really a Savoyard) once wrote a book called _Voyage autour de ma
Chambre_. I have not read it and do not even know what it is about, but
the title stimulates my fancy. In such a journey I could circumnavigate
the globe. An eikon by the chimneypiece can take me to Russia with its
great forests of birch and its white, domed churches. The Volga is wide,
and at the end of a straggling village, in the wine-shop, bearded men in
rough sheepskin coats sit drinking. I stand on the little hill from
which Napoleon first saw Moscow and I look upon the vastness of the
city. I will go down and see the people whom I know more intimately than
so many of my friends, Alyosha, and Vronsky, and a dozen more. But my
eyes fall on a piece of porcelain and I smell the acrid odours of China.
I am borne in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields,
or else I skirt a tree-clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they
trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and
mysterious, I hear the deep sound of a monastery bell. In the streets of
Peking there is a motley crowd and it scatters to allow passage to a
string of camels, stepping delicately, that bring skins and strange
drugs from the stony deserts of Mongolia. In England, in London, there
are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and
the light is so bleak that your heart sinks, but then you can look out
of your window, and you see the coconut trees crowded upon the beach of
a coral island. The sand is silvery and when you walk along in the
sunshine it is so dazzling that you can hardly bear to look at it.
Overhead the mynah birds are making a great to-do, and the surf beats
ceaselessly against the reef. Those are the best journeys, the journeys
that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your
illusions.
But there are people who take salt in their coffee. They say it gives it
a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way
there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the
inevitable disillusionment which you must experience on seeing them
gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and
you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that
beauty can give you. It is like the weakness in the character of a great
man which may make him less admirable but certainly makes him more
interesting.
Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu. It is so far away from Europe, it
is reached after so long a journey from San Francisco, so strange and so
charming associations are attached to the name, that at first I could
hardly believe my eyes. I do not know that I had formed in my mind any
very exact picture of what I expected, but what I found caused me a
great surprise. It is a typical western city. Shacks are cheek by jowl
with stone mansions; dilapidated frame houses stand next door to smart
stores with plate glass windows; electric cars rumble noisily along the
streets; and motors, Fords, Buicks, Packards, line the pavement. The
shops are filled with all the necessities of American civilisation.
Every third house is a bank and every fifth the agency of a steamship
company.
Along the streets crowd an unimaginable assortment of people. The
Americans, ignoring the climate, wear black coats and high, starched
collars, straw hats, soft hats, and bowlers. The Kanakas, pale brown,
with crisp hair, have nothing on but a shirt and a pair of trousers; but
the half-breeds are very smart with flaring ties and patent-leather
boots. The Japanese, with their obsequious smile, are neat and trim in
white duck, while their women walk a step or two behind them, in native
dress, with a baby on their backs. The Japanese children, in bright
coloured frocks, their little heads shaven, look like quaint dolls. Then
there are the Chinese. The men, fat and prosperous, wear their American
clothes oddly, but the women are enchanting with their tightly-dressed
black hair, so neat that you feel it can never be disarranged, and they
are very clean in their tunics and trousers, white, or powder blue, or
black. Lastly there are the Filipinos, the men in huge straw hats, the
women in bright yellow muslin with great puffed sleeves.
It is the meeting-place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders
with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you
expected you have come upon something singularly intriguing. All these
strange people live close to each other, with different languages and
different thoughts; they believe in different gods and they have
different values; two passions alone they share, love and hunger. And
somehow as you watch them you have an impression of extraordinary
vitality. Though the air is so soft and the sky so blue, you have, I
know not why, a feeling of something hotly passionate that beats like a
throbbing pulse through the crowd. Though the native policeman at the
corner, standing on a platform, with a white club to direct the traffic,
gives the scene an air of respectability, you cannot but feel that it is
a respectability only of the surface; a little below there is darkness
and mystery. It gives you just that thrill, with a little catch at the
heart, that you have when at night in the forest the silence trembles on
a sudden with the low, insistent beating of a drum. You are all
expectant of I know not what.
If I have dwelt on the incongruity of Honolulu, it is because just this,
to my mind, gives its point to the story I want to tell. It is a story
of primitive superstition, and it startles me that anything of the sort
should survive in a civilisation which, if not very distinguished, is
certainly very elaborate. I cannot get over the fact that such
incredible things should happen, or at least be thought to happen, right
in the middle, so to speak, of telephones, tram-cars, and daily papers.
And the friend who showed me Honolulu had the same incongruity which I
felt from the beginning was its most striking characteristic.
He was an American named Winter and I had brought a letter of
introduction to him from an acquaintance in New York. He was a man
between forty and fifty, with scanty black hair, grey at the temples,
and a sharp-featured, thin face. His eyes had a twinkle in them and his
large horn spectacles gave him a demureness which was not a little
diverting. He was tall rather than otherwise and very spare. He was born
in Honolulu and his father had a large store which sold hosiery and all
such goods, from tennis racquets to tarpaulins, as a man of fashion
could require. It was a prosperous business and I could well understand
the indignation of Winter _père_ when his son, refusing to go into it,
had announced his determination to be an actor. My friend spent twenty
years on the stage, sometimes in New York, but more often on the road,
for his gifts were small; but at last, being no fool, he came to the
conclusion that it was better to sell sock-suspenders in Honolulu than
to play small parts in Cleveland, Ohio. He left the stage and went into
the business. I think after the hazardous existence he had lived so
long, he thoroughly enjoyed the luxury of driving a large car and living
in a beautiful house near the golf-course, and I am quite sure, since he
was a man of parts, he managed the business competently. But he could
not bring himself entirely to break his connection with the arts and
since he might no longer act he began to paint. He took me to his studio
and showed me his work. It was not at all bad, but not what I should
have expected from him. He painted nothing but still life, very small
pictures, perhaps eight by ten; and he painted very delicately, with the
utmost finish. He had evidently a passion for detail. His fruit pieces
reminded you of the fruit in a picture by Ghirlandajo. While you
marvelled a little at his patience, you could not help being impressed
by his dexterity. I imagine that he failed as an actor because his
effects, carefully studied, were neither bold nor broad enough to get
across the footlights.
I was entertained by the proprietary, yet ironical air with which he
showed me the city. He thought in his heart that there was none in the
United States to equal it, but he saw quite clearly that his attitude
was comic. He drove me round to the various buildings and swelled with
satisfaction when I expressed a proper admiration for their
architecture. He showed me the houses of rich men.
"That's the Stubbs' house," he said. "It cost a hundred thousand dollars
to build. The Stubbs are one of our best families. Old man Stubbs came
here as a missionary more than seventy years ago."
He hesitated a little and looked at me with twinkling eyes through his
big round spectacles.
"All our best families are missionary families," he said. "You're not
very much in Honolulu unless your father or your grandfather converted
the heathen."
"Is that so?"
"Do you know your Bible?"
"Fairly," I answered.
"There is a text which says: The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the
children's teeth are set on edge. I guess it runs differently in
Honolulu. The fathers brought Christianity to the Kanaka and the
children jumped his land."
"Heaven helps those who help themselves," I murmured.
"It surely does. By the time the natives of this island had embraced
Christianity they had nothing else they could afford to embrace. The
kings gave the missionaries land as a mark of esteem, and the
missionaries bought land by way of laying up treasure in heaven. It
surely was a good investment. One missionary left the business--I think
one may call it a business without offence--and became a land agent, but
that is an exception. Mostly it was their sons who looked after the
commercial side of the concern. Oh, it's a fine thing to have a father
who came here fifty years ago to spread the faith."
But he looked at his watch.
"Gee, it's stopped. That means it's time to have a cocktail."
We sped along an excellent road, bordered with red hibiscus, and came
back into the town.
"Have you been to the Union Saloon?"
"Not yet."
"We'll go there."
I knew it was the most famous spot in Honolulu and I entered it with a
lively curiosity. You get to it by a narrow passage from King Street,
and in the passage are offices, so that thirsty souls may be supposed
bound for one of these just as well as for the saloon. It is a large
square room, with three entrances, and opposite the bar, which runs the
length of it, two corners have been partitioned off into little
cubicles. Legend states that they were built so that King Kalakaua might
drink there without being seen by his subjects, and it is pleasant to
think that in one or other of these he may have sat over his bottle, a
coal-black potentate, with Robert Louis Stevenson. There is a portrait
of him, in oils, in a rich gold frame; but there are also two prints of
Queen Victoria. On the walls, besides, are old line engravings of the
eighteenth century, one of which, and heaven knows how it got there, is
after a theatrical picture by De Wilde; and there are oleographs from
the Christmas supplements of the _Graphic_ and the _Illustrated London
News_ of twenty years ago. Then there are advertisements of whisky, gin,
champagne, and beer; and photographs of baseball teams and of native
orchestras.
The place seemed to belong not to the modern, hustling world that I had
left in the bright street outside, but to one that was dying. It had the
savour of the day before yesterday. Dingy and dimly lit, it had a
vaguely mysterious air and you could imagine that it would be a fit
scene for shady transactions. It suggested a more lurid time, when
ruthless men carried their lives in their hands, and violent deeds
diapered the monotony of life.
When I went in the saloon was fairly full. A group of business men stood
together at the bar, discussing affairs, and in a corner two Kanakas
were drinking. Two or three men who might have been store-keepers were
shaking dice. The rest of the company plainly followed the sea; they
were captains of tramps, first mates, and engineers. Behind the bar,
busily making the Honolulu cocktail for which the place was famous,
served two large half-castes, in white, fat, clean-shaven and dark
skinned, with thick, curly hair and large bright eyes.
Winter seemed to know more than half the company, and when we made our
way to the bar a little fat man in spectacles, who was standing by
himself, offered him a drink.
"No, you have one with me, Captain," said Winter.
He turned to me.
"I want you to know Captain Butler."
The little man shook hands with me. We began to talk, but, my attention
distracted by my surroundings, I took small notice of him, and after we
had each ordered a cocktail we separated. When we had got into the motor
again and were driving away, Winter said to me:
"I'm glad we ran up against Butler. I wanted you to meet him. What did
you think of him?"
"I don't know that I thought very much of him at all," I answered.
"Do you believe in the supernatural?"
"I don't exactly know that I do," I smiled.
"A very queer thing happened to him a year or two ago. You ought to have
him tell you about it."
"What sort of thing?"
Winter did not answer my question.
"I have no explanation of it myself," he said. "But there's no doubt
about the facts. Are you interested in things like that?"
"Things like what?"
"Spells and magic and all that."
"I've never met anyone who wasn't."
Winter paused for a moment.
"I guess I won't tell you myself. You ought to hear it from his own lips
so that you can judge. How are you fixed up for to-night?"
"I've got nothing on at all."
"Well, I'll get hold of him between now and then and see if we can't go
down to his ship."
Winter told me something about him. Captain Butler had spent all his
life on the Pacific. He had been in much better circumstances than he
was now, for he had been first officer and then captain of a
passenger-boat plying along the coast of California, but he had lost his
ship and a number of passengers had been drowned.
"Drink, I guess," said Winter.
Of course there had been an enquiry, which had cost him his certificate,
and then he drifted further afield. For some years he had knocked about
the South Seas, but he was now in command of a small schooner which
sailed between Honolulu and the various islands of the group. It
belonged to a Chinese to whom the fact that his skipper had no
certificate meant only that he could be had for lower wages, and to have
a white man in charge was always an advantage.
