To think, alas, a gnat achieves such fame!
After leaving O Le Tao I came across a kind of South Sea Mozart. He was a young Samoan of about fourteen years. He possessed a cheap German fiddle, and on its frayed strings extemporized melodies of the weirdest beauty.
“What’s that song, Pango-Pango?” said I.
He shook his curly head and said, “Me knower not, nice songer camer me out of win’ (wind) of the forest, from moan of sea-cave and stars of big sky-land.”
Saying that, he once more placed his fiddle (’cello style) between his knees, and performed a melody that might well have haunted the brain of a Brahms, a Schubert, or an Elgar. He was a handsome little fellow, with beautiful bird-like eyes. He was absolutely unconscious of the gift he possessed. He seemed, to me, the sun-varnished, perfect-limbed personification of Music itself, Music’s youth, light-winged, passionate, beautiful with elemental sweetness, the ecstasy of melancholy and inartistic carelessness. He played to his shadow in the lagoons. There was a fascinating witchery in all his ways. Yet I doubt whether such a soul as Pango’s could ever develop into that stage of music which men call “Classic.” His genius was the genius of youth, and could never grow old, and, rusting, develop into the austere ossification of the fashionable musical cranium, that awful unvibrant curvature of the musical spine that seems the melody of beauteous youth. Pango was as natural in his art as are the flowers and birds on the hillside. He could never have attained that decrepitude of imagination that invests itself in a robe of artistries, making sad old men and women imagine they hear the beautiful by having their unresponsive spines forcibly shaken by the thunderous crash, the multitudinous rumble and groan of artificial musical art. Ah, memory of Pango! Though a true musician, he would have been nowhere as a music-hall composer. Nor could he place suggestive words to music. He lacked British spiciness, too. But I vow that he did put the stars and forest streams to music as he sat out on the promontory’s edge by moonlight, looking like some young Grecian god as he hummed and played a strain that sounded like infinity in pain. To my great regret I lost sight of Pango-Pango for quite a year after that. The fact is, I left Samoa. How I left, and of the wonders of the sea, I will tell in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II. TROUBADOURING IN TAHITI
I ship with a genuine Old-time Crew—Poetic Nightmares—Tattooed Manuscripts of the Seas!—I learn the Art of Forcible Expression—Tar-pots—The Storm—Washed Overboard—Papeete—Pokara—How the first Coco-nuts came—Star Myths.
THERE are many sceptics who may disbelieve my account of the crew of the “Zangwahee,” but away with such people!
About a week after losing sight of Pango-Pango I went across to Savaii Isle. I had heard that there was an old sailing-ship anchored off Matautu, and that she was bound on a long voyage across the Pacific. I shall never forget the wonder I felt on first sighting the “Zangwahee” as she lay out in the bay. “Looks like an old Spanish galleon,” I thought, as I stared at the yellowish canvas sails and the antiquated rigging imaged in the dark-toned waters of the bay. For a moment I eyed the outlines of that craft with intense curiosity. The beautifully carven emblematical figure-head (a goddess with outstretched praying hands) kept my eyes spellbound. The poetry of the artist’s brain, the magic that had inspired the human hands to carve such outlines, seemed to enter my soul, as the light of the setting sun touched the saffron-hued sails and glimmered across the silent, blue lagoons. The movements of a man’s form on her deck made me realize the truth; for in some credulous fancy I had half thought that she was some long-lost treasure-trove ship that had lain there for centuries!