South-Sea Idyls

by Charles Warren Stoddard

At this point my crew suddenly rose in the bows of the canoe, making several outlandish flourishes with his broad paddle. I was about to demand the occasion of his sudden insanity, when we began to grate over some crumbling substance that materially impeded our progress and suggested all sorts of disagreeable sensations,—such as knife-grinding in the next yard, saw-filing round the corner, etc. It was as though we were careering madly over a multitude of fine-tooth combs. With that caution which is inseparable from canoe-cruising in every part of the known world, I leaned over the side of my personal property and penetrated the bewildering depths of the coral sea.

Were we, I asked myself, suspended about two feet above a garden of variegated cauliflowers? Or were the elements wafting us over a minute winter-forest, whose fragile boughs were loaded with prismatic crystals?

The scene was constantly changing: now it seemed a disordered bed of roses,—pink, and white, and orange; presently we were floating in the air, looking down upon a thousand-domed mosque, pale in the glamour of the Oriental moon; and then a wilderness of bowers presented itself,—bowers whose fixed leaves still seemed to quiver in the slight ripple of the sea,—blossoming for a moment in showers of buds, purple, and green, and gold, but fading almost as soon as born. I could scarcely believe my eyes, when these tiny, though marvellously brilliant fish shot suddenly out from some lace-like structure, each having the lurid and flame-like beauty of sulphurous fire, and all turning instantly, in sudden consternation at finding us so near, and secreting themselves in the coral pavilion that amply sheltered them. Among the delicate anatomy of these frozen ferns our light canoe was crashing on its way. I saw the fragile structures overwhelmed with a single blow from the young savage, who stood erect, propelling us onward amid the general ruins. With my thumb and finger I annihilated the laborious monuments of centuries, and saw havoc and desolation in our wake.

There, in one of God's reef-walled and cliff-sheltered aquaria, we drifted, while the sky and sea were glowing with the final, triumphant gush of sunset radiance. Fefe at last broke the silence, with an interrogation: "Well, how you feel?" "Fefe," I replied, "I feel as though I were some good and faithful bee, sinking into a sphere of amber, for a sleep of a thousand years." Fefe gave a deep-mouthed and expressive grunt, as he laid his brown profile against the sunset sky, thereby displaying his solitary ear-ring to the best advantage, and with evident personal satisfaction. "And how do you feel, Fefe?" I asked. He was mum for a moment; arched his back like any wholesome animal when the sun has struck clean through it; ejaculated an ejaculation with his tongue and teeth that cannot possibly be spelled in English, and thereupon his nostril quivered spasmodically, and was only comforted by the immediate application of his nose-flute, through which dulcet organ he confessed his deep and otherwise unutterable joy. I blessed him for it, though there were but three notes, all told, and those minors and a trifle flat.

Fefe's impassioned soul having subsided, we both looked over to beautiful Morea, nine miles away. How her peaks shone like steel, and her valleys looked full of sleep! while here and there one golden ray lingered for a moment to put the final touch to a fruit it was ripening or a flower it was painting,—for they each have their perfect work allotted to them, and they don't leave it half completed.

It was just the hour that harmonizes everything in nature, and when there is no possible discord in all the universe. The fishes were baptizing themselves by immersion in space, and kept leaping into the air, like momentary inches of chain-lightning. Our islet swam before us, spiritualized,—suspended, as it were, above the sea,—ready at any moment to fade away. The waves had ceased beating upon the reef; the clear, low notes of a bell vibrating from the shore called us to prayer. Fefe knew it, and was ready,—so was I; and with bare heads and souls utterly at peace we gave our hearts to God—for the time being!

Then came the hum of voices and the rustle of renewed life. On we pressed towards our islet, under the increasing shadows of the dusk. A sloping beach received us; the young cocoa-palms embraced one another with fringed branches. Through green and endless corridors we saw the broad disk of the full moon hanging above the hill.

Fefe at once chose a palm, and having ascended to its summit cast down its fruit. Descending, he planted a stake in the earth, and striking a nut against its sharpened top soon laid open the fibrous husk, with which a fire was kindled.

Taking two peeled nuts in his hands, he struck one against the other and laid open the skull of it,—a clear sort of scalping that aroused me to enthusiasm. There is one end of a cocoa-nut's skull as delicate as a baby's, and a well-directed tap does the business; possibly the same result would follow with those of infants of the right age,—twins, for instance. Fefe agrees with me in this theory, now first given to the public.

Then followed much talk, on many topics, over our tropical supper,—said supper consisting of sea-weed salad, patent self-stuffing banana-sausages, and cocoa-nut hash. We argued somewhat, also, but in South Pacific fashion,—which would surely spoil, if imported; I only remember, and will record, that Fefe regarded the nose-flute as a triumph of art, and considered himself no novice in musical science, as applicable to nose-flutes in a land where there is scarcely a nose without its particular flute, and many a flute is silent forever, because its special nose is laid among the dust.