And what was the fortune that I made—what deeds did I achieve?
(Though goodly was my heritage to the ends of all the earth)
Though I sang wild songs as our ship rolled home, O men, hear of my worth—
Weighed down with rhymes and fearful crimes, sun-tanned and deadly sane,
Face yellowish-brown—one bad half-crown and a monkey on a chain!
Such was my success. Even the monkey died before I left Suva. But I was rich in experience.
The very sight of ugly Suva city, with its wooden dwarf houses, stinks and mosquitoes, inspired me to seek for change.
Then it came again like a fever raging in my blood; it was the call of the wild, echoing through my dreams. As I lay unsleeping in the vermin-haunted bunk of that wretched hovel wherein I dwelt, that call in my blood seemed somehow to echo from the lost Waylao’s sorrow.
I arose like one in a dream. I would seek the wilds, the forest and seas again, and only dream of England’s skies.
Such were the reflections that I recall as I look back across the track of the years to my glorious vagabond pilgrimage, back to the sun-kissed bosom of the wilds, back to the starlit, tropical nights of eyes and fragrant lips, to the sea foams, the scented, dusky hair of my beloved South—my love of other days.