At Nuka Hiva—Gilbert the Astronomer—The Grog Shanty—The Astronomer’s
Audience—Ah Foo, the Chinaman—Other Worlds than Ours—The Reformed
Traders—The Death of Gilbert
ABOUT a month after the foregoing incidents took place, and while I was
in the Marquesas Group, I came across an old man who was one of those
characters which are often to be met with in the wild, outer spaces of
the world. He lived not far from the shore-side, at Nuka Hiva, and was
an enthusiastic astronomer. His lone homestead was by the lowest peak of
some hills, and so situated that it was eminently suitable for the
purposes for which he required it, which were rest, reading and quiet,
and unobserved observation of the starry skies; whereat for hours, with
hopeful eye fixed at the telescope, he would gaze on cloudless nights.
Night after night, while the traders and natives slept, the solitary old
man would sleeplessly follow his hobby. The wild poetry of primeval
nature surrounded his hut home; the swinging seas thundered or softly
broke over the reefs below, and clumps of pandanus-trees and coco-palms,
like æolian harps, caught the wandering winds and wailed mournfully.
They were and are wild places, and the scattered isles were as oases on
the vast Sahara of the Pacific Ocean. Tao-o-hae was the nearest
primitive capital, where strange races mingled and traded. Inland lived
the old tribes, the survivors of cannibalistic days. Those old tattooed
Marquesan chiefs sat by their conical dens, chewed modern plug tobacco
and smoked opium, and looked upon the calaboose as the final
resting-place for reflective age. In the villages the natives grew copra
and tropical fruits and sold them to the French, who formed the greater
part of the white population. They wore the ridi, and still encouraged
old tribal customs, and the native women and girls, though modest and
virtuous, were often ruined, body and soul, by the Chinamen who sold
them opium and did many other things.
Why old Gilbert—for that was the name we knew the astronomer by—had left
his native land and lived this lonely life was a mystery that no one
bothered about; one thing was certain—he was no myth and was there. We
all liked him. Originally he must have been a tall man, but age had bent
his backbone and reduced his height by about two inches. His unkempt
grey beard gave him a patriarchal aspect, and his deep-set clear grey
eyes, fine, lofty brow and kind expression revealed no hint of inward
vice. The native Marquesan servant who tidied his one room once a week
was old and wrinkled, being over seventy years of age. Photographs
pinned on the wooden wall of his bedroom imaged the refined faces of
relatives, one of them a sad-faced young girl.
“Solitary Gilbert” was respected by the white community of the district,
a community which chiefly consisted of traders and cast-ashore sailors
of various nations, and represented the adventurous stock of England,
Scotland, and France, one or two Mongolian niggers, and a full-blooded
celestial who did their washing and spent the proceeds on Marquesan
ladies, who wore few clothes, worked on the various plantations, chatted
and chewed.
The traders used to congregate in the grog shanty, which was run by a
jovial _libre_ from Numea, the convict settlement, tell their various
experiences and argue over the latest Marquesan politics or murders, and
also express their various views of the local missionaries, who had long
since given them up as hopeless atheists. Drinking beer till their teeth
floated seemed to be the height of their ambition, though a few hoped to
realise by trading enough money to go back to their native land. They
were jovial men; some had sailed the seven seas, and some had hurriedly
emigrated direct to the South Seas, and only thought of their country in
troublous dreams; but all of them positively refused to give up their
wild ways, listen to the missionaries and live a sweet and beerless
life. Only one man had a magnetic influence for good over them, and that
man was the mysterious old astronomer, Gilbert.
I came to know the lonely star-watcher well. Often while I was sitting
in the grog shanty, listening to the traders arguing, he would walk in,
and talk and lecture them; and they listened with profound respect. When
excited by the thrilling subject of his conversation—the stars—his aged
lips trembled and revealed the sensitive temperament of a lofty
imagination. Something in his manner and in his earnest voice made us
all lift our eyes and attention to him.
Every night he would bring his telescope under his arm and, perching it
outside on a beer barrel, get the traders, each in turn, to fix their
eyes to the lens and gaze at the heavens. We all liked the wise old man,
and from him I learnt all that I know of the stars and their travels
through space.
Once the old fellow was laid up with a chill and lay for two or three
days in bed. I did my best for him as he sat up in his bunk, attired in
a red nightshirt, looking ill and solemn, and passing the time by
talking philosophy. Schopenhauer was his pet subject when he could not
gaze at the stars. He gave me his books, but though I made a great
mental effort I only succeeded, after reading the books, in discovering
that I knew nothing, that life was nothing, that creation was a
tremendous black nothing wherein human eyes continually opened and
shaped all that Is! That stars flashed out of the same human
consciousness that imagined pain, passion and all the arts and emotions
which beautify the imagined Universe. As I knew little at that time of
philosophy, old Gilbert found me an appreciative and quiet listener, who
did not argue on any point; indeed, I became fond of him and so, through
respect for his memory, I am now attempting a short biographical note of
his existence.
