[CHAPTER XVI]
PAGO PAGO TO SUVA
We sailed from Pago Pago for Fiji on the afternoon of June 18th. Just as the anchor had been catted and the yacht was filling away on her first tack a madly paddled canoe shot alongside and a letter was thrown aboard. It was addressed only to the "Yotta," no individual being specified, and ran as follows:
"Talofa. My love to you. Please send me one bicycle."
It was signed by one of the handmaidens of Seuka, the taupo of Pago Pago. For a simple, direct appeal this struck me as coming pretty near the record, and it is a pleasure to relate that, six months later, it met with a deserved reward. There are several ways to reach it, but no smoother road to the South Sea maiden's heart than the "bicycle path."
As we stood in past the Adams a crowd of our native friends on the dock began singing the plaintive half Samoan, half English farewell song, "Tuta-pai, mai feleni"—("Good-bye, my Friend") and the oft repeated refrain, "O Ai neppa will fa-get you," followed us till the yacht passed out of hearing around the point. The kindliest, handsomest and most amiable people in all the South Pacific, these Samoans.
It was our hope to put up a new record for the Samoa-Fiji run, as we had done for that from the Marquesas to Tahiti, but the flukiness of the wind, which became apparent as soon as we were clear of the harbour, held out little promise of success. The air was abnormally clear and the sky, unusually deep and rich in colour, hardly flecked by a cloud. The sea, owing to the veering tendency of the wind, was light and even. The wind was blowing fitfully from its regular quarter, E.S.E., when we came out in the early afternoon, but shortly began coming in puffs from due east. Then it blew slightly more southerly for a half hour, before hauling up to E.N.E., and so all afternoon, as a tide creeps foot by foot up a beach, it kept chopping around to the north. By dark it had worked on to N.N.W., and was blowing, not steadily, but in jerky puffs of ominous import.
The sunset that evening was a sinister thing of red and black. The sun, glowing like a huge coal, dropped down behind the southwest end of Tutuila just as the veering wind drove up a bank of sooty clouds from the lee of the island and began blowing it to pieces. The clouds tore up into inky strips, darkly opaque, like the bars of a grate, and between the bars, sullenly, murkily, hotly red, the unobscured sky glowed like the inside of a furnace. For the space of a minute, or two, or three, this held, with its magnified reflection upon the indolently heaving sea showing in alternate welts of glimmering purple and sang du boeuf; then a new flight of cloud hove up from the lee of the island and, as a closed door quenches the light of a furnace, hid the fire of the west behind its impenetrable pall. The mate characterized it politely to the ladies as an "angry sunset," and then went forward and alluded to it in mixed but forceful metaphor as "bloody murder swingin' on the hinges o' hell."
An insufferably hot and stuffy night gave way to an equally unpleasant day. The sea was oily smooth, the sky overcast with a dull, translucent film of cloud, and the sun, heavily ringed, grew increasingly dimmer as the greyness thickened overhead. The run to noon from three P. M. of the 18th was an even hundred miles.