* * * * *
_Equator Town_, _Apemama_, _October_ 1889.
No _Morning Star_ came, however; and so now I try to send this to you by
the schooner _J. L. Tiernan_. We have been about a month ashore, camping
out in a kind of town the king set up for us: on the idea that I was
really a ‘big chief’ in England. He dines with us sometimes, and sends
up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself. This
sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself. Salt junk is the
mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship
at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter. The king
is a great character—a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet,
a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist—it is
strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal
wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description
of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as ‘about
sweethearts, and trees, and the sea—and no true, all-the-same lie,’ seems
about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.
Tembinoka is here the great attraction: all the rest is heat and tedium
and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes. We are like
to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and then
whither? A strange trade this voyaging: so vague, so bound-down, so
helpless. Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually
onions and radishes coming up: ah, onion-despiser, were you but awhile in
a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster’s barrow! I
think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips. No doubt we shall all
be glad to say farewell to low islands—I had near said for ever. They
are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine for an
island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well among the
rocks. The thought of a mango came to me early this morning and set my
greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so—.
I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and
even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success. God
knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you—well, in nine
months, I hope; but that seems a long time. I wonder what has befallen
me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public
mind; and what has befallen _The Master_, and what kind of a Box the
Merry Box has been found. It is odd to know nothing of all this. We had
an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman’s
house on Apaiang (August 23rd or 24th). You should have seen the crone
with a noble masculine face, like that of an old crone [_sic_], a body
like a man’s (naked all but the feathery female girdle), knotting
cocoanut leaves and muttering spells: Fanny and I, and the good captain
of the _Equator_, and the Chinaman and his native wife and sister-in-law,
all squatting on the floor about the sibyl; and a crowd of dark faces
watching from behind her shoulder (she sat right in the doorway) and
tittering aloud with strange, appalled, embarrassed laughter at each
fresh adjuration. She informed us you were in England, not travelling
and now no longer sick; she promised us a fair wind the next day, and we
had it, so I cherish the hope she was as right about Sidney Colvin. The
shipownering has rather petered out since I last wrote, and a good many
other plans beside.
Health? Fanny very so-so; I pretty right upon the whole, and getting
through plenty work: I know not quite how, but it seems to me not bad and
in places funny.
South Sea Yarns: