Sailor and beachcomber. A. Safroni-Middleton
chap as he raised his eyes and hands to heaven and wiped the perspiration from his heathen brow!
Yes, to hear how we lived under the banner of the sign of the Cross, wherefrom only the shadow falls over the pale-faced multitudes as they tramp to the clank of the chains of conventionality, chains gold-plated with eighteen-carat hypocrisy.
“And then Englis come to here,” he said, as he opened his South Sea mouth in astonishment. He was an unmarried man, and having no fine-looking daughters had not suffered as some of the Samoans had, the why and the wherefore I leave the reader to guess. I also leave the reader of my autobiography to remember that the South Sea Islands’ so-called savages are men just like ourselves, with inclinations and dreams and religions based on mythology and the gods of their ancient histories, and were they a powerful and mighty race, owning three parts of the world, with all the advantages of climatic conditions and education that the Western world has had, they would most assuredly emigrate from their Isles and seek to reform men to their ways of thinking, and doubtless they would find a good harvest in our modern cities for their pious endeavours. I am sure we should all, under their influence, make a grand stride towards that far-off goal of perfect good. I know that there are many men stealing across the earth who do not think as I think, but this is the autobiography of my life, and not of another life.
I was a lad in the days that I am telling you of, and had the opportunities that other men who were older and more respected did not get. I have often rushed in where the angel feared to tread, and the devil also. R.L.S. and others only saw the traders, the Samoans and other tribes, as they stood before him in one light, and the missionaries with the halo of feverish goodness to reform shining around their brows. I was a boy, my opinion unrespected, a young beachcomber who knew more than they thought he did, so they let go, and out came the true man, glorious and joyous in the wild sprees of those long-ago Samoan nights! Mind you, there were good men in the South Seas of those days, but over most of their heads, in the cemetery where the whites were buried, the flowers grew. I have stood gazing on those forgotten graves at sunset and wondered what dead desires lay beneath those crosses and stones, what sad crimes and what memories of their native lands, for the Islands, as well as Australia, were the happy hiding places of men who were flying from justice, and were I to tell you the yarns, the terrible tales of escaped innocence being hunted and cursed through miscarriages of justice, I should have to fill a book with nothing else but those tales.
I will now return to where I left the South Sea Island girl Papoo, for that I discovered was her name. As the drunken trader swayed to his tub and her frizzly-headed brown father rolled a tobacco leaf into a cigarette with two fingers and stood by the one-roomed Samoan Hotel I spoke to the girl who had so attracted my attention.
“You like music,” I said.
“Nein spoke,” she answered, but her eyes spoke for her, and I shifted my seat and got closer and read that poem of curves and shoulders, bright eyes and hair, yes, all the mystery of a woman’s eyes, lit by the magic light of sincerity.
I will not tell you all the many details of my romantic love affair; but I can often hear in my dreams the cry of the night bird and the hushed intervals, as the sea-surf rose and thundered over the shore barrier by the forest track near Vaea Mountain’s thickly wooded slopes as I sat by Papoo and made love to her, just the very same as English boys do to the girls in the London suburbs to-day. Papoo was just the same in her manner, modest to a fault, betraying her modesty by adding another garment over her ridi, which looked to me very much like the half of a discarded red nightshirt of some cranky old skipper. I played the violin to Papoo by the thatched hut where she lived and she sang weird Samoan songs, which stealing into my ears from her lips trembled with lyrical beauty, the soul of which was in my own head. Nights followed nights and I would creep behind her thatched hut on all-fours and meet her secretly. I got so deeply in love with her that I asked her to clear from the Island and go with me to Australia; and then the end came, in the sense that we could not meet so often. Her father found us out! I thought he would kill me at first, but the anger in his dark eyes sank down and he jabbered in South Sea lingo tremendously for a time. I hung my head and pretended to be heartily ashamed of myself, and so he forgave me, but kept his weather eye on me just the same; and my dear Papoo crept in the hut door, gazed over her shoulder at me as she disappeared, and pointed to the shore, and I knew that she would meet me and bolt at the first opportunity.
It was the day after that episode that I was sitting by a dead banyan-tree, when a white man, whom I thought was a rather respectable trader, emerged from the forest just by. It was Robert Louis Stevenson. He had intellectual keen eyes and a sad emotional-looking face, and looked a bit of a dreamer. Of course I did not know him then, nor can I remember much what he said at that moment. I know that I had climbed a tree and was looking at a bird’s egg when he came up to me and asked me what bird’s egg it was; I could not tell him, but I did as he requested, climbed up the tree and placed it back into the nest. Had I known he was a great author and poet I should have taken more stock of him. I remember that we strolled across the slope together and I gave him some tobacco and climbed several more trees as he stood below calling up to me to show him the eggs. It was not till nearly a week after, when I was on the beach talking to a trader friend who said to me “That’s Stevenson, the writer,” that I asked about him, but even then I did not gather that he was as famous as he was. I remember the very next day as I and Papoo lay hidden by some coco-palms we saw him lying full length, leaning half on his elbow gazing seaward, writing now and again on a slip of paper that he held in his hand. He had his boots off, for they stood beside him. I think he must have been bathing in one of the creeks by the Bay and afterwards crept up to the seclusion of the banyan-trees to dream and write down his thoughts. Papoo and I watched him for a moment, and then arose and stole away, as she had the household duties to attend to and I did not want her father to catch her again.
Almost every night I would go down by the beach and mix with sailors and traders—men from all countries they were, a good many Germans among them, especially when the Lubeck arrived from Sydney, bringing passengers and a varied cargo. The crew would come ashore and have a regular spree, some of them drinking the vile concoction sold at a shanty bar by the beach. There was one old chap who hailed from “Nuka Hiva.” He would sit drinking and smoking and yarning away for hours, telling us his experiences; he knew all the Islands, had been married over and over again, and as he was growing old and infirm through drink and temper (for he had a terribly fiery head) he would sit and curse the memory of his numerous family, not one of whom would help him. He had grown-up sons and daughters on most of the Isles of the South Seas round about; some of his children were as blackish as their mothers, and some half white and half brown. He would sit for hours while I played and strummed on the violin, telling me of the strange habits of the different tribes and their marriage customs. We would sit together and roar with laughter as he (half drunk) crawled on the shanty floor illustrating the way he solemnised the marriage of his eighth wife in Fiji, describing how he kissed her feet, and how he went through ceremonies of a most extraordinary kind in the many weddings that he had attended as bridegroom. I could not very well write here the tales he told, and moreover I do not believe all that he said was true, though he would pull his billy-goat whiskers, lift his hat from his extraordinary high bald head, and seal every detail with a blasphemous oath of “God’s truth.” He was interesting at first, but I soon wearied of his adventures, for he told the same yarn night after night, and as I slept in the same room with him my life became a burden to me. Just as I was going off to sleep he would suddenly sit up, half drunk, and say: “Did I ever tell you of my marriage with Betsy Brownlegs, the Fiji chief’s daughter?” And then, notwithstanding that I quickly answered “Yes, you have told me and everyone else in Samoa,” he would sit up and start off, pouring out the old tales.
Native Girl, Samoa
One night I got him in a decent mood, played him some old English songs, and then he revealed the best side of his character, that all men have, and with tears in his eyes looked up at me and said, “Matey, that ’ere old song makes me remember—she sang that, and I killed her!” And then out came the sorrow of his life, why he was a drunken exile in the South Seas. As a young man when in England, for he was an Englishman, he had fallen