introduced myself to him and he gave me several good lessons and
recommended me to some good studies. I told him my tale, and to my
delight he got me a job as violin player in the Brisbane Theatre. It was
an easy matter for him to do this, as he was the leader of the
orchestra. I shall never forget the novelty of those first nights, and
the sights as the stage beauties whirled round and round, cocked their
legs skyward, and bowed with blushing modesty as the audience loudly
cheered. I have never seen anything like those sights, not even in the
Fiji and Samoan Islands, where I met women attired in half of a coco-nut
shell, and stalwart brown men standing under beautiful blue skies as
nude as Grecian statues, and yet not half so nude as white women wearing
only about a quarter of their clothes.
Sickening of orchestral life, I bade my few friends farewell, and sailed
for Sydney. The harbour struck me as very beautiful, also the city
itself, with its long streets—Pit Street, George Street and the parallel
streets—along which thundered, in those days, the big engines of the
steam trams.
Alas! ill luck befell me, my money was soon all spent. I strove to get
into the theatre again; but the whole of Italy was standing at the door
offering their services for a macaroni-living wage, and I was done for,
as they were mostly good players and old in experience. I hastily wrote
home to England, begging them to send me some cash. In those days
however it took quite three months to get a reply, and long before the
letter-due period was near I was once more stranded and sleeping on
North Shore Ferry boats and on the Domain, chummy with the old
unfortunates again, as like mammoth rats we crept through cracks and
slept the sleep of the downcast and weary.
One day I made the acquaintance of two more lads who were about my own
age. They had been sleeping out in sheds for weeks, and were both
half-starved, and that afternoon we went down on the wharf of Circular
Quay together, and watched a ship unloading fruit and bananas. Taking
our opportunity, we stole a fine bunch of the latter. I shall never
forget how we enjoyed that gorgeous feed, as we sat in the Domain hard
by and shared out our stolen meal. My comrades were both English
fellows. That same afternoon we decided to stow away on a large tramp
steamer—I believe it was a “Blue Anchor Boat.” At dusk that very night,
as she lay alongside, getting up steam so as to sail next morning, we
three crept up the gangway, and after asking the chief steward and the
chief officer if there was a chance of “working our passages home” we
waited our opportunity and stole down the stokehold ladder at dark, as
quiet as three mice, right down into the big ship’s depth, and lay by
the coal bunkers all curled up together on some old sacks. For a long
time we whispered together, full of glee at the thought of such easy
success in getting away from Sydney, all Homeward Bound!
About midnight, we fell asleep. Suddenly I was awakened by footsteps,
and coming down the iron ladder right over our heads I saw the big boots
of a man. Quickly pulling the peak of my cheese-cutter cap over my eyes
I pretended to sleep. My chums were both snoring beside me, and, as I
once again peeped under the rim of my cap, I saw by the figure’s uniform
that it was the Chief Engineer. He struck a match and looked at a
steam-gauge, and just as I thought that he was going up again on deck,
and that we were undiscovered and safe, he turned and spotted us three
boys curled there upon the old sacks, all asleep as he thought. For a
moment he gazed down upon us, and then without a word crept away. I
quickly awakened my two comrades, and told them. They would not believe
me at first, but eventually I convinced them, and we all quietly climbed
up the ladder and bolted. He had seen us there, three pale-faced starved
boys curled together, and it had touched him, and now that I am older I
know that he would never have split, wishing to give us a chance to get
away back to our native land. And though we did not profit by his
kindness, I often think of the tenderness that made that rough
sea-engineer creep up to the decks and keep a still tongue for the sake
of the three little stowaways.
Next morning we saw the ship sail away half steam ahead across the Bay;
round the Point her stern passed out of sight as we three stood gazing
wistfully close together on the wharf. Away she went, with the white
hands of the passengers waving farewells, and in my dreams I saw her
pass through Sydney Heads, and heard her thundering screw start as she
passed out into the ocean and rolled away full speed ahead on the long,
long track Homeward Bound for England—and I cried myself to sleep that
night.
I soon sickened of that life, I can tell you, and one day out at
“Miller’s Point” I saw alongside the wharf a schooner which I had been
told was bound for the South Sea Islands. I was lucky and secured a
berth before the mast, and next morning as dawn crept over Sydney I was
aboard her, flying through the “Heads” into the Pacific Ocean before a
stiff breeze, with all sails set, bound for the Islands.
That night it blew like hell, and the ship almost turned upside down. I
was not used to the tumbling of small craft, which is very different to
the roll and heave of big ships, and so became terribly sea-sick. While
I was aloft that night I brought up my dinner and tea, the whole of
which was caught by the terrific wind and slashed on to the deck into
the face of the skipper and the man at the wheel. By Jove! they did
swear! But sailors are rough and forgiving, especially when you play the
fiddle to them, as I did in the calms that followed that cursed gale and
my illness.
In three weeks we sighted the first Island. At first it looked like a
huge coco-nut sticking out of the calm shining sea afar, and as we got
nearer we saw that it was quite a decent little world about 300 yards
across and 100 wide. A big crag, its population consisted of one hut, an
old man and two daughters. They were quite nude, and running out to the
extreme end of a small promontory they waved their thin long brown arms,
and showed their white teeth, as we flew by with full sails set, 300
yards off.
It was a most novel sight to me to see those lonely people on that old
rock out there in the wide Pacific. How they lived, and what they lived
there for, heaven only knows—I don’t.
As sunset faded into saffron and crimson lines along the skyline that
tiny isle faded away into the infinity of travelling darkness for ever
following the sunsets around the globe, and I and the crew of eight, all
told, lit our pipes and sat on deck as the schooner, urged by the
increasing wind which always sprang up after nightfall, crept over the
primeval waters, the sails filling out and flopping at longer intervals.
The crew were rough sailormen, two were Englishmen and four came from
“Frisco,” the cook was a mixture of Chinese and nigger blood,—a most
extraordinary-looking being he was too, with his frizzly dark hair,
slit-almond eyes, and thin yellow teeth dividing the lips which
incessantly gripped a long pipe. He and I had no love for each other. I
caught him spitting in a tin pannikin, and wiping it clean with his
claw-like hand as he put my dinner on and handed it to me. I took it,
and turning on my heel gave my arm a full-length swing and over the side
it went into the Pacific! By Jove! he did glare viciously at me. After
that I always carried my own plate to the galley and placed my food
carefully upon it myself.
Daybreak was stealing over the seas as the steep mountainous shores of
Samoa burst through the skyline ahead.
At midday the anchor dropped into the calm waters of the Bay. Out from
the beach, where the thundering surf leaped over the barrier reefs in
the sunlight like showers of broken rainbows, came the out-rigged
catamarans, swarming with savage faces. I shall never forget that
strange sight of wild men dressed in their own skins, and rough-haired
women too, bare as eggs. Along they came paddling and singing weird
tunes that sounded like the dark ages in dismal song to my trained ears.
Behind the strings of those canoes swam the mothers. On their
wave-washed backs clung their tiny brown babies. The bright maternal
eyes gleamed, and the wistful tiny bright frightened eyes of the infants
shone, as they rode securely on the brown soft backs of those original
old mothers of the sea-nursed South!
Behind them stretched the shores of their island home, thickly clad with
big tropical trees, big fan-like leaves shimmering in the distance. In a
few moments their naked feet were pattering on the deck of our ship. We
all made a rush to save our belongings from their thieving hands, as
they rushed under our very noses, like big children, to collar all that
attracted their bright alert eyes.
That night off I went in one of the catamarans with the rest of the
crew. On the beach we met half-castes and white traders loafing and
spitting by the sweltering grog shanties and Samoan women were also
loafing around. I eyed them with great curiosity. They were nearly
naked; some were dressed in cloth loin-strips only; others, leaning
against posts smoking and chewing, were dressed in some sailor’s old
discarded shirt.
Never in my life have I seen such handsome women and men as some of
those Samoans were—fine eyes, splendid physiques, the men standing
nearly six feet in their skins. Beautiful heads of hair they had too,
both the men and the women, and they were full of song; and when I
thought of the white men of my own country, with pimply, dough-coloured
skins, bald heads and stumbling gait, with pens behind shrivelled-up
ears and eyes gleaming worlds of woe, as they were pulled up to London
Town in the train every morning and every night pulled back again, my
heart was touched over the sadness of the lot of the working people of
the British Isles.
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V
I extemporise Stirring Music on my Violin at Native Weddings—Dethroned
Queens and Kings—Meet Papoo
I AM now going to tell you about Samoa and Samoan folk just as my eyes
saw them. My ship sailed away, but I was not on board of it. The Samoan
climate suited my health, and I found decent fellows living there who
made jolly companions. One of them was a reformed German missionary who
had mended his ways, left off the drink and toiled honestly on a
coco-nut plantation which helped him to eke out a living for his
accepted wife and family. They were pretty little children too—I knew
them all well, thirteen altogether, some with blue-black eyes and some
grey-black eyes. All had a tiny splash of white on their tiny plump
bodies; their mothers were as brown as pheasants’ eggs and mostly
fine-looking women.
For a week I lodged with a dark old Samoan who had a kind of bungalow on
the beach. The walls were lined with the most beautiful South Sea
shells. He traded with them, and I believe did a good business with
sailors and traders. He certainly made more headway than I ever did in
my tea shop. Well, I found my violin was a real fortune to me. I got in
with all the wealthy Samoan chiefs and attended Samoan weddings; far
away in the depths of the forest it was I who played and composed on the
violin at those South Sea forest festivals. Stirring music! The hotly
blushing bride, dressed in her bridal robe—her hair only!—which ruffled
as the breeze of the cool forest kissed her innocent nakedness, was
given away to the modest Samoan happy youth, and you must forgive me,
dear reader, whoever you are, and remember I was only a romantic boy,
when I tell you that my whole soul envied that youth! I was young and
inexperienced in the ways of Western and Southern life, and I at first
thought that the Samoan ladies were rather loose in their morals. I am
older now, and I tell you this—the morals of the South Sea men and women
place the morals of our Western life completely in the shade.
Certain phases of life in London could never occur in the South Seas,
and even were the women inclined to traffic with their comeliness, the
South Sea Samoan chief’s war-club never misses!
[Illustration: COCONUT PALM IN FULL FRUIT]
At night I would steal up the steep shore hills under the mangroves and
coco-palms and creep into the tiny dome-shaped dens, which were the
homesteads of the native men and women of those South Sea isles. They
all got to know me and trust me, and I often would share their meals as
they sat squatting around their big earthen steaming pots wherein they
cooked fish and peculiar-smelling vegetables. The heat of those dens was
terribly stifling to me with my clothes on, and I would very soon make
tracks and get outside, and from those steeps I would gaze out seaward
at the vast calm Pacific trembling into silver under the South Sea moon,
as the phosphorus-sparkling waters at intervals curled and broke to
silvery waves up the shore, by the mirroring palm-sheltered lagoons. On
the beach through patches of moonlight passed the loafing half-caste
traders and huddled groups of Samoan women with their tiny black
children running round and round them like big black rats.
Laoleo, a Marquesan, was my special comrade on those nights out. He was
the son of one of the South Sea queens who had seen her day—far away on
one of the lonely Atolls, her beauty faded and mouth mumbling and
toothless, she sat dreaming of her glorious past, and found life still
sweet in living over the memories of all that had been. Laoleo’s father
was in my time a dethroned king. I saw him once as he sat by his den. He
was fat and squatty, only had one big yellow tooth, a large head, cute
twinkling eyes and fearfully wrinkled brows, and when he wrinkled them
up, as he thought of his past, he looked like some grim personification
of the dark ages cast into human frame.
I shall never forget the great prayer-chanting night. Laoleo took me
into the inland scrub one night, and there, in the forest by their dens,
chanting to their ancient gods, sat the old naked chief and his big
brown wives and daughters, some with their ridis on, but most of them
attired only in their hair and modest smiles.
