A VAGABOND’S ODYSSEY

Portrait of the Author

A VAGABOND’S

ODYSSEY

BEING FURTHER REMINISCENCES OF A WANDERING

SAILOR-TROUBADOUR IN MANY LANDS

BY

A. SAFRONI-MIDDLETON

AUTHOR OF

“SAILOR AND BEACHCOMBER”

❦

WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1916

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED

EDINBURGH

TO

THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR COMRADE

OMAR

WHOM I BURIED IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH

NORTHERN QUEENSLAND

ALSO TO

D. RAELTOA OF SAMOA

AND TO MY MEMORIES OF MELODY AND

MIRTH IN THE SOUTH SEAS

FOREWORD

“The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Looking reflectively over this second instalment of my autobiography, I perceive that I am such a genuine vagabond that I have even travelled along in my reminiscences without caring for the material niceties of recognised literary method; so I have gone back over the whole track and tried earnestly to polish my efforts.

It seems quite unnecessary for vagabonds to wear (metaphorically speaking) old trousers with fringed ends to the legs, penniless pockets, dusty boots, an unshaven face and dirty collar, or to give vent to the devil-may-care utterances and all the ungrammatical “politeness” of the phraseology of the grog shanty and bush hotels, when they attempt to live over again on paper the tale of their wandering life. I cannot reform the world into a population of convivial beachcombers, nor would I if I could, out of consideration for future vagabonds, who naturally want the outer spaces of the world for their special province. Neither can I make you believe I could have done better in a literary sense if I had taken more trouble with my book. But I can to some extent reform myself, and at least strive to compete with the literary aristocrats on the slopes of their own cultivated ground. I am sure they will make good company if I succeed, and they will have been my best friends. Yes, I half believe in jumping out of bed on a cold night to hold a candle to the devil! I know that sometimes while you stand shivering you discover that he’s really not such a bad fellow, and the candlelight is likely to give you a glimpse of some faint resemblance in his wrinkled face, some far-off expression of that beautiful old life that he lived ere he sinned, became respectable and fell—banished from heaven.

Life is a terrible contradiction; we are dead because we are born alive. Our very creed is based on the sad fact that the cemetery tablets record the dates of the true beginning of life everlasting. The thundering city is a necropolis wherein multitudes of wandering corpses breathe, with inert souls and thoughts that are like night bats flitting through the sepulchres of our death, with dead eyes and dead mouths that open to cough and even sometimes laugh! My book of reminiscences is (to me at least) like those silent, moss-grey tablets of immortality; but even more wonderful and true (as far as I know), for, while I am dead, I can see my long ago. I can lift the stone slab from the grave in the silent night and gaze on the dead boy’s face, and in a way make the dead eyes laugh and the voiceless mouth mutter and sing in a hollow voice old, far-away songs of love, romance and its comrade, grief. Yes, you and I can see such things. Oh, how ineffably sad to some of us!

You may wonder what all this has to do with the preface to a book of reminiscences. It has a lot to do with the matter, because I am a born vagabond, and the world is incorrigibly respectable!

There are about one hundred pages missing from this book—pages that should have told of the inevitable details of stern existence: those things that all men who are vagabonds experience, such as the stomach-rumbles of hunger, monstrous hopes and misgivings, hospitals and illnesses, and cold nights sleeping out under the coco-palms and gum-trees when the wind suddenly shifts to a shivering quarter. Evil thoughts, heartaches, the tenderest wishes, passionate drums, longings, and memories in the night of a woman’s eyes, the fall before great temptation, atheistical thoughts, curses and religious remorses you will look for in vain. For, after all, I am not brave enough to tell the truth! I might have done so if I had had the friendly, courageous publisher who would not cut them out of the original manuscript. But where is the publisher who would let me hide behind his influential bulk as he risked all and published the truth? Yes, those things which would make the reader recognise the truth by his own responsive thrills.

Well, I will risk my reputation on the opinions of those critics who will be able to read the hundred pages I have left out. For real scallawags do not always leave the worst out only. Moreover, I may be lucky enough to find sympathy, for even critics are sometimes at heart genuine vagabonds, and they may realise that I have turned into the light of other days, the stars, the blue tropical skies, moonlit seas by coral reefs and palm-clad isles, and into the heart of intense dreams, to paint faithfully all that I tell.

Before my North American experiences, which I have recorded in the opening chapters of this book, I had shipped before the mast of a sailing ship, the S——p, at Sydney, N.S.W., intending to go with her round the Horn, and so home to England. But, being unable to tolerate the bullying chief mate and the offal-flavoured fo’c’sle food, I left the boat at ’Frisco and again shipped on an American tramp that was chartered for trading purposes to go cruising in the South Seas, where once more I had many ups and downs, and settled for a few months in the Fiji group and elsewhere. My reminiscences, and many of the incidents of that time, I have told in the second part of the present volume, which opens with “The Charity Organization of the South Seas.”

My South Sea Island legends and fairy tales have never been told elsewhere. I have written them as nearly as possible in the manner in which they were told me by the Samoan children and natives who were my friends. The mythology of the South Seas is unfortunately becoming almost completely forgotten by the natives, who now live under such different conditions, and seem only interested in the creeds, legends and mythology of the Western world.

These experiences of mine are written from memory, and I have as nearly as possible kept them in the order that I lived them; and if they seem far-flung for one as young as I was, let me assure you that hundreds of English boys have had my experiences and could tell this tale.

I am from a family of rovers. My uncles were travellers and explorers. My brothers out of the spirit of adventure all went to sea, and achieved success on sea and land through perseverance. My grandfather in his boyhood went to sea. (I believe he was born at sea. His mother was a lady of the Italian Court, noted for her beauty and an accomplished musician.) He was a direct descendant of Charles, the second Earl of Middleton, whose estates were eventually confiscated by creditors—an evil destiny that has survived right down to the present, it having cropped up in the author’s own affairs.

I hope to follow this volume with another one, wherein I shall tell of my life when I settled for a while among civilised peoples and became respectable, and my serious troubles commenced.

I have to thank Messrs Boosey & Company, of London, for permission to use certain extracts from my military band Entr’actes, Marches, etc., which they have published.

A. S.-M.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The New Zealand photographs are by Mr F. G. Radclife, Whangarei, New Zealand.

CHAPTER I

In Boston—Song-composing—Looking for a Publisher—How I secured him—I visit Providence—I play in the Military Band—Hard up

IN those old days of my youth an atmosphere of romance gathered from old novels and dreams still sparkled in my head. I am going to tell of the adventures that followed directly on my boyhood, when before the mast I had crossed the seas with eyes athirst for romance, looking for the wonderful, the beautiful in distant lands, in men and in women, and for that opportunity to perform those mighty, world-thrilling deeds that, alas, I have not even yet performed!

After much wandering in search of wealth and fame, following desperate trouble owing to schemes that failed in Australia and the South Sea Islands, I at length caught typhoid fever in San Francisco. With many misgivings I recovered. At last I found myself sitting in a top attic in North America. It was a humble little room, the atmosphere and surroundings the very thing to feed the fire of my aspiring mind, to force one to do better. Its one window-pane was broken; the furniture consisted of an old table, a box chair, a candlestick and my extemporised bed on the floor! I was in Boston, “the Hub of the Universe”! My sea-chest and best suit were in pawn in San Francisco. My money had almost all gone, and my latest grand passion had faded. I had been practising the violin furiously day and night, for I hoped to become the world’s greatest violinist. Yet at heart I still felt triumphant. The world seemed especially mine! One thing only existence lacked—a kindred spirit to stand shoulder to shoulder by my side on some quest for glorious violence, adventurous thrills, voyaging across the uncharted seas of imagination. O too brief, splendid madness of youth!

Far below, outside my window, over the city’s stone-slabbed streets, rattled vehicles, and the hurried, endless battalions of Yankee citizens passed by, seeking fortune or the grave. Gold seemed the incentive to all thrills; human passion, hope and ambition seemed congealed into a mechanical state of steam, electric locomotion, and all that the almighty silver dollars would clink against. I also seemed to have frozen and become a part of the machine which is called civilisation. The songs of sails aloft, the noise of forest winds and soundings across deep waters, had faded from my dreams into a wail of selfishness. Imagination is the soul of the Universe, and grief is its Bible; but, alas, I felt a gross craving for food.

So my ambition to outrival Paganini on the violin had subsided from its state of enthusiastic fire and had left in my heart a dull callousness. One intense wish survived: to get a sound pair of boots and a new suit! Winter snows were only just melting, and much privation had considerably thinned me. I had done many things which I feel remain best untold. Necessity had inspired me with many original and desperate schemes, the latest of which was a determination to compose songs. Music hall hits come, have their day, are whistled and sung by the élite and by the street-arab, and suddenly I thought, why should not I supply the public with those rotten melodies? I would do it on original lines and give the American public something new. Did they not hail as brand-new old melodies that Wellington’s soldiers sung at Waterloo and antiquated strains brought over by the passengers of the Mayflower with one bar reversed and the title altered.

I would jump from my bed at night and, throwing off my “blanket,” which consisted of half-a-dozen old overcoats which my landlady had lent me, write down inspired strains and next day put them to suitable words, words with those sentimental and lascivious suggestions in them that suit the public taste—for the artist in me had sorrowed and become temporarily gross. I sought money more than the applause of musical critics. Boston publishers became familiar with my handwriting. I had about fifty rejected manuscripts with specially printed forms, notices that offered me “their appreciation of my favours, and the editor’s sincere compliments, and by the same post with many regrets they were returning the MSS.” At length I thought my name was getting too well known: I was obliged to seek a nom de plume. With characteristic family cautiousness I hit on a name that was already famous in New York musical circles. My youthful innocence had almost passed, and I vaguely felt that to compete with the world I must deliberately stain myself with its contagion. Often my heart bristled with schemes as multitudinous as quills on a hedgehog’s hide.

I had composed an attractive melody and had placed suitable words to it, but, notwithstanding my famous nom de plume, “Muller,” I had had my manuscripts returned, torn in the post, the editor’s marks indelibly damaging it, and too often a dark stain across the first page that looked suspiciously like editorial tobacco juice.

Things began to look serious. I became, if possible, even thinner. My landlady’s politeness became gross; she thumped the door for rent. I was starving and only had a cake of common yellow soap. With the superhuman energy and pluck of aspiring youth I tried again, imitated the latest hit and sent the manuscript to “D—— & Co.,” of Boston, a small publishing firm in a side street off 6th Avenue. I signed it with my nom de plume; the initials differed by one letter from those of the original owner—I thought this necessary to save legal trouble.

I waited three days. The post brought me no letter, so I wrote to the publisher and said:

“Dear Sirs,—I am an Englishman on tour, and a member of the Carl Rosa Opera Company’s orchestra. I may have to leave Boston at any moment, so, much against my wish, I must worry you for speedy consideration of my manuscript song, Dreams of Eldorado, which I can get publicly performed in London town when I arrive back.”

Two days later, to my great delight, I received a letter asking me to call on D—— & Co. re my manuscript. The very thought of my song reaching engraving and print thrilled me; that I should be published in America at another man’s expense seemed impossible! A Vanderbilt-like feeling pervaded my being. I pawned my violin, paid my landlady a week’s rent and gave the little blue-eyed daughter twenty-five cents to buy sweets with. I could have sung with joy. Next morning at ten-thirty I was to be at the publisher’s office. By night the reaction set in. I became suspicious. Suppose it was all a ruse! For had I not borrowed a famous name? A thousand thoughts haunted me; my musical ability seemed nil. I had no talent. I hummed my melodies over; they seemed ridiculously tuneless. There was no doubt about it: the Boston publishers had seen through my scheme, had held a solemn council, and most probably would be waiting in that office to pounce upon me and charge me with my duplicity, and then God knows what they might do. On the floor all night the old overcoats moved and moved as I restlessly turned in my bed. I was numbed with awful suspicions and possible contingencies. I rose haggard and wretched, and against all my usual instincts sought a saloon and drank twenty-five cents’ worth of rum. With renewed courage I prepared to risk all. At ten o’clock I walked past a brass-plated door with D—— & Co. on it. Three times I passed it and then, walking crabwise, I went in. A little man with a skull-cap on got up and welcomed me. I hurriedly glanced round; the ambushed publishers of my imagination faded as the girl typewriter yawned and clicked away. My erstwhile gloom blossomed to monstrous hopes. Negotiations commenced. “What did I usually ask for my work?” he demanded. I blushed and hastily wiped my nose. “Will fifty dollars do?” I answered. I eventually got five dollars for the song as a preliminary payment on royalties to come. Such royalties! One cent on each copy sold after the first ten thousand advertisement copies had been given away and the second one thousand had repaid the actual expenses of the publication and engraving. Afterwards, too, I found out that to engrave a song of four plates cost the publisher five dollars. I trembled as I clutched the green five-dollar bill. “Will he alter his mind?” was my chief thought. “Does he think I am the great Muller?” The publisher broke in on my thoughts. “Place your name there,” he said, and I signed the imposing agreement, four times the length of my manuscript song.

Readjusting his skull-cap and wiping his spectacles, he began to examine my signature. The weather was cold, but I started to perspire. Was he comparing my signature with Muller’s? It was an awful thought, and with a sickly farewell I bolted!

Hurrying down the main street, I longed to get out of sight with the dollars, but I heard a shout behind me; my assumed name was loudly called: I turned; my heart sank. I nearly fainted: the publisher was running after me. I clutched my money, determined to resist. The new greatness thrust upon me by the sale of my song still remained with me. I could not humiliate my pride and run, though I longed to do so. With his little skull-cap askew, he stood puffing in front of me! I gave one glance to warn him not to get too near my person, and heard him saying: “Oh, excuse me, Mr Muller, I suppose you will be in Boston long enough to correct the proof?”

In a dream I reached my room, packed up my brush and comb, got my violin out of pawn and left Boston for Providence, where my brother lived, who had left England years before. To my great regret I found, when I arrived, that he was away in California. No one seemed to know when he would return. I could not force my way into his bachelor rooms, and so I was once more on the rocks.

I became acquainted with a young Swede who was musical and played the clarionet. Together we fixed up a small orchestra, went out to play at dances and so just managed to exist. We hired a large room in a hall near the Hoyle Buildings in Westminster Street; made our own furniture out of meat tubs and our beds of old overcoats. My violin, with coats doubled on it, made an excellent pillow. With our heads side by side on it we slept as soundly as though we were in the Australian bush. I spent hours each day, and sometimes worked far into the night, practising my violin and reading the lives of great musicians and writers.

My brother, a crack violinist and a well-known journalist in the States, did not return for four or five months, and in the meantime our orchestra failed. My friend and I lived for a time on the free lunches of the grog saloons. North American saloon owners do not allow their customers to starve while they supply them with alcoholic poison, which is, however, fifty per cent. better than English spirit. For Americans are both humane and practical. They know that dead men do not buy rum, so the bars at luncheon hours steam with hot Frankforts, plates of cold meat, cheese and biscuits, provided without any charge to their customers. The honesty of Providence is illustrated by one fact alone—if you buy ten cents’ worth of whisky they hand you a glass and the bottle, that you may help yourself. In London, Australia and the South Seas the grog-keeper would be ruined in a week if he ran his business on those lines! You seldom see a woman in a grog saloon, and never drunk in the streets.

Eventually I secured several jobs at concert halls. The pay was small, but, though other work was to be had, my temperament strongly objected to anything that needed muscular power. To tell the truth, I was ambitious. I longed to raise myself out of the ordinary ruck of things. However, when my Swedish friend got a job out at Pawtucket, digging post-holes, the high wages tempted me and I too started work there. Together we toiled for three weeks. Then once more I started composing, and had several pieces of dance music accepted in my own name. I arranged them as pianoforte solos, and one or two for the violin and piano.

When the weather got warm I sometimes went out to Fort Hill, on the Seekonk river. The prairie-land of Rhode Island survives in variegated patches of miles of beautiful scenery, with rushing rivers, and landscapes dotted by wooden homesteads that remind one of New Zealand and the Australian bush-land.

CHAPTER II

United States Military Music—The Roger Williams Park—Indians—Rhode Island Scenery and Amusements—Yankees—Experiences—A Miner from California

IN Providence I made friends with a military band conductor. He was a jolly customer, hard up but good-natured and humorous, a real American bandmaster of the old convivial school, kind at heart and fond of good whisky. His greatest virtue was a commonplace one: he would always pay you back anything he borrowed, but unfortunately he was hard up and could not do so. He had every excuse for this, for, as elsewhere, bandsmen, indeed musicians in general, were supposed to be able to live on melody and royalties that might arrive in some remote future. I worked for him, borrowed my comrade’s clarionet and secured a position in the military band. It played in Roger Williams Park, performing on the usual holidays and on sunshiny evenings.

American conductors believe in vigour and fire when they perform, and sacrifice artistic pianissimo to force and go: on the march the bands lift you off your feet through the lilt of the music. The characteristic go-ahead of the Yankees is finely illustrated by the music they perform, and the military bands swing the population along as they march down the streets: men, women and children instinctively fall into line. A Pied-Piper-of-Hamelin fever seizes hold of the citizens; the whole population is suddenly on the march as the band goes by. I played in the band on the Fourth of July, a day celebrated by fireworks and gun-firing. Americans go mad on that date, wear masks and do other hideous things; it’s a kind of Guy Fawkes celebration.

The Roger Williams Park is partly wild and partly cultivated, and artistically laid out with gardens and miniature landscapes that in summer-time are a paradise of flowers. Various kinds of tropical-looking trees abound, in scattered clumps that are haunted at sunset with bright, roving eyes: for springing from bough to bough jump swarms of big, wild, grey squirrels; their brush tails, a foot long, stick up as they jump. The children are their boon companions, and come miles with lumps of cake and bread to feed their tiny, soft playmates; for they are as tame as white mice, spring down from bough to bough and sneak a peanut off your hand, turn, brush your face with their tails and are gone! In a second they are sitting on a skyward twig nibbling away at your gift, safe against the blue sky. I found a nest of them at Pawtucket Falls, a wild, beautiful spot near Rhodes. As I was looking at the fluffy youngsters the mother arrived and, to my astonishment, chased me away.

At Pawtucket Falls, too, I met a group of travelling Indians, menagerie people I think, en route for somewhere. Fenimore Cooper and other Indian tales still interested me, so I talked to them and spoke to “Bull Face,” a grave-looking chief, tawny and wrinkled with years, and clothed in a heavy brown blanket which swarmed with fleas. He spoke English as well as I did; but the South Sea Island breeds are far removed from the Indian tribes, both by blood and habit. I never sought his tribe again. I also saw Indians camping at Ochee Springs; real Indians they were, with squaws attending to their wants as they blinked their eyes and gazed scornfully on the onlookers. Smoking their calamets, dressed in tribal fashion, they inspired me with curiosity. I cannot say that the women were as handsome as I expected, for they had stolid, broad, reddish-brown faces and expectorated frequently as they sucked clay pipes. A pretty little papoose tugged at its mother’s breast, and did not look unlike a South Sea Island baby, excepting that its forehead was high and receding, and it had an impertinent European look. The women carry their suckling babes in a basket on their back: when the babe finishes pulling at the breast it crawls into the basket behind and goes to sleep until the next meal. I saw the papooses of another tribe too; the children looked like little wrinkled old men, and you might have thought that they were small authors sitting on their bundles of unaccepted manuscript, so worried did they look.

Providence is a spacious city; English towns are in the shade compared to it, and seem overcrowded and gloomy. The streets are wide; terraced store buildings on each side tower to the skies. Piazzas shade the pavements and the citizens from scorching sunlight and rain. America has built her cities on the improved plans of the Old World, and so has an advantage over London and our provincial towns. Room to breathe in is the natural birthright of America. Extensive parks, rushing rivers, and relics of primeval scenery surround the city, and divide the suburbs for miles and miles.

No sign of poverty is betrayed by the well-dressed crowds that chatter cheerfully up and down the main streets; street-arabs are unknown. A Mile End woman of London town in rags, with bruised nose and eyes, walking down the street would create a sensation in Providence, and their weekly papers would devote an article to the distressing incident.

Brilliantly lit saloons shine in the evening streets, and regiments of laughing youths and girls hurry to the various depots, bound for the ferry-boats on moonlight trips down the rivers. The bars are closed on Sunday, but men trust men, and more sly rum is drunk on Sunday than weekdays. Niggers with ebony faces mingle with the white population, wearing white collars which support their ears: a shabby nigger has never been seen in Providence. If you shoot a nigger and do not kill him you are in danger of getting six months in the State prison for wasting shot and powder!

Many of the characters you meet in American cities remind you of Englishmen, but you can never really forget that you are in America. No true Yankee with self-respect allows you to quash his opinion. Nothing on earth can beat Providence, Boston, or any state you happen to be in. They will argue for ever; and if you at length say anything that has indisputable conviction in it, a true Yankee will squirt a stream of tobacco juice with the deliberate intention of not missing you.

Things of this kind worry you for a while, but you soon fall into their ways, and if you are smart can outrival them on their own ground; but you have got to be smart. To tell the truth, Americans have good reason to be proud of their states, and really have plenty to blow about.

Literary critics have hinted that Bret Harte discovered his characters in his own imagination. I can on oath dispute that fact. Grim Mr Billy Goat Whiskers, who fought in the North and South wars, draws his munificent pension, chews tobacco and dwells in Providence to-day. You do not meet him everywhere, but he is to be met.

In the grog saloons old miners from California told me their experiences, drew from their pockets photographs of gold nuggets and of gold claims that revealed small white dots in the far background—the tombstones of men who had thwarted them! They were innocent-looking enough, these men scarred with wounds, tropic heat and bad rum. They followed the various occupations that suited aged heroes. One old miner from Alaska suddenly arrived in Providence quite penniless. His name was Cargo. Walking down Z—— Street, he spied the name of Cargo over a sign-writer’s shop, walked straight in, spat on the floor, called the “boss,” and tried to make him believe he was the ancestor of the family of Cargo, and the rightful owner of the business. He was immovable. They expostulated with him; he would not go, so they gave him a job and thus saved legal proceedings in the High Courts of the state, and the expense of regiments of lawyers who would dispute the true owner’s claim to his business.

Providence is full of reminiscent men who tell of adventures that are wide and wonderful.

If you are disinclined to go to the theatre you can always go into a bar and in peace and comfort sit within earshot of some grog-nosed hero of the old school, and find subject matter to outrival the romance of fiction. You must take good care not to let the old fellow know you are listening, otherwise he leaves facts alone and, with ill-concealed pride, makes your blood congeal with vivid descriptions of old days, murder and despair, or your mouth water for a breath of the fortunes that knocked around ere you were born.

CHAPTER III

I travel and sell Bug Powder—Seeking my Wages—Pork and Beans—Reminiscences of Sarasate—I strive to outrival Paganini—Practising the Violin—I am presented with a Round Robin—My Blasted Ambitions

AS the hot months came round my money gave out. Work was plentiful in the numerous factories that throb and thunder with machinery in Providence, but such work was not congenial to my temperament, and would ruin my fingers for violin-playing, as the post-digging job did. Nevertheless I should have availed myself of the opportunity had no alternative appealed to me. But my friend the conductor was a crank who was always producing some new scheme or invention that would assist him financially and augment his moderate musician’s salary.

One night he came to my diggings beaming with enthusiasm over a plan to make us both rich. He had invented a new bug powder: our fortunes were made; all we had to do was to let the Providence public know the catastrophe that we had ready for these insects. Suburban houses in the States are generally made of wood that is specially suitable for the bug state. So the population of Rhode Island all have one secret; and on dark nights in hot weather candle gleams and shadowy figures can be seen dodging on the windows of the tenements, as restless folk in their nightshirts smash bugs on the wooden walls. I write from experience. They creep down the walls in regiments, and while you sleep eat your eyelids; if you wink they seek crevices, dart into your ears, and prepare for the next attack! Closing your toes together swiftly at night in bed, you can be sure that you have squashed three or four American bugs. I have carelessly glanced at skeletons which I thought were ancient dead bugs on the walls in the room of my new lodgings, and then at midnight I have lit the candle, and down the walls were marching battalions of old bug-skins! They had smelt me, and the regiments on the frontier of my bedstead were already full blown with my blood.

So it is obvious that a good insect powder would be a blessing in Providence.

Well, my Swedish friend and I threw our musical instruments aside, and started on the bug powder business, full of hope. I had several musical compositions that I was ambitious to publish on my own account. I felt that Providence bugs had presented the tide in my affairs which I should take at the flood.

With our pockets stuffed with a thousand bills, advertisements bearing testimonials from American presidents and English royalties who had stayed in America, my comrade and I tramped along with our hearts singing the excelsior song of happiness. We really lived in a paradise of ignorance and youth. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is a true phrase, and happy, though selling bug powder, was equally true of us.

We marched, singing, on the dusty, white track to Narragansett. In the suburban gardens that led to the front doors grew gorgeous flowers. I can still dream that I smell their fragrance, and see the dancing blossoms in the brilliant sunshine. Strange things darted over us, hovered near the blooms and moaned like big humble bees. They were humming-birds, glittering and flashing their vivid colours, outrivalling the flowers with their brilliant feathery garment. The sky was blue as a girl’s eyes, and nearly as beautiful. We delivered the thousand bills and spent the rest of the day by a river. Wild fowl swam across it, and fresh from the eggs, with frightened eyes gleaming, the little ones paddled behind them. For miles the country was strewn with trees and houses, many of them made of wood, and at these especially we left three or four bills and at length disposed of the lot.

When we called on my friend the conductor for a first instalment of twenty dollars for our services we found him out, but after several visits we caught him. He was pleased to hear that we had worked a full week and left five thousand advertisements, but he put off the payment of our wages and borrowed my last five dollars! We haunted him for days; he was seldom home. My comrade and I sweated for miles and miles, seeking him at his various musical engagements; but the man seemed gifted with second sight, for as we knocked at the front entrance he hurried off from the back and vanished. The bug business failed and he moved. Still we demanded our wages by post; for he had left no address, and we hoped that the postal authorities would forward our pleading request. At last we found him. The sound of martial music came down D—— Street: a military band was leading a funeral procession, of some old soldier I suppose. There at the head of the band he blew solo cornet. We dared not approach him, but in our excitement we waved our hands. He winked in a friendly way as he passed on, and the strains of Chopin’s Funeral March faded with our hopes.

