I felt rather depressed for a time, but I met an American tourist, staying at the German hotel in Apia, who was very eccentric, and he cheered me up considerably. He was a collector of native curios, and his whole life seemed to be centred on his strange hobby. He invited me into his apartments, and I could hardly move for the lumber and his large crates of native pottery, old breech-loading weapons, cutlasses, mummified human heads, dried native feet cut off at the ankles, war-clubs, human teeth and skeletons, native musical instruments and barbarian furniture. He talked of nothing else but his gruesome collection. He had a high, bald head and beak-like nose, whereon he was eternally fingering his pince-nez, which kept falling off whilst he enthusiastically held up relics for my inspection. His passion for getting curios seemed never satisfied. We dined at a native’s house together; suddenly he lifted the cloth and saw that the table was a rough, native-made table of platted cane and bamboo. Immediately he bargained for it, and to the native’s delight purchased it, and off we went with it. How he got them all away from the hotel I don’t know, for he had a regular cargo of stuff, but eventually he got his curios on board a steamer and went off to San Francisco.
I stayed on in Apia for several weeks, joining a party of tourists, and with them I visited the various scenes and islands of the group. As I write, in a dream I see the slopes rising from the sea, lying silent in the moonlight. The curling smoke from the camp fires steals above the still coco-palms that shelter the huts of the native villages. The big, hive-shaped houses are musical with humming melody and the jabbering voices of rough-haired native girls and women. Some squat cross-legged by door-holes, whence emerge tiny, brown, naked children, to turn head over heels, or race like joyful puppies after each other round the dens. Big full-blooded Samoan chiefs smile and show their white teeth as they roll banana-leaf cigarettes between their dusky fingers. Across the flat lies Apia town with its one main street; beyond the inland plateaux rise, and far off you can see the moonlit waves breaking into patches like white moss on the level ocean plains.
By the copra and coco plantations are the emigrant settlements, where tired coolies, most of them Malay Indians, rest after their toil. Native women linger near them, for they are generous men those coolies, and give the velvet-skinned native girls sham jewellery. The Indian sadhu (saint) sits by the line of dens and stores under the palms; he looks like some carved holy image as he stares with bright, unblinking eyes. The natives’ wooden idols have long since been smashed, or have rotted away, and that living idol of the East is one from many cargoes that have arrived to take the place of the old deaf South Sea idols. The new idols are real; they have live tongues and eyes that lure on true believers, converts to Allah, to do monstrous things. The deaf, dumb wooden gods of heathen times were sanctified compared with these new immigrant idols that breathe!
That old fakir, with outstretched withered arm that brings him reverence and cash, represents Hinduism, or Buddha. His thick beard is almost solid with filth, where-from at intervals, out to the hot sky, buzz big blow-flies. Just across the track is the bazaar, wooden cabins under the mangroves and coco-palms, where the Indians sell jewellery, the Koran, and richly coloured dress materials to the Samoan women. The Indians appear fine-looking men when dressed, with their dark, brilliant eyes and curly, close-cropped beards. They swear to all things by the holy prophet Mahomet, and wear a poetic smile that enlarges when you are not looking to a sardonic grin! Native women meet them at dark under the coco-palms, stroke their beards and gaze secretly up into their faces with passionate admiration.
That pretty Samoan girl, with staring, romantic eyes and rough, bronze-coloured hair, who only a week ago gave herself body and soul to some Indian, the scum of the East, sits alone under the dark mangroves by the lagoon and thinks and thinks of the day before her fall. A red, decorated loin-cloth reaches to her waist, the forest winds kiss the maiden curves of her brown, flower-like bosom. She is very young: her childhood’s dolls are still unbroken, and are being loved and nursed by her little sisters who live on the neighbouring Savaii Isle. Her father was eaten by a shark last year, and her mother is married to a white man who is never sober.
Not far away sit a group of Indian women, dark and evil-looking, with round faces. Dressed in gorgeous garments of rich yellow and crimson, they are certainly attractive; earrings dangle from their ears and some of them have a silver hoop through the nose. They loll under the coco-palms, whisper viciousness, and mortally hate the handsome Samoan girls.
The mail steamer arrived in Apia harbour a few hours ago. Along the white, dusty, inland track goes the fair, handsome white woman, Maria Mandy. She is off to her bungalow up the hill, a secluded, romantic spot. Her round, pretty face is getting quite sunburnt and brown. By her side walks an aristocratic-looking tourist; he wears pince-nez, is deeply religious and in a great hurry! Maria is dressed up to “the nines,” is scented and looks fine and sweet: the “light o’ Love” of a score of German naval officers and men of respectable repute, she has grown wealthy and intends to go soon to Sydney. With her wit and courtly polish she will get on well in Australia, and will probably get into Government House society, be extremely virtuous and so shocked that she will suggest the removal from the select clique of such suspicious characters as old Colonel B——, who will foam at the mouth and wonder why he is snubbed. Mrs S. A. and Lady H. B. will go into hysterics, weep, grind their delicate white teeth, look at the ceiling of their bedroom and ask heaven who could possibly have guessed about those intrigues; and they will never dream of the knowing Apia harlot—handsome Maria Mandy.
That fat, thick-necked German official, who likes Samoa better than the Berlin suburbs, is out walking alone; he is just off to see Salvao Marva and gaze upon her through those big-rimmed, academic spectacles. He is nearly sixty, and pretty Marva is nearly fifteen years old! No one knows about it though. He is a good man at home, plays the Austrian zither perfectly, and sings in a deep religious bass voice folk-songs of the Fatherland. Romantic Marva loves those songs, and knows them all by heart; she has a voice like a wild bird, and you do not feel so hard upon the in-auspicious fall of German culture. He is due back in Berlin soon, for his time is up in six months, so he is quite safe, and poor Marva can place the parental responsibility for her baby on to the back of the beachcomber, Bill Grimes, who will say, “Well I’m blowed, if this ain’t all right,” then accept the position and make his home in the South Seas after all.
Hongis Track, Rotorua, N.Z.