“Yes; one is an author and the other a musician. They live happily together on a lonely islet of the Paumotus Group. A late cannibal chief, who is a native of these isles, is their beloved attendant; and with him they commune in reverent dreams when the nights are long. There, on their solitary islet, they discuss their experiences among the slaves in civilised lands and the haunting memories of their childhood’s days. Dressed in the native costume of these parts, a loin-cloth only, they have long since resigned themselves to the inevitable. They now see the pompous boast of civilisation and its brazen virtue as a monstrous, hypocritical curse, a malignant fungus growth on the soul of truth, of beauty and true happiness.”
“No!” quoth I in my intense interest, quite forgetting the stern gleam of those grey eyes of art over my first interruption. I almost trembled at my foolish assertion. For a moment he ceased speaking, pulled his beard half viciously, and gazed at me like some towering schoolmaster as I humbly stood there. Like all men who have lived long in exile, one syllable of another’s voice was a tremendous interval of rude interruption. Once more he continued: “These two men whom I spoke of ere you interrupted still follow their professions. One plays on the violin to the winds, and the other writes down his aspirations on the sea sands and thoughtfully watches the tides wash the words away. They chop wood, grow pine-apples, bananas, sago, taro, tobacco, and lead an ideal existence.”
Delighted with my obvious interest, he meandered on:
“I know of another exile who lives near Guadalcanar, in the Solomon Isles. Clothed in rags that covered an emaciated body, he escaped from his own country by stowing away on a sailing-ship. He was a poet.
“After years of adventurous wandering he has settled in a wild, lonely spot near a tribal village where not so long since the folk were ferocious cannibals and addicted to the horrors of sacrificial heathen ceremonies. I saw this poet myself, for I happened to go that way two years agone.
“He had learnt the native tongue, and so makes a good living by engraving his rhymes and improvisations on the brains of the islanders. He dresses as the natives dress, in the scantiest of attire, and lives and eats as they do. The last I saw of him was when he dwelt in a comfortable parvanue near the mountain villages. He has reached the zenith of his ambitions: he wears long hair, and, standing on his lecture-stump in the native villages, he retells, in emotional, eloquent verse, their old legends and glorious tales of far-off barbarian battles, and thanks God that at last he has found a tribe of men who understand his special gift, and who wildly applaud his efforts.”
“Well now!” was all that I could utter as he ceased.
He gave a little cough as he finished his discourse, a cough that almost musically expressed the contemptuous exasperation that embittered his mind.
I would not assert that the foregoing is an exact verbal account of all that the old artist said to me, but I vouch that it is a faithful reproduction of his central ideas and all that my memory retains and which seems worth the recording. And I give it here as an illustration of the strange characters that are to be found living an isolated life in the wide spaces, the far-scattered isles of the North and South Pacific.
I stayed with that strange man for several hours. He was delighted when I played my violin to him. To my astonishment he commenced to sing some old song—Scenes that are Brightest, if my memory does not fail me. He had a fine voice, and looked annoyed when the dusky kiddies of my retinue shrieked with laughter as he sang.