Music he loved, and I would play the violin to him; old and staid as he
was, when I played softly and tenderly some old melody his voice would
join tremulously in and, though pathetically toneless, outrivalled a
master voice by its sincerity. Poetry he liked, and beyond his table and
one old chair and bunk bed his furniture consisted of two long shelves
of classical books. Through him my mind was enlarged, till I realised
that pianissimo, legato and staccato cadenza and music’s mysterious
charm, vaguely expressed, but did not fathom, the serious ideals of
life; were only as a wailing, wandering wind of the mind, stirring the
soul and the flowers of memory, as they sighed through the emotions, a
breath on the deep waters of thought.
Yes, that solitary old astronomer friend of my youth, though I did not
realise it then, revealed to me that literature and poetry were great
and beautiful music fused in the white heat of thought’s spiritual
flame, and for that alone his memory is ever dear to me.
Notwithstanding his virtues, the missionaries looked upon him as an old
madman, and he in turn gazed upon them with intense pity. The
storekeeper hard by, who sold everything from a needle to tinned meat,
was a “deeply religious” man and trusted everyone but Gilbert. I
remember him well; he was determined to be just and right, spoke often
about God and divinity, with a voice that rang with the note of justness
and sounded like the clink of Government scale-weights. He did well in
his store shop, and I think he would have weighed a gift of the widow’s
mite carefully before she left his premises.
One night he was discovered dead, and Ah Foo, the Chinaman, suddenly
left the district; though the crack in the storekeeper’s head was put
down to a fall, we had our suspicions. The traders cursed the
storekeeper’s death, because Ah Foo did their washing and they had now
to fall back on the native girls, who only wore ridis and grass and
could not resist the temptation of such finery, and so often they wore
our shirts and collars and under-pants for weeks before returning them,
and if they secured admirers they sometimes eloped into the forest with
them, and our washing was seen no more! So though the islands were made
a paradise by coco-palms, tropical fruit trees, sea-beaten reefs and
inland mountains, they had their drawbacks.
Gilbert used suddenly to appear in the grog shanty, quietly sit on a
tub, look round, critically scan the rough, unshaved faces of the
traders and then say: “Boys, beer may be well, and doubtless has its
advantages, but do you ever think of the skies, the vastness of space,
with its myriads of worlds, endless sunsets and sunrises sparkling
through infinite gloom?” At this they would wipe their mouths with the
back of their hands and gaze awestruck at one another, each seeking to
hear a reply from the other, for the word “infinity” had something in it
that outwitted their comprehension. The oldest and biggest scoundrel of
the lot would look the most earnest and, after placing his quart pot on
the shanty bench, slowly wipe his bearded mouth and say: “Professor, we
do think of them ’ere marvellous things; nights and nights they worries
us when we thinks of the vast abscess” (abyss) “called Space.” Then old
Gilbert, encouraged, would once more proceed and say: “Like unto Thee,
space hath no end; and the stars, which are as the dust of heaven,
eternally roll out blue days and sunsets for endless myriads of worlds
that are sparkling through infinite space. Yet, O men, are thy souls
immersed in no more than the fumes of beer!” At this the trader would
get argumentative and say: “What’s the end of space, and if yer go to
the end where would yer fall if yer fell over?”
“O man of beer,” old Gilbert answered, delighted to have got up a
controversy over his pet hobby, “your thoughts cannot out-travel the
range of your intellect; you but surmise an end, because your intellect
hath an end; thou art finite and the heavens infinite,” and after saying
this, which was Greek to them all, he brought forth his telescope from
under his coat. Each one outside under the clear tropical skies would
glue his curious eye to the end of the tube and gaze at the orbs of
space; and so the professor spent his time and gradually induced in the
rough traders a genuine love of astronomy.
They all got really to like him and listened eagerly to all he said, and
often they ceased their drinking bouts and saved their money when their
trading-ships came in from the scattered isles of the North and South
Pacific. Many nights down the slopes they went like obedient children,
following old Gilbert in single file, as they walked along looking up at
the stars, towards Gilbert’s observatory. They surrounded him; in a
ring, on the lonely hill at midnight, they listened to his lecture,
gazed through his old Herschelian telescope at the seaward stars and the
moon, and then looked into each other’s eyes astonished, saying:
“Wonderful, mates, all them ’ere worlds, like this ’ere, and the
professor’s found ’em!”
Gilbert would stand on the beach, proudly gazing upon his sinful, rough
pupils, as the sea-winds stirred his grey beard, and his deep-set eyes
shone as they probed him with questions, not to please him, but from
intellectual curiosity. Afterwards he granted them all one final drink
of rum!
When he died he was buried in the little railed-in plateau, where also
lay the dust of exiled white men and a few Marquesan chiefs of the old
times, who slept quietly in that silent cemetery by the mountains. When
the traders stood by old Gilbert’s grave, and slowly lowered the coffin
down, tears were in the eyes of even the worst of them. He had made them
better men, and through his little telescope tube, which pointed to the
heavens, he had put into their hearts thoughts on the grandeur of
creation and reverence for God’s wonderful work.
So Gilbert lived, toiled and died, the sincerest and most successful
missionary of the far South Seas.
------------------------------------------------------------------------