But to proceed with those adventurous happy days when the light of the great poet O Le Langi’s eyes shone upon me. Whilst stopping with Langi I was down with severe fever. I was staying at the time in a native homestead quite near to the aged scribe’s residence. Langi was very kind to me, and secured the services of a native woman to attend to my wants. This Samoan lady had a child who was about four years old. He was an intelligent little fellow and had ocean-blue eyes and curly hair. When I sat up on my bed-mat, tinkling melodies on my violin, Ramao, for that was his name, would somersault with delight; then once again peep inside the F holes of my instrument to see where the music came from. Every day he would run off into the forest to pluck flowers for me, and would make my bed with soft moss, attending to my wants with the unremitting solicitude of a lovable, innocent child. Heaven knows where he learnt the weird songs that he sang to me as he sat by my bedside, swaying to and fro like some elfin-child. Lying there stricken with fever, I would stare into his beautiful, original eyes till the whole world seemed to be singing in its happy childhood. I realized that the age of four was the golden age of mortal existence, the age that understands the grandest philosophy of life, the age when all the infinite possibilities are as near consummation as they can well be in this world. Much that had puzzled my wretched civilized brain as I listened to O Le Langi’s long discourses became clear to me. Langi was not such a fool after all; it was I who was the heathen! The iron laws of my country had sent me to school so that my God-given wisdom should be strangled by dogmatic heathenish teachers. I recalled how the great and splendidly religious Langi had crashed his club down on his threshold, and in magnificent declamatory style had said:
“Pah! Foolish white-skinned man, he come here with his mouldy skull full of worms so that he may teach us also to grow old, scraggy, and full of wretched wisdom. He hears not the voices of the gods murmuring in the children’s babblings.” Then that aged scribe had laid his wrinkled hand on my head, and in sonorous, melancholy tones had said: “O Papalagi, I say, your people looker beyond the mountains at the stars for the wisdom of the great waters when ’tis only to be heard in the sweet-toned shells that are scattered on the sunny shores of childhood.”
So spake Langi. And I, who knew that we are born in fullest possession of the divine faculties only that we may grow old and sad, had at once become a true disciple of that glorious old heathen. Indeed, I almost succeeded in realizing that the peoples of the civilized world were my humble attendants, and that O Le Langi, crammed with mythology and strange tales about sad old crabs, was a heathen Solomon arrayed in the splendour of the stars. Langi could stand on the mountain peaks of supreme “ignorance,” whisper into the ear of the universe, and, listening, hear those Truths that only murmur in some great speech of silence to the soul.
I know that the light of little Ramao’s eyes also filled my soul with some strange, intuitive wisdom. When the little fellow opened his eyes wide and said:
“Oh, listen, Papalagi, to the O le mao bird as it sings to the light of the mountain stars,” I did not hear a night-bird singing to its mate in the banyan trees, but I heard a soft-feathered transmutation of a blue day of ages ago singing tenderly, sadly, to some memory of its birth in the rosy eternity of the east. Ramao’s presence in that hut, where I lay sick with fever, cast a poetic glamour over my existence. One evening he rushed into the hut, and, stooping down by my bed-mat, swiftly covered my shoulders with the tappa-rug. Then he turned to the doorway and gave a whistle, and softly called out:
“Essimao, come in and see wonderful white boy who play on magic wood.”
He had brought his sister to see me. There she stood, a charming little maid of about seven years, peeping curiously at me through the half-open doorway. I called her; and, as though she had been born for the purpose of waiting on men in sickness, she straightway squatted by me and commenced to sing. Her voice rippled from her lips like the deep-stealing music of a forest stream. Rising to her feet she swayed softly, and it seemed that the rhythm of music rose and fell in tiny billows along the graceful movements of her limbs. Her laughter was sweetest balm to my fevered soul. She was a perfect little gipsy of the sea-nursed south. I know that if the delightful George Borrow, that true lover of the Romany Chile, had reached the South Seas and had seen Essimao place a seashell to her ear and swear that she could hear the big moani ali (ocean) beating on the shores of God’s mountain footstools, he would, I am sure, have devoted pages to the beauty of Essimao and the religious influence her presence inspired. I know that she impressed me more than all the Psalms could do. The sayings of the Apostles and the teachings of Confucius, down to those of Kant and Strindberg, etc., are as nothing to me when compared with the wisdom and charm of little Essimao and Ramao’s four infinite years. Those little philosophers made me realize, long ago, the cursed irony of the fates in decreeing that man should be born the wrong way up, so that we grow old instead of young. But my memory does not betray me when I assert here that O Le Langi was an exception, a phenomenon who had outwitted the fates, had never grown out of his wise, resplendent infancy. Like the child of four years, he was still a mighty philosopher, a true socialist, romanticist, individualist, poet, humorist, spritualist, realist, optimist, pessimist, mystic, maniac, prophet, and one who had the transcendentalist’s belief in a Supreme Being; and lo, all this encased in one skull crammed with the divine light that we are all gifted with when we are four years old. Ah, the wondrous book that an imaginative child of four years could give us could it write down its impressions, its own outlook on life and all that it imagines about this world! What marvellous truths would its great unworldliness spring upon us! Once, when I lay near to death, Ramao lay on one side of me and Essimao on the other, placing their fingers in sympathy through my hair. I felt that I had travelled so far that I had stumbled on the edge of the earth that is nearest the heavens. Perhaps I digress unduly in my reflections over Ramao and Essimao, when it is only children in the hey-day of life’s philosophical prime who can understand the truth of that which I say. Few may believe the virtues that I claim for my old friend Langi and these children. Langi, who had read many of the abridged editions of the standard works, cursed the outrageous vanity of white men. His nervous, sensitive nostrils would dilate, his sonorous, eloquently violent voice ringing out like the mellow poetry of old bells as he declaimed:
“Pah! What am this white Papalagi more than a pale-skinned thief of the night? Am he not the dark misbeliever who slay our mighty gods and doubt their virtues—and us?”
“True! true! O mighty O Le Langi!” I’d say, as I listened in incorrigible delight, while with chin and hand raised to the sky he spoke on:
“The white Papalagi am one great hypocrite, who loveth the earth, money, and old clothes—neither doth he smell over-sweet! Where? Where is this God who had power to fashion this white man, yet, lo, made some First Great Mistake—since I am brown?” And saying this, O Le Langi dashed his coco-nut-shell goblet to the ground, and exclaimed: “Think you ’tis wise His faults to change?” And still he would rave on in this wise: “I say, O Papalagi, had the first white man discovered my people living in one great town that had a leaning tower, and one rotunda and nicer cathedrals with great stained-glass windows, they would have said: ‘O great Samoan Peoples! God’s eyelight doth shine in thy sight; your women, too, are beautiful as the stars and flowers. O wondrous brown men, I greet you, Allelujah!’” Then, wiping the tears of tense emotion from his eyes, he wailed forth: “Alas, my people lived in huts, therefore were severely belaboured with rods and their daughters sold into slavery and worshipped only for their bodies’ beauty.”