It was a beautifully calm night. Overhead from seaward crept cooling
winds, drifting damp odours from wild flowers and orange-tree scents
from the shore lagoons and palm-forest glooms. Round and round whirled
the nude maidens of that strange world, swaying their bodies in lyrical
beauty and over their heads in rhythmic movement their long curved brown
arms. The men squatting around slowly moved their big brown bodies to
and fro, chanting weirdly all the time. By his big domed den sat the
dethroned king, Laoleo’s father. There he sat rehearsing his grand past,
his large thin feet on a little mat, his chin pointing towards heaven,
his face once more alive with revived majesty as his warrior chiefs
around him swayed their clubs, calling down the spirits of the mighty
dead to bless that old king and their own brave selves. Young Laoleo and
I stood in the shadows watching them all. As for me, I felt a bit
nervous—they all looked so different sitting round there with inspired
eyes bright with memories of their glorious past, wondrous battles and
beautiful cannibalistic feasts, memories of the bygone days when they
nibbled their choice old friends, found them of sweet dispositions and
wept over tender memories.
Through the spread tree-tops gleamed pale stars, and peeping through the
hut doors hard by, among the coco-palms, through big leaves gazed the
wistful eyes of their small brown naked babies—like tiny shadows of
unborn children peeping from infinity into the dim regions of moonlit
reality.
How the memories return to me as I write on. It was on that very night
which I have just described that I, the son of a proud English gentleman
of ancient family, fell in love with a South Sea Island woman, ten years
older than myself. You shall hear something of my downfall. I loved and
lost, and cried in my heart as I lay alone in my hut on a lone Pacific
isle over the grief, the breakdown that has stricken men since the days
of our first grief-stricken parents, old Adam and sad Eve. I have not
told you before, but several days preceding the events which I have just
spoken of, Laoleo and I were down in one of the shore grog shanties,
talking and yarning to the batches of beachcombers, as they loafed in
the sultry glooms by the coco-palms, smoking and spitting and playing
cards—some of them the black sheep of the civilised world, who were
never known to be really sober—when an exceedingly beautiful Samoan girl
of twenty-six years of age came in and sat just by my seat as I played
the fiddle. She was accompanied by her father, an old chief. She had an
attractive, insinuating face, and as she sat there, half-leaning against
a post, her brown naked soft velvet figure looked like some beautiful
sculptural work of art. Silently she sat as I played on, her shining
eyes gazing astonished at my white sunburnt face, and not till I had
finished the fiddling, and the drunken old half-caste trader had
finished his jig and swaggered up to the bar for another dose of stuff
called brandy, did her eyes blink and her lips part in a smile of
pleasure that revealed her white teeth. She gave me such a look as she
sat there, dressed only in a narrow tappa loin-strip, that I quickly
riveted all my attention on an attempt to tune up my violin, so as to
hide the hot blush that flamed to my ear tips.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
Contrasts—A South Sea Bar-room—I meet Robert Louis Stevenson—An Old Time
Trader’s Morals—Shell-backs
ALAS, a good many of those brown men and women of the old days have
passed away for ever, and in their place, over the islands of the South
Seas, roam the varied offspring of men from many lands, the half-caste
children of white traders, Chinese mongrels, Polynesian niggers,
descendants of wandering, adventurous viciousness, mixed up with the
outcasts of civilisation, and more often than quite enough the puny
offspring of touring American and German missionaries, and English too.
I don’t know which has won in the race to populate the lonely and
beautifully secret-keeping isles of those far-away seas, but I think the
good old flag is still to the front, flying to the breeze, represented
in the sparkling, dancing eyes of the romping children on the wooded
South Sea slopes—pretty violet eyes they have too, some grey and some
grey-brown, little laughing angels of innocence, as they gaze up at you
and go tumbling head over heels, revealing their tiny plump
white-splashed backs, and the good old missionary sprees hidden in the
dark of the unrecorded! For true it is that sometimes the virtuous and
the good have their weak moments, those sad lapses which are not on any
account recorded in the delightfully innocent autobiography of the
returned, weary but still earnest traveller, beautifully written, and
sold for ten shillings and sixpence net, circulated among the numerous
British, German, and American Christian Societies, and read by the
benevolent old gentlemen and ladies of their native land, which is so
overrun with poverty and misery.
