“Say when!” she said to the mate, as she clutched the gin bottle, holding it high as she filled the glass.
Then she smacked me on the back, and filled with beer a huge receptacle that looked like one of those fancy glasses wherein one keeps goldfish. I think Stevenson had whisky. I know he enjoyed the situation. The lady made eyes at R. L. S. and the mate too. She swore and behaved with the convivial vulgarity that is the sole prerogative of the low-caste British woman. I know that the Samoan servant-maid blushed as her mistress complained of the “’orrible ’eat,” and pulled her dress down below her Camberwell-South-East bosom. Who she was, why she was there alone in that bungalow, only God knows. I recall that she nudged Stevenson in the ribs and said she came from “Camberwool Sarth-East.” She swore at everything in Samoa, and said that she never went “art of a night because she knew the blasted natives were cannyballs!” Stevenson’s face during all this was a perfect study in self-control and amused politeness; and nothing off the stage could possibly outrival his simulated interest and his convivial ejaculation of “Well now!” as she finished each breezy yarn and ribald joke.
The mate was a London man.
“Do you remember the ‘Pig and Whistle’?” she screamed, as she plunged into reminiscent talk about the “old homeland,” smacked the mate on the shoulder, and pinched my leg! She insisted on fillng our glasses again and again. She commenced to sing. Her wild, silvery laughter rippled about our ears, mesmerized us all, and made the roosting parakeets in the orange-trees outside rise, flutter and shriek with fright. Stevenson was the first to attempt to withdraw from that little realistic drama of life in a South Sea bungalow. His æsthetic, intellectual-looking face became shadowed with a fierce determination as the wild familiarities of the woman asserted themselves. He bowed with urbane politeness as he rose from the table.
“Git the gentleman’s ’at, yer little brown-skinned slut!” she yelled.
In a moment the trembling Polynesian maid made a dive for Stevenson’s old peaked cap. Stevenson was still expressing in his politest terms the pleasure he felt at meeting the lady in the island.
“Stow it, yer son of a gun! No politeness ’ere! You know where to find me, and don’t forget me when yer comes this way!” she said, as we passed through the doorway.
Stevenson nearly fell down her bungalow’s five steps as she yelled forth a volley of ribald farewells. The relief of that parting was very evident on Stevenson’s face. He chuckled like a schoolboy when we had embarked and were all rowing our hardest, far away, safe out at sea.
But to return to O Le Langi. Many of the old-time chiefs of Langi’s type were faithful to their old creeds in many ways, and lived just as they had done in the heathen days. Indeed, Langi lived as though white men had never trod on his isles. He was deeply imbued with the old commercial spirit. Like the mediæval merchants of Cathay who travelled far with their scented merchandise, Langi would go wandering from village to village and isle to isle. True enough, he did not travel with a camel across mighty deserts, but was his own caravan; for he carried, by the aid of a large calabash slung over his own hump, not sandalwood, topazes, diamonds, and opals for mummies’ eyes, but set off with pink shells, corals, tappa-cloth, and magic charms that had been warmed by the soft bosoms of mighty queens on their wedding-nights. These charms were small precious stones that he ran through his fingers whilst mumbling his pagan prayers.
“What may they be, those little shining stones, O mighty O Le Langi?” said I one night, as he trickled the gems through his fingers and gazed in a most mysterious way on the stars. He then informed me that they were the old magic jewels of the ancient Samoan dynasty, and their value was beyond all price. It turned out that they had once been threaded on the skeins of a maiden’s hair so that they might be warmed on the virgin bosom of her whom a king was about to take to wife. It appeared that on the eve of the wedding the royal bride slept with the stones warm on her bosom, and that the warmth imparted to them was the sapphire and ruby light which shone in their depths as Langi ran them through his fingers.