Grimes and I fishing—Fish enjoy the Joke—Grog Shanty Chorus and
Incidents—The Drunken Settler—The Steaming of Romantic Brains—On
the Old Hulk—I cannot sleep—My Romance of the Figurehead—The
Hamlet in the Mountains—The Phantom Burglars of the Enchanted
Castle
AFTER our adventure with Rimbo the priest and the half-caste girl,
Grimes and I returned to the shanty, considerably impressed by the scene
we had witnessed in the forest. The idol and the pillared trees of that
natural temple, the beauty of the half-caste girl kneeling at the altar
of dark superstition, haunted us.
For several days we were very moody and spent our time fishing in the
shore lagoons, which were connected with the ocean by narrow creeks. It
was perfect sport. Almost every minute we’d pull in large
vermilion-striped denizens of the deep. The fish, as they came into view
on the end of our lines, seemed to enjoy the novelty of the game, their
slit mouths wide open, their bulged eyes agog at the joke of it all—so
it seemed!
As we sat in the grog shanty that night Grimes became confidential, and
confessed to me that he was a bit gone on Waylao. I wasn’t surprised to
hear that something was wrong with him. His fund of conviviality seemed
to have quite dried up and he had become something of a dreamer. The
boisterous, quick steps, the hilarious jigs had changed into sentimental
songs, which he accompanied on his banjo. Nothing surprised me in those
days. The soberest-looking men would suddenly get entangled with widowed
or discarded native queens, who were ever ready to overstep the
Marquesan moral code—and that’s saying something!
I heard wondrous tales in that grog shanty. Strange men would rush in
from nowhere, stare fiercely as they drank their rum, tell us how they
had ascended heathen thrones and been hastily disillusioned. Nor do I
exaggerate when I say that it was not unusual for a white man, who had
ascended the throne of some isle by a strategic marriage, to be suddenly
disturbed in the wedding chamber by half-a-dozen irate heathen monarchs
who had married into the same dynasty about a week before!
So one will see that the heathen countries differ little from the
civilised, where men aspire, enter asylums and shout through some night
of memory: “I am God, and there is no other God but me!”
Had some Homer roamed the South Seas in those days he could have
memorised many a wondrous odyssey. Nearly every grog shanty from Fiji to
Honolulu was crammed with fearsome experiences. The scenic effect on
entering a bar in those days was this—a crew of fierce-bearded chins
that were thrust forward in murderous defiance towards some opposing
crew of fierce-eyed, scrubby, untubbed men who strongly challenged a
mighty assertion.
“You’re a b—— liar!” would be the yelled response, accompanied by
thundering choruses of oaths and descending fists on the bar demanding
rum. Indeed such a scene was before me as I sat meditating in that
shanty by Tai-o-hae. Crash! came the grand interruption. Like unto a
fierce covey of barbarian drum-sticks, up went a flock of hairy fists,
that, descending, struck the grog bar with indisputable authority. The
half-bred trader swore to the truth. Dare one doubt him that the ’Frisco
schooner’s skipper bought twenty barrels of pork, which turned out to be
pickled Fijian natives who had fallen in the last tribal clash?
Then the man who had sailed with Bully Hayes laid down the law to the
Tahitian descendants of the _Bounty_ mutineers who had called him a
crimson liar.
The waxed-moustached Frenchman, with his eternal politeness, shrugged
his shoulders with surprise as Mrs Ranjo explained that she was
connected by blood with the Spanish throne.
“Mein gotts, you vash sees the vey we vash does dat in Germhanies,” came
the eternal Teutonic phrase. The midshipman who had bolted from the
windjammer in Sydney drank like a lord and sang _The Song of the
Thrush_, and afterwards a sad old English song which made some of the
men look quite doleful. It did not require _The Lost Chord_ to move the
hearts of those men—when rum was cheap. It’s wonderful how an old song
or a familiar cry touches the memory of a home-sick man, and at that
moment a dissipated, wrinkled old sailorman from London town shouted in
a rather melancholy voice: “Flies, flies—catch ’em ali-eeeeve—oh!” which
reminded his pal, Bob Slimes, of home; he stared vacantly into space for
a moment—then burst into tears!
Outside beneath the moonlit palms, to the trrrrrip-tomp-pe-tomp-te of a
banjo, and a fiddle made out of a bully-beef tin, a few select
shellbacks danced with Marquesan maids from the village hard by.
“Aloha! Awai! Awai, papalagi!” came the musical encores of the dusky
girls, followed by a weird clamouring, shuffling and hushed laughter. It
sounded as though we heard the echoes from some heathen underworld as
the white men answered the muffled screams of the girls who were trying
to teach them to dance the heathen can-can that had been forbidden by
the missionaries.
