Next day a clergyman arrived. “Ecclesiastical profession” was writ in sombre lines across his lean physiognomy.
“Who’s coming here next?” breathed O’Hara, as we looked up from the pages of our novels, making sure that he too was fleeing from the righteous arm of justice. But we were mistaken. He was simply a kind-hearted religious crank who spent his days in wandering from isle to isle seeking to reform fallen men. His woe-begone, melancholy aspect cast a deep gloom over the establishment as he moaned out sad quotations from his Bible, a gloom that pervaded the forest and darkened the sea horizon. Bones shook him heartily by the hand when he first arrived and said pious things. Bones had a face like cast-iron, but was soft-hearted and the finest hypocrite extant. Some of the honest sailormen, yielding to that sad ecclesiastic’s soft persuasion, listened to long passages from the Psalms and Solomon’s Song. Then he took O’Hara and me down to the tribal villages and introduced us to some of the old-time chiefs. Shaggy old women prostrated themselves at his feet as he prayed for their souls.
It was very evident that he had been that way before. Everyone seemed to know him. I got to like him immensely during the two days that he stopped with Bones. His madness was interesting and original, and made an agreeable change after consorting with mortals who were quite sane. Then he, too, passed away on his melancholy wanderings.
After he went, there arrived a troupe of troubadours, who came from Melbourne as deck-passengers on a schooner. Among their number were three American girls who turned that shanty into a kind of opéra bouffe, as they sang and step-danced in a wonderful way. The scene inside when the girls danced and the fat man played his guitar, looked like some living-picture representation of Madame Tussaud’s, as though all the lifeless criminals had been mysteriously awakened and were applauding the visitors, waving big hats in wild ecstasy at being serenaded so sweetly while in their degraded state. For, as they listened to the troubadours, about twenty of us stood by, looking on the shadowy scene lit up by the tallow candles that swung to and fro on wires suspended from the roof of the wide bar-room.
I believe the wandering troupe made a splendid collection that night. I know the fat man, with a big stomach, got very drunk, sang several songs, and then fell down. And the girls giggled all night long as they slept in the private compartment, wherein the unhappy fugitive girl had rested the night before.
Next day the troupe bade us all farewell, for they were bound for ’Frisco, and the boat was leaving at noon.
I think O’Hara and I had been at the establishment for two weeks then. It wasn’t a long time, but I had seen more strange sides of life in that short time than one could well see under normal circumstances in twenty years. But it must be admitted that my immediate experiences seemed very vapid compared with the exciting adventures of the peculiar men who arrived at the Charity Hermitage and seemed never weary of telling their reminiscences and hairbreadth escapes to the new-comers. Even O’Hara opened his mouth in astonishment at all he heard from the lips of those who yearned to tell yarns, as over and over again some strange old derelict would pull his whiskers while dropping into deep meditation as to “what happened next.” That Hermitage of the South Seas was a kind of Old Inn on life’s highway wherein sad men entered from the unknown, sat and drank, sang a song, and then departed out into the unknown, sometimes in a great hurry. Three extraordinary-looking beings arrived at the Hermitage one night. One resembled Don Quixote in extremis, another had a huge crooked nose that was swathed by a vast reddish beard, and the third had a huge, domed bald head that looked like a mighty billiard ball with flapping ears. They were attired in loose, dilapidated pantaloons, heavy belts, coloured shirts, and firearms, and might have been South Sea freebooters, blackbirders, or anything that is wild and lawless, if appearances are to be relied upon. They hadn’t been in the Organization Hermitage twelve hours before the half-caste surveillants arrived at the door. The three new-comers at once made a bolt out under the palms that led down to the seashore, a quarter of a mile off. And, if anyone had happened to pass along the sands that afternoon, they would assuredly have seen three weird-looking objects with twinkling eyes sticking up out of the calm blue waters by the shore’s coral reefs. To an imaginative observer those objects would certainly have resembled the figureheads of three sunken Chinese junks, wooden faces protruding, just visible at low-tide, the eyes glassy, staring at the sky, lips tightly compressed, the nostrils level with the ocean’s surface. But then again, the vast polished bald head of one was unaccountable, and the bristly hair of another toned down the weird unreality of the scene. For who ever saw a hideous Chinese junk’s figure-head with thick hair on its crown, and tobacco smoke issuing from its mouth? In short, those three objects were the heads of the three new-comers, their bodies hidden beneath the sea’s surface, their heads and nostrils exposed just sufficient so that they might inhale the breeze, as they hid from the surveillants! Next day the natives missed a twelve-seater outrigger canoe. And had high chief Makaroa looked seaward, instead of kneeling and weeping before his old idol, he would have seen a small object fading away on the ocean horizon far to the S.W. It was none other than Makaroa’s missing canoe, with the three fugitives, out on the wide world of waters, bound for Nowhere! But all this is only a detail.
Perhaps it will not be out of place to tell one of the yarns that we heard at the Hermitage,—not a swash-buckling story, but a tale that had the indisputable ring of truth in it. The teller of the story was a weird-looking fellow of about fifty years of age. He had lived in the Solomons and Fiji for years. I think he was a trader. Anyway, he had travelled the South Seas in the old heathen times, had lived in Fiji when cannibalism was in vogue, and King Thakombau reigned supreme over his dominions from the old capital of Bau. In these pages I will call him G——. I cannot reproduce his exquisite manner in telling a story. I had never heard anything like it before. He had lived in the isles to the east when Bully Hayes roamed the seas, when King Tembinok of Apamama was in his cannibal youthful prime, and Queen Vaekehu of Tai-o-hae welcomed many a dusky potentate into her impassioned arms.