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Title: Mid-Pacific
Author: Hall, James Norman (1887-1951)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928
Date first posted: 20 October 2018
Date last updated: 20 October 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1572

This ebook was produced by Al Haines, Alex White,
Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital format,
we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

In section II of Chapter I, we have written "Capitaine de Frgate",
where the printed edition abbreviates "Capitaine" as "Capne" with
"ne" as a superscript.






MID-PACIFIC

BY JAMES NORMAN HALL





TO R.M.C., G.C.G., AND L.L.W.





        MR. WORMLEY: Now _my_ choice would be an island in the
        mid-Pacific. What a delightful place that would be for
        reading and writing!

        MR. THROCKMORTON: No doubt. But, my dear Wormley, do
        _you_ write?

        MR. WORMLEY: At times--at times--mere trifles.

        MR. THROCKMORTON: Of what sort, may I ask?

        MR. WORMLEY: Oh, of any sort: fancies, little fragments
        of experience, and what not.




NOTE


On the beach near my little house on the island of Tahiti, there is an
ancient pandanus tree perched high on its stilt-like roots as though for
a wider view of the lonely sea before it. I often sit there of an
afternoon, sometimes thinking of nothing at all, deep in reverie,
conscious in a vegetative sort of way of earth and sky and southeast
wind and of the faint thunder of the surf on the barrier reef, but
scarcely more aware of my identity than the pandanus tree is aware of
its own. At other times my mind is busy sorting over memories, or with
reflections about some book I have just been reading--perhaps re-reading
for the fourth or fifth time; and then my hand fumbles its way to my
notebook pocket and before sundown I find that I have covered many pages
with scribbling, illegible to any one but myself.

Perhaps I should let it remain illegible instead of neatly transcribing
it on pages of manuscript. I can't say that I have been urged to do this
latter, or even that any one has so much as suggested that I should. But
it has occurred to me that an individual here and there might be briefly
entertained by some of these papers, and so I have gathered them
together in this little book.

There is, I confess, one other reason: I thought that, if a sufficient
number of individuals should be thus entertained, they might tell other
individuals, and they, in turn, read and tell others, and so on, in
which case I might eventually receive from my publishers the heartening
news that--but enough. I have already said more than I should, perhaps.
And I can truthfully say that this consideration does not weigh very
heavily with me. Fortunately I have emancipated myself from the need of
many material possessions or of the means for acquiring them. I have
long since learned to estimate my wealth in the Diogenic sense--in terms
of the things I can do without. And if some possible reader, after
glancing hastily through these pages, feels that he can do without my
book, let me assure him, or her, that I am the last man in the world to
be either surprised or offended.

J. N. H.
ARU, TAHITI
_November 1, 1927_




TABLE OF CONTENTS


  I. Occupation: Journalist
  II. One Kind of Journey
  III. K.F.I.--Los Angeles
  IV. Indian Country
  V. A Happy Hedonist
  VI. Prairie Winter
  VII. Under the Arctic Circle
  VIII. Glamorous Places
  IX. Leviticus Redivivus
  X. Some Island Grandmothers
  XI. A Person from Porlock
  XII. Settling Down in Polynesia
  XIII. Tahiti's Coconut-Radio Service
  XIV. Public Benches and Public Benching




CHAPTER I. _OCCUPATION_: JOURNALIST


[I]

I was at a loose end that spring, in common with hundreds of thousands
of other men, most of them just out of the demobilization camps, with
the ink on their army discharge papers scarcely dried. Day after day
there had been a shrieking of sirens and a tooting of whistles in New
York harbor as the troop ships returned from France. The canyon-like
streets echoed and rechoed with a confused tumult of shouting, and
looking up, one saw tier after tier of blurred faces at the windows of
lofty office buildings. There were parades up and down Fifth Avenue,
regimental reunions, public receptions, innumerable addresses of
welcome. But the most memorable sight, to me, was the line of soldiers
filing eagerly in and happily out of every shop where ready-made,
civilian clothing was sold. I remember vividly my own keen pleasure as I
came from one of those places with my uniform in a paper parcel under my
arm. That chapter of experience was definitely closed.

It was bright, windy March weather. The days were lengthening
perceptibly, but for all that they were not long enough by half for the
enjoyment of the blessed sense of freedom one had. A week passed, and
during this time I was as idle as it is possible to be. I rose late of a
morning and had breakfast in my room. Then, with a book in my pocket or
under my arm, I would seek out the quietest places I could find. Usually
I spent the mornings in Bronx Park, and the afternoons in wandering
through the Art Museum or the National History Museum. But it was
impossible to find solitude in New York, and one wanted it badly after
the experience overseas. I felt that I could never have enough of it
now, even though I were to spend the rest of my life on some uninhabited
island, a thousand miles from the nearest steamship route. 'I might seek
out such an island,' I thought, as I stood in a subway train, tightly
wedged in a solid mass of humanity. 'There must be many of them
scattered over the seven seas.' I had some money--not a large amount,
but enough to carry me to the other side of the world if I wished to go
so far. The more I thought of an island sojourn the more the idea
appealed to me, and the upshot of the matter was that after many
imaginary journeys, I decided to set out, in reality, for a period of
wandering among some of the remote archipelagos of the South Pacific.

A friend, resident in New York, went with me for purposes of
identification, to the passport office. Prospective travelers were lined
five deep in front of the counter, for the great horde of souvenir
hunters was already preparing for the invasion of the battlefields of
France. The clerks were being harassed with questions from a dozen
applicants at once, and had reason, I thought, to be out of patience and
temper. My turn came at length, and a young woman, seizing an
application blank, said, 'I'll make this out for you. Save time.' She
did it very rapidly: name, description of bearer, distinguishing marks
or features, place of birth, date of birth. I answered with alacrity
until she asked, 'What occupation?'

'I haven't any,' I replied, 'unless "ex-soldier" is considered one.'

'What were you before the war?'

'Oh, various things, but none of them will do now. Can't you leave the
space blank?'

'No,' she replied, 'I must write in something.' She waited with pen
poised. A drop of ink gathered at the point and splashed on the paper.
She blotted it impatiently.

'Please hurry!' she said. 'There are others waiting.'

There were many others waiting. I heard behind me a nervous tapping of
feet and several exasperated sighs.

'Why don't you put down "Journalist"?' my friend suggested. 'Didn't you
used to write things occasionally for newspapers and magazines?'

'Yes, but only occasionally,' I said. 'It was never an occupation. I
couldn't be called a----'

'It doesn't matter; "Journalist" will do,' said the young woman, writing
rapidly. 'Have you your photographs? The fee is ten dollars. Next,
please!'


[II]

Several months later I was sitting on the deck of a sixty-ton schooner,
eating a dish of rice and red beans. The schooner was called the Toafa.
There were six of us aboard--a Chinaman named Chan Lee, captain and
owner of the vessel, four Polynesian sailors, natives of the Low
Archipelago, and myself. We were carrying a cargo of general merchandise
to be exchanged among the Low Islands for copra and pearl-shell. The
tiny cabin was alive with cockroaches and copra bugs, and day after day
for many weeks we had been sharing with them our rice and red beans.
Nevertheless, although I was conscious, at moments, of a wistful longing
for the flesh-pots of New York, I wouldn't have gone back there--not for
any consideration, and at this particular moment I had only to lift my
eyes to see, on the port bow, an island so lost in the immense waste of
the Pacific that it may truthfully be called one of the authentic ends
of the earth.

Its Polynesian name is _Hoparoa_, which means 'The Farthest Land,' or
more literally, 'The Very Last.' This is not quite true, however.
Another crumb of land lies one hundred miles farther to the south. After
calling at Hoparoa, the Toafa was to proceed to this other island and
return to Hoparoa for cargo and a supply of rain-water before
continuing the homeward voyage. I decided that an island called 'The
Farthest Land' was far enough for me. Furthermore, I was a little tired
of rice and red beans, so I decided to go ashore here and wait till Chan
Lee came back.

All atolls are very much alike in their general features, but one never
tires of seeing them, and it is hard even to imagine that places so
solitary can belong to the world of reality. Hoparoa was smaller than
most of those I had seen, and Chan told me there were about one hundred
inhabitants. In shape it is an almost perfect circle, three quarters of
it barren reef enclosing a lagoon five miles wide. Four small islands
are threaded on the reef, the largest of them, where the village is,
being a mile and a half long. Another, of about the same size, lies to
windward across the lagoon. There is a good pass through the reef where
the water shoals to three fathoms over a forest of coral of every
conceivable variety of shape and color. We came abreast of it shortly
after noon, and as the current was favorable, the Toafa was carried
gently past two islets, on either side of the entrance, into the quiet
waters of the lagoon. A cloud of white terns rose at our approach,
fluttered noiselessly over the bush and around the tops of a few tall
coconut palms, and settled again like scraps of wind-blown paper. We
crept along with a light breeze, skirting the shore of the main island
which was so narrow in places that it looked like a causeway rather than
an island. Through the trees I could see the surf piling up on the outer
beaches, but there was no other sound than this, and we moved along in
the midst of a silence that seemed never to have been broken.

Presently, rounding a point of land, we came within view of the
settlement, and I was surprised to see another schooner, considerably
larger than the Toafa, at anchor about one hundred yards offshore. The
paint on her top sides, once white, was now a dirty yellow, blistered
and peeling. The seams gaped; thick streams of rust extended from her
chain-plates to the luxuriant growth of marine vegetation which covered
her bottom. The standing rigging hung slack, and the ends of the
springstay, which had parted, dangled from the masts, swaying gently
with the imperceptible motion of the vessel. An awning made of bits of
rotten canvas and pieces of sacking stitched together, was stretched
over the main boom, and lying asleep in the shade of it was a native who
looked as ancient and weather-beaten as the vessel itself. Another, a
lean old man with white hair, naked except for a wisp of cloth about his
loins, stood amidships, with his back to us, working the handle of a
ship's pump. He too appeared to be asleep, for his head was sunk on his
breast. Nevertheless he moved slowly back and forth with the regularity
of a pendulum on a grandfather's clock, and a stream of clear water, its
flow keeping time with his movements, gushed over the ship's side.

We approached so noiselessly that he was not aware of our presence until
the anchor was let go. At the sound of the splash the old man turned in
amazement. The one asleep under the awning raised his head too, and both
of them gazed at us without speaking.

'What in the world is this old wreck doing here, Chan?' I asked.

'Stay long time--hlee, four year,' said Chan. 'I come Hoparoa once
year. Always see old mans, pump, pump. No pump, go down below with
fish.'

'Why don't they let her go down? That's certainly where she belongs.'

'She got _popaa_ captain.' ('Popaa' is the native term for white man.)
'He say fine ship, only want fix up little bit. Bimeby maybe he get some
money, make more better.'

'What do you think about it?'

'No good. Captain dlink, dlink, alltime dlink. Plitty soon he finish
too.'

The village was quickly astir. The natives came crawling out of thatched
huts scarcely larger than dog-kennels, and gathered on the beach. They
were the most primitive-looking islanders I had seen in that part of the
Pacific. All the children were naked, but the men and women wore
European clothing of a sort. The men were bare to the waist, with
dungarees, in all stages of raggedness, for nether garments. They were a
healthy, happy-looking lot, and it was evident from their excitement and
pleasure that the arrival of Chan's schooner was a great event in their
lives.

Near the beach, in the center of the village, there was one house of
European style, covered with a roof of corrugated iron. Although not
large as houses go in other parts of the world, it towered like a palace
above the huts around it. The eaves were ornamented with a great deal of
gingerbread scroll-work, and a wide veranda faced the lagoon. A faded
French flag hung from a staff slanted out over the stairway. I asked
Chan whose house it was.

'Flenchman, half-caste--got native mamma,' he replied. 'He belong
government. Get dless up now. Bimeby he come.'

When he did come, the Toafa's small boat was lowered and Chan and I were
rowed ashore. My host--at least I hoped he was to be my host--awaited us
at the end of a rickety landing-stage. He was a man of fifty, a giant in
stature, swarthy in complexion, with iron-gray hair and blue-gray eyes.
He was dressed very warmly for the tropics in a double-breasted serge
suit, a white shirt with an old-fashioned 'choker' collar, a black derby
hat, and yellow shoes. The shoes, evidently, were much too small for
him. He kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other. The sweat
streamed down his face, and the stiff collar had melted by the time we
had reached him. There was something gentle and deprecatory in his
manner, and his smile was so friendly and engaging that my heart warmed
to him at once.

He shook my hand cordially and presented me with a card which read:

    _Monsieur Raoul Clmont_
    _Administrateur_
    _Hoparoa_

He greeted me in fluent French, but Chan having made some remark about
my being a 'Melican man,' he immediately changed to English which he
spoke with a quaintness I cannot hope to render here. I asked him
whether I might stay at the island until the return of the Toafa, two
weeks later.

'You wish to do so?' he said, beaming upon me. 'Then it shall arrange.
You shall stay in my house. This is the greatest honor for me!'

Immediately he gave orders to one of Chan's sailors to fetch my things.
Chan went aboard again, for there was some merchandise to be sent
ashore, and he wanted to get away as early as possible. I followed my
host to his house.

The loud squeaking of his shoes seemed to give voice to the pain they
caused him. I was relieved when he asked if he might remove them.

'Please do,' I said. 'It is a very warm day. Make yourself comfortable.'

He excused himself and returned a moment later, barefoot, but he had put
on another stiff collar which melted at once, as the first had done. I
was tempted to suggest that he remove his heavy serge coat, but he
seemed to feel that his position as administrator demanded both the coat
and the collar.

My arrival caused him an immense amount of concern, but he was so
pleased at having some official business to transact that, clearly, no
apology was necessary. He conducted me to his 'bureau' where he spent
nearly two hours over the matter of getting me registered as a
'Temporary Resident.' He transcribed my passport word for word in his
ledger, beginning with the 'Notice' on the inside front cover, and
ending with the six abstracts from the passport regulations at the back.

'I wish to have everything in due process of law,' he explained. So I
waited while he wrote everything out in a neat Spencerian hand. While
copying the 'Caution' on the inside cover, which tells what is to be
done in case a passport is lost, he stopped and read aloud this
sentence: 'New passports in such cases can be issued only after
exhaustive inquiry.'

'Exhaustive, exhaustive,' he said, musingly. 'I have forgotten this
meaning. But no! I remember! When I am tired I say I am exhaustive. This
is true?'

I explained the sense of it and he thanked me with warmth and sincerity,
as though I had done him a great service. Upon reaching the 'Description
of Bearer,' he again paused and looked at me with an expression of deep
respect.

'My guest! You are journalist! You write and write, and many people read
what you write! This is the greatest honor for me! What journal in
America have you the duty to be their author?'

'Oh, I'm not really a journalist,' I replied. 'As a matter of fact----'

He thought I was being modest.

'But you shall be!' he insisted eagerly. 'Your Government says you are
journalist. The _Secrtaire de l'tat_ of your great nation'--he turned
for reference to the passport--'insists that your value be known. You
are journalist, he writes. You must be safe and free, and have all
lawful aid and protection.'

I wish I could convey an idea of the deep seriousness with which he said
this. Had I been carrying a personal letter from the President of the
United States, it could hardly have made a more profound impression than
my passport had done. His belief more than half convinced me that I was
a journalist after all. Of a sudden a new light dawned in his eyes.

'Here too you must write,' he said. 'You must meet my friend, Captain
Handy. He has had a life of great deeds. I am sure of it! He wishes his
memoirs to be written into a book. How glad he shall be if you will help
him with his history!'

'Who is Captain Handy?' I asked. 'Is that his schooner lying offshore?'

'Yes. He is an aged man. We shall go to see him. He shall be happy.'

Nothing would do but we must go at once. I had, I confess, a good deal
of curiosity to see the captain of this ancient vessel which looked as
though all the waters of the Pacific had been pumped through her. What
was he doing at Hoparoa? I made some inquiries as we were paddling out,
but my host merely told me what I already knew, that the vessel had been
for some years at the island. He gave me to understand that I should
learn everything from the captain himself.

The canoe leaped across the water. At every powerful stroke of the
paddle my head was flung back and I expected to see Monsieur Clmont's
coat burst into tatters. We were alongside in no time, the canoe was
made fast, and we clambered aboard. The old native who had been asleep
when the Toafa came in, was now taking his shift at the pump. He looked
at us with a worried expression, and said something in the native tongue
to Monsieur Clmont who hesitated for a moment, and then turned to me.

'All day the captain sleeps,' he said in a low voice. 'Perhaps he shall
be uneasy that I speak to him now, but your coming is the great reason.
He should know this. I shall try to be bold to tell him.'

I followed him down the companionway into a cabin as dilapidated and
dirty as the rest of the vessel. There was a small table in the middle
of the floor, heaped with piles of old newspapers. Glancing at one, I
saw that it was the 'Brooklyn Eagle' of a date more than three years
past. A tin lamp with a rusty shade hung above the table. Against one
wall was a curtained recess. Monsieur Clmont stopped irresolutely
before it, then with the air of making a heroic decision, he put back
the curtains, revealing a bunk over a chest of drawers. There lay
Captain Handy, asleep.

He was naked to the waist, a tiny man, with a body incredibly thin and
hairy. In fact his arms as well as his chest were covered with a matting
of thick white hair. His head was enormous, long and lean and angular.
His temples were deep hollows, and the skull was quite bald on top, but
the hair of his beard mingled with the growth on his chest and reached
almost to his waist. I could divine rather than see the long bony jaw
beneath it, which looked even longer than it was, for his chin had
fallen down and he was breathing noisily through his mouth. The skin was
of the color of fungus, as though it had not been touched by sunlight in
many months. I was conscious of a feeling of uneasiness as I gazed at
this gnomelike little man. He seemed scarcely human.

Monsieur Clmont reached over to touch him on the shoulder, but before
he had done so he drew his hand quickly back and seized it nervously
with the other as though to prevent a second attempt.

'Should I awaken him?' he whispered, looking at me anxiously.

'I don't see why not, now that we have come,' I replied. 'Would he
object, do you think?'

'Only once before have I done this,' he said. At length he called in a
low voice, 'Captain!' There was no response. Then with one huge finger,
nearly as thick through as the old man's arm, he touched his shoulder
and called again.

'He's a sound sleeper,' I said. 'You'd better shake him, hadn't you?'

After a good deal of hesitation he did so, very gently, and immediately
looked at me with a frightened expression, as though he had committed a
sacrilege.

The mouth snapped shut, and the captain made a frightful grimace as
though he had bitten into something nauseating.

'All right, all right,' he said with a petulant intonation. His voice
was amazingly deep and resonant. It was hard to realize that so great a
volume of sound could come so easily from such a wraith of a man. Then
he opened his eyes, glassy blue and cold. The light of recognition came
into them slowly, but once it had he quickly raised himself on one
elbow.

'What's this?' he roared.

'Captain! You will excuse me? The Toafa is here. We have a----'

With a great effort the old man got to his knees and grasped the edge of
his bunk, and at the same moment Monsieur Clmont seemed to be pushed by
invisible hands backward to the companionway where he paused for the
fraction of a second, gave me a frightened, apologetic look, and
disappeared. The captain remained motionless for a moment, staring at
the empty doorway, then the baleful light died from his eyes. The
muscles of his face relaxed, his head dropped as though its weight were
too much for his strength; he balanced unsteadily on his knees, then
collapsed on his side and lay still. I waited until I again heard his
regular breathing, whereupon I went quietly out. Monsieur Clmont was
already in the canoe.

'Well!' I said, as I climbed in. 'He wasn't so happy to see us as you
expected.'

He looked at me sorrowfully.

'I was too bold,' he said. 'In the daytime Captain Handy sleeps, and he
is uneasy to be awakened.'

'Is he always like that?'

'Oh, no! You shall not think of him by this meeting. In the evening time
when he has had his breakfast, you shall see! I shall tell him you are
journalist. He shall be glad. And he plays the zither. Sometimes he
permits me to listen. It is beautiful! I am never tired to hear.'

Chan Lee was awaiting us on the beach. The breeze had freshened a
little, and as the current was now running out of the lagoon, he planned
to sail at once. He would be back in a week's time, or ten days at the
latest, he said. We watched the schooner until she had vanished beyond
the point; then Monsieur Clmont showed me my room. I saw at once that
it was his own, but he insisted that I should occupy it.

'I have not often a guest from the great world,' he said. 'Not since
eight years has a visitor come. This shall be a souvenir for me.'

'Have you always lived at Hoparoa?'

'Yes. I am born here. My mother is of this island. But you have
understood that I am of the French blood by my father? He was an honored
man of that great nation. See! He is there!'

On the wall over a table was a framed photograph of a French naval
officer in full-dress uniform. Despite his black beard there was a very
perceptible likeness between this man and Monsieur Clmont. One hand
rested on a pedestal and the other was lightly clasped around the hilt
of his sword. Across the bottom of the photograph was written:

    _A ma petite Manukura_,

    _Souvenir affectueux de nos promenades sur la belle isle de
    Hoparoa._

    RAOUL CLMONT

    Capitaine de Frgate _Le 5 Aout_, 1875

'I wish to have known my father,' he said wistfully, after a moment of
silence. 'His ship of war came but once to Hoparoa. Manukura is my
mother. She loved him but she heard of him no more. She gave me his
name. But you shall see a beautiful picture of my father I have had made
from this one. It is in my mother's room. Should you wish to meet her?'

I said I should like very much to do so, and he led me down a narrow
hallway to the other end of the house. He paused at the door.

'My mother has lost her health since five years,' he said. 'Now she
remains in her bed.'

He rapped gently, then opened the door and motioned me to follow. We
entered a large chamber filled to overflowing with furniture upholstered
in faded red plush. A brass lamp ornamented with innumerable glass
pendants hung from the center of the ceiling, and the walls were covered
with a great variety of shell ornaments in beautiful designs and colors.
But my attention was at first drawn to the bed where my host's mother
lay, propped up by pillows.

She was of the finest type of full-blooded Polynesian, rarely seen in
these days except on such remote islands as Hoparoa. Her face was full
of beauty and character, and it was easy to imagine how lovely she must
have been as a young girl. Although now a woman of seventy, her hair was
but lightly streaked with gray. It was parted in the middle and lay in
two thick braids on the counterpane. As we entered she turned her head
slowly, and her face lighted up with pleasure and surprise. Her son
addressed her in the native dialect, explaining who I was. Then he
turned to me.

'My mother says you are welcome here. You shall be our guest.'

She took one of my hands in hers and spoke to me direct, and although I
did not understand, I was in no doubt of the sincerity of her welcome.
She again spoke to her son, eagerly, and at some length. When she had
finished, he said,

'My mother wishes to know if you have heard in other lands of my father,
_le Capitaine de Frgate_, Raoul Clmont?'

I confessed, reluctantly, that I had not, adding that doubtless I would
have heard of him had I been of French nationality.

The colored enlargement hung on the wall facing her bed. With its huge
gilt frame it must have covered twelve square feet. The cheeks and lips
were red, the hair and beard a bluish black, the uniform a bright blue,
and the sword, buttons, and epaulettes, gilt. Every line and wrinkle had
been smoothed out of the face which looked like that of a wax figure.
The inscription, too, had been enlarged, of course, and one might have
read it from a great distance. In one corner was printed, in bold type,
'Midwest Art-Photo Company, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.'

Having returned to my room I spoke of some books on a shelf above the
table. I was surprised to find on that remote island an edition of
Tennyson's Poems, Coleridge's 'Biographia Literaria,' Jeremy Taylor's
'Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying,' and a volume of 'Selected English
and American Poems.' All four volumes had been well thumbed, and a copy
of a French-English conversation manual had been worn to tatters with
use. Monsieur Clmont told me they had belonged to a missionary of the
French Protestant church who had died at Hoparoa many years ago.

'He was so good to me,' he said gratefully. 'He gave me the lessons in
English. Since then I am aptly self-taught. Every day I read in these
books. I know how to say many poesies in your language. Should you wish
to hear one?'

He then recited with fervor, many vehement gestures, and quaint
mispronunciations:

    'Come into the garden, Maud
    For the black bat, Night, hath flown.'

It sounded so odd that I had difficulty in maintaining a grave face, but
I managed somehow, and commended him warmly at the close. He was much
pleased.

'Yes,' he said, 'I speak the English very well. But the writing I
cannot. How I should wish to do this! Then I should have pleasure to
compose. Perhaps I should help Captain Handy with his history.'

'Has he written much of it?'

'Oh, yes. He says it will be printed in a book, and he shall be a rich
man when this is done.'

'Chan Lee told me that he drinks rather heavily.'

'It is true, he has too much of the drink,' he replied sadly. 'He had
many barrels of rum in his vessel when he came here four years ago. It
is still not exhaustive.'

'Did he have a supply of food as well?' I asked.

'No, he had forgotten to bring this. It has been my duty to----'

He broke off abruptly, as though he had said more than he meant to say.
Then he went on to tell me of the captain's zither playing which was so
beautiful that he sometimes wept to hear it. I asked no further
questions, but as Monsieur Clmont was the storekeeper as well as the
administrator at Hoparoa, I concluded that he had been furnishing the
captain with food, and judging by the appearance of the schooner and the
length of time she had been there, he had not been paid for it. I was
more than ever convinced of this later in the evening when, at my host's
suggestion, I took a walk to the far end of the island. I had not been
gone long when I saw a small fleet of canoes stealing out from the
village to the schooner. When they came alongside I heard the captain's
booming voice, 'What's this? My supplies?' I was sure, then, that my
host had wished to send the captain, unobserved, some of the provisions
he had received by the Toafa. If he had been doing that for four years,
it seemed to me that he was paying rather heavily for the captain's
zither playing, however ravishing that might be.

I went on to the extremity of the island, and it was late before I
returned to the village. Light was streaming from the port-holes of
Captain Handy's schooner. I listened intently for the sound of music,
but all I heard was the faint creaking of the pump and the rhythmical
splash of water over the side. In the settlement there was much coming
and going. The natives stood in a line before Monsieur Clmont's store,
a small building adjoining his house, and he was hard at work passing
out the newly arrived provisions.

'My guest!' he exclaimed. 'I have searched for you. I have seen Captain
Handy. He wishes to greet you.'

'Has he come ashore?'

'Oh, no. He comes not often to the land. But I have told him you are
journalist. He is pleased. He wishes to offer you to prepare his
history. Soon I shall be ready if you will go.'

'Wouldn't it be better to wait until to-morrow?' I suggested. 'I'm
rather tired to-night.'

He regarded me with an expression of compassion.

'Of course! You wish for your sleep. Well, to-morrow evening we will go.
Now you retire to your bed.'

But I was not really sleepy, so I said I would wait until he had
finished his work. It was interesting to watch the crowd of natives
pressing eagerly forward for supplies. Case after case of bully beef was
disposed of. The mere sight of those familiar tins with their familiar
labels, 'Hellaby's Corned Beef,' 'Armour & Company,' etc., made me feel
squeamish at the stomach. It brought back the very feel of the war, and
a vivid recollection of the rending roar of nine-inch shells, the smell
of lyddite, gas, decaying human flesh. I remembered the peculiar odor of
trenches and damp dugouts filled with unwashed men. No ex-soldier,
surely, can ever again look with complacency at a tin of beef.

The expression of anticipation on the faces of Monsieur Clmont's
customers convinced me that there were no ex-soldiers at Hoparoa. But
it was not only beef they craved. Four already emptied casks testified
to the demand for sour pickles. I saw one old man eat a quart of them
within five minutes, whereupon he ordered a fresh supply which he
carried outside. No money changed hands, nor was there any bookkeeping.
Monsieur Clmont told me there was no need to keep a record of his
sales. Every one knew what he had bought and would pay for his purchases
in copra before the return of Chan Lee's schooner.

'I keep store only these few days each year when the Toafa comes,' he
explained. 'Then no more food. All is finished.'

Certainly an immense amount of it was being finished on this first
evening. Soon the whole settlement had gathered around fires of coconut
husks in the vicinity of the store. I never again expect to see a
beef-and-pickle orgy to be compared with this one. Empty tins were
scattered everywhere. Some of the natives, having eaten to repletion,
were lying with their heads pillowed on their arms, asleep. Others who
had overestimated their capacity for sour pickles, were sitting
cross-legged, rocking back and forth, groaning with faint dolefulness.
But their misery had not the slightest deterrent effect upon those whose
pickles were yet to be consumed. Monsieur Clmont himself was not at all
alarmed. The same thing happened each year, he said, upon the arrival of
the Toafa.

'They like so much these delicacies, and they are not used to them.
Always afterward there are stomach pains.'

He left me at the door of my room.

'Good-night,' he said. 'I hope you shall sleep with comfort.'

And as I had eaten but a fragment of one pickle, I did sleep soundly
until morning.


[III]

As a matter of fact I didn't awake until nine o'clock. My host had
slipped a note under my door. 'Good-morning!' it read. 'Your coffee
shall be waiting for you when you wish it. You shall find me at my
store.' And there it was I found him a few moments later. He had just
opened another packing-case, and had arranged along his counter a dozen
large funeral wreaths of imitation flowers made of colored glass beads
strung on wire framework--the kind one saw during the war in every
French cemetery back of the trenches. Evidently the holocaust of 1914-18
had not fulfilled the expectations of the makers of such equipment, and
the surplus stocks were being disposed of wherever a market for them
could be found. All the wreaths bore ornate beaded inscriptions twined
among the flowers: 'Mort Pour La France,' 'Mort Pour La Patrie,' and the
like. Monsieur Clmont stood before them, lost in admiration.

'These shall be so beautiful in our cemetery,' he said. He carried one
to the doorway to examine it under a better light, but immediately he
turned to me with an exclamation of astonishment.

'My guest! Captain Handy is coming! Never he visits the land since long
time! He wishes to greet you!'

He stuffed the funeral wreaths back in their box, moved it to one side,
brought out another chair and placed a small table beside it. Then,
excusing himself, he hurried over to his house and returned with a
pitcher of water and two tumblers which he placed on the table.
Meanwhile the captain, who was being rowed ashore by one of his
retainers, had almost reached the wharf.

'Way enough!' he roared, and then, 'Stern all!' as though in command of
at least a dozen rowers. The old native backed gently on his oars and
made fast at the end of the pier. The captain climbed the ladder, and
with the sailor following at a respectful distance, came slowly up the
beach. Under an enormous sun helmet, with his white beard streaming out
from under it, he looked even more gnomelike than he had the day before.
Monsieur Clmont went out to meet him, but he waved him aside without
speaking and entered the store. He gave me a nod, sat down, and with his
hands braced on his knees and his head drooping forward, breathed
heavily for some time, puffing out his cheeks as he exhaled. It was
plain that he was all but exhausted.

