Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Boosey & Co., London, W.
He often spoke of Waylao in sorrow, and of the sins and the passions of the dusky Southern race. Through his hospitality I met Pauline more than once. She loved to hear me play the violin. The world took on a different atmosphere as she sang old English songs her father had taught her. The beauty of those songs was intense, and I became home-sick as I listened to her voice, accompanied by the monotone of the breaking seas below and the wild oaths of sunburnt seafaring men in the grog shanty hard by. None but exiles know how an English song touches the heart and awakens dreams in a man. I had led a wild life and done many strange things, and had been influenced by many a chimera, but that white girl singing a song of England seemed something deeper than I understood, and took me back home across the seas. I spoke to Pauline in a sacred way of my mother. I said: “Pauline, I never knew how beautiful my dear mother was till I met you.” Then I spoke of my father. I told her how even when I was a little, toddling boy he had a long white beard. I think that Pauline learnt to love that dear parent of mine. She spoke so gently as I described to her the various constellations of stars that shone in our English skies. In the spontaneous utterance of youth I made her see my old father’s gnarled walking-stick as it trembled, wavered a moment, then pointed out to me the Great Bear, the Pleiades, Lyra, Alpha Centauri and remote nebulæ, constellations shining in the heavens as I walked by his side. I explained to her how I had looked up at that grand old father of mine as his sombre voice told me those magical names, and how I thought that he was the first to name the stars.
Nor did I exaggerate in saying this to her. His grey beard had a look of infinity about it as I walked by his side in those Kentish woods when I was a boy. Ah! beautiful when.
I’ve often felt like jumping over my shoulders and racing back to my childhood. As I dreamed by those coral seas I came to love the memory of that child more than life itself. I was young then, so to speak. It was only a very few years since I had laid that boy in the grave, disillusioned, dead, with a bruised, cut lip and a black eye. I buried him in the solitudes of an unknown country, buried him deep, too. Under his head I pillowed all his childhood dreams. What dreams they’d been! Ah me! Even now, after so many years, I go back to that grave in the dead of night, lift the stone slab and gaze on the dead face. He’s as white as marble. I don’t think he’ll dissolve into dust till I’m dead. He often creeps out of the forests and shadows into my room by night, sits at my feet and sings to me. We were twins once; now I stand ashamed in his divine presence.
I could write a big book about that boy and I, what we thought to do together when we grew big, when we had crossed the ocean—such wondrous deeds of chivalry to fair women and comradeship to brave men. He was plucky, that little pal of mine; would run by my side on the ships’ decks and cheer me in the wild, stormy nights up aloft. It was he who led me through the vast, tropical forests, telling me to seek Waylao. The world’s too rotten and cynical to hear all that he wished to do or all the songs he sang.