Maria Mandy is not the only lady who will become respectable and make the devil rub his hands and chuckle with delight. On the beach stroll other white women, and droves of pretty half-caste girls who will eventually get jobs as “ladies’ maids” to touring families that call at Apia on the homeward voyage to New York and London. They have fine times those girls with the German and English sailors, or with “perfect gentlemen,” and sometimes a black-sheep missionary who has been dismissed from the L.M.S. Off they go on the spree and forget themselves and do things that make even the beachcomber Bill Grimes rub his eyes and stare; for, after all, he’s not so bad; he can some day, in that “far-off event of perfect good,” buy a new suit of clothes; but the beachcombers that loaf and eat the fruit of frailty in this Eden of the South Seas can never buy another soul.
Hark! the harbour is musical with voices, for this is fair Italy of the Southern Seas, where natives paddle their canoes and sing their weird melodies as naturally as men breathe. You can hear the splash of the paddles and oars as they cut the thickly star-mirrored water. The native boats are bringing sailors ashore from the ships that arrived at twilight. The moonlit shore and the palm-clad slopes look like fairyland to the silent ships lying out in the harbour. The men step ashore, pay one shilling, or one mark, each, then off go the canoes back to the ships for other crews, as the groups of sailors go up to Apia town. Before they get there dusky guides offer their services, and they see the sights—such sights too! No missionaries could ever reform such creatures as they see. One of them, she is one of many, wears almost nothing, the curved, thick lips in her wide mouth murmur forth alluring Samoan speech. Her girth is enormous, and her brown bosom heaves with simulated professional passion, like a wave on the treacherous deep dark ocean of sensuality—whereon so often travelling men are shipwrecked. Her eyes are large, the pupils widely encircled with white, and warm with the sunlight gleam of downright wickedness; she has been taught her art in the vast university of experience with white men in the foremost ranks of civilisation’s pioneer tramp! Paid vice was never known in Samoa till the white men came; but now she lures to her velvety brown arms the unwary innocence of fragile sailormen and tourists who come from London on the civilised Thames; where the missionaries hail from, who in our land of purity, of course, cannot exert and bring into play their noble efforts, and so through innocence, O England, my England, your children fall before the lure of the wicked South!
Low-caste Samoan women are not all hideous; some have large, innocent eyes alive with wonder; half angel and half devil they look as they stand before the camera and, answering the stern voice of the operator, strive to look modest and sweet.
By the edge of the small lagoon, under those tall coco-nut-trees sit four little naked baby girls. It is dark, but their brown faces imaged in the water can be seen by the brilliant moonlight; they look like truant cherubims from Paradise out on the spree, as they sit side by side whispering musical Samoan baby words, and kissing the rag doll that was made in Germany. Their Samoan father is away in a far village on a visit to a wedding feast; if you listen you can hear the far-off sounds of tom-toms and cymbal-clanging coming across on the drifting forest wind that brings with it odours of wild, decaying flowers and fruit. Their mother is fast asleep by the door of their native home close by; she sleeps soundly, and the mongrel dog’s snout is couched softly on her bare, warm, brown breast. It looks a mystical, beautiful world, like some spiritual land beyond the stars, as the bright eyes of those tiny faces peep through the wind-blown palm leaves; and I watch them in my dreams to-night, though long since those little girls are women and now meet the eyes of Indian, Chinese and European men.
Civilisation’s iron foot is on the hills, and along the tracks that lead inland where mission schools and churches stand, to collect on weekdays and Sundays the high-class native folk who live in comfortable Polynesian homes. The night is hot, starry and almost windless, and handsome Samoan youths attired in the lava-lava (loin-cloth) patter swift-footed along the tracks under the coco-nut and tropical trees that shelter the primitive homes of the South Sea paradise. Samoan girls with wild, bright eyes, round, plump, brown faces, and curved figures as perfect as sculptural art, pass and repass up the forest tracks. They are singing Samoan songs that intensify the romantic, dream-like atmosphere of the tropical night—an atmosphere not even to be dispelled by the wailing cry of the native babies, who give short, wild, smothered screams as they lose and then suddenly recover the breasts of sleeping mothers in those thatched homes by the palms and banana groves. The vast night sky, agleam with stars, shines like a mighty mirror. You can see the red glow of the reflection from the volcanic crater miles away on Savaii’s Isle.
If you go up the slope and stand on the plateau, away inland, when dawn is stealing in grey tints along the ocean horizon, awakening the birds on Vaea Mountain, and the native homes are astir, you can distinctly see afar something that looks like a cow-shed by coco-palms and thick jungle growth. It is Vailima, the home of Robert Louis Stevenson. One light gleams in the large shed-room, and the intellectual, sensitive face of the poet-author moves there in the gloom. He has come back from Apia town and is tired, yet secretly as pleased as the two old shellbacks who have carried his curios back, and who hitch up their trousers and cough respectfully as the world-famous author sneaks them in and gives each a bumping glass of the best brand. How quietly his keen eyes gaze upon them as they drink! On a shelf the large clock ticks warningly. He glances at it now and again as the belated sailors yarn on, grow more and more garrulous and continue their strange experiences, that cling to the wonderful, distilling brain of the listener as moonlight clings to deep, dark waters. At last, with intellectual delicacy, they are hurriedly slipped off; for soon the respectable folk, whom he gave the slip to early in the evening, will return, and he must not be seen in such company again. The old shellbacks grip the extended, thin, delicate hand, look into the keen eyes and wipe their mouths as they go down the narrow track. “He’s a gentleman ’e is, d——d if ’e ain’t,” they say to each other, as the silent, lonely man they have just left sits and dreams on alone, and thinks and feels those things that no book ever did, or ever can, tell.
A few miles away lives the great high chief Mataafa; he knows Tusitala, the writer of tales. Mataafa is the old King of Samoa: his warriors have charged up those slopes and the sound of the guns from the enemy’s warships echoed and re-echoed across the bay. It is all like some far-off dream to me that in my boyhood I should have met and fiddled to the Napoleon of the South Seas, for Mataafa was exiled, though there the similarity ends. I can still see the handsome, intelligent face and remember the quick, kind eyes of Samoa’s dethroned king. I did not know, or at least realise, who Mataafa was, as he sat on a chest in the schooner’s cabin in Apia harbour. I knew he was someone important by the skipper’s behaviour and respectful attention. Only long after did I clearly realise that I was in at the death at one of the most tragic periods of Samoa’s history. I helped row the exiled king ashore and went with him to Mulinuu village, where I stayed the night, and then rowed him back in the ship’s boat again. Had I known the truth I would have clung to the old king with all the romantic vigour of my soul. The opportunity of my boyish dreams had presented itself, but I knew it not. How I would have striven to lean on that chieftain’s right arm, helping in some tragical drama of war and intrigue that would have given me the fame that my boyish aspirations yearned for as I read the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Alas! I can only remember a sad, aged face in a South Sea forest homestead, in a schooner’s dingy cabin, or earnestly talking under the forest trees by night to loyal chiefs ere he returned to the ship. I saw him three or four times ashore, and entertained him in the refuge where he lived with his faithful chiefs. Also I played the violin to him several times, while he smiled gravely and the garrulous skipper drank whisky and sang out of tune, or read out loudly snatches from The Samoan Times, which was a paper something after the style in size of The Dead Bird, published in Sydney, but suppressed and issued again as The Bird of Freedom.
Behind the stores in Apia’s street is the primeval ballroom where I played the violin to the Samoan grandees, and to tripping, white-shoed German officials, while five half-caste girls in pink frocks, with crimson ribbons in their forests of hair, went through the Siva dances. Robert Louis Stevenson gazed on, or argued with the crusty German official, who was red in the face as Stevenson expressed his opinions on Samoan politics. Just below too, down the street, is the bar-room, where I played the violin with the manager’s wife, who was a good pianist. I only performed there once: a trader was half-seas over and was arguing with a German official; suddenly he picked my violin up and hit the German over the head with it. There was a great scene and the trader was thrown out. Everyone laughed to see the look on my face as I scanned the fiddle to see if it had been damaged; even the manager and his wife put their fists in their mouths to hide a noisy smile. The German shouted: “Mein Gott! I vill see that this mans be arrested! Mein Gott! Mein Gott!”
It’s a lively place, this Samoan isle. There sits an aged, tattooed native from Motootua village. He is a wandering scribe, a poet and author of the South Seas, and well beloved by all his critics, who mostly wear no clothes! He does not write on paper, but engraves on the brains of his audiences his memories, impromptu poems and improvisations; or he tells of Samoan history and poetic lore. He wears the primitive ridi to his bony knees and a large shawl of native tappu-cloth round his brown shoulders; tall and majestic-looking, with strong, imaginative face, when he stands quite still and lifts one arm to heaven he looks like an exiled scapegrace god.
With eyes shining brilliantly he tells you the tale of creation, how man- and woman-kind came on earth. Ages ago a giant turtle, like a fish that walked on a thousand legs, came up from the bottom of the ocean and saw the blue sky for the first time, and far away the coral reefs and forest-clad shores of Samoa. Full of excitement, it slashed its tail, swam to the isle and crept ashore. Once on dry land it could not move and get back to its native ocean again. The sun blazed on its tremendous back as it crouched and died, and underneath its vast shell a plot of tiny crimson and blue flowers trembled with fear in the sudden darkness that had fallen over them. When the giant turtle was dead its crumbling flesh fed the flowers with moisture, while they cried bitterly at being hidden from the beautiful golden sunlight. When only the shell was left, and the sun was shining beautifully, the flowers peeped out and saw the green hills and coco-palms, and found that they were able to move: out they all ran and tripped up the shore, a delighted flock of laughing faces, and climbed the coco-nut and palm trees—they were Samoan girls!