'Warm,' he said at length, and again I gave an inward start of surprise
at the deep, sonorous voice issuing from the corpse-like body.

I agreed that it was.

He turned his head slightly, and the ancient retainer, who was standing
behind his chair, stepped forward and put a bottle on the table.

'Have a drink?' he asked.

'With pleasure,' I replied, and he poured out two half-tumblers of rum.
He drank his own at a gulp.

'Well, sir!' he said, smacking his lips and sucking in on his beard, 'I
understand you're going to make us a visit? This your first trip in the
Pacific?'

'The first, I replied. 'I came six months ago.'

'Hmm! I've been out here fifty-two years.'

'As long as that! You must know these islands pretty well.'

'I'd like to meet the man, white or kanaka, that knows 'em better. But
they're not what they were. You ought to have been here in the
seventies. Then you might have had something to write about. Our friend
here,' with a contemptuous nod toward Monsieur Clmont, 'tells me you're
an author.'

'Oh, no. Hardly that. I'm merely traveling. I've always wanted to visit
the South Seas.'

He poured himself another stiff drink.

'That's right. Keep your business to yourself. That's been my practice.
I reckon story writers are like the rest of us--they want a free field
if they can get it and no competition. Ever hear of a man named Becke?'

'Becke? Do you mean Louis Becke, the writer?'

'That's the one.'

'Oh, yes, I've read many of his stories.'

'They say he made a pile of money out of 'em?'

'It may be,' I replied. 'His work is popular in America. Did you know
him by any chance? I believe he spent most of his life in the Pacific.'

'Know him! I've got the best of Louis Becke many a time trading through
these islands. But I wouldn't have thought he had it in him to be an
author.'

'His stories have the stamp of truth on them,' I remarked, 'and they're
written simply. Readers like that.'

The captain snorted contemptuously.

'Truth? I can tell you more truth about the South Seas in twenty minutes
than Louis Becke could tell you in twenty years. And that's what I've
come to see you about,' he added. 'I've got an offer to make you.'

Again he turned his head, and the old native who watched his every move,
placed before him a parcel wrapped in a newspaper.

'As I said,' he went on, 'I've been fifty-two years in the Pacific. I
know it from the Carolines to Easter Island as well as you know the back
of your hand. Romance? Adventure? I've had more of it in a day than most
men have in a lifetime. Well, the last two or three years I've been
writing out some of my recollections. I've got 'em in the back of this
old ledger, not everything, of course, but the most interesting ones.
Now, then, what I want you to do is this: take this book, read it over,
print it out for me on your writing machine on nice paper, put in any
fancy work you want to about waving palms and blue lagoons, and when you
go back to America get it made into a proper book for me. Here's a
chance you won't have again in your whole life. It'll sell, you needn't
worry about that, and I'll go halves with you. We'll split fifty-fifty.
How's that? Fair enough?'

I tried to excuse myself, but it was useless. He thought I was merely
holding out for better terms. By that time he had more than half emptied
the rum bottle, and he went on at great length to assure me that I
should have little to do except to make a fair copy of his manuscript
and carry it to some publisher.

'It's all there,' he said, laying his hand on the parcel; 'and better as
it stands than any story Louis Becke ever wrote. Wait till you read it!
Man! there's a fortune in it! But mind! I want my share! I'll go
fifty-fifty and not a penny above it!'

'It's not that,' I explained again, and so it went on. I was astonished
to see that frail old man--he looked as though he might drop dead at any
moment--carry his liquor so well. I had had but the one drink. He alone
finished the rest of the bottle, and the only apparent effect was to
make him more loquacious and argumentative, to accentuate the bell-like
quality of his voice, and to deepen his conviction, both that he had a
masterpiece here and that I wanted the lion's share of the proceeds from
the sale of it. At last I agreed to read it. He pushed the parcel across
the table, and keeping his hand on it, drew down his eyebrows and
regarded me suspiciously.

'I can trust you?' he asked.

'You'll have to,' I replied, 'if you leave it with me.'

He weighed the matter and decided that the risk must be taken. Then he
tried to pour himself another drink. Noticing that the bottle was empty,
he rose.

'Time to go aboard,' he said.

He grasped the corner of the table, swaying slightly. The ancient
retainer gave him his helmet, and made a timid offer of assistance, but
the captain threw off his arm and walked gingerly to the door. I watched
with concern as he went along the rickety wharf and down the ladder to
his skiff. He managed it without accident, however, took the tiller, and
ordered his oarsman to push off. When halfway out to the vessel he
turned with difficulty in his seat, and looked back, holding his helmet
against the sun.

'Be careful of that ledger,' he called out. 'And mind! Fifty-fifty! Not
a penny more!'


[IV]

It was then past midday and oppressively hot and still. Every one at
Hoparoa slept during the heat of the day. In fact, repose was the
principal island occupation. The natives could lie down anywhere, at any
time, and go to sleep at once, as dogs or cats do. After lunch,
observing that my host was getting drowsy, I excused myself, went to my
room, put on my pajamas, and lay down on the bed to cool off. It was a
good time, I thought, to examine Captain Handy's Memoirs, so I propped
the ledger against my knees and opened it.

It had a bouquet like that of an empty rum keg, and there was no doubt
that a great deal of liquid of various sorts had been spilled on its
pages. It was redolent, too, of coffee, fish, tobacco, and salt beef.
The memoirs filled about two hundred pages in the back of the volume,
written in pencil, in a quavery hand. I began with page one:

                       FIFTY YEARS IN THE PACIFIC
                                   Or
                      THE LIFE OF GEORGE C. HANDY

    There's been a lot of books about the South Sea Islands and most
    of them are not worth the paper they're printed on. I ought to
    know. I've traded in the Pacific for fifty years as my title
    shows, and if anybody knows the ways of kanakas, I do. I've
    decided to put down some of my recollections, and reader when
    you've finished this book if you don't wish there was more of it
    I'll miss my guess.

    I'll begin at the time when I was supercargo on the schooner
    Manaura that belonged to Wyatt & McClintock of Papeete. That was
    in 1872 when the kanakas would take anything you'd a mind to
    sell them and pay anything you'd a mind to ask. They didn't pay
    money of course they didn't have any, but they'd give you pearls
    and pearl-shell and copra which is as good as money any day.

    Old Joe Cheeseman was captain of the Manaura. All we had for
    cargo was some cheap laundry soap, some kegs of salt beef, some
    calico and overalls, and about ten cases filled with bottles of
    physic pills. Well, this trip we went first to Tikehau. There's
    a good pass into the lagoon at this island and we anchored in
    front of the village. The natives paddled out and we said we'd
    give them two bars of soap, three pairs of overalls and six
    yards of calico for every ton of copra they brought us. We laid
    up there till we had fifteen tons then we went to Rairoa. That's
    a big island with several villages. They had a lot of pearls. We
    got a tobacco sack full, A-1 quality and all we paid for them
    was a case of physic pills. We said the medicine was good for
    anything from sore throat to rheumatism. We had good luck all
    that voyage and went back to Papeete with 70 tons of copra and
    pearl-shell and a cigar box full of fine pearls.

    The next trip we went to the south'ard. We carried about the
    same cargo only instead of physic pills we had three barrels of
    rum and a lot of cheap mouth-organs. Kanakas are a lazy lot as
    everybody knows who has had to deal with them but when you've
    got something they want they'll work for it. In these days of
    course trading is nothing to what it was in the seventies and
    eighties. We loaded the schooner again in no time and most of
    the cargo was paid for with the three barrels of rum and five
    dollars worth of mouth organs.

I read on for a dozen pages, then dipped into the record farther along,
and it was all like this. It seemed incredible that a man who had spent
half a century in the Pacific, voyaging among widely scattered
archipelagos, should have found nothing worthy of record but his trading
ventures. There was something awe-inspiring in his singleness of
interest and purpose, which was to get as much as he could from the
islanders and to give as little as possible in return. Occasionally
there were such passages as the following: 'We landed at Puka-Puka and
found a big pow-wow going on, singing and dancing and all that,' but no
mention about what 'all that' was--nothing but long diatribes against
the natives who could not be tempted at such times with laundry soap or
overalls. I searched diligently for an hour, and the only passage I
found to relieve the bleak monotony of the narrative was this:

    When we were coming up from Manga Reva, Joe (Cheeseman) got
    sick. We didn't have any medicine aboard but I found one of the
    bottles of physic pills we'd been passing off on kanakas. I
    asked Joe if he wanted some and he said he guessed he could get
    along without. He got worse and worse and was out of his head a
    good deal of the time. He kept saying, 'Put me ashore George put
    me ashore' so when we came to an island not far off our course
    we took him over the reef in the whale boat and came within one
    of getting swamped. It was a god forsaken place no people on it.
    He was thirsty for coconut water so I gave him some. He kept
    getting worse and worse and the next day he died. Just before he
    died he said 'Don't you bury me at sea George. Leave me here.'
    So I did. We got to Papeete two weeks later.

I put the ledger on the table and took down one of Monsieur Clmont's
English books--Jeremy Taylor's 'Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying,' but
because of the sultriness of the afternoon, perhaps, the text soon
blurred before my eyes and I fell asleep.

I was awakened by a knock at the door and was surprised to find that it
was quite dark in the room. 'Come in!' I called, and my host entered.

'My guest! I have aroused you!' he said apologetically. 'But the food is
ready.'

After a plunge in the lagoon I felt greatly refreshed and did full
justice to a supper of delicious baked fish. We were in the midst of the
meal when a note was brought in from Captain Handy, asking us to come
out to the schooner that evening. He said he had something important to
tell me.

We found him perched in a sort of child's high-chair at the cabin table,
with a bottle of rum before him. He took it for granted that I had spent
the afternoon reading his story.

'Well, what did you think of it?' he asked at once.

He awaited my reply so eagerly that I couldn't find it in my heart to
disappoint the old man. So I said, which was true, that I thought it a
remarkable document.

'Didn't I say so?' he replied, triumphantly. 'But I haven't told the
half of what I might. That's what I want to see you about.'

Then he began a long account of some experiences which he now believed
should be included in the memoirs, and I sat there, again marveling at
his capacity for rum. I asked some questions, hoping to get him started
on something interesting, but I might just as well have saved my breath.
An hour passed and still he rambled on. Finally, Monsieur Clmont, who
had not spoken a word all evening, said, 'Captain, should you wish to
play on the zither?' I warmly seconded the suggestion, and the captain,
after a moment's hesitation, told M. Clmont to fetch it from the drawer
under his bunk. We waited while he tuned some of the strings. Then,
tucking his beard more carefully under the table, he began.

I thought I was prepared for anything, but certainly I was not prepared
for the performance which followed. At first he played some simple
pieces, waltzes, marches, and the like, to limber up his fingers; but
each number was more difficult than the one preceding. When he played 'I
Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and 'Listen to the Mocking Bird,'
his fingers were all but invisible as they flew over the strings.
Monsieur Clmont sat on the extreme edge of his chair, tightly clasping
his shoulders, and I felt little thrills racing up and down my spine.
But 'Larboard Watch' was the most remarkable performance. He sang this
to his own accompaniment, and when he came to the refrain,

    Larboard watch, ahoy!
    Larboard watch, ahoy!

his virtuosity with the instrument at the end of each line was truly
wonderful. And for depth and volume, his singing voice surpassed his
speaking voice. Indeed, it seemed miraculous, coming from a man well
into his seventies, who was nothing but skin and bones and beard.

Had he continued singing and playing in the manner of 'Larboard Watch,'
I could have listened with pleasure all night; but he soon became very
muddled, which was not surprising, considering all the rum he had drunk.
He tried a few other songs but made increasingly sorry work of them. At
length he pushed back the instrument in disgust.

'No use,' he said. 'Can't sing an' more.'

Then he began calling me 'Joe,' and it was evident that he thought I was
his old trading partner, Captain Cheeseman.

'You gwan with that bus'ness, Joe,' he said. 'Lot of money in it--both
of us. I'll trust you, but mind you don't try any your monkey tricks!
Fifty-fifty, fair enough, ain't it? 'Sfar's I'll go anyway.'

Presently his glazed eyes rested on Monsieur Clmont, and he pointed a
limp, skinny finger at him.

'Hey, Joe! Wha's that kanaka doin' here? Owe 'im anything? Give 'im
bottle physic pills. Tell 'im run along.'

His utterance became thicker and thicker, and a few moments later he
passed out completely. He would have fallen over in his chair had not
Monsieur Clmont sprung forward to catch him. He carried him to his bunk
and covered him with a soiled sheet, tucking the edges gently around his
shoulders. Then, having carefully put the zither back in its drawer, he
extinguished the light, and the faint radiance of the last-quarter moon,
streaming through the port-hole, fell on the captain's face, silvering
his beard and the tufts of snowy hair at his temples. He was in a
profound stupor, but he looked like some ancient holy man, sleeping
peacefully after a supper of herbs and water.

'Does this happen often, Monsieur Clmont?' I asked, as we were paddling
back to shore.

'Yes, but to-day is more unusual than before. He has failed his sleep.'

After a long silence he added, 'I should wish to play on the zither like
Captain Handy.'

I supposed that we should see no more of the captain for a day or two,
at least, but late the following afternoon he again came ashore. It had
been raining during the early part of the afternoon, and having nothing
better to do, I had been writing some letters to be posted later, when I
should again be on a steamship route. The natives had never before seen
a typewriter, and every one in the village had assembled in front of the
veranda where I was at work. Monsieur Clmont was as deeply interested
as any of them. He thought a typewriter a marvelous instrument, which it
is, in fact. After watching for a while, he asked whether I would mind
letting the others come up to see how it worked. I was glad to comply,
so he lined them up and brought them forward one by one, to look over my
shoulder for an instant. He made them keep absolute silence, and finding
it difficult even to compose letters under those circumstances, I wrote
and re-wrote, 'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of
the party.' I had covered three pages with this immortal sentence by the
time Captain Handy appeared.

He thought I was transcribing the Memoirs, and was greatly disappointed
to learn that I had not yet begun it. Being in an indulgent mood, I
decided that I might as well make a day of it, so I copied his first
chapter to show him how it looked in print. This was a great mistake, as
I soon realized, for he came again the following day, and the day after
that, and the day after that, always followed by the old retainer
carrying the usual bottle. He looked more and more haggard and
disheveled, for the loss of his daylight sleep and the increased
consumption of rum were telling on him severely. Then a curious thing
happened: the ledger disappeared.

We searched high and low, without success. I confess that I was glad. I
knew the book couldn't be lost, and meanwhile I was relieved of the
dreary task of copying it. But the captain became increasingly
suspicious, and one day he accused me of stealing it. His opinion of his
story, never a modest one, had risen enormously since its disappearance,
and he really thought I meant to smuggle it away with me and rob him of
his fifty per cent. I tried to reassure him, but only succeeded in
thoroughly convincing him of my guilt. At last he made an official
complaint before Monsieur Clmont, _Administrateur_.

His position was a delicate one. Here was I, his guest, and a journalist
for whom the Secretary of State of the United States of America had
asked a safe and free passage through foreign lands, and 'all lawful aid
and protection,' accused of theft by Captain Handy, who had had a life
of great deeds, and who played so beautifully on the zither. He informed
me of the accusation with a delicacy and tact which would have done
credit to a French ambassador.

'But Monsieur Clmont!' I said. 'You don't really believe that I have
stolen his ledger, do you?'

'My guest! I should never believe this! But Captain Handy exacts you. I
am _Administrateur_. It is my duty to accept his complaining. But you
shall see! You shall be excused by due process of law.'

So he made out the complaint in French. It was an interesting document,
but too long to be included here. I had the honor of copying it for him
on my typewriter--the first typewritten legal document ever uttered at
Hoparoa. But to my great regret, before the trial took place the ledger
was found. It had slipped down at the head of my bed and worked in under
the mattress.

To prevent any possible further complications I decided to make an
excursion to the island on the opposite side of the lagoon. I took some
fishing tackle, a light blanket, and nothing by way of provisions but
some salt and a box of matches, for I wanted to see whether I could
support myself for a few days something in the fashion of the islanders.

Monsieur Clmont carried me across in a sailing canoe. No one lived on
this other island, but there were two or three thatched huts used by the
natives when they came over to fish or to make copra. My host spent the
afternoon with me, showed me where to find hermit crabs for bait, and
the best places to fish. They all seemed best places to me, and the fish
took the hook so readily that I saw at once I should have plenty of
food. He left me at dusk, and I asked him not to return for me until the
end of the week.

I had a gloriously lonely time, one of the happiest weeks I have ever
spent anywhere. My only fear was that Monsieur Clmont might come back
too soon or bring Captain Handy over. Fortunately, on the second day it
began to blow very hard, and the wind increased steadily, so that it
would have been impossible for any one to cross from the village island
which was dead to leeward. It was an awe-inspiring sight, particularly
at night, to see the surf piling up on the reef. The great swells rose
higher than the land, it seemed, and fell with a thundering shock which
shook the little island to its foundations. I thought my hut was going
to be blown away, and in fact one of the empty ones was demolished.
Despite the wind, it was bright, clear weather, and I spent the days,
and most of the nights as well, in the open.

On Saturday it fell calm again, and to my great disappointment I saw the
canoe returning. I gathered at once from Monsieur Clmont's manner, that
something unusual had happened. I was not mistaken. Captain Handy was
dead.

It had happened three days before. One of his sailors had found him in
the morning, lying on the cabin floor. He had been dead for some hours.

'It was needed to bury him at once,' he said. 'I should have wished to
come for you, but this was prevented by the great wind. We gave him the
funeral that afternoon.'

The old schooner looked even more forlorn than usual, I thought. The
soul had quite gone out of her now, but one of the ancient sailors was
still at the pump. I wondered whether he would ever be able to stop
pumping, having done it for so long. We passed close alongside, and
through the clear water I could see innumerable rusty tins lying beneath
her. A small mountain of them rose from the floor of the lagoon. It was
roughly of the same shape as the schooner, and hollow in the center,
like the crater of an extinct volcano.

'Monsieur Clmont,' I said, 'I wish you would tell me something.'

He looked at me inquiringly.

'It is none of my business, of course, but have you been supplying
Captain Handy with provisions all these years?'

'He was my guest,' he said. 'And he was an aged man. This was my duty.'

He volunteered no further information and I did not press him for any;
but as we were walking out to the cemetery, he said, 'Should you think I
might have Captain Handy's zither?'

I told him that I thought he was fully entitled to it.

The cemetery was on the ocean beach, a quarter of a mile from the
village. A wooden cross had been erected over the captain's grave, and
leaning against it was one of Monsieur Clmont's beaded funeral wreaths
which bore the inscription, 'Tomb Sur Le Champs d'Honneur.' We removed
our hats.

'He was a man of great deeds,' said my host, gravely. 'He is sleeping
now.'

I nodded, without speaking.

'Should you wish to continue with his memoirs?' he added, after a brief
silence.

'Oh, I don't know,' I replied. Then for the first time I felt the
prompting of what must have been the journalistic instinct.

'I wonder whether I could make something of the captain's history after
all?' I thought. I had very little money left, after my six months of
wandering. If I could write a little story perhaps I might be able to
sell it to some editor----

Then I heard, or thought I heard, a deep, muffled, sepulchral voice
issuing from the newly made grave:

'Now mind! Fifty-fifty!'




CHAPTER II. ONE KIND OF JOURNEY


Emerson called traveling 'a fool's paradise.' 'It is for want of
self-culture,' he said, 'that the idol of Traveling, the idol of Italy,
of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans.' There is
probably as much truth in this as in most general statements, but as I
myself am a lover of traveling, I prefer to be more charitable in my
judgment of other, likeminded people. I prefer to believe that
individuals who long, at times, for movement and change of scene,
experience the most natural and wholesome of appetites, one which they
do well to indulge, if they can.

One evening, not a great while ago, I was seized with such a longing,
and it came about in a curious way. I was walking along a lonely stretch
of beach road on the island of Tahiti, in French Polynesia. The sun had
just set and the sky had that serene and luminous purity which often
succeeds a heavy tropical downpour in the midst of the rainy season. I
went briskly on my way, enjoying the freshness of the air and the rich
and varied mountain landscape, anticipating with keen relish the dish of
curried shrimps and rice which I knew awaited me at the restaurant on
the Papeete water-front where I was accustomed to dine. Presently I came
to a mango tree by the roadside, and halted for a moment to watch the
mynah birds--there must have been hundreds of them--settling for the
night in the dense foliage, and already engaged in their usual evening
conference, which is so strange a thing to hear. This comes as
inevitably as dusk, and as I listened to the noisy chorus I wondered
what it could be they find to discuss with such volubility every
twenty-four hours. 'Surely,' I thought, 'it is not mere idle chatter. It
must have significance in the bird world which we humans try so vainly
to understand.' The conversation was all but deafening. Innumerable
waves of shrill sound mingled and intermingled, but occasionally one or
two voices rose triumphantly above the others, and there followed a
gradual subsidence of the full chorus while these particular spokesmen
gave expression to their own views of the matter under discussion. Then
one of the silent birds would take exception to some statement and the
tumult would again become general.

I was listening with interest to one of these outbursts when of a sudden
the island seemed to fade from view. It was a cold, clear winter
morning; I was a small boy again, standing ankle-deep in snow, watching
a farm wagon, heavily laden with husked corn and drawn by four horses,
moving slowly up a hilly street in a little Iowa town. The breath of the
horses came out in clouds of steam, and the driver, the reins buckled
around his shoulders, walked beside the wagon, beating his mittened
hands together.

'Hello, my boy,' he called. 'Better pull your ear-tabs down. If you
don't, Jack Frost will be giving you a nip first thing you know.'

I was surprised and mystified for a moment at the suddenness and clarity
of that vision which vanished as quickly as it had come. Why should it
have appeared in a place so remote from Iowa and winter? But while I was
walking slowly on, trying to puzzle it out, the cause was made
clear--the mynah birds. Their shrill chorus, heard from a little
distance, resembled very closely the sound of the steel-rimmed wheels of
a heavily loaded wagon screeching as they turned over dry, powdery snow.

What curious creatures we are, all of us! And what trivial incidents
lead us, sometimes, toward decisions which upset the routine of our
lives. It may be that Emerson, too, had had some unsettling experience
at the time when he set down his observations on the folly of traveling.
It may be that he was merely trying to exorcise thus some sudden longing
of his own for other horizons, changed associations. Perhaps he
succeeded; or perhaps, the spirit of restlessness growing upon him, he
threw down his pen in disgust, seized his hat and stick, walked as far
as Walden Pond and back, and called it a journey. This attempt at
self-deception failing, in a petulant mood he again seated himself at
his desk to disparage his fellow countrymen who gave scope to their love
of wandering. Well, we know what he wrote, but we shall never know what
all of his thoughts were at this writing, and there must be errant,
undisciplined thoughts to pester philosophers as well as other men,
thumbing their noses, so to speak, at those which are given form and
substance and such an air of final judgment on pages of manuscript.
'What about us?' they shout derisively, and they whistle and hoot and
cat-call like a crowd of gamins in a peanut gallery--'Hey, mister! What
about us?' But sages, from the very nature of their calling, must be
cautious men, and so that discordant outcry, however deafening it may be
within the walls of their book-lined studies, never reaches the ears of
the outside world.

But to continue, had I been content merely to recognize the identity of
sound between a nightly chorus of mynah birds and the complaining of
steel-rimmed wheels over dry snow, perhaps I should not have started on
my journey at all. But I was greatly pleased with the immediacy of the
recognition, and such a throng of boyhood memories came crowding back in
the train of it, that I sat down on the beach the better to enjoy them;
and the result was an overwhelming desire to leave the South Seas. Now
love of wandering--largely, I confess, for its own sake--has kept me all
these years as poor as Job's turkey. I had thought I was rid of it at
last, having remained at Tahiti for nearly a year without once wishing
to go elsewhere. But here it was again, in another guise, for I found
that I was longing, not so much for new horizons as for those which had
ringed me round in boyhood. I wanted to make a sentimental journey to a
little, back-country, middle-western town which has for me many happy
associations. I sprang up, hoping to outdistance the yearning by mere
physical movement, but it walked apace with me and was still abreast
when I reached the restaurant in Papeete. Dinner was in progress, and
Mr. Mitchner, the proprietor--a Frenchman by naturalization, born in
England, of German parents--was moving among the tables exchanging
gossip with his guests.

'You're late this evening,' he said as I took my seat. 'I thought you
weren't coming and the curried shrimps are all gone.'

At another time this would have been a disappointment, but I had just
lost my appetite for curried shrimps. I found that I was longing, as
only a northerner can who has had a winter vision under a mango tree,
for buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. How many years had passed since I
had enjoyed that most delectable of cold-weather dishes? I couldn't
remember, but I found a melancholy pleasure in thinking of it, and I did
some of my thinking aloud, in the presence of Mr. Mitchner. I described
how they were made, and assured him that there was no place in the world
where the art of mixing and baking them had reached such perfection as
in a small town I could name in the upland prairie country of Iowa. He
listened with a show of interest, and when I had finished, he said:

'I know what's the matter with you--you're homesick.'

I admitted that this was true.

'Well, why don't you go home, then, if you're so hungry for buckwheat
cakes? We can't supply you here, that's certain.'

He left me to attend to some matter in the kitchen, while I ate, without
relish, a dish of _poisson mayonnaise_. I noticed a young man seated at
a near-by table, his supper untasted before him. He was writing in a
notebook. It was fascinating to watch him, he was so deeply absorbed, so
wholly oblivious to everything around him. His eyes sparkled with
interest and he smiled to himself as he wrote. Now and then he paused to
gaze through the window across the lagoon to the island of Moorea,
fifteen miles away, whose jagged peaks were still faintly outlined
against the afterglow. Evidently he was a stranger at Papeete, some
traveler but recently arrived. I envied him the freshness of his
impressions, and remembered my own keen pleasure when I had first set
foot in this tropical island world.

Mr. Mitchner returned from the kitchen and sat down with a sigh of
weariness in the chair opposite mine. I called his attention to the
young man in the corner.

'Yes,' he said, lowering his voice. 'He seems to be enjoying himself,
doesn't he? What do you suppose he finds to write about, letting his
dinner get cold, that way? Some one told me that he is Hilaire Belloc's
son--you know, the English author. I've heard that his father has sent
him on his own, without a penny, to see the world. He must earn his way
as he goes. Now that's what I call a sound plan for a young man's
education, a heap better than sending him to college in a motor car. But
of course you must know your son. He must have the right kind of stuff
in him.'

This young man had, I thought. Traveling would do him nothing but good.
I wished that his father might have looked in on him at that moment.

'You know,' said Mr. Mitchner, after a brief silence; 'your speaking of
buckwheat cakes reminds me of an Englishman I once knew in the Solomon
Islands. It's odd what a man will do, sometimes, when he gets hungry for
home cooking. This man was taken about the way you've been, but what he
wanted was a dish of apple tart and cream. So what did he do but go all
the way home to Devonshire to get it! That's as true as I'm sitting here
talking to you. I knew him very well. When he came back, eight months
later, he brought a wife with him, but what he went for was the apple
tart. He was a sorry man, though, about a year afterward. His wife was a
regular shrew. That's the trouble with journeys. They never turn out the
way you expect them to. But if you really want to go to America,' he
added, 'you can, you know. There's the Jeanne d'Arc: she's sailing
to-morrow.'

It often happens thus when the itch for wandering comes. The irritation
spreads with amazing rapidity. Everything seems to add to it. A young
man writing up his travel diary at a table, ignorant of your very
existence, scatters further contagion as a dynamo scatters sparks, and a
hotel proprietor, with complete indifference to his own practical
interests, says, 'There's the Jeanne d'Arc: she's sailing to-morrow.'

Having finished my dinner I walked resolutely away from the water-front,
along the road leading inland toward the mountains, but at every
cross-road I was aware of a smell, an odor, or better, of innumerable,
mingled odors, something less than fragrance, perhaps, but very pleasant
for all that--the unmistakable bouquet of a four-thousand-ton tramp
steamer, homeward bound after a long voyage in the tropics. The attempt
to ignore it was futile. I was drawn toward it with irresistible
attractive force, and, a few moments later, found myself standing in the
darkness of the after-deck of the Jeanne d'Arc. Mr. Mitchner had told me
that she was bound ultimately to Marseilles, but she was first to stop
at the Marquesas, going thence, via Panama, to Baltimore and New York
before proceeding to France.

The sailors had been given shore leave for the evening, and all was
silent aboard. I saw a light burning over a passageway, and entering, I
came to a door with the lettering, 'Commandant,' over it. It was a quite
ordinary, varnished cabin door, with a brass knob in need of burnishing.
It was hard even to imagine that it might open upon America.
Nevertheless I knocked, a voice said, '_Entrez!_' and the following
afternoon, Mr. Mitchner, who was standing in the doorway of his
restaurant, made a trumpet of his hands and called across a widening
strip of water, 'I hope you enjoy your buckwheat cakes!'

I hoped so, too, but I didn't enjoy them because I didn't have them. The
Pacific is wide, and tramps the most leisurely of steamers. As for the
Jeanne d'Arc, she was nearly a year from home; her bottom was covered
with a wonderful growth of marine vegetation, and every variety of
ship-loving mollusc which tropical seas afford. Days passed, weeks
passed, months passed. We moved eastward across that lonely and
seemingly interminable ocean with the deliberation of a scow laden with
cement. By the time we reached Baltimore, where I went ashore, tulips
were in bloom. I knew by that sign that there would be no more buckwheat
cakes until next winter, so I proceeded westward by leisurely stages,
and it was early summer before I crossed the Mississippi into Iowa.

The town of Riverview is not an easy place to reach even in these days.
You must take a local train from Des Moines, change again at Orchard
Valley and go on by a branch line. In my boyhood there had been but one
train daily between Orchard Valley and Riverview. It came down in the
morning to meet the east- and westbound trains on the main line, and
returned in the late afternoon after the arrival of the Des Moines
local. It was a pleasant surprise to find the old schedule unchanged
after so many years. As for the train itself--a baggage-coach and
day-coach drawn by a small engine with a flanged smoke-stack--it was
precisely as I had remembered it.

There were few passengers that afternoon--no one I knew; but Mr. Frey,
the conductor, I recognized at once. Even as a boy he had seemed old to
me, although he could not then have been more than thirty. He punched my
ticket three times, in the old, deliberate manner which had such
fascination in the days when it was my dream to become the conductor of
a passenger train.

'Don't you remember me, Mr. Frey?' I asked.

He lowered his chin and gazed at me over the rim of his spectacles.

'No,' he said, after a brief scrutiny; 'no, I reckon I ought to but I
can't say I do. Wait a minute! You're not one of the Channing boys, are
you?'

'That's very close,' I replied. 'They're my cousins. We used to come to
Riverview every summer and at Christmas time to visit our Aunt
Martha--Mrs. Martha Colby.' Then I gave him my name.

'Well, I'll declare! Sure enough I remember you now! But you've grown
clean out of knowledge. That mustache changes you more than you might
think.'

A moment later when he had finished collecting the tickets he sat down
beside me for a chat.

'Yessir! That mustache makes a big difference. I recollect the time when
you didn't have even the promise of one. Seems to me like it wasn't no
longer ago than yesterday that you came into George Shipley's
barber-shop for your first shave. Jaspar Willis and me was
there--remember?--and after you got out of the chair, Jaspar said,
"Well, I never saw such a change in a boy in all my born days! You must
feel a lot better, sonny, to get rid of all them whiskers," and you went
out of the shop mad as a hornet.'

He chuckled reminiscently.

'How long's it been since you was back here?'

'Fifteen years this summer.'

'Has it now! As long as that? I wouldn't have thought it. You'll miss
your Aunt Martha. She was a fine woman, one of the kindest and best that
ever lived, I reckon. Lord! I wonder how many times I've carried you
boys up and down this line? And that makes me think: here's something
I'll bet you've forgotten.'

He reversed the back of the seat in front of us and showed me a deeply
cut notch on the sill of the adjacent window. It had long since been
varnished over and was blackened by soot and time.

'I think you was the one that done it,' he said. 'You boys was going
down to Orchard Valley to the circus, and you had a brand-new
pocket-knife your aunt had give you. Well, when I came along for the
tickets, there you was, hard at work, as if my nice new car--it was new
then--was nothing but an old store box to try jack-knives on.'

The reminder of this forgotten incident brought back the very feel of
boyhood, and scores of happy memories all but lost under the dust of
many years. I was grateful to Mr. Frey who was not at all aware of the
service he had done me.

'Yes,' I said, 'I remember, and I was the guilty one.'

'That's what I was thinking,' he replied. 'Remember how I blowed you up?
I was hopping mad at first, but you know, that was the very day I was
boosted to conductor, and afterward I thought, well, that mark will be a
little souvenir of my new job, and I was glad then you'd made it. That's
how I happen to remember it so well.'

'I don't suppose there's any chance now to get buckwheat cakes at
Riverview?'

'Buckwheat cakes! At this time of year? No, you'll have to come back in
the winter time.'

'Are they as good as they used to be?'

'Every bit. But say! there was no one could make them like your Aunt
Martha. Many a time she's called me in for a big plateful when I was on
my way to the depot. She was the best cook Riverview has ever seen or
ever will see, I reckon.'

We talked of one thing and another while the train, proceeding on its
leisurely twenty-mile journey, past Oak Grove and Cherry Hill, seemed to
be traveling through time as well as space, back to the very period of
my boyhood. There was a meadow lark on every fence-post, and the
right-of-way was even brighter with honeysuckle and Sweet William than I
had remembered it. Looking out over cornfields and pasture land where
the cattle were drowsing in the shade, I realized that I was as native
to this country as a pignut tree; that for all my wandering my roots
were still here, deeply embedded in the rich, black soil.

The train drew up at the same small brick depot, standing as of old at
the edge of the open prairie. It was a pleasant and truthful augury, for
outwardly at least, the town had changed very little. Picket fences and
board sidewalks had long since disappeared, to be sure, and the
hitching-posts around the square, but the same two-story brick business
blocks fronted it, and the same boyhood smells of drugs, drygoods,
groceries, sprinkled streets and freshly cut grass mingled in the sultry
air.

Plummer's livery stable had been converted into a garage, but the old
Willard hotel had withstood like rock the winds of change. Two
commercial travelers sat on the front porch, their chairs tilted back
against the wall, as though they had not moved for a generation, and
when I went in to supper, I more than half believed, for a moment, that
the dining-room girl who stood by the window, one hand resting on her
hip, the other lightly patting her elaborately arranged hair, was the
one who had presided there when I was in knee trousers. Her hair had
been bobbed, of course, but it required as much patting as of old, and
she had the same leaning-forward carriage and slightly disdainful air.
As she approached my table her cheeks quivered at every step, and that
was just as it used to be. Then, with the well-remembered, far-away look
in her eyes, she greeted me with the old formula: 'Do you wish
beefsteak, pork chops, or cold roast beef?' I was sure of it then: the
_genius loci_, changeless in nothing but its love of change in most
American towns, had been as faithful as possible at Riverview and the
Willard hotel. I could have ordered and consumed another supper for the
mere pleasure of again hearing, 'Do you wish.'

But it was while eating, absent-mindedly, of a dish of lettuce,
sprinkled with vinegar and sugar, that I shrank forthwith to boyhood
stature. Illusion became perfect at that moment. Opposite me sat two of
my cousins, the Channing boys, with a third at my side. Aunt Martha was
at the head of the table--we always came to the hotel for the Sunday
evening meal--her head and shoulders mirrored in a glass over the
sideboard behind her. 'Now, boys,' I heard her say, 'aren't you going to
eat any of this nice lettuce?' It is a curious fact that, in that town
where, with the exception of the hotel, appetizing food was the rule
rather than the exception, vinegar and sugar was the inevitable green
salad dressing. I remember my astonishment at discovering, long
afterward, that lettuce may be a really palatable food.

Before leaving the dining-room I stopped to examine the mirror over the
sideboard. It was the identical one which had hung there in my aunt's
time with a wavery flaw in the glass which had so queerly distorted her
reflection as she leaned over her plate. So I came away at once, and
tried not to think any more of such imperishable things as mirrors.

I saw a few vaguely familiar faces during my evening walk, but only one
or two that I could identify. Doctor Hammond I would have known at once,
even though he had not been sitting in his rocking-chair on the sidewalk
in front of his office. His hair and beard were snow white now, but he
looked as vigorous as ever, his eyes were as clear, and his face as
kindly and thoughtful. He glanced up from his paper as I passed and said
'Good-evening to you' in his old courtly manner, but it was plain that
he did not recognize me.

As dusk deepened into night old ghosts met me at every corner, old
memories came crowding back, and mine being an avowedly sentimental
journey, I gave myself up to sentimental reflections. How gently, I
thought, Time has dealt with this sleepy little town! In what kindly
fashion the years have passed here. In so quiet a place one would have
an enviable sense of leisure; one's gift of life would seem an
immeasurably generous one. Engaged in these reflections I turned into a
side street leading again to the open prairie, and midway along it came
to a house that had a puzzlingly familiar aspect. It stood but a short
distance from the sidewalk, and was half hidden in shrubbery. On the
front porch I heard some one rocking back and forth, back and forth.

I stopped for a moment, trying to recall its association for me, one
which seemed to be connected in some way with my aunt and the Willard
hotel. Then I remembered that we had often passed this way during our
after-supper stroll on Sunday evenings. A family named Albright had
lived here then--a young man and his wife. In the first year of their
marriage he had been injured by a tree which had fallen during a wind
storm, and I remembered Aunt Martha telling us that he had been
paralyzed and would never walk again. She used to bring him delicacies
of her own making: currant jelly, cherry pie, a dish of peach dumplings,
or strawberry shortcake. Neither the Channing boys nor I ever saw him
during these visits. We sat on the front steps while Aunt Martha went
with Mrs. Albright into his bedroom, and we could hear her hearty laugh
and cheery voice as she tried to make them forget their troubles. When
they returned to the front porch, Mrs. Albright, who was little more
than a girl, sometimes gave way to her feelings. 'There, there, Nellie!'
my aunt would say, patting her shoulder. 'You and Frank have had your
share of trouble, goodness knows, but you mustn't let it get the best of
you.'

Once I had gone to the house with all the small boys of the town,
following Riverview's contingent of soldiers returning from the
Spanish-American War. There were a dozen or more of them, just arrived
from the demobilization camp, and they had been met at the station by
the band and many of the townspeople. During the parade which followed
they stopped for a moment in front of the Albright house. The band
played 'Just as the Sun Went Down,' and Mrs. Albright, who had come to
the door, had said, 'Boys, Frank and I both thank you for this, and he
wants me to tell you that he would have been with you in Cuba if it
hadn't been for that tree.'

'We know that, Nellie,' their spokesman had replied. 'Please tell Frank
from all of us that we talked of him and thought of him many a time.
Tell him to keep up his courage. We'll all be in to see him, and if our
good wishes are of any use, he'll be up and around again before he knows
what's happened.'

Then Mrs. Albright had gone into the house, crying.

How long ago that seemed, as though it were an event in a previous
existence. One's sense of time is so much a matter of personal
experience that the Spanish-American War seemed to me as far away as the
Battle of Hastings or the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

I was walking slowly on when I heard some one call through the darkness
from across the street:

'Oh, Mrs. Albright!'

'Yes? Is that you, Mrs. Gaynor?' a small, plaintive voice replied.

'Yes. How is Mr. Albright this evening?'

'He hasn't felt so well to-day. This hot weather's pretty trying for
him.'

'Of course it is,' replied the first voice with a deeply sympathetic
intonation.

'I've moved him into the sitting-room. He's more comfortable there, by
the west window.'

The rest of the conversation was lost to me, but I had already heard
more than enough. I no longer thought of Time in the guise of a kindly
old gentleman bringing generous gifts of years.

'Mr. Mitchner was right,' I said inwardly, as I walked back to the
hotel. 'The trouble with journeys is that they never turn out the way
you expect them to.'




CHAPTER III. K.F.I--LOS ANGELES


On the chart the island was credible enough. It was indubitably
there--every little indentation of coastline, all the details as to
harbors, promontories, soundings, etc. And how often I had read of it in
the narratives of the early voyagers in the Pacific! Nuku Hiva in the
Marquesas? I knew it as well as one can know a place one has dreamed of
a thousand times since boyhood. But somehow, from the moment of actually
_seeing_ it, further belief required an act of faith.

For I was not prepared for the quality of light which manifested itself
on that particular afternoon. The sky was cloudless, and, as though it
had been an opaque, impermeable yet viewless wall, it seemed to be
stemming an eastward-moving tide of light, piling it high in ary shapes
of a color so palely blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from that of
the sky itself. As I gazed I was reminded of a beautiful word in the
Tahitian dialect--_ahinavai_, which means, 'distance rendering objects
indistinct.' Such a distance still separated us from the land, and it
was hard to convince myself that the faint outlines were not of my own
imagining. For an hour at least, as we approached, I more than
half-expected that phantom of an island to vanish momentarily, and to
see again the clear circle of the horizon where it had taken shape.

But it was the fact that we were approaching Herman Melville's island
that I found it hardest to realize. Ever since my first reading of
'Typee,' in my twelfth year or thereabouts, Nuku Hiva had always been
Herman Melville's island to me. I remembered ploughing through the snowy
streets of a little prairie town, thinking of nothing but Typee Valley
for days and nights on end, but it had never occurred to me that I
should one day go there. And here at last was the island before me,
growing more distinct every moment in the mellow, westering light, and I
was sitting on deck, in the shade of a bit of canvas, reading 'Typee'
again.

It was during my journey on the Jeanne d'Arc, the tramp steamer from
Marseilles. She was always 'from.' The Pacific was really her home and
she knew the loneliest parts of it. She smelled of tropical islands; she
carried with her the clean, earthy smell of nickle-ore and chrome-ore
from New Caledonia, of pearl-shell from the Low Archipelago, of vanilla
from Tahiti and Bora Bora, and the pungent, not unpleasant odor of
copra. Her officers all came from the same village in Brittany, but they
had seen precious little of it since the War. Eleven months out of the
year they paced the bridge and the decks of the Jeanne d'Arc, the most
leisurely of tramps. We rarely did better than a hundred and twenty
miles in twenty-four hours, but their patience was as wide as the
Pacific itself, and they seemed to have stared the very blue of it into
their eyes.

The wireless operator was the only youth in the ship's company. He had
served his apprenticeship in the Mediterranean, and this was his first
voyage in the South Seas. The Pacific, he thought, was _triste_, too
large, too lonely, and he longed for his inland sea where daily and
nightly, he had been able to hear any number of radio-programmes, from
Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Paris, Berlin, London. In the Pacific there was
nothing, or practically nothing, and he had almost all of his time on
his hands. He spent a great deal of it in his stuffy little wireless
room, taking his apparatus apart and putting it together again from
sheer boredom, or listening to occasional messages from far-distant
vessels. 'I've just been talking with the Union Liner, Makura,' he would
say happily. 'She's fifteen hundred miles away. Their operator says
they're going to have a fancy-dress ball to-night.' In the evenings he
would sit patiently for hours, trying to tune in on concerts from
Australia or the cities on the California coast. On the morning of our
arrival at Nuku Hiva, I tried to persuade him to go with me for a day of
exploration in Typee Valley, but he had never heard of it and wasn't
interested; so I set out alone.

It is a four hours' walk over the mountains from Tai-o-hae to Typee
Valley. Never have I had a lonelier walk, for I carried in mind pictures
from Melville's story and others of early sojourners in the Marquesas,
and I had not realized what vast changes had been wrought here in three
generations. The great and irrevocable change upon which all the others
depended was Death. There were no Marquesans left, or almost none--in
the entire group of islands there are now less than twelve hundred
inhabitants. As for Typee Valley, I found a wretched little settlement
near the sea, and that was all. An old native I met who spoke French,
brokenly, told me there were twenty-five inhabitants. His father, he
said, remembered clearly the arrival, in 1842, of the French squadron at
the time the islands were annexed by the French Government. That was the
summer of Melville's arrival, and I recalled his description of Nuku
Hiva as he first saw it:

    Toward noon we drew abreast the entrance to the harbour, and at
    last slowly swept by the intervening promontory, and entered the
    bay of Nukuheva. No description can do justice to its beauty;
    but that beauty was lost to me then, and I saw nothing but the
    tri-coloured flag of France trailing over the sterns of six
    vessels, whose black hulls and bristling broadsides proclaimed
    their warlike character. There they were, floating in that
    lovely bay, the green eminences of the shore looking down so
    tranquilly upon them, as if rebuking the sternness of their
    aspect. To my eye nothing could be more out of keeping than the
    presence of these vessels; but we soon learnt what brought them
    there. The whole group of islands had just been taken possession
    of by Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars in the name of the
    invincible French nation.

Melville realized, of course, that that was the beginning of the end for
the Marquesans, but he could not have realized, I think, how quickly the
end would come. I myself could scarcely credit the fact that it had
come, standing though I was in Typee Valley, listening to a silence so
profound that it seemed never to have been broken from the beginning of
time. The old native beside me--he was a man of sixty or thereabouts,
with iron-gray hair, a deeply lined face, and one leg horribly swollen
with elephantiasis--was listening, too, it seemed. I wondered what
voices he heard in the murmuring of the stream, what pictures of other
days were in his mind as he gazed into the green depths of the valley
before us. Whatever his thoughts, he didn't disclose them. His hut was a
little distance up the valley and he accompanied me that far, carrying
on his shoulder a gasoline tin filled with _Poi-Poi_, the fermented
breadfruit paste which has always formed a principal article of food in
the Marquesas.