The university man shifted his eyeglass, flushed and quoted a verse in
Greek as the naked leg of some dusky dancer outside poked through the
shanty door, giving those pious old shellbacks a fearful shock, as one
can imagine. It was only a leg, terra-cotta colour, rounded with full,
perfect symmetry, five polished nails shining like pearls on the wagging
toes, and it caused a deal of critical comment. From the saloon bar came
guttural and musical voices of customers who had seen better days, and
still had some cash in hand. “Yesh, old man—hic, hic—you’re right, it’s
sheer bosth. A man’s a man even if he did bolt with a woman—and the
brass.” Here came much confidential whispering. Polished oaths were
intermingled with the faint echoes of the operatic strain, _Ah che la
Morte_, then silence again as someone fell to the floor!
Like a death groan the song moaned and faded—it was the voice of
Pauline’s father, who had tried to sing some half-forgotten song of
other days. Could one have peeped out of that shanty door into the
moonlight, he would have been seen once more on his regular night route,
staggering beneath the palms homeward, the eternal white jacket
fluttering afar as the ever watching, sinister, white-faced man kept by
his side, swaying and tottering like some awful-looking, sardonic mimic
as they returned to that lonely home in the hills.
“Toime, gentlemen, please!” It was the only call of _closing_ time in
Tai-o-hae, and came from the umpires outside as two burly, sunburnt men
of the sea _closed_ together. The struggle soon ceased. A faint hurrah
announced the victor, as crash! his opponent fell to the sward. It was
nothing much, just a little forcible argument between two passionate men
on some point that neither remembered when the winner had been
proclaimed, and once again they drank—fearless comrades at the shanty
bar!
Those rough men had a strange fascination for me. I do not hint that
they were samples of the highest order, but I emphatically assert that
that shanty was a good old honest slop-shop of life. Therein one could
go and pick up a good bargain in the way of man—bad as well as good. It
was as though Fate had made a glorious fizzling stew, a stock-pot of
bubbling, singing life, always at boiling-point. Flavoured with the
finest “familiar juice,” a connoisseur could sniff at the shanty door
the odoriferous steaming poetry, the delicious fragrance from the
boiled-down wild-bird-like songs. It was the steaming of romantic
brains, the intoxicating odours of forgotten moonlit nights—a woman’s
kisses years away, old memories, dead certs and dead dreams. For those
old birds would sometimes come to the surface, flutter their wings and
sing unearthly songs, strains of haunting beauty, only for a moment as
they opened their grog-blossomed beaks, flapped their despairing, broken
wings and then sank once again into the depths of the boiling groggy
soup!
They were at this despairing, flapping stage when slowly the hubbub of
the shanty faded. One by one the men went back to their ships. Songs
ceased, and wild ejaculations of spontaneous merriment died out. The two
pearl fortune hunters from the Paumotus had bummed their last drink and
were snoring lustily on the atrociously hard wooden settee. Mrs Ranjo
put out the first two rows of candles as old Ranjo struggled into bed
with his boots on.
As Grimes and I stole out into the night we followed the last two
lurching, ragged shadows as they went arm in arm back to their ship to
sleep. They looked like two enormous frogs, staggering and hopping in
drunken glee, their hind legs akimbo. We were the last to arrive on that
derelict hulk, for it was there that I too retired to sleep.
But I could not sleep that night. I stole from my bunk and crept up on
to the old hulk’s deck, watching the dim horizons, and wishing that the
western stars might answer that old figurehead’s eternal appeal, the
call of those beseeching hands, that the tattered sails might spread,
and, ghost-like, steal away, taking us across that moon-enchanted sea,
across phantom oceans beyond the sky-lines of mortal dreams. Ah! how
glorious to go out of the realms of Time and yet be alive, bound for the
beyond, voyaging on an old raft, alone with those ragged old shellbacks,
singing rollicking chanteys with them—till we crashed up against the
shores of Immortality. As I stood there dreaming I half fancied it had
happened; that I saw that huddled, sinful crew of sailormen, with
awestruck, staring eyes, creeping up those hallowed shores. It was a mad
fancy, I know. I knocked the ashes from my pipe and stole below, once
again, into the bowels of the hulk. Uncle Sam, Grimes, the Irishman, the
Scotsman and the bank manager were still sleepily arguing as they pulled
off their boots. One by one they jumped into their bunks, where the dead
sailors, the old hulk’s crew, had once slept and dreamed. Select, in the
far corner by the fore-peak, the university man lay fast asleep, his
dirty white cuffs still on.
I lay and stared through the port-hole at the infinite expanse of blue
sea outside. The world, somehow, did not seem to be made for sleep by
night. I crept from my bunk once more; all was silent below excepting
for double-bass snores. I stole up on deck.
