The festival’s orchestra helped in no small way to enhance the poetic beauty of the whole scene. The bamboo flutes and bone-clappers (made from the skeletons of dead chiefs) played a suitable accompaniment to the many “turns” that I witnessed. The special music that was performed on this occasion was something between a Marquesan Tapriata and a Samoan Siva dance. Though I cannot reproduce the moaning of the resounding seas on the shore below or the echoes in the mountains, I give here an impressionist piano-forte arrangement of the wild music I heard that night.
It is many years since O Le Tao departed for the legendary splendours of his beloved shadowland: that much I certainly know. For, on a voyage bound for the Malay Archipelago, not so long ago, my ship put into Samoa, and, standing in the small village cemetery near Safuta, I gazed in sorrow on a little wooden cross, and distinctly made out these words, written in English and Samoan:
“Here lieth the mortal remains of High Chief
O LE TAO
Died, aged 83, in the year of our Lord, 1903.”
“In my Father’s House are Many Mansions.”
Gazing on that grave, I realized the briefness of all living things, be they great or small. There was something pathetic too in so humble a tomb for one who had dwelt in such imaginative splendour. For the island nightingale still sang its passionate song in the breadfruit, as the same aged tamanu trees sighed in their glory by the sea. But, doubtless, the children of a new age still whisper his name in wonder, telling how he was favoured by the goddess Pafuto for the majesty and inborn virtue of his mighty heart.
When I left O Le Tao’s hospitable homestead it was with feelings of regret, and it was a long time before I returned to Samoa. Brief as was my stay with that old chief, it was of long enough duration to influence me; indeed, I might say that I became a semi-pagan too. Cenerita no longer pointed in vain to the moonlit mountains, attempting to show my blind eyes the shadow-gods that she declared were stalking across the moon-ridden hills—I too saw them! I became a veritable heathen. My personality became robed in the weird atmosphere of pagan dreams. Civilization fell from me like an immaculate tall hat knocked off one’s head with a brick. The stern, dull, drab colour of the world changed for me. The bright-winged katafa, the brown-robed O Le mao bird, and bronzed-winged Samoan doves became warm-throated goddesses sitting in the breadfruit trees over our heads, their eyes bright with discovery as I played heathenish melodies and Cenerita sang. I was happy enough, for I lived in a small native house all alone; it had two rooms and was allotted me by the kindness of O Le Tao. That hut was my tiny grand ancestral hall. Just beyond my threshold waved the plumes of my coat-of-arms—a coco-nut tree crowned with a tawny bunch of fruit. My clock, far away over the wide waters of my blue demesne, chimed each sunset on the wave! Sometimes, when I played my violin far into the night, I saw ghostly shadows moving under my lovely garden trees; then I knew that I had awakened the wild people of another world, who came to listen with delight to the Tusitala of the “magic-stick” from the lands beyond the setting suns. Sometimes I would invite Tamariki, Cenerita, and a few more sweet-minded Samoan children to spend the evening with me. They would sing part-songs, melodies of which none knew the composer, wonderful strains that had been mysteriously blown into some old Samoan musician’s soul from the moonlit ocean caves. Crude as some of those songs were, I heard the true note. Metaphorically speaking, I threw all my music studies away. Away with such rubbish! No western music ever thrilled me as I was thrilled by the haunting poetry of wild sweet sounds such as I heard on those Samoan nights. It often seemed unbelievable, dream-like, when I sat on a fibre mat before the limelight of the stars and whiffed the odours of wild flowers and listened to the perfect strains of that great University of Samoan elemental musical art. Often when I heard the final chant of some musical genius I would arise and cheer loudly, as the rough, tattooed audience beat their drums and whistled their encores. Sometimes a sun-varnished maid would stand before the forest audience and sing some masterpiece that expressed all the impassioned melody of music’s far-away, forgotten childhood. I would hear the seawinds sigh their long-drawn accompaniment across the lovely wild-stringed harp of forest trees; a cloud would pass away from the moon and so lift a great silver curtain of ghostly light from the leafy, gnarled colonnades. And then the dusky, star-eyed prima donna of the forest would bow with a grace that was seemingly quite out of place as one listened to the wild hubbub of the fierce-eyed, tawny men who waved their arms as they cheered from the orchestral stalls of jungle, bush, and fern. Such sights, such experiences might well turn the brain of a much more sober head than I claim to possess.
Listen: