-room—I meet Robert Louis Stevenson—An Old Time Trader’s Morals—Shell-backs

      Alas, a good many of those brown men and women of the old days have passed away for ever, and in their place, over the islands of the South Seas, roam the varied offspring of men from many lands, the half-caste children of white traders, Chinese mongrels, Polynesian niggers, descendants of wandering, adventurous viciousness, mixed up with the outcasts of civilisation, and more often than quite enough the puny offspring of touring American and German missionaries, and English too. I don’t know which has won in the race to populate the lonely and beautifully secret-keeping isles of those far-away seas, but I think the good old flag is still to the front, flying to the breeze, represented in the sparkling, dancing eyes of the romping children on the wooded South Sea slopes—pretty violet eyes they have too, some grey and some grey-brown, little laughing angels of innocence, as they gaze up at you and go tumbling head over heels, revealing their tiny plump white-splashed backs, and the good old missionary sprees hidden in the dark of the unrecorded! For true it is that sometimes the virtuous and the good have their weak moments, those sad lapses which are not on any account recorded in the delightfully innocent autobiography of the returned, weary but still earnest traveller, beautifully written, and sold for ten shillings and sixpence net, circulated among the numerous British, German, and American Christian Societies, and read by the benevolent old gentlemen and ladies of their native land, which is so overrun with poverty and misery.

      I knew one old Samoan chief, who was a cute, intellectual fellow, and could speak “pigeon English” well enough to ply me with numerous questions concerning my native English land. I often remember how his bright eyes lit up with astonishment when I told him of the far-away sorrows of London Town, so different to the warm moonlit forest of his own Island. I told him how men slept on door-steps, shivering, clothed in verminous rags which fluttered in the cold night winds as they half covered starved skin and bone of dead men who still breathed—men who had dropped out of the fighting ranks of life, lost the forlorn hope, and did not believe in God, for they had sorrowed in life and found hell in the death of breathing-despair. I told him of tiny wistful eyes of children starving as they gazed into shop windows watching the mist rise from the steaming foods, and yet nothing in their little pinched bellies. I told him of vast cathedrals pointing their steeples up to the grey English skies, costing millions of money to build, while far below their stone walls, stealing along the wet cold streets, those tiny trembling prayers, God’s helpless children, crept without food and clothing. I told him of women, dishevelled and weary, sleeping out on the Embankment and huddled in dark corners and ditches, some fallen through drink, and some through loving too well the man who had betrayed their trust; and I told him of their more fortunate sisters who had loved and been unbetrayed by the object of their lucky trust, and how terribly bitter those very women were towards their fallen, lost sisters. I was young then, otherwise