Eventually we caught him in a cul-de-sac, got ten dollars out of him and lived on pork and beans for a fortnight. Providence would be indeed stricken without pork and beans. As a rule they are not cooked, or rather baked, at home, but bought in jars, hot from the baker’s oven, ten and twenty-five cents a jar. Crime is scarce in Providence, capital punishment abolished. If a citizen sat down to his meal and discovered no pork and beans, and slew the waiter, he would get off on extenuating circumstances. Well, to revert to the bug powder business, like all my commercial enterprises, it ceased on my receiving the ten dollars, and my employer the bandmaster told me, when I met him a month after, that I had made five dollars more out of the enterprise than he did.

This brings me to another friend, a Sioux Indian, who was married and lived in the next rooms to my own. His wife, a white woman, took in washing and kept him. I used to sit in the evening and listen to his opinion of the States. His whole soul hated the Yankees. I once praised the Americans and their cities. He was down on me in a flash. “I am the true American,” he growled, “and the day will come when we shall get our country back.” I did not argue the point with him; his old wife kept him, and he showed base ingratitude by his opinions. He was educated and well dressed, and revealed to me, by all his conversation, the same kind of spite for the foreigner that I had noticed in the South Seas. Notwithstanding that the States had been peopled by whites so long, still the Yankee was an interloper and the robber of his country. He was not a bad old Indian, and was a friend to me during my stay at his tenement.

Just before I took his rooms I went to Boston to hear H——, a celebrated violinist who was performing there; I was anxious to hear if he was as wonderful as the review notices made him. I do not think I have ever heard such fine playing equalled even. He played Mendelssohn’s concerto, and swayed the legato strain out till it sang like a rivulet of silver song as the deeper notes mellowed to a golden strain as perfect in quality as the sunset lyre-bird of Australia. I have heard Sarasate, Ysaye, Joachim and many others, but no one with a better tone and intonation, except Sarasate, who played like some inspired magician off the concert stage. I heard him play at his villa in Biarritz, where I had the pleasure of receiving a gratuitous lesson from the celebrated maestro. “No, like this,” he said, as I played one of his own compositions: then he lifted his violin to his chin, and looked out of the villa’s latticed window as he played and rippled out a sparkling chain of diamond-pure notes and then literally swooned into the adagio.

I never had the courage to play that particular piece after.

After hearing that violin virtuoso at Boston I became enthusiastic and returned to Providence. The fever was on me. Again I determined to be the world’s greatest violinist! I almost wept at my wasted life on sea and shore. What might I not have been now, thought I, had I been practising the violin all those thousands of days instead of making sailors and South Sea Island savages my comrades? I went to the music stores and purchased the American editions of Petrie’s Studies, and Paganini’s Twenty-four Etudes-Caprices.

In my room, over the old Indian’s, I commenced. At daybreak I jumped each morning off my trestle bed and started practising. At first I tackled the Caprice which is double-stopping throughout. In a week I had got it off. I had long fingers, otherwise I should think it an impossibility. All day I bowed away. My furniture consisted of a music-stand, the Etudes, my bed and me! When I look back and think of my wonderful perseverance, it seems almost incredible. True and wonderful is the energy and happiness that aspiration brings to youth! Day after day I worked away at the studies with almost demon-like fury. Soon my chin had a great scab on it where the violin rested as I ground out the double-stopping sweeps, arpeggios and staccatos. I became thin and haggard-looking. I greedily devoured the lives of great violinists, among them Paganini and Ole Bull; also, after long intervals, pork and beans, as the old Indian below-stairs cooked them. He soon looked upon me as a sad kind of madman. I would gulp down the beans, look at his old grandfather clock and rush upstairs, then once more grind away, determined to make up for lost years. I saw the mighty crowds at concerts TO BE, applauding my wonderful playing! I was a new Paganini. Ah! how I remember it all. Through excessive playing the corns on my finger-tips became so hard that I could not feel the strings! My nervous system was soon wrecked, and my brain became ethereal with dreams—music was the all in all of life. People who did not play the violin were insanely ignorant.

Inspired, I extemporised melodies as I bowed and toiled away during the night hours: the day was not sufficient. The doors of the next tenement would suddenly bang, and strange tappings sound on the walls. I opened the window at midnight. I thought my double-stopping assuredly entranced the neighbours. It was hot weather, their windows were open too. In my imagination I thought I was playing to crowded houses. I heard the applause. Do you think I exaggerate? Believe me, I could never write down the depth, the magnificence, of those enthusiastic dreams. Only those who have felt as I felt, and were once inspired with ambition as I was inspired, will know exactly all that I felt, and all that I dreamed.

One day ten solemn-looking American citizens appeared outside the door of the Indian’s tenement; they wanted to see me. My name was called. I laid the violin down. I had no friends. Had my brother arrived? Strange thoughts flitted through my brain. Had people come as a special convoy to praise my extraordinarily fine playing? I opened the door and, white-faced and tremulous, I stared at a grey-bearded, solemn-looking old man who acted as spokesman. He presented me with a round robin. Fierce faces were looking over his shoulders! Two or three hundred signatures were there, the landlord’s signature looked the boldest! I was either to stop playing the violin or give up the premises and move at once. This was a terrible blow to me. I should lose a day’s practice if I had to tramp about looking for another room. I hated the world. Men were hard and mercenary. Only violinists and musicians had souls. I looked at my violin; it was my dear, abused comrade, and I clung to its reputation more than ever. No mother on earth ever leaned over her child with thoughts that outdid the tenderness of mine as I leaned over my tiny, responsive comrade, silent in its coffin-shaped bed. The dead child of my musical aspirations it seemed to me, for they were gone, and my mighty ambition lay a dead failure. Oh, you aspirants, you musicians and poets of this world, all you who love art for art’s sake, for you, and you alone, I write this. You will understand; you are my brothers. I can wish you more success, but no greater happiness than the delirium, the ecstatic joy that was mine when I sought to become the world’s greatest violinist.

I became melancholy: my incessant practice and irregular meals had, for the time being, destroyed my nerves. I thought of my schooldays and my life at sea, and longed for my boyhood’s days in the Australian bush. I remembered the kingly stockman and his wife, and the surrounding bush loneliness; the leafy gum clumps and the parrots roosting in them; and the hours when I sat on the dead log by the scented wattles in the hollows and watched the fleets of cockatoos like tiny canoes fade away in the sunset. I heard in dreams the laughter of the romping bush children as I raced them down the scrub-covered slopes, and I longed for those ambitionless days to come again.

MEMORIES

I can still see the forest trees

All waving in the dusk,

As scents drift on the wandering breeze,

From wattle-blooms and musk;

And o’er the mountains far away

Where home the parrots flock,

Roams through the sunset’s crimson ray

The drover with his stock.

The old bush homestead by the sea

Still stands, the front door swings

As on the tall, gaunt, dead gum-tree

The magpie sits and sings.

There, by the door, the stockman sits

And smokes; as on her rug

His pale wife sits just by and knits—

His beard three children tug!

And as I stand and, dreaming, gaze,

The years have taken wing,

And from my heart out of old days

Comes this sad song I sing.

That garden where those children ran,

Raced me, laughed, screamed with joy,

Is overgrown—and I, a man,

Have overgrown the boy.

I know the redwood’s forest height

Of branches thrilled with words,

All laden with God’s golden light—

Songs of soft, bright-winged birds—

Has blazed to ash in homestead fires

Of cities o’er the plains;

Of all those woods and sweet desires

This poem now remains.

Sweet Ellen, curled hair and brown eyes,

I loved her pretty ways;

And as I dream sad heart-mists rise

From those wild boyhood days.

My love was half a passion then,

That pure love God earth gave—

It comes in after years to men

For someone in a grave.

Their shanty where I sweetly slept

And heard the night-birds’ screams—

As thro’ the scrub the dingo crept—

Has rotted into dreams.

Now thro’ the hills the echoes fly

Of hearts o’er shining rails—

The night express fast thundering by

That brings the English mails!

Yet often I go back again

To where the homestead stands;

I gaze in eyes thro’ mists of pain

And clasp old shadow hands;

Kiss Ellen, Bertha and Lurline:

Those pretty children three

May some day read these lines of mine

And all remember me.

CHAPTER IV

My Brother’s Return—Scenery—Old Providence—Robert Louis Stevenson—New York—At Sea—The Change

IN August that year I at last received a letter from my brother, telling me he had left California and would arrive in Providence in a few days. I was delighted, for I was then completely on the rocks, having spent all my earnings on buying a violin bow and a stock of music! My comrade the Swede promised to come with me to meet my relative at the station.

The next day we stood on the platform together at eleven o’clock. The telegram said 12.30 P.M., but we were young and eager. We rubbed our hands with joyful anticipation as we stood there anxiously watching. Our funds were low and my brother had performed a miracle—he was a poet and journalist, and had made money out of his profession. When the train steamed in and the saloon car door opened I recognised at a glance the characteristic contour of the family face, though I had not seen my brother since we were children. I rushed forward overjoyed, and the welcome of brotherhood smiled in his expression. Six feet in height, and correspondingly athletic in appearance, he was well able to carry his own portmanteau, but privations and thoughts of affluence from his exchequer inspired me. Impulsively I seized it!

Years of residence in the States seemed to have changed his original nationality and the accent of his speech. He stood smiling before me, a Yankee of the aristocratic type. His keen grey eyes stared at my shabby clothes: the situation was evident to him at a glance. In a store by the civic centre, with an entrance that looked like the south nave of the Crystal Palace, my comrade and I were measured for new suits. Words could not express my gratitude.

With this lightening of my financial cares I felt the dim delirium, the exuberance, the faint revival of my old romantic glamour return; the world seemed beautiful after all.

My Swedish friend was delighted too, and smiled from ear to ear. I can still see his tall, lanky figure, and his merry round blue eyes as he puffs and tootles away on his beloved clarionet. Ah, how happy we were, marching on, carelessly unfulfilling the great promise of youth while we were yet youthful! Yet what is the good of promise fulfilled when youth is gone, when the glamour has faded, and you look through the grim spectacles of reality at the rouged cheeks of blushing truth and beauty? Oh, to remould this scheme of life, and be born old! To travel with Time and grim experiences down the years towards cheerful, glorious youth, back, back to the innocence and beauty of childhood’s dreams! To die full of hope and fond beliefs—and let the true believers travel the other way!

I know not where we went or why we went. I only know that my brother embraced the occasion and caught the vagabond fever; and that our valet, an old Turk (who kept swearing that he wasn’t an Armenian), sang jovial songs that were musically reminiscent of his harem days as he stumbled and struggled behind us, carrying our bundles of fruit, new suits, bouquets of flowers, and my long-wanted expensive copyright Etudes, Petrie’s Violin Studies, and all that sudden and unexpected affluence inspired us to buy.

I recall, too, how we were walking up the brilliantly lighted main street when a negro, who was anxiously watching for the editor of a Providence journal (that had criticised his lodging-house and the lady lodgers who kept such late hours), suddenly whipped out a revolver and fired. The editor had appeared at his door and received a bullet in his face, but he too had a revolver—probably he had been expecting the negro’s compliments—and he fired back and blew all the negro’s front teeth out. The next bullet from the negro’s revolver went through the Violin Studies which I held by my side, and but for the fortunate ricochetting of the bullet I should not now be able to write my reminiscences! I think the negro recovered from his wound and the editor was severely reprimanded for not hitting a vital spot. For the sins of negroes are dwelt upon like the sins of the poor relation, and I must admit that negroes are sometimes almost as bad as white men. There were no moving pictures in those days to perpetuate the episode, but still it is flashed vividly before my mind’s eye. I see the three races of good fellowship, my tall brother and myself, between us my lanky Swede comrade, and, just behind us, straight-nosed Turkey struggling along on bandy legs. Equipped with argosies of youthful dreams, pitching the moon and stars and sun from hand to hand, with rollicking song on our lips we fade away down the uncharted seas of Westminster Street, Providence!—to awaken on dim shores of cold daybreak as once more I kneel and take the sacrament before the grim, mock-eyed old priest—Reality! When I was twenty years and one month old—how long ago it seems!

We visited most of the fashionable places of interest, went almost everywhere, through the Open Sesame of my brother’s liberality. And that is saying a good deal, for theatres and palatial halls of amusement abound. There’s “The Gaiety,” “The Colonial,” “Hippodrome,” “Sans Souci,” “Bijou,” and heaven knows how many more, wherein the cheerful multitudes of R.I. folk scream with laughter and weep over unreal dramas.

I no longer played the monotonous second fiddle in the orchestra of the music hall; we sat, a happy trio, the smiling occupants of orchestral stalls, where I saw the Indian squaw fade to a shadow and die rather than sell her honour; and the American missionary weep over the grave of the half-caste Zulu in Timbuctoo who had died sooner than he would drink rum! Here was no painting of true life, no dramatic, realistic scene showing the besotted derelict who died far away in the isolation of some alien land—the man from nowhere, who took the wrong turning twenty years before, being hurried into his roughly made coffin: then his two lonely comrades watching the sunrise gleam in his dead eyes, and the half-boyish smile on the silent lips, as they place the coffin lid on, and creep along at daybreak, carrying him under the mahogany-trees to the hole by the swamp. They say a prayer and murmur: “Pity, Bill, that we left the bottle of whisky by his bed. Didn’t he rave about someone in the old country? Wonder what ’twas all about. The weather’s hot. Buried him rather quick, eh? Here’s the cross: ‘Bill.’ No name. ‘Died of Fever, Remembered by Us.’”

Moonlight ferry trips, picnics, concerts and songs are as characteristic of Providence as of the South Sea islanders of Samoa and Tonga. One difference divides the Providence population from the islanders—the natives of Providence wear clothes; but the Yankee mechanics outdo the Savaii and Fiji islanders in tobacco-chewing, and can spit over their shoulders with even swifter certitude than my sailor comrades of San Francisco, whom I told you about in my first book of South Sea reminiscences. Boating is an essential feature in their amusements. Rhodes-on-the-Pawtucket is crammed with boats. On sunshiny days thousands of youths and girls paddle and sing away, and never reflect on the time when Red Indian canoes darted in the moonlight over those same waters.

My comrade was still with me, and we got several engagements to play at dances and concerts. My brother was in the ring, so to speak, and so we were received with an enthusiasm that we had greatly missed when we really wanted it. My friend eventually, however, went off to Alaska to some relations. He promised to write to me, but I never heard of him again.

My brother owned, and still owns, I hope, estates called Cranston Heights, an elevated, breezy place. On the hottest day a sleepy wind creeps about them. From that spot you can gaze down into the valleys and see a wall of cliffs about an eighth of a mile long, rising a hundred feet high. There on a large boulder, known as Middleton’s Rock, my brother and I would sit reflectively smoking long Yankee corn-cob pipes, as we reclined, shaded by umbrellas of green-leafed trees from the hot sunlight. We sat there talking and dreaming of years ago when the Indians camped on Cranston Heights. I think my brother could outrival Fenimore Cooper and Cody in his knowledge of Indian history and the legends of the original tribes that owned America. Stone arrow-heads and Indian pottery to this day are often found there, and my brother showed me several relics which were dug out of his estate.

Rhode Island was of course originally an Indian settlement. Forests grew by the rushing rivers, and on the prairie landscapes stood native villages. The dominion was under a King Philip, and the island is sometimes called, for poetical purposes, “Land of King Philip.” The forests have succumbed to the woodman’s axe, though still patches of woods and prairie-land are left, and it was in that clump that I sat and played my violin and dreamed sometimes. Still the beautiful rivers run across the landscapes like veins of silver and gold fluid, glittering under the leafy clumps of beech, maple, hickory and many varieties of trees that resemble tropical types. The waters of those old rivers, like the coming and passing of singing humanity, have long since slipped into the distant seas, but still other waters flow on and are known by the ancient Indian names. The Seekonk river winds through Providence and throws its liquid mass into Narragansett Bay. From Cranston Heights you can see the exquisite scenery that is characteristic of the neighbourhood of Providence; across the valleys the hills fade before the eyes into dreamy distances as sunset floods the horizon. If you are poetical you can see the ghostly camp fires and dead Indian riders galloping and fading into the arched sunset of blood fire. The view reminded me of a South Sea modern shore village, for here and there were dotted bungalows, fenced by trees and green shrub and flowers. Things have altered a good deal since those days, for I have recently visited Providence.

Mr J——, whose palatial bungalow was among them, is one of Rhode Island’s greatest business men, and his commercial success is deserved, through his unassuming philanthropy. He has given a great deal of land, parks and drives to Providence. I think it was in Meshanticut Park, one of his gifts to the city, that I met with an adventure. The weather was hot, and I spied a small lake by some trees. Immediately I undressed and, though my brother expostulated, I dived into the water: the park officials came and arrested me, but my brother explained and I got off with a caution. Years of wild life in the South Seas had taught me to bathe where and when I liked, and I had yet to learn that park lakes in Providence were not as lagoons on the isles of the wild South Seas, wherein the whole population bathe without even the modest fig leaf, gossip, mention the weather and go their ways.

Oaklawn is another pretty spot. I stayed there with some of my brother’s friends, at Wilbur Avenue, I think. There is a little wooden bridge thereabouts, not far from an old stone mill. Near this spot in the old days a great Indian battle was fought, and there by that little bridge my brother would sit for hours, writing his articles for the provincial and New York papers.

It was at Oaklawn Bridge that I sat and told my brother of my various boyish experiences in the South Seas, of the island chiefs, and of my reminiscences of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom I had met at Apia and on ships at sea. My brother was deeply interested in all I told him. He was a great admirer of Stevenson’s work and his perfect literary style. We talked of Stevenson’s easy and careless manner that seemed such a contrast to his perfection and polish in writing. How he did not care a tinker’s curse for the opinion of the conventional world, and loved to shock visitors to Samoa by appearing before them suddenly in old clothes, bare-headed and bootless. I saw him come aboard a ship dressed in that way; and I recalled how, on another occasion, I met him coming down the track inland from Saluafata, the native village. “Hello, youngster,” he said; and, as I was going his way, off we tramped along the track together as he hummed beside me. Then, with the sunset, out came the native children rushing from the forest. Like tiny ghosts they glided, begging, in the shadows at our legs as we strode alone; and as Robert Louis Stevenson threw brass buttons to them, they raced after them, and then, half frightened that he might want to reclaim the prizes, they suddenly disappeared, racing back into the forest. The sunset died behind our backs and the stars crept over the Vaea Mountain top and the dark-branched coco-palms each side of the track; the shadows thickened as the stars brightened. So well do I remember that night that even now I seem to see my companion striding onward beside me, his loose neck-cloth fluttering in the wind that drifts in from the sea, stirring the coco-palms and pungent-smelling forest flowers as it passes. Still I see his ghost-like shadow, the clear eyes, the thin, æsthetic face; still he is humming a folk-song, while his right hand beats the moonlit bush with a stick—and yet he has lain there many years on the top of the Vaea Mountain—his rugged island tomb railed by the dim sky-lines of surrounding tropical seas, his vaulted roof the everlasting sky, studded with the brightest stars, as he lies with his stricken aspirations like some dead Christ of the lost children of the wild, solitary South.

A critic in The Times, reviewing my first book, Sailor and Beachcomber, after writing a column of critical appreciation, finished up by saying: “Mr Safroni-Middleton prides himself on having known Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas.” My book has three hundred and four pages: on three of them I spoke of Stevenson; but I fail to see why I should pride myself on knowing him, except in this sense, that I am proud to have met him and to count him among the many men who followed after my own heart.

If he had not died before I returned, a little older, to Samoa, he would have welcomed me as I should have welcomed him; for he had several times expressed a wish that I should call on him and take my violin, but in the foolishness of a boy’s thoughtlessness I did not go. Worldly greatness did not appeal to him, nor did my letters of introduction, for I had none, and he was, I am quite sure, aware of the fact.

Well, to return to my experiences in North America. After a time I left Providence, and then went down the Hudson river bound for New York. There I stayed in a temperance hotel close to the Bowery, and I cannot forget the scene.

Along winding avenues that divide the towering wooden buildings rushed battalions of hurrying legs. The noise of car bells and gongs and the babble of shouting voices assailed my ears. All the races under the sun seemed to have emigrated to that spot to fight in scheming regiments for the almighty dollar. White men, Chinamen, black men, tawny men, yellow men, Armenians, Turks, Germans with thick necks—all were there. Over my head rushed express trains. No space seemed wasted. Indeed the Yankees in their commercial search for gold peg out claims in the sky, claim square miles of stars, as up go their buildings to the heavens. By the second-storey windows on elevated railway tracks crash along the trains. In those days they ran by steam, and the coal-dust showered down your neck and in your eyes as you moved along with the thick crowd below; a crowd so dense that you could shut your eyes, make no effort, and still be propelled along in the mighty rush, as you dreamed of other days of peace and solitude! I went across Brooklyn Bridge by night: swung on mighty steel cables, it dangles in space and has several divisions for vehicles and pedestrians. Below rushed the ferry-boats on the Hudson river, their port-holes ablaze with light, and the sound of music on deck fading as they passed underneath. Across the bridge hurried electric cars, racing along by the mechanical genius of man’s brain, the light of the Universe—the stars switched on to wheels!

I only stayed one week in New York, for I met an old shipmate whom I had sailed with from Sydney. He was on a tramp steamer. One of the deck-hands had gone into hospital, so I yielded to my friend’s persuasion, went on board, secured the job and signed on. For the rest, it is all like a dream now: I can hear the rattle of the rusty chain as they haul the anchor up, and the uncouth, shrill calls of the pulling crew rising above the clamour of the steam winches, just before the tramp steamer moves away from the wharf to put to sea. New York and its babble of voices with their nasal twang, its vast drama of scheming existence in a feverish hurry, fades away and becomes a memory of some monstrous “magic shadow show” lit by the sun far off somewhere across the lone sea miles astern.

The sea routine has commenced: deep down in the stokehold firemen with cadaverous faces turned to the furnace blaze are toiling away. They look like shadows in the flame-lit gloom, like dead men working out their penance in hell. Attired in pants and a sweater only, with their hairy chests steaming with running perspiration, they work furiously. Their conversation is made up chiefly of oaths and forcible criticism on the lack of generosity they found in Bill or Jim, who only stood them ten drinks ashore, after all they had treated them to on that first spree night of the last trip. They are not bad men, and as they spit out the coal-dust in a thick mass from their stained lips, and take a gulp of condensed water to quench their thirst, I feel deeply sorry for them, and realise that they are the unsung heroes of the sea. I look at the row of unshaved faces thrust forward to the roaring fires, and at their shrivelled hands and big arms moving the long steel stoking bars, and wonder at the marvellous strength and virtue of the hard-working ship’s firemen.

On deck, like iced wine to my lips, I drink in the fresh sea breeze. It is dark. I cannot turn in, for I should not sleep, so I go into the fo’c’sle and watch the sailors playing cards, then return on deck and look over the ship’s side. Under the pendulous, curved moon—for it seems to sway to the roll of the rigging—the mate’s form moves to and fro as he tramps the bridge. The sailing ship that we sighted on the weather-side at sunset is now only a tiny travelling star low down on the ocean darkness far astern, where her mast head-light shines.

The weariness of the sea’s monotony is on me; we have been to sea long enough to be half-way across the Atlantic. The weather is much colder. The moon is large and low, and looks like a ghostly arch to the south, for it seems half submerged far away on the edge of the ocean, that seems shivering for miles with silver mystery. Just over the side I watch the mirrored masts and rigging glide along with us as though a ghostly ship is following; and the hours fly and dawn breaks greyly, and once more the tramp steamer is surrounded by blue sky-lines, till sunset sinks to a wild blaze in the western arch of the sky. The sailors go on watch. The cook washes his pots and pans ere he cuts his corns and turns into his bunk.

The wind’s voice murmurs mournfully in the rigging and round the bridge awnings; as the night grows older it swells to a tremendous voice that is really me! for it is the re-echo of my own hearing and dreaming consciousness. I fancy I hear the hounds of death racing across the wild sea moors as shadows dropping from the flying clouds go running over the moonlit sea, and now, as though a door in the sky is opened, the stars and moon are driven and shut away in the outer Universe. For a mighty sheet of storm-cloud slides across the heavens. The world is changed to an infinity of dark and wind, and the one dim figure of the look-out man on the fo’c’sle head. The thundering seas slowly rise with their white crests glowing in the ebon darkness as the brave old tramp steamer, like a frightened thing, stays her way a moment, and shivers as seas strike the weather bow. Then again she pitches onward, as wonderful little men, with bony, haggard faces with weary eyes in them, stare into the furnace fires of the steamer’s bowels, and shovel and stoke to sustain an honest existence, and drink tank water. No wonder they drink beer when they get the chance. I am quite sure I should.

A week later we sighted the cliffs of England, and soon after the sea tramp touched the wharf at Liverpool with a jerk and a shiver, and went to sleep among a forest of masts and funnels till her next trip.

CHAPTER V

Home—On an Orient Liner—The Orchestra—A Sailing Ship—Paganini—Port Said—Honolulu

AGAIN I am home and meet familiar faces, and enjoy the sweet security of home life and respectability; but soon the flight of time brings its inevitable changes both to my feelings and to those around me. I am no longer the prodigal son and a romantic novelty to the many who welcomed me at my arrival in the monotonous suburb; but nevertheless we are all moody companions in the sad drama of respectability. I had made up my mind to go travelling no more, but my good resolutions have faded away, and my whole soul is centred on inventing the best excuse for my not being able to accept the good position in London that will make me, at last, the respected son of a respected father.

Well, I feel a bit ashamed of my incorrigible personality, and yet how much my soul is burdened with the thought that I must aspire to higher things, and go off to the city each day like Mr W.’s son does, to sit on a stool. I can never be the pride and joy of the family, and as I sit alone and dream I am miserable with dim forebodings. On the back of the chair is my very high white collar and the smart tweed suit, and by my washstand my beloved fiddle. Just over it, on a peg by my bed, is my big-rimmed Australian hat. Alas! that hat speaks of tropical sunshine and coco-palms. I can hear the arguing voices of bushmen in the grog shanty by “Bummer’s Creek,” and the trade wind in the shore banyans as the beachcomber laughs and nudges his pal in the ribs.

I cannot sleep, for the parrots are flying and muttering across the sky of my dreams; I hear the crack of the stock-whips on the slopes as the scampering, flying sheep go racing across my bedroom floor. I close my eyes, and the natives start singing in the Fijian village, and the drums are beating the sunset out ere I am wide awake, through the civilised jingle of the milkman’s cans in the cold, windy street below.

