It had been a wild night. A storm had swept the Pacific Ocean into an infinite expanse of flaming foam. Earth, air and sea had become, for a while, a mighty harp for the passions of the elements to play upon, while the great mountain peaks caught the vast cloud wracks flying beneath the moon on their pinnacles. Each moment I saw those mists tossed into glorious silvered waves of multitudinous shapes, as they broke away and, like raging phantom seas, rolled across the sky.
There was no rain. Only the wild song of the pines and bread-fruits on the ranges were singing to the storm. Then the distant ocean ceased its wild tumbling, the passion of the winds died away, the long-drawn thunder of the seas on the shore reefs decreased, and only after wide intervals came the moan of those ramping shore chargers. The landscape of forest and mountain scene appeared like some mystical shadow-land as the visionary light of the constellations shone again across infinity. I recall the creeping natives moving along like dusky ghosts after the storm, only their shaggy heads dripping wet with the heavy, silvered rains of brilliant moonlight that fell glimpsing through the palms.
Again I fancy I hear them singing their legendary songs, strains of wild music telling of the dark ages. I see them sitting or dancing by their huts, embrace and whirl away, vanish in the shadows like the phantoms of some far-off, forgotten world.
Such are my memories of the night when Pauline came to me out of the shadows. I had wandered back to the vicinity of the grog shanty. As I stood smoking, and in deep reflection, I saw two figures pass out of the shanty’s saloon door; away they went staggering along the same old track, bound for that lonely habitation by the mountains—it was John L—— and his everlasting dodging pal. Pauline’s father was quite drunk. I could hear his wailing voice singing some English song till the musical groans faded right away up in the hills.
Then she came, Pauline, the white girl. Her eyes were shining with fear as she hovered by the shanty door. Those shellbacks and all the types of derelicts were singing their wildest songs as she listened for her father’s voice.
So beautiful did she appear to me as we met each other beneath the palms that I half fancied she might be some spiritual creation treading the mossy earth.
I had seen her before, but that did not destroy the impression she made. I suppose I had a fit of my old insanity upon me. It may have been the full moon, or hereditary taint, the strain of some mad ancestor. Anyway everything appeared beautiful to me; even the roughest of men seemed to have shining eyes from which gleamed a glory of divinity, in strange disguise, expressing some hidden poetry of the universe.
I was playing my violin when she came, and still played on as she stepped out of the bamboo thickets. Standing there in the shadows before me, she seemed as ethereal as the vision of my figurehead.
I trembled from head to foot. She looked up and said: “How beautiful!”
I had once hoped to outrival Paganini and make men stare with wonder as I played before them. I had hoped to do fine things, but never in all the glorious fervour of imaginative ambition had I dreamed of such a tremendous success as the praise of those lips.