V
I extemporise Stirring Music on my Violin at Native Weddings—Dethroned Queens and Kings—Meet Papoo
I am now going to tell you about Samoa and Samoan folk just as my eyes saw them. My ship sailed away, but I was not on board of it. The Samoan climate suited my health, and I found decent fellows living there who made jolly companions. One of them was a reformed German missionary who had mended his ways, left off the drink and toiled honestly on a coco-nut plantation which helped him to eke out a living for his accepted wife and family. They were pretty little children too—I knew them all well, thirteen altogether, some with blue-black eyes and some grey-black eyes. All had a tiny splash of white on their tiny plump bodies; their mothers were as brown as pheasants’ eggs and mostly fine-looking women.
For a week I lodged with a dark old Samoan who had a kind of bungalow on the beach. The walls were lined with the most beautiful South Sea shells. He traded with them, and I believe did a good business with sailors and traders. He certainly made more headway than I ever did in my tea shop. Well, I found my violin was a real fortune to me. I got in with all the wealthy Samoan chiefs and attended Samoan weddings; far away in the depths of the forest it was I who played and composed on the violin at those South Sea forest festivals. Stirring music! The hotly blushing bride, dressed in her bridal robe—her hair only!—which ruffled as the breeze of the cool forest kissed her innocent nakedness, was given away to the modest Samoan happy youth, and you must forgive me, dear reader, whoever you are, and remember I was only a romantic boy, when I tell you that my whole soul envied that youth! I was young and inexperienced in the ways of Western and Southern life, and I at first thought that the Samoan ladies were rather loose in their morals. I am older now, and I tell you this—the morals of the South Sea men and women place the morals of our Western life completely in the shade.
Certain phases of life in London could never occur in the South Seas, and even were the women inclined to traffic with their comeliness, the South Sea Samoan chief’s war-club never misses!
Coconut Palm in full fruit
At night I would steal up the steep shore hills under the mangroves and coco-palms and creep into the tiny dome-shaped dens, which were the homesteads of the native men and women of those South Sea isles. They all got to know me and trust me, and I often would share their meals as they sat squatting around their big earthen steaming pots wherein they cooked fish and peculiar-smelling vegetables. The heat of those dens was terribly stifling to me with my clothes on, and I would very soon make tracks and get outside, and from those steeps I would gaze out seaward at the vast calm Pacific trembling into silver under the South Sea moon, as the phosphorus-sparkling waters at intervals curled and broke to silvery waves up the shore, by the mirroring palm-sheltered lagoons. On the beach through patches of moonlight passed the loafing half-caste traders and huddled groups of Samoan women with their tiny black children running round and round them like big black rats.
Laoleo, a Marquesan, was my special comrade on those nights out. He was the son of one of the South Sea queens who had seen her day—far away on one of the lonely Atolls, her beauty faded and mouth mumbling and toothless, she sat dreaming of her glorious past, and found life still sweet in living over the memories of all that had been. Laoleo’s father was in my time a dethroned king. I saw him once as he sat by his den. He was fat and squatty, only had one big yellow tooth, a large head, cute twinkling eyes and fearfully wrinkled brows, and when he wrinkled them up, as he thought of his past, he looked like some grim personification of the dark ages cast into human frame.