D. RAELTOA OF SAMOA
AND TO MY MEMORIES OF MELODY AND
MIRTH IN THE SOUTH SEAS
FOREWORD
“The path to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Looking reflectively over this second instalment of my autobiography, I perceive that I am such a genuine vagabond that I have even travelled along in my reminiscences without caring for the material niceties of recognised literary method; so I have gone back over the whole track and tried earnestly to polish my efforts.
It seems quite unnecessary for vagabonds to wear (metaphorically speaking) old trousers with fringed ends to the legs, penniless pockets, dusty boots, an unshaven face and dirty collar, or to give vent to the devil-may-care utterances and all the ungrammatical “politeness” of the phraseology of the grog shanty and bush hotels, when they attempt to live over again on paper the tale of their wandering life. I cannot reform the world into a population of convivial beachcombers, nor would I if I could, out of consideration for future vagabonds, who naturally want the outer spaces of the world for their special province. Neither can I make you believe I could have done better in a literary sense if I had taken more trouble with my book. But I can to some extent reform myself, and at least strive to compete with the literary aristocrats on the slopes of their own cultivated ground. I am sure they will make good company if I succeed, and they will have been my best friends. Yes, I half believe in jumping out of bed on a cold night to hold a candle to the devil! I know that sometimes while you stand shivering you discover that he’s really not such a bad fellow, and the candlelight is likely to give you a glimpse of some faint resemblance in his wrinkled face, some far-off expression of that beautiful old life that he lived ere he sinned, became respectable and fell—banished from heaven.
Life is a terrible contradiction; we are dead because we are born alive. Our very creed is based on the sad fact that the cemetery tablets record the dates of the true beginning of life everlasting. The thundering city is a necropolis wherein multitudes of wandering corpses breathe, with inert souls and thoughts that are like night bats flitting through the sepulchres of our death, with dead eyes and dead mouths that open to cough and even sometimes laugh! My book of reminiscences is (to me at least) like those silent, moss-grey tablets of immortality; but even more wonderful and true (as far as I know), for, while I am dead, I can see my long ago. I can lift the stone slab from the grave in the silent night and gaze on the dead boy’s face, and in a way make the dead eyes laugh and the voiceless mouth mutter and sing in a hollow voice old, far-away songs of love, romance and its comrade, grief. Yes, you and I can see such things. Oh, how ineffably sad to some of us!
You may wonder what all this has to do with the preface to a book of reminiscences. It has a lot to do with the matter, because I am a born vagabond, and the world is incorrigibly respectable!