Memories and Reflection—A Picture of Robert Louis Stevenson—German
Appreciation—Of Norman Descent—A Cannibal’s Execution—An Australian
Sundowner—A Voltaire of the Southern Seas—Types
DREAMING over New Zealand days and the many types and characters I have
met destroys the continuity of actual events: my thoughts digress for a
moment to various experiences and pictures which my memory has recorded.
Memories, in the perspective of dead Time, vary with our moods.
Sometimes the figures and events stand out vividly, and at other times
are illusive, and seem some sad, intangible thing far away in the
background of life.
The old bushman’s red beard and twinkling eyes; the squatting savages by
their huts; the sensitive mouths and wondering eyes of the native girls;
old scallawags; beachcombers; the noise of sailors on ships in the bay;
Horncastle’s jovial face aglow with joy and drink; the palm-clad shores,
and Apia’s primitive town, seem far-off dreams. I can still see Robert
Louis Stevenson in Samoa; his tall, bony form, attired in white
trousers, shirt and old shoes only, stands on the beach. His hand is
arched over his watching eyes, his loose scarf blows out behind him to
the gusty trade wind, as he stares seaward at the fading schooner that
takes some friend away for ever. He looks like some memorial figure, the
statue of a half poet, half pioneer gazing with aching eyes across the
sea. The wind stirs the wisp of dark hair on the high, pale brow; the
head is hatless and perfectly still, but the fine eyes are alive and
full of far-away thoughts. Now he moves away and goes up the shore, and
does not even see the smile of recognition on the face of the trading
ship’s skipper, who passes with a Samoan sailor and one other. Like the
memory of some tragical living picture it all flashes across my mind. I
could think it all unreal, some far-off rocky, beautiful unknown isle,
set in the seas of my imagination, as I paint the stars, the skies, the
breaking waves, the ships and the sailors coming into the harbour, or
once more going seaward. At other times Samoa’s Isles come back vividly,
and just as a sailor, far away at sea, stands on the fo’c’sle head and
watches the big clouds shift on the horizon as they break and suddenly
reveal blue tropical skies over the outstretched, unknown continent’s
shores of singing waves and palm forests, so I see the past, and the
figures move. The winds stir the trees, and the magical, musical voices
of savage men and women sing and laugh, in a world that is now _The
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments_ of my boyhood.
As you can imagine, I have met many strange types of men and women in my
travels, types both good and bad. I tramped many, many weary miles in
the Australian bush when I was fifteen years of age. Often I tramped
alone, when I could not get a congenial comrade. I was sometimes very
lucky; and my reminiscences of those good comrades are the lights that
shine down the dark tracks far away as I remember their eyes. One was a
man of about thirty years of age. He was exceedingly cheerful and full
of song and devilment. I can still see his refined face aglow as he sits
under the scorched gum-trees smashing swamp mosquitoes on his hand or
singing his favourite songs in a quiet, manly voice. We stayed together
for two or three days at a sheep station, where the boss was a German.
He was all right. But there were two German women and a son there too.
When I played the violin to them, and turned around for the welcome and
expected applause, they said: “Vell, dat vash little nize”; and then
they shook their Teutonic square heads and, with their eyes and hands
lifted to the shanty roof, said: “But, O-ez! you shoulds hear zem play
that tunezz in Germanhy—O-o-o-o-e-z-z-z-z-z ze diff-er-enze!”
Then my boyish blood warmed up and I said: “Germans can’t play the
violin. Paganini wasn’t a German. No German ever played except by
science.”
“Mein Gott! Mein Gott! O, haves you never vash heards Vons
Kriessburgh? He play that same tuenz vich you just now play
so—phoo!”—here they shrugged their shoulders with disgust at my
performance—“like dis,” and the two German women, who had faces like
pasty pumpkins with glass eyes stuck in them, and the son, with his
big moustache twirled at the ends, lifted their hands and eyes to the
roof to express the ecstatic memory of the German’s violin-playing.
