IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS
By Beatrice Grimshaw
Author Of “From Fiji To The Cannibal Islands,” Etc.
London: Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row
1907
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IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS
In desire of many marvels over sea,
When the new made tropic city sweats and roars,
I have sailed with young Ulysses from the quay,
Till the anchor rattled down on stranger shores.
Kipling.
MOST men have their loves, happy or hopeless, among the countries of
the earth. There are words in the atlas that ring like trumpet calls
to the ear of many a stay-at-home in grey northern cities--names of
mountains, rivers, islands, that tramp across the map to the sound of
swinging music played by their own gay syllables, that summon, and lure,
and sadden the man who listens to their fifing, as the music of marching
regiments grips at the heart of the girl who loves a soldier.
They call, they call, they call--through the long March mornings, when
the road that leads to everywhere is growing white and dry--through
restless summer nights, when one sits awake at the window to see the
stars turn grey with the dawn--in the warm midday, when one hurries
across the city bridge to a crowded eating-house, and the glittering
masts far away down the river must never be looked at as one passes. Of
a misty autumn evening, when steamers creeping up to seaport towns send
long cries across the water, one here, and another there, will stir
uneasily in his chair by the fire, and shut his ears against the
insistent call.... Why should he listen, he who may never answer?
_(Yokohama, the Golden Gate, Cape Horn, the Rio Grande, Agra, Delhi,
Benares, Bombay, the Amazon, the Andes, the South Sea Islands, Victoria
Nyanza, the Pyramids, the Nile, Lhassa, Damascus, Singapore, the
tundras, the prairies, trade-winds, tropics, and the Line--can’t you
hear us calling?)_
Love is not stronger than that call--let sweetheartless girls left
alone, and the man of cities who has loved the woman of the wandering
foot, give bitter witness. Death is not stronger--those who follow the
call must defy him over and over again. Pride of country, love of home,
delight in well-known faces and kindly hearts that understand, the
ease of the old and well-tried ways, the prick of ordinary ambitions
hungering for the showy prizes that every one may see--these are but as
dead leaves blown before the wind, when the far-off countries cry across
the seas. Not one in a hundred may answer the call; yet never think, you
who suppose that love and avarice and the lust of battle sum up all the
great passions of the world, that scores out of every hundred Englishmen
have not heard it, all the same. “In the heart of every man, a poet has
died young”; and in the heart of almost every Briton, a wanderer once
has lived. If this were not so, the greatest empire of the world had
never been.
So, to The Man Who Could Not Go, I address this book--to the elderly,
white-waistcoated city magnate, grave autocrat of his clerkly kingdom
(never lie to me, sir--what was your favourite reading in the sixties,
and why were you a very fair pistol shot, right up to the time when you
were made junior manager?)--to the serious family solicitor, enjoying
his father’s good old practice and house, and counting among the
furnishings of the latter, a shelf of Marryats, Mayne Reids, and Michael
Scotts, wonderfully free of dust--to the comfortable clergyman, immersed
in parish cares, who has the oddest fancy at times for standing on
dock-heads, and sniffing up odours of rope and tar--to all of you, the
army of the brave, unwilling, more or less resigned Left Behinds, who
have forgotten years ago, or who will never, forget while spiring masts
stand thick against blue skies, and keen salt winds wake madness in the
brain--to all I say: Greeting! and may the tale of another’s happier
chance send, from the fluttering pages of a book, a breath of the
far-off lands and the calling sea.
CHAPTER I
_Fate and Her Parcels--How It All came true--The First South Sea
Island--Coleridge and the Tropics--The Spell of the Island Scents--What
happens to Travellers--Days in Dreamland--A Torchlight Market--The
Enchanted Fei._
LIKE an idle messenger-boy, Fate takes a long while about her rounds,
but she will get through with them and deliver all her parcels, if you
give her time enough.
She has so much business that she confuses orders very often, and you
are never sure of getting what you sent for. Still, you will certainly
get something, if you wait, and it may even be the thing you demanded.
The morning she called at my door, with a very full basket, she had
already been to my neighbours, and given them, in a big assortment of
goods--a failure on the Stock Exchange, a hunting accident, and a broken
engagement. What they had ordered was a seat in Parliament, and a winter
at Monte Carlo, with anything good that might come in in the way of
new-laid motor-cars. But Fate was, as usual, in a hurry, and she never
changes any goods, once delivered. So they had to take them in.
