“This is the rough of it,” he said. “To write poetry here is difficult. When I was at Heidelberg and Paris I often spent nights writing sonnets. That merely tells the sense of the himene, but cannot convey the joy or sorrow of it. Well, let’s sink dull care fifty fathoms deep! Look at those band-boys! So long as they have plenty of rum or beer or wine and their instruments, they care little for food. Watch them. Now they are dry and inactive. Wait till the alcohol wets them, They will touch the sky.”
Llewellyn’s deep-set eyes under the beetling brows were lighting with new fires.
His idea of inactivity and drought was sublimated, for the musicians were never still a moment. They played mostly syncopated airs of the United States, popular at the time. All primitive people, or those less advanced in civilization or education, prefer the rag-time variants of the American negro or his imitators, to so-called good or classical music. It is like simple language, easily understood, and makes a direct appeal to their ears and their passions. It is the slang or argot of music, hot off the griddle for the average man’s taste, without complexities or stir to musing and melancholy.
The musicians had drunk much wine and rum, and now wanted only beer. That was the order of their carouse. Beer was expensive at two francs a bottle, and so a conscientious native had been delegated to give it out slowly. He had the barrel containing the quartbottles between his legs while he sat at the table, and each was doled out only after earnest supplications and much music.
“Horoa mai te pia!” “More beer!” they implored.
“Himene” said the inexorable master of the brew.
Up came the brass and the accordion, and forth went the inebriated strains.
Between their draughts of beer—they drank always from the bottles—the Tahitians often recurred to the song of Kelly. Having no g, l, or s among the thirteen letters of their missionary-made alphabet, they pronounced the refrain as follows:
Hahrayrooyah! I’m a boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!
Hahrayrooyah! Hizzandow! To tave ut fruh tin!
Landers being very big physically, they admired him greatly, and his company having been two generations in Tahiti, they knew his history. They now and again called him by his name among Tahitians, “Taporo-Tane,” (“The Lime-Man”), and sang: