When I entered I was somewhat surprised at the hangings on the walls. Pictures of the kaiser, pretty scenes along the Rhine, German castles,—what had they to do with Stevenson? what with Colonel Logan and British occupation? The chambers are so large and the woodwork is so somber that these pictures fairly shrieked out at one, like a flock of eagles in high altitudes. I felt almost guilty, myself, simply for being in the presence of such enemy decorations, and remarked about them to my guide.
"The colonel won't touch them," he said, respectfully. "They are the property of the German Governor, and till the disposition of the islands is finally settled, the colonel won't move them. He's a soldier, y'know."
We came out again upon the veranda just in time to see Colonel and Mrs. Logan arrive in their trap. He was tall, straight, an icy chill of reserve in his bearing. Mrs. Logan was a pretty young woman, as warm and cordial as he was stiff. He preceded her up the steps and was saluted by the sergeant with the explanation of my presence.
"Am showing this gentleman round a bit," he said.
"Has he had a look round?" said the colonel, perfunctorily, saluted stiffly, and passed by as though I didn't exist. As Mrs. Logan came up behind she suppressed a smile that threatened to make her face still more charming, and the two passed within.
I smiled to myself. How should I have been received had Stevenson come up those steps that day? To the colonel there was nothing in my journey to the tomb. Nor was there anything in it to the soldiers at the barracks. Yet the fact that I had been there made me one of them.
"How'd ye like it?" asked a soldier on my return, with the same manner as though I had gone to see a cock-fight. "Blaim me if Oi'd climb that yer 'ill on a day as 'ot as this to see a dead man's grave."
They asked me if I'd like to take a swim in the stream Stevenson liked so well, and on the strength of my great interest three of them got leave to accompany me. They winked to me when the sergeant agreed. We wandered along, jumping fences, crossing a grassy slope, and cutting through a spare woods. The bamboo-trees creaked like rusty hinges. Cocoa plantations stood ripe for picking. The luscious mango kept high above our reach, so that we were compelled to devise means of getting at it. The soldiers seemed concerned about my seeing everything, tasting everything, learning everything the place afforded. We chatted sociably, plunging about in the stream, with only a few stray natives looking on. Then we made our way back as leisurely as possible, they being in no hurry to return to the barracks. How I got back to Apia I haven't the faintest recollection.
5
I had set out to see the world without any definite notion of whither I was drifting. I had bartered the liquid sunshine of Hawaii for Fiji's humid shade, and twisted a day in a knot between Suva and Apia so that I hardly knew whether or not Fiji was more devilishly hot than Samoa. And then for four days I endured the stench of ripening bananas in the hold of a resurrected vessel which, if ships are feminine, as sailors seem to believe, was decidedly beyond the age of spinsterhood. I was headed for New Zealand. Little wonder, then, that when I found that we had finally arrived with our olfactory senses still sane and were about to land in a real country with real cities and a social life dangerously near perfection, I felt as though I were coming to after ether.