I had given up expecting her when her knock came to my door, because
my order had been sent in some years ago, and so far had remained
unacknowledged. But she fairly emptied her basket into my hands, once
she was admitted.
“Goods all right, and none the worse for keeping; couldn’t find time to
see to you before, I’ve been so busy attending to an order from Japan
for a new army and a gross of assorted victories,” she panted. “Had to
serve the Czar of Russia with a lot of old defeats I’ve had lying by
since the Crimea, instead of the new empire he sent for; and can’t get
time to fill more than half the German Emperor’s order for fireworks.
You private people are lucky to get anything at all. Count the goods,
please--one journey round the world, two-and-a-half years of mixed
adventures, a hundred South Sea Islands, threescore new friends, first
quality, one large package luck. That’s all, I think--sign the book,
and let me go; I’ve got seven attacks of appendicitis, a foreclosed
mortgage, two lawsuits, and a divorce, to deliver in this square before
lunch.”
So, like the fairy tales, “it all came true,” and one bright winter
afternoon a Cunard liner bore me away from the streets and shops and
drab-coloured, huddled houses of Liverpool, down the muddy Mersey--off
round the world.
There were thousands of people on the quay, come to see the famous boat
away, for it was Saturday afternoon, and the town took holiday. They had
a few hours of freedom before them--then, the airless office room,
the stuffy shop, the ledger and the copying-press, and the clattering
typewriter, the grim window giving on the dark wet street, for six long
days again. Next year, and the year after,-just the office, the frowsy
lodging, the tram car, the pen in the strong young fingers, the desk to
stoop the broad young shoulders, the life foreseen, eventless, grey for
ever and for ever. And I was going round the world.
It is three weeks later, and the big “A and A” steamer is ploughing
along in the midst of a marvellous dazzle of diamond-spangled, pale-blue
tropic sea and scorching, pale-blue tropic sky. The passengers, in cool
white suits and dresses, are clustered together on the promenade deck,
looking eagerly over the port railing, while the captain, telescope in
hand, points out something lying only a mile away, and says: “That’s
Tiki-Hau, so now you’ve seen a South Sea Island.”
We are on our way to Tahiti, a twelve-day run from San Francisco, and
are not stopping anywhere, but as Tiki-Hau is the only glimpse of land
we shall get until we cast anchor in Papeete, every one wants to look
at it. Not one of us has ever seen a South Sea Island, and, we are all
eager to realise this little fragment of our rainbow-coloured childish
dreams.
Is it as good as we dreamed it? we ask ourselves and each other. The
verdict, given unanimously, is: “Yes--but not the same.”
Here is no high green palmy peak, overhanging a waveless sea, with
sparkling waterfalls dashing down from crag to crag, like the coloured
illustrations in our old school prize books. There are, indeed, just
such islands in the Pacific, we are told--many hundreds of them--but
there are still more of the kind we are now looking at, which is not
half so often mentioned. All South Sea Islands are either high or low;
the high island, with lofty mountains and dark, rich volcanic soil, is
the familiar island of the picture book, while the low type, composed
only of coral, is the variety to which Tiki-Hau belongs.
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What we can see of the island, however, is enough to set at rest any
tendency to comparison. None of us want anything better; none of us
think there can be anything better, among the wonders that the Great
South Seas yet hold in store.
Tiki-Hau is an island of the atoll or ring-shaped type, a splendid
circle of seventy and eighty-foot palms, enclosing an inner lagoon clear
and still as glass. Outside the windy palms, a dazzling beach runs down
to the open sea all round the island--a beach that is like nothing the
travellers ever have seen before, for it is made of powdered coral,
and is as white as salt, as white as starch, as white as the hackneyed
snow-simile itself can paint it. All the island--the whole great ring,
many miles in length--is coral too, white, branching, flowering coral
under water, white, broken-coral gravel above, with here and there a
thin skin of earth collected by a century or two of falling palm-leaves
and ocean waste. Outside the magic ring the sea-waves tumble, fresh and
blue, upon-the cloud-white sand; within, the still lagoon glows like
a basin of molten emerald. Above, the enormous palm-trees swing their
twenty-foot plumes of gaudy yellow-green to the rush of warm trade-wind,
high in the burning sky. A glorious picture indeed--but one before which
the painter well might tremble.
