It was a magical world, crammed with wonder and goodness. A little bird inspiring a girl’s soul with faith; and lo! she has strangled her wicked thoughts with the flight of those disguised, swift-winged goddesses, those goddesses of a creed which had a more salutary effect on those wild Marquesan people than all the denominations of the civilised world put together.
The missionaries had a hard task to wrench their deep faith in that glorious, poetic superstition from the native heart. The wonderful heathen atmosphere would cling like distilled moonlight to their mystery-loving brains. That tiny, grey, Catholic, wooden abbey, with its little steeple and the Virgin’s figure peeping from the South Sea chestnuts, often peeped in vain. It could not dispel the wonders of the great tikis (wooden gods) which stood in the depths of their forest colonnades—supreme, upright, ever watching, ever smiling with that Fate-like grin on the wooden slit-mouth, as their bulging pearl-white eyes stared on through the ages.
Waylao was reared up in such an atmosphere; her brain was a veritable mythological bible of heathen magic and its wonderful goddesses and gods. She told me many things about mythology, for from her earliest childhood she had listened to her mother’s tales. Indeed I heard a good many strange tales from old Lydia herself. Sometimes when I had little to do I would go up to her cottage and, smoking my pipe, listen to the native woman’s yarns. Though the old woman looked a full-blooded Marquesan, she declared that she was a descendant of that South Sea Bluebeard, Thakombau, the last of the Fijian kings.
No one who faced Lydia ever left her presence without hearing such exclamations as: “Me! the descendants of great kinks [kings] stand ’ere before yous!”
Here she would strike her bosom and, assuming a majestic pose, roll the whites of her eyes and shout: “Me! tink of it, ’aves to feed chickens and work wiles that lazy hussies Wayee sleeps in bed, wears flowers in hair, and tink she beautiful white womans.”
Here she would purse her big mouth out with rage, roll her eyes and roar: “Wayee! Wayee! you tink you white womans. You tink you great lady, better than your old mother. Go you at once and get white mans one dozen eggs from chicken-’ouse.”
Waylao had so often listened to the old woman’s garrulous descriptions of the palatial splendour of Fiji, those ancestral halls wherein her rumoured relatives lolled in royal comfort by the Rewa river, that she often looked with longing for the day when she might go to Fiji. She did go some months after, but it was on a quest that she had not anticipated in her wildest imaginings.
I will now revert to my immediate doings at that time. I had been away with Grimes to Hivaoa. I had secured several musical engagements among the French residents who lived on the coast. When we returned to Tai-o-hae we were both once more warmly welcomed by the rough men of the shanty. I was always welcomed there because of my violin. Indeed I had formed a scratch orchestra from the members of that wild crew. This musical gathering was composed of two banjos, two mouth-organs, piccolo, flute and clappers, with now and then a jews’ harp thrown in. One can imagine that it was not suitable for rendering artistic selections from the works of the great masters. Still, the combination answered our purpose, for it made the shellbacks happy.
About this period a French official presented me with a cornet, and I at once started to practise it in the shanty. For a while the brave shellbacks tolerated my thrilling endeavours on that cracked instrument. Then they rose en masse and threatened to take my life. After that I went into the mountains to practise. The echoes would fly across the ranges, and scare the parrots and the natives in the villages just below. I became an imparadised being in the eyes of some of the old-time Marquesan chiefs through that cornet. They would creep up the slopes as I blasted forth the shrill notes, then go on their knees before me and beg for one blow. I do not exaggerate, but I achieved more fame as a musician through that old cornet and my endeavours to master it than ever I did from my violin performances. Some of the natives fairly worshipped me. I only had to go up into the hills and peal forth the scales to cause a general hubbub amongst the natives on the plantations. Indeed the white overseer came up to my secluded mountain studio and said: “Look you here, young feller, if you blow that b—— thing off in this ’ere group, I’ll have you shot, or ejected from the isles altogether.”
“Surely I can play the cornet out here in the South Seas,” said I.