The last dark wintry morning arrives. It has all been settled. I have signed on for a voyage as violinist and assistant purser on the Orient liner the Britannia. I am to catch the 4 A.M. train to London Bridge. How dark and cold it is as I get up and dress, then go up the next flight to kiss my three sisters a last good-bye. They lift their sleepy heads and put their arms around my neck. “Good-bye, Tiggy,” they say once again, as I gently close their bedroom door and go downstairs. My father helps me on with my overcoat, and says very kind words. I try to answer, but my voice sounds husky and I keep placing the wrong arm in my overcoat sleeves. Now comes the greatest task of all, a task that will tax all my courage. I strive to hide my weakness and make a joke about the bad penny turning up again soon, and then neither of us speak, and once again I kiss her lips, the lips of the most beautiful woman this world ever gave me. I hurry down the streets. I am glad it’s dark, for my eyes feel weak, and the windy light of the lamp-posts seem to swim about the street spaces. I am haunted by her face all down the Channel that night, for she caught my soul adrift among the stars ere I was born, and my heart still sings a sad song for the woman who was my mother.

There is a deal of sameness on a large liner’s trip to the colonies. But for the complication of characters among the passengers and crew, and the ports that we put into on the voyage out, the passage would be extremely monotonous.

Forward, near the fo’c’sle, was the glory hole, between decks, wherein slept the crowd of stewards and cooks. They were a jolly lot of men, and when the steerage and fore-cabin passengers had finished their evening meal they would sit on their sea-chests yarning or playing cards far into the night. Sometimes they would sing songs, accompanied by the twang and tinkling of the assistant cook’s banjo; and older men, who were tired out, thrust their fierce faces out of their bunks and swore at being kept awake, as once more the wild chorus of I owe Ten Shillings to O’Grady re-echoed through the “glory hole.” Sleepless passengers up on deck clapped their hands with pleasure to hear the monotony broken, as the big pistons in the engine-rooms throbbed out their incessant pom-pe-te-pom, and the screws thrashed the racing liner across the world. In the morning at four-thirty the men would be dead to the world in their bunks as the second steward started shouting: “Now then, you sleepers! Now then, you sleepers, rise and shine!” or “Come out of it, you young b——!” and so on, as sleepy heads lifted up in the rows of bunks and then dropped helplessly again. Some were romantic boys who had read autobiographies, and some middle-aged men who had sickened of the workman’s train and drifted to sea.

In the evenings I played the violin in the saloon and deck concerts aft, beyond the dividing rope which was the boundary line that told the fore-cabin passengers that they must not approach the élite in the first saloon.

Our orchestra consisted of three violins, ’cello, bass, and the usual brass and wind. I had an easy time, and often till midnight would stand on deck watching the stars and the world of waters below, and listening to the voices of passengers on deck outward bound for Australia, to find fame and fortune—or ill fame.

I became very friendly with a member of our ship’s band, the solo cornet player. He was a quiet, elderly man, turning grey, and had once been a player in the orchestra of the Lyceum Theatre. A fine all-round musician he was too. He would sit on deck after dark, put a mute on his instrument, and extemporise melody and make it sound like a sweet-voiced girl singing softly to herself. He had the real temperament, and had received a first-class musical education.

Nothing reveals character, the intellectual calibre of the instrumental player, so much as the type of composition that makes up his private repertoire. For in that he only plays the compositions which appeal to him. Some are devoid of personality and only perform the stock pieces that are fashionable. Others revel in melody that tells of the light side of life, its gaiety, or the pathos of dramatic existence on the stage, the tragedian’s mock grief before the footlights ere the curtain falls. Others find their musical heaven vaguely expressed by playing those pieces that seem to murmur, as a sea-shell murmurs of the ocean, that indefinable note of poetry, the voice of the unknown, the intense inner life of our existence. My friend was one of the latter kind. He gave me many useful hints which I profited by, (as I often did in my travels), and so received a free musical education, the only music lessons I ever really had.

But for the throb of the engines and thrashing screw, the vessel’s motion, and the stewards’ sea-legs aslant to the deck’s list as they walk the saloons and cabin alley-ways, you could half think you were in some subterannean hotel. Travel on a liner, and the wild poetry of the sailing ships swerving to the swell of travelling seas, the climbing sailors aloft singing their chanteys among the storm-beaten sails, the flying clouds overhead that race the moon, all seem to be something that you dreamed of, or lived through ages ago.

Sea-boots and oilskins seem mythical things that faintly recall your yellow-backed old buccaneer novels, or the days when Drake sailed down the seas.

Officers on the P. & O. liners speak with university polish. “Ay, ay”, “Hold hard!”, “Look out, you son of a sea-cook!”, “Holy Moses!”, “Up she comes”, “All together!”, “Let go!”, “Haul the mainsail up!”. This is all changed now to “Make haste, Mr Pye-Smith” and “Yes, sir, I beg your pardon. What a draught!”. Or a bell tinkles down in the engine-room, and the mammoth liner, like a mighty iron beast, slows obediently to half-speed, stops, or slashes her tail and goes full speed astern, without one song or oath.

The stormy night and head-wind, the huddled group of sailors in oilskins singing their wild chantey, O, O, for Rio Grande, on deck in the windy dark as they bend together and pull while the vast monotone of the ocean becomes the orchestral accompaniment to voices from strong, open, bearded mouths, and your world of stars suddenly veers as the dark canvas sails and yards swerve round; the chief mate shouting, “What the blazing hell—— Ay, there!” as on the wind comes faintly back, “Ay, ay, sir, all clear!”: this smacks more of the sea. Why, on a sailing ship, the very sea-cook at the galley door, amidships, clutching his pans, gazing across the wild, lonely waters, where the leaping, white-bearded waves seem like old misers’ hands plucking at the sunset’s gold, is sheer downright poetry compared with the electric-lighted saloon crowded with munching, over-fed men and women with moving mouths and pince-nez on their respectable noses.

The sailing ship has its rough, uncomfortable side, for well I remember my last trip from ’Frisco round the Horn, when I stood on deck at night, with deadly cramp gripping my legs, my eyebrows frozen together, my nose pinched and blue with cold, the decks awash and our sea-chests afloat in the fo’c’sle and deck-house. I recollect the cook holding on to his pots and pans and swearing as only an old-time boatswain, and that cook, could swear as we begged for a pannikin of hot coffee: stuff that tasted like heaven-sent life-blood to our frozen lips as we two boys drank it. The weather-beaten boatswain in his oilskins and sea-boots went by us in the dark, as great seas came over, singing a song to himself as though he was soliloquising in some quiet bar off the Mile End Road instead of experiencing the wildest weather I have ever seen, or ever want to see.

How I admired those old seafarers! “Fetch that, matey,” they’d say, and off I’d rush, eager to please and obey the orders of Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake, for such men they seemed to me.

In the fo’c’sle at night they’d say: “Get that fiddle out and play to us.” A thrill of boyish pride would go through me to notice their attention and respect as I played my best. Presently they would join in as I played the chanteys they had taught me, Sailing down to Rio or Blow the Man Down. Without removing their pipes or chewing quids, their cracked, hoarse-throated voices would join in.

Deep bass voices two or three had, and as they sat round me on their old sea-chests, and I scraped away to the tuneless, yelling, bearded mouths beneath the dim light of the fo’c’sle oil lamp, I drank in the last breath of the winds of sea romance. I see them now as I dream. There they sit on their sea-chests, oilskins and sea-boots on, with curios from other lands fastened over their bunks around them, as they open their big bearded mouths and sing. How ghost-like their eyes look by the light of the dim lamp, as the hazy tobacco smoke curls thickly to the low roof! Then their hollow voices fade and the visionary “Old Hands” vanish as the last breath of wind blows them like cobweb-fine things through the fo’c’sle door, along the moonlit deck, away seaward for ever as I dream.

How I recall these lonely nights and the sailors moving across the deck in the dark, or climbing aloft like shadows back to the sky. I used to stand alone and gaze over the ship’s side and suddenly feel the intensity of living, as my thoughts half clung hopefully to the stars, like lost, migrating swallows that cling to the rigging of ships far out at sea; and the mighty, moving water all around me seemed to break with its monotone against eternity. I remember lying in my bunk, and by the oil lamp’s light watching the ship’s cockroaches go filing across the photographs of my parents and relatives which I had tacked on my bunk side to remind me of home, though I required no such reminder. Those silent faces intensified the difference between reality and my boyhood’s dream; as a cold breath out of the grave of my beloved, who slept in the seas outside, blew through the door across my face as I dreamed of her—my beautiful dead romance!

Truly, sailing ships have their rough side as well as a wildly romantic one. Rolling down south, with gales behind bringing the seas up like majestic travelling hills as under the poop they go, and she rolls and swerves as the masts sweep across the sky, is the motion of sea poetry. If you are aloft you look down and could swear that she must turn turtle. Telling you this calls back my feelings when I first went aloft as a boy of fourteen years.

The ship was rolling heavily, and as I looked down on deck something seemed to have happened (I turned pale, I’m sure): she was turning right over. I clung on with might and main as the masts and yards went over; death seemed to stare me in the face: like a wild beast I hooked on with fingers, toes and teeth, prepared for the final plunge into the heaving ocean below, when lo! to the mysterious equal pull of gravity she slowly swerved and rose, the rigging jerked and rattled, the jib-boom lifted and the figure-head at the bows lifted her face from the weather-side and went right over to peep at the lee-side. Overjoyed, I looked over my shoulder astern and saw the chief mate yawning on the poop and the man at the wheel quite unconcerned, when I had instinctively thought they were clinging to anything movable, prepared to dive into the ocean when the ship turned clean over. That bronzed, broad-shouldered mate grinned when I stood on the poop. He asked me how I had felt. He was a good sort. He’s dead now and under the sea, missing these many years; and the red-bearded Scotch skipper, who was like a father to me, is worse off, for the last I heard of him was that he was still alive and missing—mentally. “But this won’t buy the baby a frock,” as they say at sea when you go off dreaming and leave your work to yarn. So I must return to the P. & O. liner as she races across the Mediterranean, bound for Suez.

We had called in at Naples, where we had taken on board a batch of passengers. I remember one of them especially; he was a distinguished old Italian and his profile recalled to my mind the pictures I had seen of Dante. He wore a loose cloak and a cavalier hat, and carried a violin-case. His eyes were eagle-like, yet bilious-looking, for he was suffering from some kind of yellow jaundice and slow circulation. On the hottest nights his teeth chattered with the cold. When we were crossing the Red Sea and the passengers brought their beds on deck to sleep, hoping to get a whiff of air, he went into his cabin in the usual way, with his teeth chattering with the cold, crawled into his bunk and got into his bed-clothes—a large canvas sack heavily lined with wadding; bodily into this he would go and tie the tapes at the head of the sack tightly round his neck, so that no air could possibly get into the sack and give him a chill. The very sight of it all made me perspire and gasp in that stifling hot weather. I felt sorry for him, and I cannot imagine now that he could have lived very long after getting to Australia, where he was going for his health’s sake. He was a splendid violin-player, but did not perform. I used to talk to him on deck, and discovered that he was a Genoese. I was greatly interested to hear that his father, who was also a musician, had known intimately the celebrated violin maestro, Paganini, and had had violin lessons from him. From broken English, and Italian gesticulations, I learnt that the great violinist had peculiar ways. He had stayed for a few days at my friend’s childhood home and while there had upset the quiet routine of the family, for he was extremely superstitious and restless, and walked about the house all night. He declared that a ghostly woman stood with her face at his window whenever he played a certain melody that had come to him in his dreams. Beyond his family’s enthusiastic reminiscences over Paganini’s violin-playing, that is the only incident that vividly impressed me. My friend was a remarkable character and, though he was ill, extremely vivacious and always talking excitably. Sometimes he would sit on deck after dark, and plucking the strings of his violin, pizzicato, guitar style, would sing softly to himself in Italian with a clear, sweet, musical voice that was very effective.

I went with him ashore at Port Said. It was fearfully hot, but as my friend walked down the gangway with me he was well swathed in scarves, and wrapped up in shirts under his large fur-lined cloak. He seemed to have plenty of money and was anything but mean with it. It was a treat to get away from the hubbub of the natives coaling the steamer. I only have a dim, dream-like recollection of that particular visit ashore at Port Said. I remember the town with the white buildings and palm-trees dimly outlined under the stars, and the begging, dark-faced descendants of the Egyptian Pharaohs who rushed forth out of alley-ways and sought our patronage. Signor Niccolo was terribly thirsty, and the English restaurant was so crowded with passengers from the boats that we both went off and sought elsewhere for refreshments. We went up a dark alleyway, directed there by a swarthy man who evidently misunderstood our requirements. In the darkness it seemed like some subterranean passage to an Egyptian ghost-land as we walked along and heard the uncouth voices of the inhabitants issuing from the little barred windows that were let in in the high walls on each side. Shuffling by us went the sandalled feet of black men with white turbans on that looked like towels swathed about their heads. Presently we arrived at a tunnel-like entrance that led into a suspicious, dimly lit little restaurant. As we sat at one of the small tables and sniffed peculiar odours, that smelt like scented tea and aromatic herbs, four dusky beauties came through a little secret door and laughingly revealed their teeth, then asked in broken English what we would like to drink. Signor Niccolo called for wine and I had coffee. Off rushed the dark female attendants to execute our orders. “Funny plaze and funny girlees, eh?” said Signor Niccolo to me. “Seems so,” I answered, for the waitresses were only dressed in little singlets, with a loose piece hanging to their knees and a scarf swathed about their bosoms for modesty’s sake, which was the only modesty that we saw there, as they lifted their scanty robes to dust the furniture. We drank our refreshment and hurriedly escaped from the place.

I do not think there are any missionaries at Port Said; possibly the English and American officials look upon it as hopeless. Port Said was a veritable hell of iniquity in those days, and still is. Passengers often went ashore and lost the boat, or disappeared altogether. After we left a Yankee saloon passenger sat on the settee and told us of his experiences there. He had gone into an isolated restaurant at the north end of the town and called for a drink. In his button-hole he wore a large red camellia blossom which, though he did not know it, was a kind of Masonic sign. So directly he had ordered his whisky and sat down in the large arm-chair, the attendant, who was an old black Arab mute with a heavy grey beard, suddenly touched a spring in the wall, and lo! up went a partition on each side and he was shut in a little room, staring with surprise at the old mute, who, to his astonishment, now spoke in a musical voice. The old man’s beard and eyebrows dropped off and with the old cloak fell rustling to the floor, and there, with shining dark eyes and pouting lips, a dusky harem beauty stood before him! Even the sedate P. & O. chief officer smiled behind his napkin as the Yankee told us that yarn, and we tried to keep straight faces over all the details which I have left out!

Three or four weeks later I arrived in Melbourne, where I stayed a week in Collins Street and at length succeeded in getting a berth on a boat that was bound for the Islands. Eventually I arrived at Honolulu, where I had some luck with my violin-playing which enabled me to take a cheap passage to Apia, where I had lived before.

CHAPTER VI

Changes in Samoa—Curios—A Moonlit Scene—Saints and Fakirs—Indians—Apia Town—Vailima—The Chief Mataaga—A Forest Ballroom—The Wandering Scribe—A Legend of Samoa—An old Shellback’s Yarns—Tuputa and the Sinless Lands—A Tribal Waltz

IT was some time since I had left Samoa. Things there seemed to have considerably changed. Many of my friends, both natives and white men, had gone away to another island. I went up to Mulinuu village, expecting to see my friend Raeltoa, the Samoan, and to my great regret learnt that his wife had died of consumption and that he had gone away to the Line Islands, in the Equatorial Group. Robert Louis Stevenson had died some months before, and was at rest on the top of Vaea Mountain. Indeed with his death the old Samoa seemed to have passed away.

I felt rather depressed for a time, but I met an American tourist, staying at the German hotel in Apia, who was very eccentric, and he cheered me up considerably. He was a collector of native curios, and his whole life seemed to be centred on his strange hobby. He invited me into his apartments, and I could hardly move for the lumber and his large crates of native pottery, old breech-loading weapons, cutlasses, mummified human heads, dried native feet cut off at the ankles, war-clubs, human teeth and skeletons, native musical instruments and barbarian furniture. He talked of nothing else but his gruesome collection. He had a high, bald head and beak-like nose, whereon he was eternally fingering his pince-nez, which kept falling off whilst he enthusiastically held up relics for my inspection. His passion for getting curios seemed never satisfied. We dined at a native’s house together; suddenly he lifted the cloth and saw that the table was a rough, native-made table of platted cane and bamboo. Immediately he bargained for it, and to the native’s delight purchased it, and off we went with it. How he got them all away from the hotel I don’t know, for he had a regular cargo of stuff, but eventually he got his curios on board a steamer and went off to San Francisco.

I stayed on in Apia for several weeks, joining a party of tourists, and with them I visited the various scenes and islands of the group. As I write, in a dream I see the slopes rising from the sea, lying silent in the moonlight. The curling smoke from the camp fires steals above the still coco-palms that shelter the huts of the native villages. The big, hive-shaped houses are musical with humming melody and the jabbering voices of rough-haired native girls and women. Some squat cross-legged by door-holes, whence emerge tiny, brown, naked children, to turn head over heels, or race like joyful puppies after each other round the dens. Big full-blooded Samoan chiefs smile and show their white teeth as they roll banana-leaf cigarettes between their dusky fingers. Across the flat lies Apia town with its one main street; beyond the inland plateaux rise, and far off you can see the moonlit waves breaking into patches like white moss on the level ocean plains.

By the copra and coco plantations are the emigrant settlements, where tired coolies, most of them Malay Indians, rest after their toil. Native women linger near them, for they are generous men those coolies, and give the velvet-skinned native girls sham jewellery. The Indian sadhu (saint) sits by the line of dens and stores under the palms; he looks like some carved holy image as he stares with bright, unblinking eyes. The natives’ wooden idols have long since been smashed, or have rotted away, and that living idol of the East is one from many cargoes that have arrived to take the place of the old deaf South Sea idols. The new idols are real; they have live tongues and eyes that lure on true believers, converts to Allah, to do monstrous things. The deaf, dumb wooden gods of heathen times were sanctified compared with these new immigrant idols that breathe!

That old fakir, with outstretched withered arm that brings him reverence and cash, represents Hinduism, or Buddha. His thick beard is almost solid with filth, where-from at intervals, out to the hot sky, buzz big blow-flies. Just across the track is the bazaar, wooden cabins under the mangroves and coco-palms, where the Indians sell jewellery, the Koran, and richly coloured dress materials to the Samoan women. The Indians appear fine-looking men when dressed, with their dark, brilliant eyes and curly, close-cropped beards. They swear to all things by the holy prophet Mahomet, and wear a poetic smile that enlarges when you are not looking to a sardonic grin! Native women meet them at dark under the coco-palms, stroke their beards and gaze secretly up into their faces with passionate admiration.

That pretty Samoan girl, with staring, romantic eyes and rough, bronze-coloured hair, who only a week ago gave herself body and soul to some Indian, the scum of the East, sits alone under the dark mangroves by the lagoon and thinks and thinks of the day before her fall. A red, decorated loin-cloth reaches to her waist, the forest winds kiss the maiden curves of her brown, flower-like bosom. She is very young: her childhood’s dolls are still unbroken, and are being loved and nursed by her little sisters who live on the neighbouring Savaii Isle. Her father was eaten by a shark last year, and her mother is married to a white man who is never sober.

Not far away sit a group of Indian women, dark and evil-looking, with round faces. Dressed in gorgeous garments of rich yellow and crimson, they are certainly attractive; earrings dangle from their ears and some of them have a silver hoop through the nose. They loll under the coco-palms, whisper viciousness, and mortally hate the handsome Samoan girls.

The mail steamer arrived in Apia harbour a few hours ago. Along the white, dusty, inland track goes the fair, handsome white woman, Maria Mandy. She is off to her bungalow up the hill, a secluded, romantic spot. Her round, pretty face is getting quite sunburnt and brown. By her side walks an aristocratic-looking tourist; he wears pince-nez, is deeply religious and in a great hurry! Maria is dressed up to “the nines,” is scented and looks fine and sweet: the “light o’ Love” of a score of German naval officers and men of respectable repute, she has grown wealthy and intends to go soon to Sydney. With her wit and courtly polish she will get on well in Australia, and will probably get into Government House society, be extremely virtuous and so shocked that she will suggest the removal from the select clique of such suspicious characters as old Colonel B——, who will foam at the mouth and wonder why he is snubbed. Mrs S. A. and Lady H. B. will go into hysterics, weep, grind their delicate white teeth, look at the ceiling of their bedroom and ask heaven who could possibly have guessed about those intrigues; and they will never dream of the knowing Apia harlot—handsome Maria Mandy.

That fat, thick-necked German official, who likes Samoa better than the Berlin suburbs, is out walking alone; he is just off to see Salvao Marva and gaze upon her through those big-rimmed, academic spectacles. He is nearly sixty, and pretty Marva is nearly fifteen years old! No one knows about it though. He is a good man at home, plays the Austrian zither perfectly, and sings in a deep religious bass voice folk-songs of the Fatherland. Romantic Marva loves those songs, and knows them all by heart; she has a voice like a wild bird, and you do not feel so hard upon the in-auspicious fall of German culture. He is due back in Berlin soon, for his time is up in six months, so he is quite safe, and poor Marva can place the parental responsibility for her baby on to the back of the beachcomber, Bill Grimes, who will say, “Well I’m blowed, if this ain’t all right,” then accept the position and make his home in the South Seas after all.

Hongis Track, Rotorua, N.Z.

Maria Mandy is not the only lady who will become respectable and make the devil rub his hands and chuckle with delight. On the beach stroll other white women, and droves of pretty half-caste girls who will eventually get jobs as “ladies’ maids” to touring families that call at Apia on the homeward voyage to New York and London. They have fine times those girls with the German and English sailors, or with “perfect gentlemen,” and sometimes a black-sheep missionary who has been dismissed from the L.M.S. Off they go on the spree and forget themselves and do things that make even the beachcomber Bill Grimes rub his eyes and stare; for, after all, he’s not so bad; he can some day, in that “far-off event of perfect good,” buy a new suit of clothes; but the beachcombers that loaf and eat the fruit of frailty in this Eden of the South Seas can never buy another soul.

Hark! the harbour is musical with voices, for this is fair Italy of the Southern Seas, where natives paddle their canoes and sing their weird melodies as naturally as men breathe. You can hear the splash of the paddles and oars as they cut the thickly star-mirrored water. The native boats are bringing sailors ashore from the ships that arrived at twilight. The moonlit shore and the palm-clad slopes look like fairyland to the silent ships lying out in the harbour. The men step ashore, pay one shilling, or one mark, each, then off go the canoes back to the ships for other crews, as the groups of sailors go up to Apia town. Before they get there dusky guides offer their services, and they see the sights—such sights too! No missionaries could ever reform such creatures as they see. One of them, she is one of many, wears almost nothing, the curved, thick lips in her wide mouth murmur forth alluring Samoan speech. Her girth is enormous, and her brown bosom heaves with simulated professional passion, like a wave on the treacherous deep dark ocean of sensuality—whereon so often travelling men are shipwrecked. Her eyes are large, the pupils widely encircled with white, and warm with the sunlight gleam of downright wickedness; she has been taught her art in the vast university of experience with white men in the foremost ranks of civilisation’s pioneer tramp! Paid vice was never known in Samoa till the white men came; but now she lures to her velvety brown arms the unwary innocence of fragile sailormen and tourists who come from London on the civilised Thames; where the missionaries hail from, who in our land of purity, of course, cannot exert and bring into play their noble efforts, and so through innocence, O England, my England, your children fall before the lure of the wicked South!

Low-caste Samoan women are not all hideous; some have large, innocent eyes alive with wonder; half angel and half devil they look as they stand before the camera and, answering the stern voice of the operator, strive to look modest and sweet.

By the edge of the small lagoon, under those tall coco-nut-trees sit four little naked baby girls. It is dark, but their brown faces imaged in the water can be seen by the brilliant moonlight; they look like truant cherubims from Paradise out on the spree, as they sit side by side whispering musical Samoan baby words, and kissing the rag doll that was made in Germany. Their Samoan father is away in a far village on a visit to a wedding feast; if you listen you can hear the far-off sounds of tom-toms and cymbal-clanging coming across on the drifting forest wind that brings with it odours of wild, decaying flowers and fruit. Their mother is fast asleep by the door of their native home close by; she sleeps soundly, and the mongrel dog’s snout is couched softly on her bare, warm, brown breast. It looks a mystical, beautiful world, like some spiritual land beyond the stars, as the bright eyes of those tiny faces peep through the wind-blown palm leaves; and I watch them in my dreams to-night, though long since those little girls are women and now meet the eyes of Indian, Chinese and European men.

Civilisation’s iron foot is on the hills, and along the tracks that lead inland where mission schools and churches stand, to collect on weekdays and Sundays the high-class native folk who live in comfortable Polynesian homes. The night is hot, starry and almost windless, and handsome Samoan youths attired in the lava-lava (loin-cloth) patter swift-footed along the tracks under the coco-nut and tropical trees that shelter the primitive homes of the South Sea paradise. Samoan girls with wild, bright eyes, round, plump, brown faces, and curved figures as perfect as sculptural art, pass and repass up the forest tracks. They are singing Samoan songs that intensify the romantic, dream-like atmosphere of the tropical night—an atmosphere not even to be dispelled by the wailing cry of the native babies, who give short, wild, smothered screams as they lose and then suddenly recover the breasts of sleeping mothers in those thatched homes by the palms and banana groves. The vast night sky, agleam with stars, shines like a mighty mirror. You can see the red glow of the reflection from the volcanic crater miles away on Savaii’s Isle.

If you go up the slope and stand on the plateau, away inland, when dawn is stealing in grey tints along the ocean horizon, awakening the birds on Vaea Mountain, and the native homes are astir, you can distinctly see afar something that looks like a cow-shed by coco-palms and thick jungle growth. It is Vailima, the home of Robert Louis Stevenson. One light gleams in the large shed-room, and the intellectual, sensitive face of the poet-author moves there in the gloom. He has come back from Apia town and is tired, yet secretly as pleased as the two old shellbacks who have carried his curios back, and who hitch up their trousers and cough respectfully as the world-famous author sneaks them in and gives each a bumping glass of the best brand. How quietly his keen eyes gaze upon them as they drink! On a shelf the large clock ticks warningly. He glances at it now and again as the belated sailors yarn on, grow more and more garrulous and continue their strange experiences, that cling to the wonderful, distilling brain of the listener as moonlight clings to deep, dark waters. At last, with intellectual delicacy, they are hurriedly slipped off; for soon the respectable folk, whom he gave the slip to early in the evening, will return, and he must not be seen in such company again. The old shellbacks grip the extended, thin, delicate hand, look into the keen eyes and wipe their mouths as they go down the narrow track. “He’s a gentleman ’e is, d——d if ’e ain’t,” they say to each other, as the silent, lonely man they have just left sits and dreams on alone, and thinks and feels those things that no book ever did, or ever can, tell.

A few miles away lives the great high chief Mataafa; he knows Tusitala, the writer of tales. Mataafa is the old King of Samoa: his warriors have charged up those slopes and the sound of the guns from the enemy’s warships echoed and re-echoed across the bay. It is all like some far-off dream to me that in my boyhood I should have met and fiddled to the Napoleon of the South Seas, for Mataafa was exiled, though there the similarity ends. I can still see the handsome, intelligent face and remember the quick, kind eyes of Samoa’s dethroned king. I did not know, or at least realise, who Mataafa was, as he sat on a chest in the schooner’s cabin in Apia harbour. I knew he was someone important by the skipper’s behaviour and respectful attention. Only long after did I clearly realise that I was in at the death at one of the most tragic periods of Samoa’s history. I helped row the exiled king ashore and went with him to Mulinuu village, where I stayed the night, and then rowed him back in the ship’s boat again. Had I known the truth I would have clung to the old king with all the romantic vigour of my soul. The opportunity of my boyish dreams had presented itself, but I knew it not. How I would have striven to lean on that chieftain’s right arm, helping in some tragical drama of war and intrigue that would have given me the fame that my boyish aspirations yearned for as I read the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Alas! I can only remember a sad, aged face in a South Sea forest homestead, in a schooner’s dingy cabin, or earnestly talking under the forest trees by night to loyal chiefs ere he returned to the ship. I saw him three or four times ashore, and entertained him in the refuge where he lived with his faithful chiefs. Also I played the violin to him several times, while he smiled gravely and the garrulous skipper drank whisky and sang out of tune, or read out loudly snatches from The Samoan Times, which was a paper something after the style in size of The Dead Bird, published in Sydney, but suppressed and issued again as The Bird of Freedom.

Behind the stores in Apia’s street is the primeval ballroom where I played the violin to the Samoan grandees, and to tripping, white-shoed German officials, while five half-caste girls in pink frocks, with crimson ribbons in their forests of hair, went through the Siva dances. Robert Louis Stevenson gazed on, or argued with the crusty German official, who was red in the face as Stevenson expressed his opinions on Samoan politics. Just below too, down the street, is the bar-room, where I played the violin with the manager’s wife, who was a good pianist. I only performed there once: a trader was half-seas over and was arguing with a German official; suddenly he picked my violin up and hit the German over the head with it. There was a great scene and the trader was thrown out. Everyone laughed to see the look on my face as I scanned the fiddle to see if it had been damaged; even the manager and his wife put their fists in their mouths to hide a noisy smile. The German shouted: “Mein Gott! I vill see that this mans be arrested! Mein Gott! Mein Gott!”

It’s a lively place, this Samoan isle. There sits an aged, tattooed native from Motootua village. He is a wandering scribe, a poet and author of the South Seas, and well beloved by all his critics, who mostly wear no clothes! He does not write on paper, but engraves on the brains of his audiences his memories, impromptu poems and improvisations; or he tells of Samoan history and poetic lore. He wears the primitive ridi to his bony knees and a large shawl of native tappu-cloth round his brown shoulders; tall and majestic-looking, with strong, imaginative face, when he stands quite still and lifts one arm to heaven he looks like an exiled scapegrace god.

With eyes shining brilliantly he tells you the tale of creation, how man- and woman-kind came on earth. Ages ago a giant turtle, like a fish that walked on a thousand legs, came up from the bottom of the ocean and saw the blue sky for the first time, and far away the coral reefs and forest-clad shores of Samoa. Full of excitement, it slashed its tail, swam to the isle and crept ashore. Once on dry land it could not move and get back to its native ocean again. The sun blazed on its tremendous back as it crouched and died, and underneath its vast shell a plot of tiny crimson and blue flowers trembled with fear in the sudden darkness that had fallen over them. When the giant turtle was dead its crumbling flesh fed the flowers with moisture, while they cried bitterly at being hidden from the beautiful golden sunlight. When only the shell was left, and the sun was shining beautifully, the flowers peeped out and saw the green hills and coco-palms, and found that they were able to move: out they all ran and tripped up the shore, a delighted flock of laughing faces, and climbed the coco-nut and palm trees—they were Samoan girls!

That same night a cloud was leisurely travelling across the clear skies with a cargo of male stars asleep on its breast; and as it passed right over the very spot where the new girls were climbing and clinging to the trees, the high chief of the stars, who was old and grey, looked over the side of the cloud and was astonished, for he saw the girls and at once called loudly to the youthful, sleeping stars, who rubbed their eyes and jumped up. They were beautiful youths with bright faces. “Look down there,” said the old, grey star, and all the young stars looked and saw the Samoan maidens climbing about the tree-tops. “Oh, what shall we do to get down to them?” they all wailed, and the old, grey star said, “Ah, you were happy till I awoke you from sleep, but now your passions are awake and you cry aloud for sorrow.” Then they all became impatient and fierce, and cried out: “Stop the cloud, stop the cloud”; and the old, grey-bearded star sighed and said: “So shall it be.” The moon at once shone out in the sky and the old leader put his hand up to the orb and filled his arms with beautiful moonlight ere he struck the cloud with his magic breath and the thick, dark mist dissolving fell as sparkling rain softly to the isle far below. The bright moonlight clinging to the falling drops made ropes of moonbeams dangle to the forest tree-tops, on which the laughing stars slid as they went down, down—as beautiful youths, to fall into the outstretched arms of the surprised maidens. And that’s how man and woman first came to the Samoan Isles!

Many more were the strange but really poetic tales told by him and by other wandering authors, but their memories and the children of their poetic imaginations are forgotten for ever. I do not think many of the old-time South Sea legends have ever been collected and translated, and so they only survive in the biographical writing of men who visited the islands and happened to have retentive memories for such things as poetic lore, and so preserved some of those old fragments of Samoan stories, as I have attempted to do from my recollection of many of them.

The lore of the South Seas has faded and has been replaced by tragic human drama and rumour. Subject matter for three-volume novels is plentiful in Samoa; indeed throughout the whole of the South Seas you could draw and never drain dry the living fountains of human drama.

Peaceful-looking homesteads, clean, religious and happy, abound, but some are tense with passion. By the mission room down at Mulinuu lives pretty Lavo; she is only sixteen and deeply religious. She loves the handsome white missionary with all her soul, but dares not speak out or confess. Eventually he goes away back to his own country, and a few days later they find poor Lavo’s body in the lagoon. She looks beautiful even in death, as she still clutches the photograph of the homeward-bound missionary. Her native relatives wring their hands and wail; they lay her in the native cemetery just by the plateau, and sing sadly of her childhood till she is forgotten.

A white man was found with the side of his head blown off last night; he arrived at Apia a week ago, looking worried and haggard. All evidence of his identity had been destroyed by him, excepting a torn, half-obliterated letter which reads like this:

“My own dear R——. Yes, I still love you, and will not believe you did that. I read the full account in this morning’s Chronicle. My heart is heavy, dear; give yourself up and face it. Oh, my darling, don’t leave the country. I love you, and will die, I am sure, if you go away. Meet me to-night at same place. I long to see your poor dear face. God watch over you. Yours ever,

E——.”

The German High Commissioner kept the revolver that was found by the dead man’s side, and his fat old wife took possession of the photograph that was found on him. She has tacked it up on her bedroom wall; it’s such a nice, happy-looking, girlish face. They buried the suicide in the whites’ cemetery, at the far end, among the “no-name graves.”

On the slopes around Apia a few emigrants from far-off countries live in comfortable bungalows. They are happy with their wives and children. Their memory of the cities and turmoil of the old country is sweeter for the dreaming distance; they were a bit homesick at first, but now they have become contented and love the new peaceful surroundings, and look forward to the arrival of the mails. They still suffer, though, with the unrestful disease of the far-away suburban towns of advanced civilisation, and so cannot sleep for wondering who the strange couple are who rent the solitary bungalow on the edge of the forest up in the hills. It is quite evident that the new-comer is a gentleman, for he speaks well and has polished ways, but his wife talks like a servant-girl; she’s pretty, though. They arrived suddenly in Apia, and three months after the baby was born. He seems very fond of the baby, and the mother too, but he often gets very despondent. He’s a handsome man and does not look a bit practical; indeed he looks as though for the sake of affection and his word he would sacrifice all ambition and leave the world behind him. He seems to hate respectable people, and only goes down to the Apia bar-rooms to mix with old sailors and traders and the remnants of the beach; he stands treat and is a godsend to them, for he seems to have plenty of cash. One old shellback entertains him for hours with wonderful tales of other days, and his comrades sit by and silently smoke and drink as the bar becomes hazy with tobacco smoke. The lights grow dim as the old sailor’s yarn rolls the world back, and in the now romantic atmosphere of the bar shades of old pioneers dance ghostly wise; old schooners and slave galleons are anchored in the harbour; you can hear the laughter and song of dead sailors and traders. They are dancing jigs, their sea-boots shuffle, under the coco-palms just outside the bar-room, the bright eyes of dark native girls shine as they whirl clinging to their arms: how they welcome the white men from the far-away Western world—the men whose ships long ago died down the seaward sunsets, and faded away beyond the sky-line into Time’s silent sea ere our generation was born.

Out on the promontory sits the high chief Tuputo in his homestead. He has a noble, wrinkled, tattooed face, and, though he belongs to the old school, he wears glasses. The lizard slips across his moonlit floor, and through his door he can see the silvered waves and the wind-stirred coco-nut trees twinkling by the barrier reefs; the waves are breaking and wailing as they wailed and broke in his childhood. He has been a sailor in the South Seas; he remembers tribal wars in Fiji and Samoa and has refused many invitations to secret cannibalistic festivals. Now he sits reading the English newspapers, for long ago they taught him to read English, and he is a staunch Catholic. Often he reads and wonders over the terrible crimes that are reported in the police news of his late-dated London newspapers. He had once, long ago, thought that England and New York were sinless lands ethereal with Christian dreams, imparadised cities, their spires glittering in the sunlight of the Golden Age. If not, why did missionaries leave them to come across the big seas to Samoa, and all the isles of the Southern Seas?

The great world war has not commenced yet, but even now his withered hands itch to clutch his disused war-club and sally forth to take revenge on those white men who laugh at his majestic bearing; those men who stole his isles and brought rum and vice to contaminate the virtue of his race. How spiteful will he feel when he wipes his spectacles, and, astonished, reads the truth! But then he will cool down, look at his innocent old war-club on his homestead wall and offer his humble services for the vast tribalistic war clash in the white man’s lands, while Thakambau and Tano, the cannibal kings, and Ritova and King Naulivan, who never heard the word culture, sigh and turn in their graves to think that they are dead, while the very world is trembling with glorious, bloodthirsty battle. Ah, well, their children’s children are coming to help us: may the old Thakambau spirit still be alive in their blood to help the advance of culture—the civilisation of sad humanity. Let us hope, too, that our semi-savage Allies will not eat the fallen foe! But I must proceed with my own wanderings, for I have a long way to travel yet.

Samoa still rises silently in moonlight out of the sea of my dreams. I can hear the barbarian orchestra clanging away down in the native village, as Samoan girls and youths, and two or three white men, waltz under the palms just below the plateau, where groves of orange-trees hang their golden fruit amongst dark leaves. As I play the violin the semi-savage people whirl to the wild rhythm of the forest ballroom music of a tribal waltz.

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CHAPTER VII

Robert Louis Stevenson—Bohemian Incidents—I lead a Tribal Orchestra—The Big Drum—Robert Louis Stevenson at a Tribal Wedding—Robert Louis Stevenson in the Grog Shanty—Mr and Mrs Stevenson—The Last Man-eater of the Marquesan Group

I NOTICED that the brief incidents in my first book, Sailor and Beachcomber, concerning my personal recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson were received with an interest which I had not expected. Had I anticipated this, or had he struck me as an adventurous old shellback of crime and sea-lore, I should have dwelt more on the subject, but so much has been written about Stevenson’s life in the South Seas, by men who have devoted volumes to their reminiscences of that novelist, that I deliberately left the matter alone.

As far as Stevenson the literary man is concerned I, of course, have nothing whatever to add, excepting, perhaps, that Stevenson’s books dealing with the South Seas did not strike me as being as realistic and breezy as I had expected them to be, coming from such fresh experience and so able a pen. But having often seen him in Samoa and elsewhere, out of the limelight and under circumstances that have never, as far as I know, been written about before, I feel that I may as well tell at length the few incidents that I think may be of interest. I cannot do this better than by pursuing my own reminiscences, and so I will revert to my first visits to Samoa when I was a lad of about sixteen years of age.