Here, for the first time, we begin to understand why pictures
of tropical scenes are so few and so unsatisfactory. Paint! what
combination of coloured grease that ever came out of a box could hope to
suggest the pale green fire of those palm-tree plumes, the jewel-blaze
of the lagoon, the sapphire flame of the sea, the aching, blinding
whitenesses of spray and sand? Who could paint the sun that is literally
flashing back from the light dresses of the passengers, making of every
separate person a distinct conflagration, and darting lightning rays out
of the officers’ gold shoulder-straps and buttons? Does any dweller in
the dim grey North really know what light and colour are? did we
know, with our tinselled April days, and gentle blue-and white August
afternoons, that we were so proud of once? Well, we know now; and, alas,
in the dim, prosaic years that are yet to come, we shall remember!
The ship steams on, the atoll fades away in the distance, and once more
comes the changeless level of long blue empty sea. But we have seen a
coral island, and the picture is ours for ever.
Flying-fish, skimming and “skittering” over the surface of the waves, we
have all become used to now. The first day we met them was a memorable
one, all the same--they were so exactly what one had paid one’s money
to see. Sharks have disappointed us so far; never a sight of the famous
“black triangular fin” have we yet enjoyed, and the passengers have an
idea that something ought to be said to the steamship company about it.
Nor have the equatorial sunsets quite kept up their stage character.
Books of travel, and sea literature in general, have led us to expect
that the sun, in the tropics, should go out at sunset as though Poseidon
had hold of the switch down below the water line, and turned off the
light the instant sun and horizon met.
... The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out.
At one stride comes the dark.
They don’t, Mr. Coleridge, and it doesn’t, and you never were there to
see for yourself, or you would not have talked beautiful nonsense
and misled countless travellers of all ages who did see, but who have
refused to look, save through your illustrious spectacles, ever since.
Even on the equator, the sun gives one time to dress for dinner (if the
toilet is not a very elaborate one) while it is setting, and after it
has set. So dies one more illusion. Yet it can easily be spared, in the
midst of a thousand wild dreams and strange imaginings, realised to the
very utmost, as ours are to be ere long.
Tahiti comes at last. In the pearly light of a sunrise pure as a dawn
of earliest Eden, we glide into the shadow of a tall, rose-painted peak,
spiring eight thousand feet up into heaven, and anchor in the midst of
a glassy mirror of violet sea. Papeëte, the loveliest, sweetest, and
wickedest town of all the wide South Seas, lies before us--just a
sparkle of red roofs looking out from under a coverlet of thick foliage,
a long brown wharf and a many-coloured crowd. Across the water steals
a faint strange perfume, unlike anything I have ever smelled
before--heavy, sweet, penetrating, suggestive.... It is cocoanut oil
scented with the white tieré flower, and never, from Tahiti to Samoa,
from Raratonga to Fiji, Yavau, Manihiki, or Erromanga, will the South
Sea traveller lose the odour of it again. Cocoanut oil, and the nutty,
heavy smell of copra (dried cocoanut kernel) are charms that can raise
in an instant for any old island wanderer, in the farthest corners of
the earth, the glowing vision of the wonderful South Sea world.
... Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heartstrings crack,
They start those awful voices o’ nights
That whisper: “Old man, come back!”
_(Old island wanderers in all parts of the world--settled down to
desks in the E.C. district--tramping through the December glare of Pitt
Street, Sydney, for “orders”--occupying a tranquil, well-bred billet,
and a set of red-tape harness, in the Foreign Office--do you smell the
tierê flower, and hear the crooning of the reef, and feel the rush of
the warm trade wind, and the touch of the sun-baked sand, under the utu
trees once more?)_
So I landed in Papeete, and found myself in the South Sea Islands at
last.
All that afternoon, like “Tommy” in Barrie’s _Thrums_, I kept saying to
myself: “I’m here, I’m here!”... There was no mistake about Papeëte. It
was not disappointing or disillusioning, it was only more lifelike
than life, more fanciful than fancy, infinitely ahead of all past
imaginations.
