So runs the entry. I feel it’s worth reproducing if only to show the material, sanguine side of youth. Besides, it’s honest to let one see both sides. I’ve always been lucky. When I first ran away to sea I got pally with an ordinary seaman who gave me lessons in boxing. One may imagine how often I blessed him afterwards. I never dreamed how invaluable a commodity a trained fist was for one who loved peace and who trusted and felt kindly towards men.
CHAPTER XI
Grimes and I fishing—Fish enjoy the Joke—Grog Shanty Chorus and Incidents—The Drunken Settler—The Steaming of Romantic Brains—On the Old Hulk—I cannot sleep—My Romance of the Figurehead—The Hamlet in the Mountains—The Phantom Burglars of the Enchanted Castle
AFTER our adventure with Rimbo the priest and the half-caste girl, Grimes and I returned to the shanty, considerably impressed by the scene we had witnessed in the forest. The idol and the pillared trees of that natural temple, the beauty of the half-caste girl kneeling at the altar of dark superstition, haunted us.
For several days we were very moody and spent our time fishing in the shore lagoons, which were connected with the ocean by narrow creeks. It was perfect sport. Almost every minute we’d pull in large vermilion-striped denizens of the deep. The fish, as they came into view on the end of our lines, seemed to enjoy the novelty of the game, their slit mouths wide open, their bulged eyes agog at the joke of it all—so it seemed!
As we sat in the grog shanty that night Grimes became confidential, and confessed to me that he was a bit gone on Waylao. I wasn’t surprised to hear that something was wrong with him. His fund of conviviality seemed to have quite dried up and he had become something of a dreamer. The boisterous, quick steps, the hilarious jigs had changed into sentimental songs, which he accompanied on his banjo. Nothing surprised me in those days. The soberest-looking men would suddenly get entangled with widowed or discarded native queens, who were ever ready to overstep the Marquesan moral code—and that’s saying something!
I heard wondrous tales in that grog shanty. Strange men would rush in from nowhere, stare fiercely as they drank their rum, tell us how they had ascended heathen thrones and been hastily disillusioned. Nor do I exaggerate when I say that it was not unusual for a white man, who had ascended the throne of some isle by a strategic marriage, to be suddenly disturbed in the wedding chamber by half-a-dozen irate heathen monarchs who had married into the same dynasty about a week before!
So one will see that the heathen countries differ little from the civilised, where men aspire, enter asylums and shout through some night of memory: “I am God, and there is no other God but me!”
Had some Homer roamed the South Seas in those days he could have memorised many a wondrous odyssey. Nearly every grog shanty from Fiji to Honolulu was crammed with fearsome experiences. The scenic effect on entering a bar in those days was this—a crew of fierce-bearded chins that were thrust forward in murderous defiance towards some opposing crew of fierce-eyed, scrubby, untubbed men who strongly challenged a mighty assertion.