After playing for a considerable time, I stopped, and intimated to the chiefs that I wished to get away. At first they begged me to stay; but, seeing that I was determined, they loaded me with coco-nut milk. One old woman took a large bone hair-comb from her mop and presented it to me. After a little discussion they agreed to let Fanga Loma accompany me a little way on the route. I was glad of this gracious act, for I felt a bit nervous that night. And so off Fanga Loma and I went. I heard the death-owl screaming as we entered the deep shadows of the forest. Fanga began to sing a pretty strain as her bare feet shuffled a kind of tempo to her melody while she walked beside me. I felt like a heathen as the moonlight streamed through the giant trees and that strange girl stared up into my eyes. Those eyes of hers were unearthly bright, and seemed to express the wild, poetic mystery of her race. She cast a weird atmosphere over everything by her eerie presence. The trees around me, the moonlight on the tropic flowers, the stealing streams, and the stars, seemed charged with the magical light of Fanga Loma’s eyes! I’ve often fancied I’ve felt the mystery of the great Unseen that dwells about us as we move through this mortal existence, and such a feeling of the proximity of the unknown and “worlds not realized” came to me that night. That eerie, star-eyed girl seemed some enchantress, some dusky Christabel haunting my footsteps as I softly trod the mossy path of that moonlit forest. It was a bewitching melody that she sang as she softly swayed in an elfin-like manner beside me.
“For Heaven’s sake don’t sing that!” I whispered, as I looked into her face.
And did she stop?—not she! She simply sang on all the more, then looked up into my eyes. I trembled; a fierce light shone in those unearthly bright orbs.
“Why you leaver go my arm?” she wailed; then she said softly: “Papalagi, must you go and leaver Fanga Loma for ever?”
We were standing by the cross-road of the forest as she said that. The girl’s manner and the eerie gaze of her eyes carried me out of myself back into some other age. I realized my weakness, and turned away from those shining, appealing eyes. I kissed the hand she offered, and gazed as though in deep thought on the floor of the silent forest.
“Fanga, I must go back to Suva, but I will return some day,” I whispered, as I looked in fright on the giant trees, wondering if they could hear!
Then the girl fell on her knees, lifted her hands to the forest height, and cried out in this wise:
“Is not the world of love, the magic of the stars, flowers, and deep waters and touch of a maiden’s lips enough for such as you? Are not these trees that sigh over us our dear, great friends, and yours too, O white Papalagi? Who is this great white god that seems sweeter to you than the loving arms of a maid? Hear me, I am daughter of great chief. The village will be your own, chiefs will fawn at your feet and cast nicer fruits and shells at you!”
For a moment I marvelled at the maid’s sudden outburst. I wondered if she had been reading some South Sea novel, so strangely romantic did it all seem.
“I will come again, Loma,” I murmured, as I recovered my senses and gazed steadily into the eyes of that wild girl of the forest. She was little more than a child; many acts of hers had told me that much.