There were the waving palms of picture and story, laden with immense
clusters of nuts; there were the wonderful bananas, with broad green
leaves ten and twelve feet long, enshrouding bunches of fruit that
were each a good load for a man; there were the greenhouse flowers of
home--the costly rare stephanotis, tuberose, gardenia--climbing all over
the verandahs of the houses, and filling half-cultivated front gardens
with stacks and bouquets of bloom. And the dug-out canoes, made from a
single hollowed log supported by an outrigger, flitting about the glassy
lagoon like long-legged waterflies--and the gorgeous, flamboyant trees,
ablaze with vermilion flowers, roofing over the grassy roadway in
a series of gay triumphal arches--and above all, beyond all, the
fiery-gold sunlight, spilling cataracts of flame through the thickest
leafage, turning the flowers to white and red-hot coals, painting the
shadows under the houses in waves of ink, and bleaching the dust to
dazzling snow--how new, how vivid, how tropical it all was!
The native population was out in full force to see the steamer come
in. So, indeed, were the white residents, in their freshest suits and
smartest muslins, but they met with small attention from the little band
of newcomers.
It was the Tahitians themselves who claimed all our interest--the famous
race who had been so well liked by Captain Cook, who had seduced the men
of the _Bounty_ from allegiance to King George of England, a hundred
and sixteen years ago, who were known all the world over as the most
beautiful, the most amiable, and the most hospitable of all the South
Sea Islanders.
Some of the passengers, I fancy, expected to see them coming down to the
shore clad in necklaces and fringes of leaves, eager to trade with
the newcomers and exchange large pearls and thick wedges of fine
tortoiseshell for knives, cloth, and beads.... Most of us were better
prepared, however, having heard a good deal about Papeëte, the Paris of
the South Seas, from the people of the steamer, and having realised, on
our own account, that a great deal of water might run under a bridge in
a hundred years, even here in the South Pacific.
So the smartness of the native crowd surprised only a few, of whom I was
not one. On the contrary, I was surprised to find that here, in this
big island group, with its fortnightly steamer, its large “white” town,
and its bureaucratic French Government, some kind of a national dress
did really still exist. The Tahitian men were variously attired, some
in full suits of white, others in a shirt and a brief cotton kilt. The
women, however, all wore the same type of dress--a flowing nightdress of
cotton or muslin, usually pink, pale green, or yellow, and a neat small
sailor hat made in the islands, and commonly trimmed with a pretty
wreath of shells. Most of them wore their hair loose, to show off its
length and fineness--Tahitians have by far the most beautiful hair of
any island race--and not a few were shoeless, though nearly all had
smart parasols. The colour of the crowd was extremely various, for
Tahiti has more half and quarter castes than full-blooded natives--in
Papeete at all events. The darkest, however, were not more than
tea-coloured, and in most instances the features were really good.
So much one gathered in the course of landing. Later on, during the few
days I spent in an hotel waiting for the Cook Island steamer--for, alas!
I was not staying in Tahiti--there was opportunity for something further
in the way of observation. But------
But------ It happens to every one in Tahiti, why should I be ashamed of
it? There was once a scientific man, who came to write a book, and took
notes and notes and notes--for two days and a half. Then, he thought he
would take a morning’s rest, and that is five years ago, and he has been
resting ever since, and they say in the stores that he has not bought so
much as a sheet of letter paper, or a penny bottle of ink, but that his
credit for cigars and ice, and things that go with both very well, and
for pyjamas to lounge about the back verandah in, and very cheap novels,
and silk-grass hammocks, is nearly run out in Papeete. There was a
Government official--perhaps it was two, or three, or sixty Government
officials--who came to Papeete very full of energy and ability, and very
much determined to work wonders in the sleepy little colony.... He, or
they, is, or are, never to be seen awake before three in the afternoon,
and his clerks have to type the signatures to his letters, because he
will not trouble to write his name; and their people think they died
years and years ago, because they have never carried out their intention
of telling some one to find some one else to send a message to say they
are alive. And there are a dozen or fourteen gentlemen who keep stores
in Papeete, and if you go in to buy things in the morning or afternoon
or evening, mayhap you will find the gentleman or his understudy asleep
behind the counter, but mayhap you will find the door shut, and the
proprietor away at breakfast, which takes him an hour, or lunch, which
takes from two hours to three, or dinner, which occupies him from six
till nine inclusive. After that, he may open again for a little while,
or he may not.
Must I explain now what happened to me in Papeëte, or why I am not in
a position to add anything to the scientific or ethnological, or
geographic knowledge of the world, concerning the Society Islands in
general?