And now that I had heard this about him I took the trouble to remember
more exactly what he was like. I recalled his round spectacles and the
round blue eyes behind them, and so gradually reconstructed him before
my mind. He was a little man, without angles, plump, with a round face
like the full moon and a little fat round nose. He had fair short hair,
and he was red-faced and clean shaven. He had plump hands, dimpled on
the knuckles, and short fat legs. He was a jolly soul, and the tragic
experience he had gone through seemed to have left him unscarred. Though
he must have been thirty-four or thirty-five he looked much younger. But
after all I had given him but a superficial attention, and now that I
knew of this catastrophe, which had obviously ruined his life, I
promised myself that when I saw him again I would take more careful note
of him. It is very curious to observe the differences of emotional
response that you find in different people. Some can go through terrific
battles, the fear of imminent death and unimaginable horrors, and
preserve their soul unscathed, while with others the trembling of the
moon on a solitary sea or the song of a bird in a thicket will cause a
convulsion great enough to transform their entire being. Is it due to
strength or weakness, want of imagination or instability of character? I
do not know. When I called up in my fancy that scene of shipwreck, with
the shrieks of the drowning and the terror, and then later, the ordeal
of the enquiry, the bitter grief of those who sorrowed for the lost, and
the harsh things he must have read of himself in the papers, the shame
and the disgrace, it came to me with a shock to remember that Captain
Butler had talked with the frank obscenity of a schoolboy of the
Hawaiian girls and of Ewelei, the Red Light district, and of his
successful adventures. He laughed readily, and one would have thought he
could never laugh again. I remembered his shining, white teeth; they
were his best feature. He began to interest me, and thinking of him and
of his gay insouciance I forgot the particular story, to hear which I
was to see him again. I wanted to see him rather to find out if I could
a little more what sort of man he was.
Winter made the necessary arrangements and after dinner we went down to
the water front. The ship's boat was waiting for us and we rowed out.
The schooner was anchored some way across the harbour, not far from the
breakwater. We came alongside, and I heard the sound of a ukalele. We
clambered up the ladder.
"I guess he's in the cabin," said Winter, leading the way.
It was a small cabin, bedraggled and dirty, with a table against one
side and a broad bench all round upon which slept, I supposed, such
passengers as were ill-advised enough to travel in such a ship. A
petroleum lamp gave a dim light. The ukalele was being played by a
native girl and Butler was lolling on the seat, half lying, with his
head on her shoulder and an arm round her waist.
"Don't let us disturb you, Captain," said Winter, facetiously.
"Come right in," said Butler, getting up and shaking hands with us.
"What'll you have?"
It was a warm night, and through the open door you saw countless stars
in a heaven that was still almost blue. Captain Butler wore a sleeveless
under-shirt, showing his fat white arms, and a pair of incredibly dirty
trousers. His feet were bare, but on his curly head he wore a very old,
a very shapeless felt hat.
"Let me introduce you to my girl. Ain't she a peach?"
We shook hands with a very pretty person. She was a good deal taller
than the captain, and even the Mother Hubbard, which the missionaries of
a past generation had, in the interests of decency, forced on the
unwilling natives, could not conceal the beauty of her form. One could
not but suspect that age would burden her with a certain corpulence, but
now she was graceful and alert. Her brown skin had an exquisite
translucency and her eyes were magnificent. Her black hair, very thick
and rich, was coiled round her head in a massive plait. When she smiled
in a greeting that was charmingly natural, she showed teeth that were
small, even, and white. She was certainly a most attractive creature. It
was easy to see that the captain was madly in love with her. He could
not take his eyes off her; he wanted to touch her all the time. That was
very easy to understand; but what seemed to me stranger was that the
girl was apparently in love with him. There was a light in her eyes that
was unmistakable, and her lips were slightly parted as though in a sigh
of desire. It was thrilling. It was even a little moving, and I could
not help feeling somewhat in the way. What had a stranger to do with
this love-sick pair? I wished that Winter had not brought me. And it
seemed to me that the dingy cabin was transfigured and now it seemed a
fit and proper scene for such an extremity of passion. I thought I
should never forget that schooner in the harbour of Honolulu, crowded
with shipping, and yet, under the immensity of the starry sky, remote
from all the world. I liked to think of those lovers sailing off
together in the night over the empty spaces of the Pacific from one
green, hilly island to another. A faint breeze of romance softly fanned
my cheek.
