“I felt a bit wild at the way some of the sailors chaffed me about Waylao. But I don’t care. I’m getting used to chaff and the winks and ways of this clever world.
“You ought to have heard the skipper giving Waylao advice about stowing away in the holds of tramp ships. He gave her a little cash, too. Shows he doesn’t belong to a Charity Organisation, doesn’t it?
“I promised to meet Waylao ashore. Sailors all winking and accusing me of leaving ship so as to accompany the pretty stowaway. I’ve been to Suva before, so I know all about the best spots for a girl like Waylao to get lodgings.”
CHAPTER XIX
Waylao’s Ancestors—Lodging Hunting—Mr and Mrs Pink—I turn Missionary—Piety at Home—My Disastrous Accident—My Tardy Recovery
I THINK it will be best now to leave my diary alone and go on in the old way.
I see by the last entry that Waylao had some mad idea of going up to Naraundrau, which was a native town not far from the coast and the source of the Rewa river. She thought that she would come across some of her mother’s royal-blooded relatives there. I told her that possibly her mother had exaggerated about the greatness of her people, or that perhaps, even if it was true, they were all dead, or slaving on the sugar plantations. But it was no good: she had some idea that she was descended from the great King Thakombau and that his palatial halls still existed up at Naraundrau.
In my previous visit to Fiji I had met descendants of that Bluebeard of the South Seas, for such he was. He was a bloodthirsty cannibal in his earlier days, but in his old age became converted to the Christian faith. He had strangled dozens of maids and wives in his day for the cannibalistic orgies. But his later years had been renowned for his devoutness, though it was hinted by the old chiefs that his heart still clung fondly to the old beliefs and the heathen gods. Indeed it was rumoured that ere he died he gave minute instructions for several huge war-clubs and a large barrel of the best rum to be buried in his grave with him. “For,” said he, “if I am denied to enter shadow-land because I’ve deserted the old gods, I say, if the great white God denies my entry into paradise—why, what matters, can I not fight my way in?”
A week after Thakombau’s death a terrible thunderstorm broke over the district of Bau, where he was buried. The natives round those parts were horror-struck. They looked up at the lightnings and hid in the caves in their terror: they swore that the great cannibal king, Thakombau, had been denied by the great white God, and that, drunk with the rum and armed with his mighty clubs, he was fighting his way into the white man’s heaven—with all his dead heathen warriors behind him.