I knew one old Samoan chief, who was a cute, intellectual fellow, and
could speak “pigeon English” well enough to ply me with numerous
questions concerning my native English land. I often remember how his
bright eyes lit up with astonishment when I told him of the far-away
sorrows of London Town, so different to the warm moonlit forest of his
own Island. I told him how men slept on door-steps, shivering, clothed
in verminous rags which fluttered in the cold night winds as they half
covered starved skin and bone of dead men who still breathed—men who had
dropped out of the fighting ranks of life, lost the forlorn hope, and
did not believe in God, for they had sorrowed in life and found hell in
the death of breathing-despair. I told him of tiny wistful eyes of
children starving as they gazed into shop windows watching the mist rise
from the steaming foods, and yet nothing in their little pinched
bellies. I told him of vast cathedrals pointing their steeples up to the
grey English skies, costing millions of money to build, while far below
their stone walls, stealing along the wet cold streets, those tiny
trembling prayers, God’s helpless children, crept without food and
clothing. I told him of women, dishevelled and weary, sleeping out on
the Embankment and huddled in dark corners and ditches, some fallen
through drink, and some through loving too well the man who had betrayed
their trust; and I told him of their more fortunate sisters who had
loved and been unbetrayed by the object of their lucky trust, and how
terribly bitter those very women were towards their fallen, lost
sisters. I was young then, otherwise how much more could I have told the
astonished old chap as he raised his eyes and hands to heaven and wiped
the perspiration from his heathen brow!
Yes, to hear how we lived under the banner of the sign of the Cross,
wherefrom only the shadow falls over the pale-faced multitudes as they
tramp to the clank of the chains of conventionality, chains gold-plated
with eighteen-carat hypocrisy.
“And then Englis come to here,” he said, as he opened his South Sea
mouth in astonishment. He was an unmarried man, and having no
fine-looking daughters had not suffered as some of the Samoans had, the
why and the wherefore I leave the reader to guess. I also leave the
reader of my autobiography to remember that the South Sea Islands’
so-called savages are men just like ourselves, with inclinations and
dreams and religions based on mythology and the gods of their ancient
histories, and were they a powerful and mighty race, owning three parts
of the world, with all the advantages of climatic conditions and
education that the Western world has had, they would most assuredly
emigrate from their Isles and seek to reform men to their ways of
thinking, and doubtless they would find a good harvest in our modern
cities for their pious endeavours. I am sure we should all, under their
influence, make a grand stride towards that far-off goal of perfect
good. I know that there are many men stealing across the earth who do
not think as I think, but this is the autobiography of my life, and not
of another life.
I was a lad in the days that I am telling you of, and had the
opportunities that other men who were older and more respected did not
get. I have often rushed in where the angel feared to tread, and the
devil also. R.L.S. and others only saw the traders, the Samoans and
other tribes, as they stood before him in one light, and the
missionaries with the halo of feverish goodness to reform shining around
their brows. I was a boy, my opinion unrespected, a young beachcomber
who knew more than they thought he did, so they let go, and out came the
true man, glorious and joyous in the wild sprees of those long-ago
Samoan nights! Mind you, there were good men in the South Seas of those
days, but over most of their heads, in the cemetery where the whites
were buried, the flowers grew. I have stood gazing on those forgotten
graves at sunset and wondered what dead desires lay beneath those
crosses and stones, what sad crimes and what memories of their native
lands, for the Islands, as well as Australia, were the happy hiding
places of men who were flying from justice, and were I to tell you the
yarns, the terrible tales of escaped innocence being hunted and cursed
through miscarriages of justice, I should have to fill a book with
nothing else but those tales.
I will now return to where I left the South Sea Island girl Papoo, for
that I discovered was her name. As the drunken trader swayed to his tub
and her frizzly-headed brown father rolled a tobacco leaf into a
cigarette with two fingers and stood by the one-roomed Samoan Hotel I
spoke to the girl who had so attracted my attention.
“You like music,” I said.
“Nein spoke,” she answered, but her eyes spoke for her, and I shifted my
seat and got closer and read that poem of curves and shoulders, bright
eyes and hair, yes, all the mystery of a woman’s eyes, lit by the magic
light of sincerity.