And yet Butler was the last man in the world with whom you would have
associated romance, and it was hard to see what there was in him to
arouse love. In the clothes he wore now he looked podgier than ever, and
his round spectacles gave his round face the look of a prim cherub. He
suggested rather a curate who had gone to the dogs. His conversation was
peppered with the quaintest Americanisms, and it is because I despair of
reproducing these that, at whatever loss of vividness, I mean to narrate
the story he told me a little later in my own words. Moreover he was
unable to frame a sentence without an oath, though a good-natured one,
and his speech, albeit offensive only to prudish ears, in print would
seem coarse. He was a mirth-loving man, and perhaps that accounted not a
little for his successful amours; since women, for the most part
frivolous creatures, are excessively bored by the seriousness with
which men treat them, and they can seldom resist the buffoon who makes
them laugh. Their sense of humour is crude. Diana of Ephesus is always
prepared to fling prudence to the winds for the red-nosed comedian who
sits on his hat. I realised that Captain Butler had charm. If I had not
known the tragic story of the shipwreck I should have thought he had
never had a care in his life.
Our host had rung the bell on our entrance and now a Chinese cook came
in with more glasses and several bottles of soda. The whisky and the
captain's empty glass stood already on the table. But when I saw the
Chinese I positively started, for he was certainly the ugliest man I had
ever seen. He was very short, but thick-set, and he had a bad limp. He
wore a singlet and a pair of trousers that had been white, but were now
filthy, and, perched on a shock of bristly, grey hair, an old tweed
deer-stalker. It would have been grotesque on any Chinese, but on him it
was outrageous. His broad, square face was very flat as though it had
been bashed in by a mighty fist, and it was deeply pitted with smallpox;
but the most revolting thing in him was a very pronounced harelip which
had never been operated on, so that his upper lip, cleft, went up in an
angle to his nose, and in the opening was a huge yellow fang. It was
horrible. He came in with the end of a cigarette at the corner of his
mouth, and this, I do not know why, gave him a devilish expression.
He poured out the whisky and opened a bottle of soda.
"Don't drown it, John," said the captain.
He said nothing, but handed a glass to each of us. Then he went out.
"I saw you lookin' at my Chink," said Butler, with a grin on his fat,
shining face.
"I should hate to meet him on a dark night," I said.
"He sure is homely," said the captain, and for some reason he seemed to
say it with a peculiar satisfaction. "But he's fine for one thing, I'll
tell the world; you just have to have a drink every time you look at
him."
But my eyes fell on a calabash that hung against the wall over the
table, and I got up to look at it. I had been hunting for an old one and
this was better than any I had seen outside the museum.
"It was given me by a chief over on one of the islands," said the
captain, watching me. "I done him a good turn and he wanted to give me
something good."
"He certainly did," I answered.
I was wondering whether I could discreetly make Captain Butler an offer
for it, I could not imagine that he set any store on such an article,
when, as though he read my thoughts, he said:
"I wouldn't sell that for ten thousand dollars."
"I guess not," said Winter. "It would be a crime to sell it."
"Why?" I asked.
"That comes into the story," returned Winter. "Doesn't it, Captain?"
"It surely does."
"Let's hear it then."
"The night's young yet," he answered.
The night distinctly lost its youth before he satisfied my curiosity,
and meanwhile we drank a great deal too much whisky while Captain Butler
narrated his experiences of San Francisco in the old days and of the
South Seas. At last the girl fell asleep. She lay curled up on the seat,
with her face on her brown arm, and her bosom rose and fell gently with
her breathing. In sleep she looked sullen, but darkly beautiful.