“No,” she said a little more softly; “it is years since I was in Samoa. ... My father is buried there.”
“You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?”
She shifted in her chair. “Romantic!” Her tone conveyed a very slight uneasiness and vagueness. “I am afraid you must ask some one else about that sort of thing. I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that was half-barbaric.” Here she laughed slightly.
Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off. “See—a vessel!” I said; and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking. I saw that she too was watching idly.
At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: “Yes, I suppose life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?”
“Indeed, then,” she replied decisively, “you are not to suppose anything of the kind. The danger is not alone for the white people.”
At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to explain what she meant. She thought a moment, and then briefly, but clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim of civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns; how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest and purest, the valour of nationality. These phrases are my own—the substance, not the fashion, of her speech.
“You do not, then,” I said, “believe wholly in the unselfishness of missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?”
“I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to men-of-war’s men;” and she paused, listening to a song which came from the after-part of the ship. The air was very still, and a few of the words of the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.
Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the first-class passengers near joined in the refrain: