As I vividly recall her, Tai-o-hae, its romantic scenery, its background of pinnacled mountains and dim blue ocean horizons once more surround me. Waylao stands on the ferny slopes by the pomegranates and flamboyant trees. She has not yet perceived me. I hold my breath as I catch sight of her and stare with all the ardour of sanguine youth. The softest, warm sea wind creeps through the giant bread-fruits; her loose tappa robe stirs, lifted by the winds, and twines about the perfect limbs of the girl’s delicate figure. Standing there, with hand held archwise at her brow, her massive, bronzed hair uplifting to the breeze as she stares seaward, I half fancy that the dusky heroine of a romantic South Sea novel has suddenly stepped from the pages of my book and stands before me, smiling in the materialised beauty of reality.
“Aloah, monsieur!”—it is a salutation in French official fashion. Her speech rings in my ears like music. She seems even more beautiful than she appeared yesterday when listening to my violin solo in the grog shanty by the beach.
By degrees reality returns. It’s no dream at all. I’m an ordinary mortal, who was bitten ferociously last night by Marquesan fleas and who only possesses one English shilling and ten centimes in cash.
Though poor in worldly goods, I’m rich with transcendent cheek, gallantry and the enormous deception of youth. I take a mighty interest in all that interests the girl. I pluck a flower from the bush beside us. She smiles deliciously when I, recalling my old aunt’s advice to be polite to ladies, have bowed and fastened the flower in a fold of the diaphanous robe that modestly covers her maiden bosom. As we walk up the slope I feel that I am the old confidential friend of the family; in ten minutes I learn the last five years of her history. I know that her mother, old Lydia, kicks up a shindy if she’s out too late at night. I know that Benbow (as I will call him), her father, gets awfully drunk when home from sea. I know that, notwithstanding her rough surroundings, she is innocent as a child; I know she loves her pet canary. I envy that canary as she babbles on, and I catch glances from her fine lustrous eyes, dark with a blue depth in the pupils, a depth that sparkles at times as though a far-off star shines in their heavens.
In a few moments we part. I hear a musical ripple of laughter as she disappears in the mission-room where resides Père de ——, the old priest, who has known and educated Waylao since she toddled.
The next adventure that I can recall is that I was compelled to accept a rotten job on a plantation. It somewhat grieves me to confess that such humble employments came to me through the curse of being cashless. I sweated in fine style whilst planting nuts. I also pulled taro, broke copra with a native axe, cleared scrub, and did other odious things that did not chime in with the elements of romance.
Soon afterwards I threw the job up in disgust and eventually found it more congenial to consort with the derelicts who frequented the grog shanty hard by.
About those men and their ways I will attempt to discourse in the next chapter.