As I stood there, perfectly alone with the night, so tremendously vast
and lonely did the heavens appear that I became, as it were,
half-etherealised, inspired by some intense, sad religion. I felt half
sorry for God. Staring up at that vast, mirror-like expanse, I half
fancied I saw the Great Poet of the Universe enthroned in eternal
loneliness, encircled by dark infinities, surrounded by His shattered
dreams—the stars.
Only that legendary woman, that derelict’s figurehead, and I seemed to
be intensely awake in the whole world. The poetry of existence hung like
a mysterious shroud about me. That figure seemed to be my glorious dead
romance. She was no insensate, legendary form, but a woman of immortal
beauty. The crumbling wood became mysteriously imbued with light, the
marble-like shoulders reddened, she blushed to the brow. I smelt ancient
scents of burning sandalwood; a faint breath of warm wind stole across
the silent tropic sea; her glorious hair was outblown. As I leaned over,
the bosom heaved and the eyes shone with etherealised beauty. It was not
wonderful to me when she moved, and her arms were outstretched to mine.
I felt the fragrance of those lips breathe incense into my soul. The
stars shone in her hair. I became half divine. I heard the cry of
mortality; it seemed afar off, yet it cried in the swinging monotone of
the seas on the reefs. I wondered on her romance: who was her lover, who
the artist that had fashioned those beautiful lines, the curves of that
graceful throat, her head thrown back? Ah! where was that poet lover as
she, the legendary woman of his soul, lived on—rotting in the warm,
tawny arms, the impassioned clasp of the wild, amorous, glorious South?
How strange it all seemed—his dust somewhere—and that figure from his
soul still pointing its allegorical hands to the far-off stars, still
obeying the eternal impulse of his work.
As I stared at that figure I seemed half to remember—perhaps _I_ was
that dead artist! What had brought me in all the world to that
mysterious corner of the South? I’m mad enough, thought I.
Leaning forward, I struck a match on the poor crumbling shoulder and
then deliberately placed the tiny blue flame against the wraith’s crown
of spiritual hair—puff! a bright blaze, a fizzle, and lo! she had
vanished—gone! my beautiful romance!
I lit my pipe, half chuckling at the thought of my splendid madness, the
glorious insanity that a tiny match flame could so easily dispel.
I looked shoreward. The moon was hidden behind a wrack of cloud massed
to the southward. Though the mist seemed to hang in perfect stillness in
the heavens, it made me stare in breathless admiration as the
palm-plumed mountain range and inland peaks slowly rose, grandly,
silently to the skies. Like some slow-travelling castaway’s raft, the
cloud wrack crept beneath the moon. It seemed only by a miracle that
those jagged peaks did not burst through that crystalline dome of starry
heaven.
That old hulk was not the only romantic spot in the heathen-land. By a
mossy track, not far from the rugged feet of the mountains, stood that
which now appears across the years to have been a phantom-like hamlet.
It was a native village of tiny huts. One little, grey, wooden building
stood with its verandahed front facing a gap in the granite hills.
Once or twice I went into that little homestead and played the violin,
for the settler, John L——, was fond of fiddling.
I slept there one night, or tried to, but the weirdness of that little
homestead gave me no sleep, for from that enchanted homestead’s window
one could see the distant ocean, looking like a witch’s vast cauldron,
full of boiling, bubbling, fire-flecked, silvered foam. It was a silent,
windless night that I spent there, yet between the intervals of the
nightingale’s “tin lan lone, loe lan ting,” up in the bread-fruit trees,
came weird sounds that thrilled me with fear. It was a faint, far-off
kind of rasping. It sounded as though two burglars were busily filing at
the gates of some enchanted castle of dreams wherein I slept!
“Sea-saw—sea-saw” it went, with a frightening sound, then silence at
regular intervals. Yes, as though those two burglars, who would rob that
castle of romance, paused in their nefarious work, wondering if they
were heard. I was wide awake, but still the sounds continued! As a
zephyr of wind came and wailed a plaintive accompaniment in the
she-oaks, those mysterious raspings sounded as though a phantom
violon-cellist had come to perform at the castle gate. First came the
low bass’s mellow note, and then it seemed that the performer’s bow was
swung over to the “A” string sounding some weird, falsetto harmonic! I
leapt from bed, determined to rout the troubadour of such an unseemly
hour. I discovered that, like most romantic ideas, the cause of it all
was human—and even so had a low origin, for it was Pauline’s father,
drunk, snoring on the verandah, while his weird comrade even in sleep
followed his deep bass snore in a falsetto, obsequious-like echo.
That was the only occasion that I slept in the white girl Pauline’s
home.
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