“Here’s the whisky, Dad,” said she, as the cockatoo looked down from its perch and shrieked: “Gabby-ell! Gabby-ell! Kai-kai-too!”
In a moment that weird symbol in wood, that represented all that was unromantic to her ardent soul, ceased its ominous “tip-e-te-tap-tap” as the old sailor looked up and spied his daughter.
“Thankee, thankee, kid!” he growled as he put forth his hand. Such was the domestic atmosphere that the girl had rushed back to.
After the young apprentice had waved his farewell to Gabrielle he strolled away under the palms. “Well, she’s a beautiful creature. Who’d have thought of meeting her in this wild place? She’s ethereal, too beautiful to make love to,” he sighed.
Possibly the contrast between Gabrielle Everard and the Solomon Island mop-headed girls etherealised her natural beauty in his eyes. This was a fatal outlook for Hillary, considering the girl’s impulsive nature and his chances in the love affair that he had unknowingly embarked upon. And possibly this outlook of his was the result of outward glamour having greatly influenced his indwelling life. He had succeeded in making himself the more unfitted to cope with his immediate surroundings by poring over such writers as Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Rousseau and Ruskin. But still, these writers, with their mad denunciations and rhapsodies, had helped to awaken in Hillary’s soul that adoration for the beautiful, that love for living art that nourishes a delight in God’s work. The young apprentice did not digest the whole contents of those volumes; he was too young to grasp their full meaning, but his mind had grasped enough to make him a kind of derelict missionary of the beautiful. When the moods came to him he would bury his nose in the pages of Byron, Shelley, Keats, etc. And the influence gathered from those poets possibly filled his head with vague imaginings over beauty and innocence, feeding the fires of wild aspiration that cannot be realised in this world, and were never realised and acted up to by the poets who wrote the poems.
As he walked on thoughts of the strange girl on the lagoon would haunt his brain. He had quite made up his mind to secure a berth on the sailing-ship that was leaving for New South Wales in a few days, but Gabrielle Everard’s eyes seemed to have magically changed the future for him.
It was almost with relief that he gave his arm to the drunken shellback who suddenly appeared from nowhere, struck him on the back and spat a stream of tobacco juice across Hillary’s poetic vision, taking him completely away from himself. Then the shellback faded away, went off shouting some wild sea chantey as he rolled over the slopes, bound for the sailor’s Morning and Evening Star—the distant light of Parsons’s grog shanty. It was getting dark. That night Hillary seemed inspired. He sat outside the wooden building where he lodged and played his violin to the shellback, traders and natives who came over the slopes to listen. Mango Pango, the pretty Polynesian servant, grinned from ear to ear, showing her pearly teeth, as she danced beneath the palms that grew right up to the verandah of his landlady’s homestead. Even the congregated sailormen ceased their unmelodious oaths as they pulled their beards and listened to his playing.
Hillary wasn’t a master on the violin; his career had been too erratic for him to get the necessary practice to accomplish great things in instrumental playing. But still he could perform the Poet and Peasant overture and most of the stock pieces, besides playing heathen melodies that sent the natives into ecstasies of delight. His sailor critics swore that his extemporised sea-jigs were the most classical of compositions that they had ever heard. For when he played the South Sea maids threw their limbs about in rhythmical swerves, till the soles of their pretty bare feet sometimes seemed turned toward the South Sea moon! Mango Pango, Marga Maroo and Topsy Turvy were dancing to their heart’s content as the hills re-echoed the shellbacks’ laughter and the wild chorus of O, For Rio Grande when the concert was disturbed. For notwithstanding the wild surroundings, the hilarity and awful oaths, piety roamed those savage isles.
As the strains of the Poet and Peasant overture trembled from Hillary’s violin a tall, handsome savage, attired in European clothes, stepped out from beneath the palms and complimented the young Englishman on his artistic performance. He was an educated savage, and naturally conducted himself in public just as a late missionary from the North-West Mission School at Honolulu should do. He was certainly an attractive-looking being, possibly through his mother being a Papuan and his father a handsome Malayan. Even the shellbacks pulled their whiskers and beards, and put on their best behaviour as he stood there and spoke as becomes a Rajah and late missionary who has “saved” thousands of souls; for he studied the philosophy of the Psalms so that they might fit in with his views. And it might be mentioned at once that he did not allow idealistic views to disturb the nice equilibrium of his earthly requirements. When he was excited his speech lapsed into the native pidgin-English. But he spoke perfectly as he addressed Hillary, saying: “You play exceedingly well, young man, and your rendering of Spohr’s concerto strikes me as superb. For perfect intonation and verve your performance outrivals the rendering by Monsieur De T——, whom I heard play it at the Tivoli, Honolulu.” So spake the civilised heathen.
“’Ark at ’im! an ole kanaka missionary!” whispered Bunky Lory, the ordinary seaman.