Stevenson was at that time residing at Vailima, Upulo. I had met him several times in Apia and at sea, for at that time I was always cruising on the trading schooners and visited most of the chief islands in the North and South Pacific. I eventually got on a schooner that ran between Samoa and Suva (Fiji), and it was on these return trips to Apia, and during my sojourns there, that I saw Stevenson frequently, which was natural enough, since he lived there and hundreds of men became acquainted with him in that isolated paradise, where conventionality, as it is known in Western civilisation, was completely dropped, and all men became hail-fellow-well-met as soon as they sighted each other. Even missionaries practised this outward appearance of brotherhood.

I recall how I was sitting in a German store in April one afternoon when a Samoan, who knew me well, approached me and asked me if I would like to come that same evening to a grand tribal wedding festival that was to be held five miles off, round the coast. “And will you bring your violin?” he inquired. I accepted, and my companion, a young American sailor who had a banjo, agreed to go with me. I was well known among the chiefs and natives as an obliging violinist, for I seldom refused to perform at native ceremonies; the scenes that I witnessed, indeed the novelty and romance of it all, amply repaid me for all the trouble I was ever put to, though that is saying a good deal, for my troubles were sometimes serious ones.

That same afternoon my friend and I tuned our instruments up and made ourselves look as smart as possible, for the chief who was giving the ball was one of high standing, and a well-known follower of Mataafa, the ex-King of Samoa.

In high spirits we started off to tramp the five miles which had to be covered before we reached our destination. We had not walked more than three hundred yards from Apia’s main street when suddenly Stevenson appeared with several of his acquaintances, coming across the slopes carrying fish which they had purchased from the natives down by the beach.

Whangarei Falls, North Auckland, N.Z.

Stevenson turned and saw us, and noticing that we were carrying musical instruments, he came up and said in a jocular way: “Where are you hurrying off to? The Lyceum Orchestra?” Whereupon I told him our destination and he immediately became interested. “Are you in a hurry? I should like to come,” he said quickly. I assured him that we were in no hurry, and told him we would wait; but as his friends were becoming impatient he said that he would come on later, and so off we went without him.

When we arrived at the coast village where the ball was to be given, my friend and I sat down under the palms exhausted, for the walk was a long one and the heat terrific. Just before us was the native village, groups of conical, shed-like houses, sheltered by coco-palms growing to the shore’s edge.

As we sat wiping the perspiration from our brows, the village was all astir with excitement over the approaching festival. Native girls, dressed in picturesque style, passed by us along the track: they were jabbering excitedly to each other over the beauty of the bride who had been married that day, and who was to appear at the feast that evening to dance and reveal her manifold beauties to the village maids and youths ere she went off on the honeymoon to the bridegroom’s home.

The shadows were falling over the palm-clad shores of the wild coast and village of Samoa as the sun dropped seaward. So my friend and I started off once more and arrived at Kalofa’s distinguished residence. Kalofa was the bride’s father, and a wealthy man for a native. We were greeted with loud cries in joyous Samoan phrases as we arrived, carrying the violin and banjo under our arms. As we entered the large primitive ballroom, a shed that held about two hundred people, an old Samoan at once started crashing away at a monster wooden drum, and another drum-player inside the shed did likewise. The noise was deafening, and the more so because the ballroom instrument was a large European drum that had been purchased from one of the American warships that had come into Apia harbour. This drum was lent out at a high charge on special occasions by the chiefs. I forget who was the original owner, but I know that he was quite a wealthy man through the money he received from his drum receipts, and I often regretted that I had not known the tastes of Samoans, or I should have arrived at Samoa with a cargo of old army drums and made a fortune.

Well, as we entered the ballroom Kalofa himself rushed forward and greeted us affectionately before all the chiefs as though he had known us for many years. I had only seen him once before, and my cheerful companion the banjoist had never seen him till that moment. Nevertheless we met him as though we were the oldest friends, and bowed respectfully as the whole audience arose and waved their dark hands as they cheered us. It was a wonderful sight that we saw round us, for right to the far end of the large, low room sat in half circles the élite of the native village, dressed in all the colours and grotesque garments imaginable. Handsome Samoan girls, half dressed and quarter dressed, were squatting amongst old tattooed chiefs who wore the ridi only, while lines of old women sat with the handsome youths, who glanced behind them at the girls who, I suppose, were being looked after by the chiefs. The code of morals in Samoa was becoming very strict, so many maids having been tempted by the amorous youths to do things which they ought not to do. In the centre of the throng was the barbaric orchestra. I have led and conducted many orchestras and bands during my time, but never such a deliberately planned inharmonious ear-torturing lot of musicians as I led that night. I think the instrumentation was chiefly strings and wind; the former consisted of wires strung across gourds and the latter of bamboo flutes, old coppers and the drum which I have previously mentioned.

I sat down in the middle of the orchestral players, squatting, with my comrade by my side, on a mat, and all the native musicians around me gazed with great curiosity as I started to tune the violin, and my comrade to pink-ee-tee-ponk on his banjo; indeed, so great was their curiosity that they arose from their mats and poked their faces against our instruments. Hitting my violin with the bow, so—tap-tap, I made a sign to them to take their seats, and then the overture commenced! My comrade and I tore away at the strings. I forget what we had proposed to play, but as soon as we started and the members of the orchestra heard the violin wailing, they went completely mad with delight, and then tried to outdo us; so placing their flutes to their dusky mouths they all started to blow terrifically, and the drums started off and the stringed gourds twanged! In a moment I realised that to keep up our musical reputation we must outdo the barbarian music, so I signed to my comrade, who looked at me as though he had gone mad, and then started to grind away at all my violin strings at once! I believe we both caught the primitive, barbarian fever, for though the row was terrible my memory of it all is one of some far-off event of supreme musical delight! Not Wagner’s wildest dreams, no Futurist’s idea of harmony could have outdone the reality of that tribal music. Then suddenly it all changed from thunder to weird sweetness, minor melodies of sad, forgotten loves and dreams, for on a little elevated bamboo platform the bride stood before us. She was a dusky, tender-limbed maiden of about sixteen years of age. Dressed in a blue frock that went no higher than her brown bosom, fastened on by a red sash, her thick hair bedecked with tropical blossoms, she looked like the beautiful dusky princess from a South Sea novel. Her husband, a fine-looking Samoan of about thirty, stood beside her as she gazed up into his admiring eyes and sang a tender song of love. It was a really beautiful melody and I at once caught the spirit of it, and as she sang on sweetly I extemporised a delicate accompaniment on my violin, interspersed with minor pizzicatos. As soon as she ceased her song a tiny child stepped forth, and kissing her feet handed her a large bouquet of richly coloured forest flowers; then the bridegroom stooped and kissed the child on the brow as all the audience solemnly murmured “O whey—O whey” three times. This child was a relative of the bride’s, and not her own child; though, to tell the truth, this was often the case in tribal weddings at which I had officiated as violinist, where often the custom was that the bride’s first-born came as chief witness to the altar, and sometimes was old enough to toddle all the way!

When she had sung one more island ditty to her delighted husband the Siva dance commenced. Through a little door behind the stage came about a dozen girls clad only in flowers and grass, and when they had squatted in a circle on the stage they started to beat their bare limbs with their hands as they chanted, and the orchestra went tootle-tootle on the bamboo flutes.

As the time passed the audience increased; chiefs, half-castes and many high-caste natives were there. Robert Louis Stevenson arrived, with his face wreathed with smiles, and stood just inside the door, watching and talking to the natives. The old ex-King Mataafa, who was at that time residing at Malie with his faithful followers, was also there and stood talking to our host, who was, I believe, related to Samoan royalty. Mataafa was a very intelligent-looking old man, well dressed and with a majestic walk. About that time there was a deal of trouble brewing between the subjects of Mataafa and those who stood by King Malietoa, and possibly the old king was travelling incognito, for he hardly revealed himself, but stopped in the shadows.

Stevenson went round behind the audience to him and was greeted very warmly; they evidently knew each other well.

As the festival proceeded, and the bowl of kava was handed round, the chiefs and women-folk became excited, while outside under the moonlit coco-palms the girls and youths started to dance and caper about. My friend and I took the first opportunity to get outside, for the heat was stifling inside “the hall.”

When we arrived in the fresh air Stevenson was standing by the doorway smoking. “Hallo! there you are; I’m sorry, but I was too late to see the beginning,” he said, and then added: “That bride was a beautiful girl, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I answered, as several native girls came up to us, and, laughing, seized us and invited us to dance. The girl who had gripped hold of Stevenson was a very wild but good-looking maid, and gazing up into his face she started to make eyes at him. Stevenson looked round laughingly and then accepted the invitation of the girl to dance with her, and so off they went! As far as I can remember the novelist was a good dancer and looked at his ease as he held the Samoan beauty in his arms and gently whirled with her under the coco-palms.

All the time that Stevenson and I were dancing the native orchestra was booming and shrieking away in the festival shed, and often we heard the old native drum-conductor cry out “O Le Sivo,” and then came a terrible crash as he struck the old army drum with a war-club!

Stevenson seemed delighted with himself for a little while, and then we got too hot and, much to the disgust of the maids, stopped. They were cool enough in their scanty attire, but we were bathed in perspiration and fairly steamed in the moonlight as we suddenly stood still.

Now I am coming to the comical part of it all, for Stevenson’s partner proceeded to make violent love to him, and the look on his face made it quite obvious that he was beginning to feel uncomfortable, for he eventually walked off and she at once followed him! He made several attempts to get rid of her by talking to a native who stood by, but still the girl persisted, till he suddenly walked up to me and said, “I say, for God’s sake get her away somewhere; dance with her, do anything to attract her attention.” I at once went to the rescue and asked her to dance. I was not much of a dancer, but as a lover I have always been passable! Stevenson seemed very grateful, but only expressed it by walking off in great haste as I clutched the girl tightly.

No sooner had Stevenson got out of sight than she started on me, threw her arms about my neck and began to say loving things about my beauty, I suppose, in her own language. Several natives were standing under the trees, shaking with laughter as they watched us: one of them touched his forehead significantly and then I realised that the girl was not quite right in the head! “I say, Hill,” I said, as I quickly turned to my comrade, “she wants you to dance with her; do take her, old fellow.” “Right you are,” he answered, for he was an obliging fellow in that way, and then I also bolted and went off, toward the chief’s Fale-Faipule (the head residence), to get my violin, which I had left in his care for safety. As I approached the bamboo door I saw Stevenson peeping through a chink! “Has she gone?” he said. “Yes, I’ve got rid of her; she is a bit wrong in the head,” I answered. Then, as Stevenson came out into the open, ready to start away home, to our astonishment the girl we were talking about ran across the grass and embraced him once more! “Well I’m d——d!” he said, and at that moment two natives came across the track and collared her. I think they were her parents; anyway they took her off, and Stevenson hurried off also, for the hour was late and the code of morals strict in the Vailima domestic establishment.

My friend and I got back to Apia soon after. I slept soundly and dreamed of dusky brides and mad lovers. So ended that wedding as far as I was concerned.

A few days after the preceding events I saw Stevenson again. It was in the daytime, and I and my friend were busy packing up cases of tinned food, which had just arrived from Sydney on the s.s. Lubeck, which generally called at Apia every month. Adjoining the stateroom—where we were assisting in packing the cases—was a grog shanty’s bar-room. The reputation that this shanty had was an evil one, for it was only visited by the beach fraternity who lived solely on rum, and by Samoan women who welcomed German sailors to their dusky arms after dark. In broad daylight it was a bona-fide beach hotel, frequented by traders who had no reputation to lose, yet who seemed the happiest of men as they told fearless tales to their rough comrades, squirted tobacco juice in endless streams through the open door and drank fiery rum.

Well, suddenly Stevenson walked into the bar, and placing a coin on the counter called for drinks. He seemed full of glee, and laughed heartily as his two companions told him something that was evidently humorous. These two men, whom Stevenson had most probably just met, and who interested him, were shellbacks of the roughest type. One was positively comical-looking with dissipation, and had a warty grog-nose; the other seldom spoke, but simply nodded his head, as an umpire of truth, when his companion told Stevenson the wonders of the South Seas. They were telling him about earlier black-birding days, when native men and girls were lured on to the schooners and carried off to slavery and worse. I cannot remember the things that they told him, but I distinctly remember Stevenson’s deep interest as he stood by them, with his head nearly touching the low roof of the shanty, and called for more rum for his companions, though he did not drink himself.

The convivial old rogues were delighted with Stevenson’s generosity, and seeing that he listened eagerly to their yarns the chief speaker became more garrulous and dramatic than ever as he lifted his hands up to the roof and said: “Sir, them things that I tells you is nothing to what I could tell you.” Meanwhile the novelist listened and looked out of the grog shanty door, to see that no one was about who would carry the news to Vailima that Robert Louis Stevenson was full of glee, treating old rogues to rum, in a grog-house of mystery and lurking crime.

There was a native woman in the bar, whom the barkeeper called Frizzy. She had a large mop of frizzly hair and I suppose got her name from that. She was one of the abandoned class, had four half-caste children and was a half-widow, for the father of the children, a German official, had gone back to Berlin.

Whilst Stevenson was listening to his newly acquired friends this woman approached him with her ghastly smile, at the same time offering for sale her little plaited baskets of red coral. Stevenson shook his head, and as she was still persistent one of the old shellbacks pushed her away as though she was a mangy dog. Stevenson looked at him with disapproval, for, though he was naturally opposed to women of her class, he was a champion for the unfortunates who had been lured to their mode of life by white men. He then called the woman, who had walked away, and asking her the price of the coral bought two baskets, though I am sure he did not want them.