A duty, obvious, immediate, and unperformed, is perhaps the best of all
spices to a dish of sweet laziness. And there is not on earth’s round
ball such a spot to be lazy in as pleasant Papeëte. One is never fairly
awake. It is dreamland--and what a happy dream! The golden light on
the still lagoon is surely the “fight that never was on sea nor
land”--before we sailed in under the purple peaks of Orohena. The
chanting of the coral reef far out at sea, unceasing, day and night, is
the song the sirens sang to strong Ulysses, in the dream dreamed for
all ages by the old Greek poet, long ago. The languorous voices of
the island women, sweet and low as the “wind of the western sea”--the
stillness of the island houses, where feet go bare upon the soundless
floors, and music waxes and wanes so softly now and then in whispering
songs or lightly swept piano keys, that it only blends with the long
mysterious murmur of the wind in the rustling palm trees, to lull the
senses into perfect rest--these, too, are of the world of dream.
Something out of dreamland, also, is the little hotel where most of the
travellers stay--a rambling bungalow in a grass enclosure, overrun with
vivid flowers and splendid leafage. That the proprietress should welcome
her guests in a long lace and muslin nightgown-dress, her pretty brown
feet bare, and her flowing wavy hair crowned with a wreath of perfumed
gardenia and tuberose, seems quite a natural part of the dream; that the
chamber-maids should be beautiful island girls clad in the same garb,
and that they should sit in the drawing-room playing the piano and
singing wild melancholy island songs, like the sighing of the surf on
the shore, when they ought to be making beds or serving dinners, is also
“in the picture.” That the Chinese cook should do elaborate Parisian
cookery, and that the coffee and the curry and the bread (or at least
the bread-fruit) should be picked in the garden as required, and that
there should be no visible means of shutting the door of the bathroom,
which is very public, until a carpenter is called in, and that
L--------, the charming proprietress, should explain with a charming
smile: “Only the house been using it all this time,” to account
completely for the deficiency--all this belongs unmistakably to the
irresponsible dream-country. And when the warm tropic night drops down,
and one goes wandering in the moonlight, to see for the first time
the palm-tree plumes all glassy-silver under the radiant sky, flashing
magically as they tremble in the faint night wind, it is more than ever
the land of dream that is thus lit up in the soft clear dusk. So vivid
is the moonlight, that one can even see the scarlet colour of the
flamboyant flowers fallen in the dust, and distinguish the deep violet
and hyacinthine hues of the far-off mountain peaks across the bay....
How, in such a place, can one waste the night in sleep?
It is certainly not like any sort of waking life one has hitherto known,
to find that the market of Papeëte--one of the principal sights of
the place--is held on Sunday mornings before sunrise. One might have
supposed that such a supremely indolent people would scarcely choose the
most inconvenient hour of all the twenty-four for a general gathering.
But they do choose it, and the visitor who wants to see the market must
choose it also.
L-------- calls me, herself, at some unearthly hour, not much after
four, and I get up and dress in the warm darkness. It is the hot season
at present and the air, night and day, is very like a hot bath, and not
far behind it in temperature. I have been loafing about the town during
the previous day in rather thin shoes, and my feet have been almost
blistered by the heat of the ground striking up through light soles,
so that I cannot walk very far, and am glad to find the market close at
hand.
L--------, in a fresh muslin nightdress (she has something like fifty or
sixty of them), acts as guide. She has put a new coronet of flowers in
her hair, and before we reach the market she proceeds to dress me up
Tahiti fashion, with, long necklaces of sweet white blossoms round my
neck, falling all over my dress, and a heavy crown of closely woven
gardenias on my head, instead of my hat, which she removes, and politely
carries. She wants to pull my hair down as well, but in a temperature of
eighty degrees the idea does not sound tempting, so I decline to follow
Tahitian custom further. Besides, there is really no knowing where she
would stop!
There is not yet a glimmer of daylight when we enter the market-place,
and flaring lamps and torches cast huge flickering shadows all over the
gay assembly. Fruit and fish for the most part are the wares--but such
fish, and such fruit! Where one would look at home for white and grey
turbot, pallid plaice, zinc-coloured herrings, here one may see the
most gorgeous shapes of gold and scarlet and green; of iridescent rose,
silver, orange; of blue, brilliant as a heap of tumbled sapphire, and
pearl as bright as the lining of a shell. Tahiti is famous for
its beautiful fish, and indeed these in the market look almost too
poetically lovely to eat.
Then the fruit! bananas as big as cucumbers, as small as ladies’ fingers
(after which, indeed, this little sugar-sweet, variety is named), dark
red bananas, flavoured like a peach, large bloomy ones, tasting and
looking like custard within; smooth yellow ones, like those exported
to other countries, whither the daintier fruits will not safely
go--pineapple in rough-skinned heaps (one learns soon in Tahiti how to
eat a pineapple, and that is to peel it, cut it into largest possible
lumps, eat the latter undiminished even if they make you speechless,
and never, never, shoe the fruit)--oranges of several different kinds,
custard-apples, rose-apples, paw-paws, melons, avocado pears, guavas,
mangoes, and other fruits the name of which I have never heard--all
lying together in masses under the lamplight, costing not as many
halfpence to buy as at home they would cost shillings.
The native beauties are here in a merry crowd, intent quite as much upon
enjoyment as on business. Scarcely one but wears a flower behind her
ear--and if you have ever been in the South Seas, you will know what
that pretty little signal means, but if you have not, why then I shall
not tell you--and all are so wreathed, and crowned, and necklaced with
woven blossoms, that the air is heavy with scent, and the market-place
looks as though the transformation scene of a pantomine were just about
to begin, with a full chorus of flower-decked nymphs appearing for the
dance.
One exceedingly pretty girl, with a perfect cataract of black hair
overflowing her pale green gown, and a pair of sparkling dark eyes that
could never be matched outside the magic lines of Cancer and Capricorn,
is making and frying pancakes with something fruity, nature unknown,
inside them. She has half a dozen French officers about her, enjoying
breakfast and flirtation at the same time. Another, who is selling
a number of the oddest little parcels imaginable, made out of cut-up
joints of bamboo, carefully sealed, is doing a good trade among the
coloured and semi-coloured ladies. L-------- says she is selling
readymade sauces, to be eaten with fish or meat, and adds that she
herself will show me what Tahitian sauces are like later on, because
there is no one in the whole group fit to act as scullion to her in that
important matter--or words to the same effect.
Strange-looking mountain men are here, dressed in shirt and kilt of
cotton cloth, patterned in flowers and leaves as big as soup-plates. The
former garment is a concession to Papeete--outside the town, the “pareo”
or kilt alone forms the Tahitian full-dress suit. These men have come
in to sell the “fei,” or wild banana, which is only found on the highest
and most perilous of the mountain precipices. To get it, the Tahitian
must climb where not even a goat would venture to go, and make his way
back, having secured the fruit, carrying a bunch that is a heavy load,
even on level ground. Many are the lives that have been lost gathering
the “fei,” but the Tahitian, like all islanders, is something of a
fatalist, and the death of one fruit gatherer never stops another from
going a-hunting in the very same place next day.
There is something about the same “fei” that is worth noting. It is
one of the standing dishes of the islands--a cooking banana, large, and
well-flavoured when baked, but not so attractive on the whole as many
of the other kinds. The Tahitian, however, ascribes to this variety a
certain magic property, not unlike that of the fabled lotus. If you eat
of the “fei,” he says, especially if you eat freely of it, you will fall
under the spell. For ever, in its working, it binds you to Tahiti. You
may go away, and without any intention of returning, say goodbye to the
islands, and place many thousand miles of land and sea between yourself
and sweet Tahiti, saying to yourself that you and Papeëte have no more
to do with one another for ever.... Yet by-and-by--some day, one
knows not when; it may be soon, or it may be late, but it will surely
come--you will return to Tahiti. The spell of the fei will work, and
draw you back again.
So the natives said, and I thought the fancy a pretty one, and wondered
whether it had really any connection with the lotus myth, and then
forgot all about it.
That is three years ago, and since those days I have travelled the whole
world over, leaving Tahiti behind as one leaves a station passed long
ago on a railway journey, upon a line that one never expects to traverse
again. As I write, the snows of winter Britain lie thick outside my
window, and a sea of Arctic coldness breaks in freezing green and grey
upon a desolate shore. Nothing on earth seems farther away than-the
warm blue waves, and flowers that never fade, and shining coral sands of
Tahiti. But... there is a steamer running southward before long, and a
great sunny city on the other side of the world where the island boats
lie waiting at the quays. And one of those island boats, in a month or
two, will carry a passenger back to Tahiti--a passenger who ate of the
fei three years ago, and went away for ever, but on whom the spell of
the magic fruit has worked--after all.