Their mouths went “O, o-ez-e-z-z-z-z-z-z-ez,” emitting a strange sound
that faded away in complete exhaustion as they sank down on to the
three chairs like three puppets. Not only violin-playing, but
everything, was wonderful in German art. If one said, “What a nice
picture,” or “What nice butter,” they’d raise their eyebrows and sigh
out that old crescendo, “O, O-e-z-z-z,” and say: “Have yous _never,
never_ tasted German butter?” It was the same with eggs, beef, pork,
men, boots, girls or any d——d thing!
My congenial comrade went off to New Zealand, and I ran across another
one, who was most uncongenial for a time. We were tramping across the
bush-lands, looking for work on stations and secretly hoping that we
were not wanted. My friend was a short, thick-set, thick-necked fellow
about two years older than I, with a slightly elevated, protruding chin
and a mouth that talked from morn till night about his ancestry. I
forget now whether he said they were descendants of Julius Cæsar’s
invading horde or of William the Conqueror. Anyway our friendship was
one incessant argument.
I was just on six feet high, full of health and independent strength,
and I found that I was supposed to walk beside him with my head hanging
for shame because I was only a “common Englishman.” We were on a lonely
bush track; ragged gum-trees fenced the broken sky-lines for miles and
miles around us. The only onlookers were parrots and cockatoos, like
vividly coloured leaves overhead. There was no sight or sound of human
habitation in that vast, sombre solitude as we tramped along together. A
feeling of grim exultation seemed to suddenly seize me. Once more I
swallowed another pill of insult, and I looked down sideways at my
blue-blooded companion. I thought of my ancestral forefathers, and
wondered if _his_ ancestors had robbed my ancestors, and ravaged their
lands and castles—my possible birthright!
He did not know what I was thinking of as he talked away. His short legs
strutted along the track with the toes turned up, his nose and chin also
inclined skyward, as once more he reminded me of my plebeian origin.
Suddenly!—— Well, I’ll not tell you all, for why should we be proud of
the animalistic strain that sometimes dominates our natures? Why be
proud that suddenly a bolt seemed to fall from the blue, and one of the
reputed descendants of the first Kaiser Bill got his deserts, and lay
with his back in the dust, his Imperial nose and semi-conscious eyes
staring half vacantly up at the Australian sky, while plebeian, old
pioneer England, with a swag on his back, tramped away and faded on the
horizon—triumphant—alone!
Ere sunset darkened the sky I lay ambushed in a clump of wattles by the
forest, then peeped and saw my comrade coming slowly down the track with
his toes turned down. I repented and thought: “Even if it’s true, he
cannot help being the descendant of bloodthirsty ravishers, who killed
old men and robbed my country’s churches. No, even he cannot help
himself.” So I crept out and told him I repented, and once more we
tramped along as comrades. So silent was he about William the Conqueror
that you would have thought such a man had never lived. He admitted that
night, as we sat by the camp fire, when I had explained my feelings to
him, that his descent was only a family rumour. Hearing that, I truly
forgave him, and we lifted the billy can of cold tea and drank a united
toast to the memory of Caractacus and Boadicea, and death to all
descendants of the first great bloated Kaiser Bill who dare prove to us
their murderous, cowardly ancestry!
[Illustration: LAKE ROTORUA AND MOKOIA ISLAND, N.Z.]
I met yet another gentleman of ancient emigrant blood in Tahiti. He was
a gigantic old chap, a chief. I slept in his hut with four American
runaway sailors, who were waiting with me for the next boat to call, so
that we could clear out. Night after night that old chief would sit and
tell us of the wonderful earlier days, when he was the great king of the
inland dominions, loved by all the tribes for his bravery and justice,
and had had a special envoy sent out by Queen Victoria to represent her
appreciation to the one true Christian monarch of the Southern Seas.
He had fine eyes, and they flashed as he told of these old days, and his
tattooed frame swelled majestically over many a wild memory. He even
shed tears as he sang to us old far-off songs of dead heroes, mighty
chiefs and tender maids he had eaten at the cannibalistic festive board.
One night we returned to the hut and found that the great monarch had
bolted off with all our possessions; even my last shirt had gone! Two
weeks later he was caught by the gendarmes; then we heard that he was a
ferocious cannibal of low origin, and that they had been trying to catch
him for twelve months. He had killed a native boy, strangled him in the
forest, and eaten him. Before we left we heard that he had been shot by
the French Commissioners. About six weeks after, while I was walking
along the beach at Apia, I met him. He ran for his life, before my
friend and I got a chance to recover from our astonishment and run in
the opposite direction. The hired native sharpshooters had deliberately
missed him, and the old scoundrel had fallen dead till nightfall only!
Another time I met an old dilapidated sundowner, a real specimen of the
Australian bush-lands. It was miles up country where I first met him,
sitting under his gum-trees by a creek making his billy boil. He gave me
a hot drink and I gave him a tobacco plug; and as the billy boiled up
again he said: “Where yer bound for?” “Anywhere,” I answered. “Wall, yer
better come with me to Coomiranta Creek, ten miles off the western
track, by Wangarris Yards; we can get plenty tucker there; and then on
to the Sandy Hills and across Dead Girl’s Flat into Hompy Bom, that
leads across Gum Creek into Dead Crow’s Paddock, two miles or more from
Dead Man’s Hollow. Then strike the gullies by Riley’s ranch, and there
we can get another stock of tucker. He’s a real all right ’un Riley is,
and not too bad either.”
And so he rambled on, as he wiped his grizzly grey beard, a beard so
thick with spittle and tobacco juice that it acted as a kind of
fly-catcher for him; the buzzing insects flapped their wings and
struggled with their tangled feet in that awful hairy web till they were
swept into Eternity by his brushing hand. Indeed his companionship was
greatly esteemed by me, for as we tramped along under the sweltering sun
I walked beside him untormented by the mosquitoes and the myriads of
hissing flies that like a swarm of honeybees kept on his side, following
his monstrous bushy beard as we travelled south.
His whole life was centred on the various stations by the known tracks
and the grades of generosity in the hearts of the overseers and
stockmen. These sundowners arrive at the stations at sunset and appeal
for work just as the day’s work is finished and bolt off at daybreak
into the bush, with their old brown blanket on their backs. Stolid old
men some of them, they are real derelicts of the old days. They look
like grey-bearded figure-heads of ships, fixed on weary, ragged bodies,
as with their pipes in their mouths they pass and fade across the oceans
of scrub, spinifex and sand, buccaneers on the high seas of Australian
bush. My old sundowner hardly ever spoke as we wandered along under the
gum-trees, as the magpies sat on the twigs and chuckled, and bees moaned
in the bush flowers of the hollows. We arrived in a bush town of about
twenty wooden houses and two shops that sold all humanity requires. I
played the violin, and he was delighted when I gave him all the money
which he collected in his vast broad-rimmed hat.
“I say, matey, chum up with me,” he said, as his long-sleeping
commercial eye opened and stared at the money. But I didn’t chum up with
him; I was not built for a sundowner. I recall how he always said his
prayers after he had tucked his blanket around his body and laid his
head on the heaped bush grass. He was old then. I suppose he’s long been
dead now, and lies somewhere in those far-away bush-lands.
I’ve seen some strange types in my time; but what are those types
compared to the normal tribes I’ve seen and played to, laughed, loved
and squabbled with. Little brown children clothed only in moonlight and
sunlight, singing cheerfully by the South Sea breakers under the
dark-fingered coco-palms. Sad little faces, some like deserted baby
angels, looking up into my face—my children! Dishevelled, strange old
bush mothers, crooning to their buds of humanity, tiny brown clinging
hands and moving mouths at their kind, softly feeding brown breasts—my
mothers! Old tattooed chiefs and grim-looking kings; rough-haired
semi-savage girls; and youths jabbering in strange tongues, with hushed,
secret voices, over the terrible white plague that had entered and
stricken their primitive city of huts; the white-faced, fierce-looking
invaders from across the seas. Ravishers of their maidens! The scum of
the Western cities prowling about the villages that had become the
hot-beds of lust and sin’s terrible paradise. Missionaries, with
melancholy, hollow voices, who seldom knew anything of the intense inner
life of humanity and the great philosophy of happiness. Superstitious,
bigoted old chiefs cursing the white man’s Bible. Philosophical old
brown men with high brows and keen dark eyes reflectively nodding their
heads. South Sea Oldenburgs striving to convince grim South Sea
Spinozas. Stalwart, dark tattooed Schopenhauers shouting about
wind-baggery.
I can see again the ironical heathen chief sitting by his palatial hut.
He is clever, a Voltaire of the Southern Seas. His strong face is
tattooed; grim-looking are his little eyes as he grins and looks at the
Marquesan coat-of-arms which he has invented and placed at his door—a
large empty rum barrel and on top of it a Christian Bible!
I see the pretty Samoan girl, Millancoo, with lovely dreaming eyes and
thick bronzed hair, with a red and white hibiscus flower stuck in at
each side. Her brown limbs and figure are the perfection of graceful
beauty, dressed only in a little blue chemise. She eloped with a “noble
white man” to the Gilbert Isles, and committed suicide when he left her,
ere her first-born could creep to her bosom and taste the only milk of
human kindness it would most probably have ever known.
Earnest-faced Tippo, her sister, sits on the slope. Happy as night with
its stars is she, with six little dark, plump children with demon-like
eyes romping all round her. She has married an uncivilised nigger from
Timbuctoo! O happy girl! How the natives chided and sneered at her at
first for not marrying a great white lord as her sister did!
Beautiful women, and men also, I have met in strange places. I have
found them in the hovels and among the scum of life, and sometimes in
the palatial home of affluence. Convicts of New Caledonia in the
calaboose or toiling in chains, breathing, yet as dead as dust, with
hollow, sad eyes, corpses from La Belle France—my poor brothers! Old men
and women begging by the kerb-side in the far-away civilised Isle of the
Western Seas! The old man in rags, a skeleton on tottering feet,
shivering, going down the cold, windy, main road of the lighted suburb,
singing, with a palsied old mouth, some song that God composed ere
Christ came. He is my beloved comrade; bury me with him, so that the
flowers over us may twine in our dead dust and find mutual sympathy.
I have seen multitudes of commercial burglars, wealthy villains, who
fought so valiantly to save their own lives that they have received the
commercial V.C. for valour—and penniless, profligate angels, fighting
side by side in the battle of nations—that battle wherein the bullets
cause mortal wounds, though many years pass before they send the
bloodless corpses to heaven—or hell.
I have seen old, ragged, hideous, long-dead women still sitting by the
attic’s hearth fire, sipping the gin bottle—sweet-fumed opium for their
spectral dreams. As they stare at the embers burning in the red glow
they see their own girlhood faces smile once more back into their
bleared eyes, with remembered beauty, happiness and glorious faith. Old
_roués_ too dream somewhere—the men who made the vows to those drunken
old women and never kept them—may they sleep well, but never wake!
I have heard the majestic cathedral organ thunder its rolling music to
the roof as the beggar passed by the massive, nail-studded door on
swollen feet, rubbed his cold skeleton hands together and spat
viciously. No food in his body, and his soul—well, why should he worry
about his soul?
I have seen the great shocked multitude open their eyes aghast, and
heard the tremendous crash, the clatter of the hail of stones, when the
voice said: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.” O wonderful goodness! O icy, stony virtue.
Ah! not only in the wild Australasian bush or in the Southern Seas is
the great drama of life enacted; the great drama that makes your heart
cold, and the old warm belief become encrusted with icicles, as you
dream over the strange lot of the wandering, lost children.
I’ve laid me down deep in the bush to sleep,
And wrapt my body in the sunset’s blaze.
Then wondered why He made sad wings for days
To fly away—and all our world to weep.
Like to a myriad birds blown round sunset
In song, I thought I watched God’s careworn Face
Brushed by bright wings—the unborn human race
Who did not want their mortal birth—just yet!
I heard the growing flowers cry in the night,
And trees—that whisper of old cherished things.
And still the startled, hurried rush of wings—
It was the stars sighed out—upon their flight.
O Troubadours, O Stars, what sing you of?
O wandering minstrels, is it to God’s plan
You sing?—or to the exiled heart of man
Who pays with death’s blind eyes and cherished love?
But still the children cry upon the plain
Beside a grave; and still the cheerful king
Grows fat; and sad old men say: “Anything,
O God, except to live this life again!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------