I never tired of listening to his way of telling the poetic legends of his island world to the white men, though I must admit that, beyond myself, few men of my colour were interested in all he had to say. Grins and jokes and indecent remarks were their highest contribution in the way of interest or gifts when he finished his poems.
I do not exaggerate in saying that, though Langi could not speak our language better than an English child of ten years, he was conversant with the works of many of our poets. He had an old volume of Byron. He asked me if I knew Keats!
“He great Tusitala chief!” he said, when I told him Keats was dead. Then he started off in raptures over Saturn and the fallen deities and goddesses of Hyperion! He had also read Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
It seemed a wonderful thing that one should leave one’s country and travel thousands of miles across desolate seas and pioneer lands, to find, at last, on a savage isle of the remote wild South Seas, a savage who loved poetry!
It is true enough that the old chief got little appreciation out of his talent, but many kicks.
Poor O Le Langi! None of the natural chances of the literary world came his way either by birth or luck. He was born in a spot remote from all the dubious possibilities that the civilized world offers to budding aspirants. He had none to puff him. With all his astuteness he could seize on no scheme that would elevate him on a pedestal in the eyes of men. Alas! no starving, unrecognized poet of another tribe expired on his doorstep, so that the O Le Langi family for successive generations might write the dead poet’s memoirs, and the memoirs of their father’s memoirs concerning the poet’s last sigh and the benevolence of the O Le Langi family to the dying poet’s last ten minutes! Ah me! No publisher chanced upon sad O Le Langi till I, a penniless traveller, appeared on the scene, recognizing his wonderful genius. And now that his body is dust beneath his beloved coco-palms, I would write these humble memoirs and commemorate the dust of the greatest poet I ever met on earth.
It is nothing against the posthumous poetic fame of O Le Langi to say that he had loved passionately, more than twice. Indeed, it is well known that men who are not poets have this mortal failing.
The amorous weakness of O Le Langi was impressively forced upon me, for did I not walk beneath the coco-palms and breadfruits to that silent, hallowed spot where slumbered his sleeping passions?—the little native cemetery where slept the dead women and children that he had loved.
It was through this sad visit that I heard so much; for as O Le Langi knelt over each little mound of crumbling dust he kissed the earth and wept like a child. I saw at a glance that the solid earth did not hide from the eyes of imagination the stretched figures, the eyes, the lips, and the little fingers that he had once loved.
Rising to his feet he surveyed me with solemn eyes, then said: