He had fine eyes, and they flashed as he told of these old days, and his tattooed frame swelled majestically over many a wild memory. He even shed tears as he sang to us old far-off songs of dead heroes, mighty chiefs and tender maids he had eaten at the cannibalistic festive board. One night we returned to the hut and found that the great monarch had bolted off with all our possessions; even my last shirt had gone! Two weeks later he was caught by the gendarmes; then we heard that he was a ferocious cannibal of low origin, and that they had been trying to catch him for twelve months. He had killed a native boy, strangled him in the forest, and eaten him. Before we left we heard that he had been shot by the French Commissioners. About six weeks after, while I was walking along the beach at Apia, I met him. He ran for his life, before my friend and I got a chance to recover from our astonishment and run in the opposite direction. The hired native sharpshooters had deliberately missed him, and the old scoundrel had fallen dead till nightfall only!
Another time I met an old dilapidated sundowner, a real specimen of the Australian bush-lands. It was miles up country where I first met him, sitting under his gum-trees by a creek making his billy boil. He gave me a hot drink and I gave him a tobacco plug; and as the billy boiled up again he said: “Where yer bound for?” “Anywhere,” I answered. “Wall, yer better come with me to Coomiranta Creek, ten miles off the western track, by Wangarris Yards; we can get plenty tucker there; and then on to the Sandy Hills and across Dead Girl’s Flat into Hompy Bom, that leads across Gum Creek into Dead Crow’s Paddock, two miles or more from Dead Man’s Hollow. Then strike the gullies by Riley’s ranch, and there we can get another stock of tucker. He’s a real all right ’un Riley is, and not too bad either.”
And so he rambled on, as he wiped his grizzly grey beard, a beard so thick with spittle and tobacco juice that it acted as a kind of fly-catcher for him; the buzzing insects flapped their wings and struggled with their tangled feet in that awful hairy web till they were swept into Eternity by his brushing hand. Indeed his companionship was greatly esteemed by me, for as we tramped along under the sweltering sun I walked beside him untormented by the mosquitoes and the myriads of hissing flies that like a swarm of honeybees kept on his side, following his monstrous bushy beard as we travelled south.
His whole life was centred on the various stations by the known tracks and the grades of generosity in the hearts of the overseers and stockmen. These sundowners arrive at the stations at sunset and appeal for work just as the day’s work is finished and bolt off at daybreak into the bush, with their old brown blanket on their backs. Stolid old men some of them, they are real derelicts of the old days. They look like grey-bearded figure-heads of ships, fixed on weary, ragged bodies, as with their pipes in their mouths they pass and fade across the oceans of scrub, spinifex and sand, buccaneers on the high seas of Australian bush. My old sundowner hardly ever spoke as we wandered along under the gum-trees, as the magpies sat on the twigs and chuckled, and bees moaned in the bush flowers of the hollows. We arrived in a bush town of about twenty wooden houses and two shops that sold all humanity requires. I played the violin, and he was delighted when I gave him all the money which he collected in his vast broad-rimmed hat.
“I say, matey, chum up with me,” he said, as his long-sleeping commercial eye opened and stared at the money. But I didn’t chum up with him; I was not built for a sundowner. I recall how he always said his prayers after he had tucked his blanket around his body and laid his head on the heaped bush grass. He was old then. I suppose he’s long been dead now, and lies somewhere in those far-away bush-lands.
I’ve seen some strange types in my time; but what are those types compared to the normal tribes I’ve seen and played to, laughed, loved and squabbled with. Little brown children clothed only in moonlight and sunlight, singing cheerfully by the South Sea breakers under the dark-fingered coco-palms. Sad little faces, some like deserted baby angels, looking up into my face—my children! Dishevelled, strange old bush mothers, crooning to their buds of humanity, tiny brown clinging hands and moving mouths at their kind, softly feeding brown breasts—my mothers! Old tattooed chiefs and grim-looking kings; rough-haired semi-savage girls; and youths jabbering in strange tongues, with hushed, secret voices, over the terrible white plague that had entered and stricken their primitive city of huts; the white-faced, fierce-looking invaders from across the seas. Ravishers of their maidens! The scum of the Western cities prowling about the villages that had become the hot-beds of lust and sin’s terrible paradise. Missionaries, with melancholy, hollow voices, who seldom knew anything of the intense inner life of humanity and the great philosophy of happiness. Superstitious, bigoted old chiefs cursing the white man’s Bible. Philosophical old brown men with high brows and keen dark eyes reflectively nodding their heads. South Sea Oldenburgs striving to convince grim South Sea Spinozas. Stalwart, dark tattooed Schopenhauers shouting about wind-baggery.
I can see again the ironical heathen chief sitting by his palatial hut. He is clever, a Voltaire of the Southern Seas. His strong face is tattooed; grim-looking are his little eyes as he grins and looks at the Marquesan coat-of-arms which he has invented and placed at his door—a large empty rum barrel and on top of it a Christian Bible!
I see the pretty Samoan girl, Millancoo, with lovely dreaming eyes and thick bronzed hair, with a red and white hibiscus flower stuck in at each side. Her brown limbs and figure are the perfection of graceful beauty, dressed only in a little blue chemise. She eloped with a “noble white man” to the Gilbert Isles, and committed suicide when he left her, ere her first-born could creep to her bosom and taste the only milk of human kindness it would most probably have ever known.
Earnest-faced Tippo, her sister, sits on the slope. Happy as night with its stars is she, with six little dark, plump children with demon-like eyes romping all round her. She has married an uncivilised nigger from Timbuctoo! O happy girl! How the natives chided and sneered at her at first for not marrying a great white lord as her sister did!
Beautiful women, and men also, I have met in strange places. I have found them in the hovels and among the scum of life, and sometimes in the palatial home of affluence. Convicts of New Caledonia in the calaboose or toiling in chains, breathing, yet as dead as dust, with hollow, sad eyes, corpses from La Belle France—my poor brothers! Old men and women begging by the kerb-side in the far-away civilised Isle of the Western Seas! The old man in rags, a skeleton on tottering feet, shivering, going down the cold, windy, main road of the lighted suburb, singing, with a palsied old mouth, some song that God composed ere Christ came. He is my beloved comrade; bury me with him, so that the flowers over us may twine in our dead dust and find mutual sympathy.