His house was the farthest from the beach of any in the settlement; the
path beyond it was so overgrown in places that I had difficulty in
making my way, but I pushed on, going deeper and deeper into the valley,
seeing on either hand the great stone platforms, now overgrown with
trees and bush, upon which the natives had formerly built their houses.
As I scrambled over rocks, through the brush, and back and forth across
the stream, I heard, occasionally, the cry of the _kuku_, a beautiful
wood-pigeon, the only voice to break the silence of the valley. It is a
lonely little bird, and its cry, a long-drawn-out 'Oh-h-h-h, Oh-h-h-h,
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,' dying gradually away, is almost human in quality.

At length I came to the place which must have been, within a few hundred
yards, where Melville had lived. It is all but impenetrable jungle now;
I sat on a huge flat-topped boulder in the middle of the stream, and,
having brought my copy of 'Typee' with me, I re-read passages in which
he had described so vividly scenes from the life of the natives
eighty-five years ago. I found it hard to enter into his feelings of
anguish and despair as he thought of his remoteness from home and
friends. If only he might have foreseen, I thought, what was to happen
here in so brief a time, he would have wasted no moments in fears and
forebodings about his own situation. What a record he could have made of
the life of this finest of primitive races in the Pacific!

But the record he had made was vivid enough. The pictures that rose into
mind as I read of the life in that once happy valley were in such
contrast to the scene of lonely desolation actually before me, that I
soon closed the book and gave myself up to my own reflections. It was
easy to imagine that Melville's own spirit was somewhere in the
vicinity--I heard his voice so clearly in the soundless way it comes to
one from the printed page, and the voices of those old friends of his
who had shown him such warm-hearted hospitality. I sat for a long time
in that green, quiet place, listening to the music of running water, and
at length I was scarcely more animate than the trees around me which
threw a grateful shade over my resting-place.

It was mid-afternoon when I started down the valley, and night had
fallen long before I reached the Jeanne d'Arc in Tai-o-hae Bay; but
there was a full moon to light me along the trail over the mountains and
across the high slopes of the plateaus. At ten o'clock I was having a
belated supper on deck when the wireless operator appeared.

'Oh, there you are!' he said eagerly. 'Come quick! I've tuned in on a
California station--K.F.I., Los Angeles, I think! Clear as a bell--not a
bit of static! And it's a wonderful programme! There's been an orchestra
playing----'

I followed him to the wireless room. He fixed on his head-piece and
adjusted his dials, listening for a moment.

'Somebody's talking now,' he said, as he handed me the apparatus. 'You'd
think it was right in this room!'

It was a woman's voice I heard, brisk, alert, and businesslike:

'...So much for sponge-cake. Now, ladies, I hope you're all
listening, are you? Because next I'm going to give you some recipes for
really scrumptious little desserts. The first is for strawberry-whip,
for your luncheons these hot July days. We all like strawberries, don't
we? Well, this is a _particularly_ lovely dessert. First, you mash to a
pulp two cups of nice ripe strawberries and sweeten to taste. Add two
teaspoons of gelatine soaked in a little more than a tablespoonful of
cold water and melted. Then, whip to a froth the white of one egg----'

I was not interested in strawberry-whip just then; I was thinking of
Typee Valley, so I didn't wait for the rest of it.




CHAPTER IV. INDIAN COUNTRY


A traveling salesman whom I met on the train assured me with enthusiasm
that it was 'the best, busiest little city west of the Mississippi,' and
perhaps it was, and is, from a commercial point of view. From any other,
in so far as I could judge after a five hours' visit, it seemed to have
but small claim to distinction. Indeed, there was nothing, not even a
name, to distinguish it as a Western town, and a chance visitor, had he
been set down blindfold in the main business thoroughfare, might easily
have thought it a street in Albany, or Dayton, Ohio, or Indianapolis, or
Los Angeles, or Atlanta, Georgia.

It was a busy place--there was no doubt of that--and growing rapidly;
but to me it seemed mere rank increase without order or design, and one
would have said that here dreary uniformity was something inherent in
the principle of growth. It met the eye on every hand, and in the
residence districts the machine-made individuality of the houses was
even more depressing. Most of them, evidently, had been turned out
wholesale by real-estate promoters. Dwellings of precisely the same
design appeared again and again, in street after street, and the same
want of imagination was apparent in the public and semi-public
buildings. The post-office was in the Colonial style and looked as out
of place in the setting as the city hall--a replica, with certain
bizarre concessions to utility, of a Grecian temple. One of the
Protestant churches, an enormous structure of yellow brick, was flanked
by two squat towers surmounted by green domes. What sort of men, I
wondered, were the City Fathers who permitted such things?

Then it occurred to me that there were no City Fathers any more in such
towns as this. Perhaps there never had been. The development of the
country had been too rapid. Migration had followed migration in quick
succession; the population was still fluid, and, like water, its only
business was to spread, to fill, and, rising to certain levels, to flow
on.

I walked for miles over stone-covered prairie where, within the memory
of living men, the buffalo had roamed. The business streets were lined
with motor cars and filled with shoppers. Caught for a moment in a
cross-street crush, I overheard a fragment of conversation between two
women just behind me.

'What'll we do now?' asked one.

'I'm kinda tired, ain't you?' said the other. 'Let's go sit in a movie.'

Having nothing better to do, I too acted upon this suggestion. The
theater was well filled even at that hour of the morning, and as I
glanced at the rows of pale, expressionless faces behind me, faintly
illuminated by the light from the screen, it seemed to me that all those
people, like the two women whose conversation I had overheard, had come
there merely to sit. The film was an utterly banal one, having nothing
to commend it but the excellence of the photography. Part after part was
reeled off, and one longed and half hoped for some demonstration on the
part of the audience, some active protest against such an insult to
common intelligence; but the rows of pale faces showed neither pleasure
nor displeasure, neither amusement nor boredom, as though the minds
behind them were as blank as they.

I left at the conclusion of the fifth part and resumed my aimless
wanderings. Here and there, on side streets, I came upon buildings
remaining from the early period of settlement. They had an appearance of
immemorial antiquity, but this, I realized, was merely by reason of the
contrast with the modern buildings around them, and because of the vast
changes which had taken place, both fundamentally and in the externals,
in American life since the beginning of the new century.

There was nothing, certainly, in the appearance of the principal hotel
to remind one of pioneer days. It was a fourteen-story building with the
date, 1920, on the cornerstone. Over the main entrance hung a large
sign:

                    WELCOME TO THE INTERSTATE RETAIL
                     CLOTHING DEALERS' ASSOCIATION!
                          CONVENTION HEADQUARTERS

Being tired after my long walk, I went in there to rest. The walls of
the spacious lobby were covered with convention signs and advertisements
of clothing, hosiery, underwear, and haberdashery of all sorts, and a
throng of delegates, wearing badges, were listening or not, as they
chose, to a concert of popular dance music furnished by radio from
Kansas City.

I bought a local paper at the news-stand and sat down to glance through
it. It was the kind of paper to be found everywhere in these days, with
syndicated news columns, syndicated comic strips, syndicated editorials.
Even the local news struck me as being the same local news I had read
while passing through other American cities on my way westward. The
Y.M.C.A. was making a drive for funds for a new building; a valuable
property in the heart of the business district had just been sold; the
mayor had extended the freedom of the city to the members of the Retail
Clothing Dealers' Association, and so forth. I was about to lay the
paper aside when my eye caught the heading of a column on an inside
page: 'Fifty Years Ago: Items from the old "Weekly Gazette" for July,
1872.'

    Frank Holliday has sold his holdings on the north branch of the
    Smoky River and is going on west. He says this country is
    getting too settled-up to suit him. Frank is one of those men
    who have to have at least thirty miles of breathing room all
    their own in order to feel comfortable. He's aiming now, he
    says, for the other side of the Rockies....

    A nest of rattlers was routed out from under the floor of the
    Plain Dealer saloon yesterday. The largest measured four feet,
    two and one half inches. Some of the boys played a joke on Joe
    McCracken, who was having a comfortable snooze at one of the
    tables in the Plain Dealer. They coiled up the dead snakes on
    the floor beside him, and when he woke up he gave a yell you
    could have heard all the way to St. Louis. Joe thought he 'had
    'em again.'...

    On Monday negotiations were at last opened up with the Indians
    of the Smoky River Reservation for the disposal of their lands
    to the United States Government. Colonel George Godfrey and J.
    C. Appleby, acting for Uncle Sam, met the Indians in the grove
    of cottonwoods a mile east of town. They explained to the chiefs
    why the Government was making this request for purchase.
    Homesteaders are coming into the Smoky River Valley in
    increasing numbers, and it is only a matter of a few years
    before the country will be filled with settlers and the
    Reservation completely surrounded. For this reason, the
    Government, having in mind the Indians' own welfare, urged them
    to move to a fine site already chosen for a new reservation four
    hundred miles farther west, where they can live in peace and
    quiet.

    The Indians, according to the usual custom, made their replies
    the following day. Most of them were firmly opposed to moving
    on. Chief Grey Wolf's speech, which is a fair sample of the
    others, was as follows:

    'I heard what you said. I don't want to give up my lands. This
    country is like my mother. She has fed me and my children. When
    you moved us across the Missouri you said this valley was to be
    ours forever. You told us to build fences. You told us to plant
    corn. We did what you said. Now you want us to move again. It
    seems to me we have no home and you will always be driving us
    farther away from the lands of our fathers. We have gone far
    enough. I don't want to give up my lands. I want to stay here.'

    While we appreciate the Indians' point of view, they cannot be
    allowed to stand in the way of progress. We hope, and believe,
    that our government agents will bring such pressure to bear as
    is needful for their removal from this rapidly developing
    country.

Under this, the present editor of the paper had appended the following
note:

    It is hardly necessary to inform our readers that the hopes of
    the editor of the old 'Weekly Gazette' were realized. The site
    of the cottonwood grove where this historic meeting was held is
    now in the very heart of the city and is occupied by the New
    Jefferson Hotel.

Luncheon was being served in the hotel dining-room, and the crowd in the
lobby began to thin out. A bell-boy passed, calling, 'Mr. Goldberg,
please! Mr. Goldberg, please!' with passionless insistence, and a man
with a huge paunch and a shining red jowl, who was being massaged and
manicured at the same time in the hotel barber-shop, raised his head and
shouted, 'Here, boy!' Several commercial travelers were shaking dice and
exchanging banter with the girl at the cigar stand. From a near-by
alcove came the busy clacking of the public stenographer's typewriter. A
telephone rang in the long-distance booth. One of the badged delegates
who had been sitting beside me, waiting for the call, opened the door
and took down the receiver.

'Hello... Yes... Yes... Hello! Is that you, Sam? Say, this is
Charley. How's every little thing in St. Joe? What? Yeah, I'm down here
for the convention. Look here, Sam, I thought I'd call you up about
that----'

The door of the booth slammed and I heard no more.

The Indians had passed on--no doubt of that. But it was hard even to
imagine that they had ever been within a thousand miles, or years, of
that spot.




CHAPTER V. A HAPPY HEDONIST


Several years ago there appeared, in England and America, a book called
'Isles of Illusion.' I don't know what its fortunes were. It must have
found a considerable number of appreciative readers, and then, perhaps,
it was sucked under and lost in the ever-increasing stream of books. If
that is the case, then I am sure that it has been only temporarily lost,
and that it will reappear farther down the stream. For 'Isles of
Illusion' is an extraordinary book, and volumes of that kind have a
buoyancy which keeps them bobbing up into the view and notice of patient
watchers along the banks.

It comprises a series of letters written from the South Seas during the
years 1912-20 by an Englishman to an English friend, and former Oxford
classmate, at home. Most of them are dated from various islands in the
New Hebrides archipelago; a few at the close of the volume were written
from an island in French Polynesia. They were published, evidently with
the writer's consent, by the friend to whom they were written. After
reading them one is at a loss to say which is the more surprising--that
the friend should have suggested, or that the writer should have
consented to their publication, for such intimate, revelatory letters
are seldom to be found within the covers of a book, and I can think of
no other instance where such a record has been publicly circulated
during the writer's lifetime. To be sure, this writer's name is
withheld. He is called, merely, 'Asterisk,' but any one whose curiosity
prompted him to do so could have no difficulty in discovering his
identity, and it must be known, long before this, not only to his
friends but to many others beside. One would have said, judging only
from the letters, that he would have been the last man in the world to
have consented to their publication. Why he did so would offer matter
for an interesting but perhaps not very fruitful discussion. The only
important thing to be decided is this: whether they were written with a
view to eventual publication. There is abundant evidence to be found on
almost every page, that they were not so written.

Considered only from the point of view of the reading public, there can
be little question of the advisability of giving the record a wide
circulation. Rarely indeed do such letters find their way into print,
and I am convinced, after my third reading of them, that they will still
be read when Asterisk is as anonymous as he perhaps thought to remain
during his lifetime.

I do not mean to say that they are masterpieces of epistolary
literature, but they have this most essential quality of all good
letters: they are interesting. You may not like the man who wrote
them--indeed, I could understand the point of view of one who conceived
an active dislike for him--but I can promise that you will not suffer a
moment's boredom in his company. What a gift of the gods it is, never to
be tedious! It would cover a greater number of defects of character than
those to which Asterisk so frankly confesses in his letters. He is not
an artist at life, carefully shaping his destiny, moving steadily onward
through good fortune and bad toward some desired and attainable
end--there are few men of that sort anywhere, in any age. On the
contrary, he is a chimera chaser, a follower after wandering fires, and
he cares not where they lead him. He is also a born rebel, a kicker
against the pricks of life, and has nothing but contempt for those who
settle neatly into grooves and stay there, limiting their desires
according to the dictates of prudence and comfort. Some of his letters
are decidedly amusing, but taken as a whole I doubt whether you will
smile very often as you read his book. What makes the story valuable is
the vivid picture it gives you of an educated, sensitive, fastidious man
thrown upon his own resources in a primitive tropical environment. He
was disgusted with modern life, modern civilization. He was sick and
tired of England--he wanted to be happy and he found no happiness there.
He wanted to be free to live his life in his own way, largely outside
the conventions of gregarious folk. And so, with some misgivings and
many sanguine hopes, he set forth in search of this freedom.

Of his life previous to the New Hebrides experience, we know the little
his friend tells us in a brief introduction to the letters. His father,
the product of an old-time grammar school, taught him Latin when he was
five. He was then sent to a Wesleyan school, and from there to a local
'preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen.' Various other schools
followed, and in his seventeenth year he went to London to be enrolled
as a medical student. He had been given a lump sum which was to have
kept him and paid his fees until he qualified. This he spent,
apparently, for other things than fees. Then his father died, and with
his money gone there was no more medical school, but by that time he had
a groundwork in medicine which was to stand him in good stead later. He
became a bank clerk and afterward there was a long period of teaching as
junior master in a preparatory school. A legacy received in his
twenty-ninth year enabled him to go to Oxford where his pride suffered
because he was compelled to associate with men seven or eight years his
junior. His friend tells us that 'he took a fairly tolerable place in
the Chemistry School. And so to the peak of his ambition at last--a
mastership at a public school.' After teaching in England for some two
years he went to South America where followed another period of usherdom
and disgust. It was from Montevideo that he set out for the South Seas.

R. L. S. first turned his thoughts toward the Pacific. What an
incalculable amount of disillusionment in other men Stevenson has, quite
innocently, to answer for! I have read all of his South Sea books, both
descriptive and imaginative, and I cannot find that he painted life in
the islands in such rosy colors. There was a deal of glamour, of course,
in everything he wrote about them--there couldn't help being. Stevenson
found glamour, happily and rightly so, wherever he went, and the result
has been that an army of men, most of them young, some of them
middle-aged, a few of them old in years but still young in hope, have
followed him in his wanderings, particularly to the South Seas in search
of the Delectable Isles. Individuals here and there have found
them--they were bound to find them--but Asterisk is not among the
number. There were times when he thought he had--moments when he was
radiantly certain that he had. But always afterward came the reaction:
he loathed with an intense and bitter hatred everything connected with
the South Seas. It was the old story over again of a man trying to find
the material counterpart of a dream. It was the old story, too, of a man
carrying his own little private hell, himself, with him wherever he
went, and fondly hoping that a mere change of scene would, somehow,
miraculously transform it into a miniature Garden of Eden.

His choice of the New Hebrides was, to say the least, unfortunate. Had
he searched the Pacific over he could hardly have found a group of
islands less suited as places for white men to live. As a matter of fact
he did not deliberately choose this group. An opportunity for going to
New Caledonia came to him while he was school-mastering in Montevideo,
and as it was a move in the right direction, he decided to take it. He
went in company with another Englishman who had partially persuaded him
that they could both make their fortunes as planters. Asterisk had no
desire to make his fortune; all he wanted was enough money to insure
independence, and he was willing to sacrifice ten years of his life, if
necessary, to the Mammon of Business in order to lay by a small
competence. In one of his early letters to his friend, written on
shipboard during the twelve-thousand-mile voyage to New Caledonia, he
speaks thus:

    Brookes pesters me to death with elaborate figures concerning
    plantations and I pretend to be interested. I suppose we shall
    be successful but I don't seem to care. Sometimes I wish that I
    had waited and gone in my own way to do what I wanted. But then
    I think that perhaps the time might never have come...
    Brookes reckons that in ten years we ought to be making about
    2000 a year. Then he is going to retire and live comfortably in
    England. Shall I have lost my faculty of appreciation by then? I
    don't think so. I am going to treat my inner self most carefully
    all the time, so as to husband all my strength, all my longing
    and love of beauty, and I really hope that instead of having
    deteriorated it will have increased tremendously.

One would say that this letter had been written by a young man. It
breathes the very spirit of youth, and yet, at this time Asterisk must
have been in his late thirties. One reason why I find his letters so
interesting is that they seem to be the expression of two men, one of
them young, nave, full of illusions, the other old and bitter and
cynical.

But it seems that his friend Brookes had made a mistake in his
arithmetic, 'a nought too many or too few or something.' When they
arrived at Nouma, in New Caledonia, they found that their project was
impossible of achievement. The gains were slow and very uncertain.
Furthermore, a large capital was necessary and they had barely enough
money to pay their living expenses for a week. 'So back to the hotel to
reconstruct our plans. Brookes immediately cabled his brother in Japan,
and is off thither, via Sydney, on the 20th. I found myself left
stranded, a waif in the great Pacific.'

Asterisk had better stuff in him than his erstwhile companion. He cabled
no friends or relatives for money, but set out to look for a job. And he
soon found one as a plantation manager in the New Hebrides, at six
pounds a month, all found.

    Needless to say I have already determined to accept. I have
    learned much about the New Hebrides. From all accounts they are
    worthy, very worthy, from the point of view of beauty--typical
    South Sea islands of the stuff of which we have dreamed. There
    is a drawback, malaria... but I am not afraid because the
    risks are enormously lessened by proper care and a decent
    physique. Of course, if I find that it does make life impossible
    I shall move on.

He did find that malaria made life all but impossible, but he didn't
move on. He remained in the New Hebrides for seven and a half years.

For an account of the details of his life there you must turn to the
letters. I am interested not so much in his experiences as in his
reactions to these experiences. I wish to learn how 'the happy
hedonist,' as he bitterly styles himself in one of his letters,
succeeded or failed in his search for beauty, happiness, and the free
life.

The solitude closed in on him at once. You all but see loneliness
flowing around him silently and smoothly, as though it were something
tangible, like water. I have often wondered why it is that tropical
solitude is so much harder to endure than that of the unfrequented
places of the North. It is--at least I think it is. A gray, misty,
northern sea with never a sail on it is nothing like so lonely as a
tropical sea, bright and blue and sparkling in the afternoon sunshine.
As for landscape, go to the bleakest, the most barren of northern lands,
and you do not have there the feeling of forsakenness which often
assails you in tropical countries where Nature is so exuberantly lovely,
so smilingly indifferent to your little concerns and worries. The wan
mellow sunlight of the North has in it something consoling and friendly,
and the sky seems not so far away. In the tropics it is otherwise. There
'high noon' is a fearfully expressive term. High noon it is in all
truth--high beyond the farthest reach of fancy, and a brief, bewildered,
groping glance toward that infinity of blue brings home to you, not
intellectually as in the North, but emotionally, what an atom of dust
you are, creeping under that brilliant sky. And when you seek escape
from this overwhelming sense of littleness and loneliness by going into
the depths of some valley, the damp sepulchral gloom and the utter
silence soon drive you forth again. Yes, assuredly, one finds solitude
at its worst in the tropics.

In Asterisk's case it was not so much purely physical isolation. Often
there were other human beings within reach, but with a few exceptions he
preferred unbroken solitude to their companionship. His was a spiritual
and intellectual isolation, and one marvels that he endured it for seven
and a half years. Probably he couldn't have endured it had it not been
for his friend in England. One is glad that he had such a friend to turn
to. He poured out his soul to him, told him all that he was doing,
thinking, hoping, suffering. He sent him voluminous letters at every
opportunity. That his friend was a true friend in need is evident from
the following:

    If ever a man deserved salvation for a single act, you do for
    the writing of the letter which I received yesterday. I was
    feeling miserable, sitting at my tent door in the cool of the
    evening, gnawing my nails and cursing everything, looking lazily
    out to sea with no hope of seeing even a canoe. In the failing
    light I saw a speck, a lump on the water, an excrescence, mast
    sand no sails. It must be a launch. It must be Bernhardt,
    because no one else ventures up this wild coast. I got up and
    ran a good mile to where I knew he must anchor, and got there as
    he came ashore in his dinghy. He had got my mail, a great fat
    parcel of it--incidentally he had got my tobacco and I had been
    smoking 'trade' for a week--and there sticking out in the most
    obtrusive manner was your letter. I shook Bernhardt warmly by
    the hand (he thought I was drunk, as he was) and ran back to my
    tent. I had to be alone. I felt the envelope and it was so
    thick, and then (don't laugh!) I kissed it.... I opened and
    read solemnly and conscientiously my other letters--dull
    nonsense about surveying from lawyers. Then I filled myself a
    mighty pipe of Baron, mixed a corresponding whiskey and started
    to read.

I like to think that he had this great pleasure often, and only lonely
men who live in the backwaters of the world know what a pleasure it is.
No doubt he did have it, although he sometimes reproaches his friend for
sending him skimpy letters. But it must be remembered that his friend
was living in England, in wartime. It would not be surprising if he
sometimes forgot or temporarily neglected the happy hedonist.

Apropos of loneliness he has much to say, many vivid and memorable
descriptions of his reactions to it. The solitude of the spirit which
all sensitive men feel, at times, wherever they may be, was objectified
for him. It was like a presence; it seemed to take on a shadowy
substance and form and to follow him wherever he went.

    I fill my day as far as ever I can with the, to me, peculiarly
    obnoxious details of plantation life. But always there is the
    horror beside me, saying, 'when there is nothing more to do, or
    when you are tired, you will have no one to speak to. There will
    be nothing new, nothing new anywhere.' I rush out and stare at
    the sea and the horizon. I know every detail of it by heart. I
    know that there will never be a sail to break that ghastly line.
    And yet I stare and stare.... It is the knowledge that one is
    'right up against it' that is so appalling; that one is bound to
    go on living this rat's existence for months if not years to
    come.

There were years of it to come, and as the New Hebrides are pestilential
places, particularly in the rainy season, Asterisk suffered all the ills
which tropical flesh is heir to, with the exception of blackwater fever.
A large part of the time he was dopey with quinine. He drank much
whisky, partly for health's sake, partly to revive his spirits, and to
make solitude more endurable. Weakened by recurring attacks of fever,
sitting in his little 'iron hell' drenched with perspiration, tormented
by swarms of flies, fleas, and mosquitoes, sick at heart and often too
utterly weary to read, his thoughts went round and round in a
perpetually narrowing circle with himself perpetually at the center. You
may think as you read his letters that there never was such a colossal
egoist, but that will be because you have never lived alone, in a
malarial tropical climate, far from everything that makes life gracious
and pleasant.

His opinions of places varied considerably, depending upon whether he
was ill or comparatively well when he set them down, but his opinions of
his fellow Colonials changed very little from first to last. With a few
notable exceptions he hated them with a consuming hatred. They were
largely responsible for the enormous amount of bile he discharged into
his letters. In doing so he gained momentary relief, but there was
always more and to spare where that came from. The Australians were his
particular abominations. He called them 'Orstrylyuns,' imitating their
own pronunciation. There is no doubt that the lowest type of Australian
is at the very bottom of the scale with respect to the white human
animal. He is in all truth of the scum of the earth. There is no doubt,
either, that men of this type are to be found in considerable numbers in
such places as the New Hebrides. Asterisk loathed them, individually and
collectively. He hated their phonographs with their cheap music-hall
records. They would invade his privacy of a Sunday, bringing their
'phono' with them. And then, instead of talking on paper with his friend
in England, he would be compelled to listen to the kind of music which
enchanted them. I can all but hear one of them saying, ''Ere, chum,
lissen to this. This is a bit of all right, this is,' and then he sets
the mechanism going, and Asterisk, 'the savourer of pleasureable
emotions,' listens to a Sydney vaudeville artist, singing,

    'Old yer 'and out, naughty boy!
    'Old yer 'and out, naughty boy!
    Larst night in the pile moonlight
    I saw yer! I saw yer!
    With a nice girl in the park, etc., etc.

He hated their accent, their obscenity, their boastful talk of 'woyte
Orstrylia for woyte Orstrylyuns,' their perpetual 'nigger-cheating,' and
their shameless brutality to these same black islanders.

    ...the treatment of these poor wretches makes me writhe.
    People howl about Chinese slavery. I could tell them things
    about the recruiting and treatment of Kanakas that would open
    their eyes a bit.... They are enticed away by every species
    of trickery, often by actual violence, and then the gold-greedy
    white man wonders that they don't toil for twelve hours in the
    broiling sun with one meal of rice, willingly and heartily that
    'master' may become rich.

    I feel almost at the end of my tether and can't stand this crowd
    of Commonwealth yobs any longer. Their conceit is insufferable,
    their ignorance is unplummable. I can't even understand their
    language. Could you feel interested in a 'bosker come-back'?
    Would you, at my age, like to be called a 'Jackeroo'?... The
    English words that strike my ear are chiefly: blahdy, boi
    croipes, petreotism, Kichnur, and the boieys.

He acknowledges, on another occasion, that they are not all so bad as he
has sometimes painted them, and he wonders whether he is not a
degenerate and a snob because he dislikes their company and finds that
he has nothing in common with them. Personally, I don't think he was,
and in confessing that he was often utterly weary of his chance
companions of the 'Saturday-night-bath' class, with their 'boi croipses'
and their 'Jackeroos,' he was more honest with himself than, for
example, Walt Whitman, who shouted, on paper, 'Camerado!' to every Tom,
Dick, and Harry he met.

It would be strange if, during a period of nearly eight years, he never
had a really happy day. He did have some, but they were few and far
between, and one seems to catch the reflected light of them long
afterward, through the gloom of succeeding days. Meanwhile he was doing
all sorts of things to make a living. At first he managed plantations.
Then, because of his knowledge of languages--he both read and spoke
French, Italian, and Spanish--he was offered, and accepted, a position
as interpreter-translator at the High Court at Vila. The New Hebrides,
it may be well to explain, are held jointly by France and England and
governed by a joint Commission. The work here was confining, and he
suffered much from fever, but as usual, it was the people rather than
the work and the illness that he couldn't stand. The society of the
little tropical island port was not at all to his taste, so he held
himself aloof. What he disliked particularly was that in his official
position he had to be both respectable and respectful.

    I have to bow and smirk and say, 'Parfaitement, Monsieur le
    Prsident.' 'Je vous serai infiniment oblig, Monsieur le
    Procureur,' etc., when what I would like to say would not bear
    writing. I am longing to be free, to do, say, wear, and think
    what I damn well please. I didn't leave usherdom to become a
    _rond de cuir_, and that is what I should speedily become here
    if I didn't die or go mad first. Why should I be the slave of
    other people's convention, their paltry laws and accursed
    consciences? My life is all my own to play with and experiment
    upon just as it seems good to me. I know that this is foolish,
    and very largely impossible, but I intend to have my times of
    freedom, if only to chortle about them when I return to live
    among folk who dare not form an opinion for themselves, let
    alone perform an independent act. Ouf!--I nearly got started on
    a tirade.

It is hard to think of Asterisk as having been a schoolmaster; harder
still to imagine his having ever wanted to be one. For as I have said,
he was a born hater of conventional life, a born kicker against the
pricks. Perhaps the explanation is that in school teaching he found more
pricks to kick against than elsewhere. However that may be, I will
venture to say that he was a first-rate master who did his work
conscientiously and well, bitterly though he may have hated methods of
teaching and all the rest of it. It is plain from his letters that he is
a man who takes pride in his work, whether he likes it or not, and tries
always to give the best of himself whatever he may be doing. But it is
remarkable that he remained a teacher for so long. He really did believe
in personal freedom. He really did believe that his life was his own to
experiment with as he chose. At length he decided upon an experiment
which was a dangerous one, to say the least. He took a native wife, in
the island fashion.

This was in the fourth year of his sojourn, and three years after his
experience as court-interpreter. In the meantime, after having traveled
all over the archipelago as a surveyor, he had again become a plantation
manager. Evidently, his attitude toward the natives had undergone a
change during these years. In 1914 he tells his friend that the New
Hebrides Kanaka is the last word in ugliness, filth, and depravity, and
the fact of a white man mating with a female of such a kind argues even
greater depravity, and shocking bad taste, 'even on the part of an
Orstrylyun.' Two years later, in announcing his decision, he explains to
his friend that his wife, although a New Hebridean, comes from the
island of Aoba, and that the Aobans are freaks among the natives, being
Malayan rather than Papuan.

    Their complexion is light; their hair yellowish and long; their
    features are good. I should not call the women classically
    beautiful, but they are very pleasing and petite. Also they are
    worshippers of bodily cleanliness, spending the whole day in the
    sea.

From this time on his letters are of the greatest interest, for Asterisk
tried to be, and usually succeeded in being, quite honest with himself.
I believe that his conventional self was thoroughly convinced, almost at
once, that he had gotten into a mess; but you see his unconventional
self looking at the matter from every possible angle, trying to decide
whether, viewed broadly, it was really a mess or not. This latter rarely
had the upper hand in the argument. Asterisk realized that he was
treading a dangerous path, but despite his misgivings he got a great
deal of amusement out of his 'experiment' and one can imagine him
thinking, 'I wish that some of my school-mastering colleagues could look
in on me now. Wouldn't they be horrified!' He taught 'Topsy,' as he
called her, Biche-la-mar, and tried to learn her own island dialect.
Solitude was more supportable now, and sometimes, particularly when she
was ill, he realized with a shock 'how absurdly and disgustingly
attached' he had grown to his little brown woman, who sat on the floor
and sang little songs, behaving toward him just as a nice Persian kitten
would behave.

    Sometimes I have the ordinary futile longing for a soul mate,
    for the wife who could be all in all to me... for the
    intellectual life _ deux_. More often now I understand that I
    am better off with my nut-brown savage who, two minutes after a
    storm of tears... was choking with laughter over 'Simon Says
    Thumbs Up.' 'Allez, go on! Again! Me want win 'im you.' She will
    play for hours at these nursery games. Do you remember playing
    'Pat-a-Cake' with your nurse? Topsy loves it. Many a time when I
    have been aching for sleep she has kept me up with, ''e no long
    time sleep yet. Allez! You me two.'

    Thank heaven I can still howl with laughter and forget my age
    and pomposity on suitable occasions. I trust I shall never
    develop a sense of the fitness of things. One is always fit to
    be a fool, no matter what young fools may think....

    If I could come to Europe, pick my woman, and be free and
    independent to raise my kids in my own way, there would be
    something over which to hesitate. But the alternative is denied
    me. What woman--except such an one as I should loathe--would
    marry me, middle-aged, penniless, bald, ugly and cranky? I have
    not got--and I thank my own god for it--one feature that would
    redeem me in the eyes of such a bourgeoise as I could marry.
    Fancy me being even as respectable as you....

It was at about this time that his friend in England had recommended his
reading some Henry James. It was a curious suggestion under the
circumstances, and Asterisk confessed, emphatically and picturesquely,
that it didn't appeal to him. There is no doubt in my own mind, either,
that Henry James is not the novelist for a man living in wild country,
more particularly in wild tropical country. I once tried reading 'The
Awkward Age' on an atoll in the Low Archipelago. It was a beautiful
little island; the palms were always bending to the cool trade wind,
blowing across leagues and leagues of lonely sea. I was tranquil in
mind, healthy in body, and wholly free from interruptions of any sort. I
had very few books with me, and they had all been read and re-read many
times. And yet I couldn't read 'The Awkward Age' with either
understanding or sympathy. All that I got from my reading was a sense of
the complete unreality of polite, civilized life, and of the art,
however admirable, that dealt with it. I can understand Asterisk's lack
of appreciation in the stifling, pestilential heat of the New Hebrides.
It is interesting to speculate as to what Henry James would have made of
life in such a place, had he gone there at Asterisk's age, for example,
or perhaps a little earlier. I have said that Asterisk was a fastidious
man--and so he was, despite the non-fastidious things he did--but Henry
James was a thousand times more so. It was Conrad who called him 'the
historian of fine consciences.' What would have happened to him, had he
been compelled to remain in such an archipelago for ten or fifteen
years, say--to work for his living, and to live alone without
intellectual companionship? But this is altogether too far-fetched a
speculation. Henry James would never have gone in the first place.

To come back to Asterisk, not many records, however intimate, throw such
a revealing light into a man's mind and heart as these letters of his
do. You see every corner of both as clearly as you see his lonely figure
going resolutely about his work, or sitting under a tree, thinking
things over, pipe in mouth, his chin resting on his hands, and his
battered old sun helmet pulled down over his eyes to keep out the
intense blaze of light. You see his island, too, as vividly as though
you were actually there, a ghostly witness of everything that takes
place. You see him getting up of a morning, peevish and grouchy after a
night of fever, of fitful sleeping and tossing and turning, and
semi-delirious thinking about the future. You see his house, every
detail of it, and the little house he had built for Topsy, where she
spent her time 'making the most impossible botches and bungles' in the
shape of clothes for the baby that was soon to be born.

Having had his coffee, he goes out to oversee his native labor. He had a
large gang to supervise, sometimes one hundred or more. He holds his
'sick-parade,' for there was always plenty of illness. The most common
diseases were fever, diarrhoea, and abscesses, and of course, skin
diseases innumerable. The men line up and he goes along the ranks making
inquiries.

ASTERISK: You sick long what?
No. 1.    Me pever, Master. (p=f) (The infirmier, a 'civilized' boy from
          Noumea, takes the man's temperature while A. moves on.)
A.        You sick long what?
No. 2.    Belly b'long me, me hear 'im, 'e no good. Me tink belly b'long
          me, 'e run out, finish.
A.        You been kaikai what name?
No. 2.    No. Me kaikai rice, no more.
A.        You no been kaikai crab?
No. 2.    Yes, me bin kaikai one crab. (Probably at least twenty scavenger
          land-crabs.)
A.        (_to infirmier_) Toi, donne du sel d'Epsom  ce boy.
A.        You sick long what?
No. 3.    Arm b'long me 'e swell up. Me 'ear 'im, 'e strong. (Strong=hot
          and hard.)
A.        All right. You go long house. By and by me put him on medicine.
          To-morrow night after to-morrow, him not very good, me cut him
          arm along you.
No. 3.    All right, Master. Me tink very good you cut 'im.

There were always abscesses to cut, but the natives were extraordinarily
stoical and had no fear of the knife. If he didn't cut them they would
do it themselves with a piece of glass, which invariably resulted in
mixed infection and sinus formation. So he had to put a tabu on
self-cutting.

Sick parade over, the natives are sent out to work. Asterisk follows. It
wasn't such an irksome job, the overseeing business, except for the
deadly monotony. He sits on a log in a little patch of shade, smokes his
pipe, and thinks. Now and then he sings out, 'Go ahead there!' just to
show them that he isn't asleep. Occasionally he strolls around and
pretends to be in a terrible rage merely to maintain the proper respect
due to the presence of a white man. He returns to his little patch of
shade, and a feeling of nostalgia comes over him. To hell with the South
Seas! It was only the sentimental trippers, viewing the islands from the
deck of a comfortable steamer who raved about them. Let them try living
on one for a year, for three months, for only three weeks. Lord! It
would be good to be in England now! But what would he do in England?
No--useless trying to delude himself. He had found it bad enough there
before the war. It would be a thousand times worse, now, with everybody
being patriotic. All those young men in Kitchener's millions--are they
really noble-minded, or are they merely sheep? If one of them had a
grain of imagination, would he be so noble? What a side-splitting farce
war is, looked at dispassionately. Even here he felt occasional waves of
hatred against the Germans surging through his silly self. Fortunately
he had the time and the requisite detachment to think of the many
Germans he had known, just as harmless and silly as he himself, and so
the rage quickly passed.

He thinks of Montevideo. It would be pleasant to go back there--to drop
into the Club Uruguay at apritif time, with the atmosphere thick with
the fumes of Brazilian tobacco and absinthe, and some _joven
distinguido_ with a shocking accent reciting Verlaine. Yes, it would be
amusing, but only for a short while. He would be heartily sick of the
place before a week had passed.

Asterisk, Junior, who is on the way? Oh, Lord! Well, one thing was
certain: it would never do to let himself become fond of the little
brat. If he were to give way now, it would mean the renunciation of all
that he really loved. Supposing he were to settle down in the islands
for good, and try to make something of his son, for it was sure to be a
boy. Plenty of white men had lived happily for years with Aoba women,
and had brought up half-caste children. But to begin with, these men
were invariably the mental and physical inferiors of their native wives,
and to end with, the half-castes were unspeakable. No, it wouldn't do at
all, for a thousand reasons. The mockeries of civilization are one
thing, but there is a world of difference between merely hating them and
hurting one's head against them. As for really 'going native,' that was
impossible, for him at least. We simply can't help being respectable
Puritans. It isn't our fault. A fat duck who should set back the
Mendelian clock a few hundred years and proclaim himself a wild bird of
soaring flight, would be justly laughed at by the rest of the poultry
yard. No, the family is the product of thousands of years of evolution,
and those who try to upset it, or to establish weird families of mixed
breed on a cannibal island, only hurt themselves and make themselves
ridiculous. There were no two ways about it--he would have to shift,
leave Topsy and the baby when it came, clear out of these accursed
malarial islands for good. But the curious thing to reflect upon was
this: when he had gone, ten to one he would think back over these years
with pleasure. All the idyllic aspects of the life would become grossly
exaggerated in his eyes. Once away, glamour would be sure to raise its
deceiving and malicious head. He might even be homesick for this Hell's
Kitchen! Wasn't that always the way of it? 'There's no times like the
old times!' 'Ah, you should have sailed in my last ship, mates! She was
something like!' What complete, unteachable asses all men were!

These and innumerable other reflections scratched around inside his
bald, middle-aged head as he went about his week-day employments, and on
Sunday you see him sitting at his table, scratching them down on paper
in letters to his friend. And so he went on down the road with Topsy
until they came to their first important milestone, the birth of
Asterisk, Junior, whom he named 'Bilbil.'

Then followed a really awful period for Asterisk. He was torn with
doubts as to what he should do. One day he would decide, definitely,
finally, and irrevocably that he must leave the islands at once. The
next day he would decide, just as irrevocably, that he must remain, and
he would elaborate plans he had made for Bilbil's upbringing. What a
chance he now had to educate a boy, and his own at that, according to
his own ideas!

    I am a crank. I know it. I have now got in my hand most of the
    elements for an unordinary life--a little savage mate, a fat
    baby, the island life where I can't starve or want, a cynical
    pleasure in flaunting before all the respectable Kerlonials
    tastes and fancies which I hope to transmit to my heir, an
    opportunity for determining that at least one child shall not
    grow up in damnable ignorance of nature, shall not from babyhood
    be loaded with the barnacles of convention. All that interests
    me enormously. A return to Philistia does not. I have got a
    unique chance now. If I were to throw it away I should deserve
    whatever might befall me.

But it was not only the unique opportunity which made him hesitate about
leaving the islands. Little Bilbil had a great deal to do with it. The
flow of affection toward him grew stronger from week to week--it worried
him immensely to find how deeply the current ran. Then he would see the
grown-up, half-caste son of some planter or trader, arrogant, shiftless,
good for nothing, and he would say to himself, 'There goes my Bilbil
twenty years from now,' and he would rush back to his house to add to a
letter--in which he had outlined ambitious plans for Bilbil's education,

    The sooner I get rid of him the better.... I have been
    fighting hard to convince myself that I have no color
    prejudices, but I chuck up now.... I am so afraid that if I
    take Bilbil away and get him among whiter things, I shall
    straightway begin to hate him. I know I should. No, I have made
    a horrid mistake.... The only real way out is to end the
    whole business before it goes any further.

Whereupon he would again complete arrangements with some decent Colonial
of his acquaintance, who would see to it that Topsy and Bilbil had a
comfortable and happy life after his departure. And again these plans
would be unmade, and so it went on, week after week, month after month.
In one of his letters he says, 'I don't suppose you've passed so many
sleepless nights in your life as I have during the past year,' and no
doubt he was right in supposing this.

One day Topsy came in 'for a talk,' and she told him something. It was
the last straw for Asterisk. He seizes his head in his hands and sits
thus for a long time. Then he takes his pen, worn to a mere stub by this
time, with recounting on paper plans and canceled plans and all the
cares of family life, and wearily passes on the news to his friend,
adding,

    It is abominable. Topsy will have to go back to Aoba to have
    that child _au naturel_ and leave Bilbil with me. One small
    mtis may be _mets delicieux_, but two would be a surfeit, an
    orgy, an impossibility, an Oxford breakfast.

There is something comical about all this as there is in most tragic
situations. Well, what was to be done now?

I am afraid I have given the impression, thus far, that Asterisk's time
and thought were wholly occupied with his personal and family cares. In
reality this was far from being the case. His mind, despite frequent
attacks of illness, the intense heat, and the dreary routine of
plantation life, was perpetually active. He was not the kind of man who
could merely sit. He had to think as well. He considered, weighed, and
judged all sorts of things, and his letters are filled with these
opinions and judgments, always his own and always interesting. I can't
find that he deteriorated to any extent, intellectually, for all his
seven and a half years of solitude. In fact, his mind during the last
two years seems to have been much keener and healthier than at first. As
a matter of curiosity I had thought to make a subject-index of his
letters, but the task would require more time than I have to give to it.
It would be an interesting one, and would show what a wide variety of
matters he found to reflect upon during his exile. He was a keen
observer, too; nothing escaped his attention, and he sent his friend
many a lively account of island happenings, many a vivid little picture
of something he had seen on the plantation or in the bush.

In February, 1919, the second baby was born, dead. On this occasion the
mother had nearly a week of agony, and was herself at the point of death
when the child was delivered. At that moment she gave Asterisk a sudden
brief glimpse into her strange little soul.

    She was quite certain that she was going to die, but seemed
    equally convinced that I was going with her wherever she went.

    'By and by two feller 'e go where? By and by two feller 'e go
    same place? 'E where? 'E long England? 'E long Nouma? Me tink
    'e stop long way too much. By and by two feller 'e go longa
    steamer?

    'Bald 'ed, you sabby koumala (sweet potato) where me cook 'im
    long you, me burn 'im? By God me sorry too much long that!'

    I had quite forgotten the incident. She had done even as Alfred
    the Great on one occasion, and I had cursed her heartily. She
    had evidently been consumed with shame for the heinous offense
    and seized the nearness of death as an opportunity for
    unburdening herself. To-day she is as merry as a cricket again,
    and if I were out of earshot would be up and off to the beloved
    sea for a swim.

I could write indefinitely about these letters, for they are of
absorbing interest to me. Often a single paragraph offers matter for
pages of comment, but I hope that I have already said enough and quoted
enough to persuade some of those who have not read it to turn to the
volume for themselves. It rarely happens that a man of Asterisk's
antecedents and upbringing has had the courage--or perhaps I should say,
the fool-hardiness--to do what he did, and of the few who have done so,
not one, in so far as I know, has left a record of the experiment to be
compared with his.

At last, in November, 1919, he left the New Hebrides, after having
arranged for Bilbil to be adopted into a planter's family. Topsy was to
remain with this family until the spirit should move her to return to
her beloved Aoba. Asterisk went to Australia, and with returning health
all his keen zest for life and for new experience came back to him. He
was as full of plans as ever. He was going to Norfolk Island to make his
fortune extracting oil of lemon; he was going to England to seek
employment in a bookshop, and he asks his friend to make inquiries about
possible openings in this field against his return; he was going back to
school-mastering and was considering an offer in Sydney; he was going to
be a commercial traveler. But some months later, on an island in French
Polynesia, where he had found employment as secretary to a Phosphate
Company, we find him considering yet other projects. The very last
paragraph in his last letter to his English friend reads:

    Just at present the moon is between the quarter and the full,
    giving enough light to read by, and the palms and the surf would
    make me cry if they didn't make me so gorgeously happy. I think
    I am just beginning to know what happiness beauty can give.

Perhaps I should leave him there, giving the reader the impression, as
his friend, perforce, did--that possibly he had found what he had been
so long searching for. But this was not the case, and I can't forbear
adding a brief postscript.

About two years ago, my own trail in the Pacific chanced to cross that
of Asterisk on an island many hundreds of miles from the New Hebrides.
He had long since left the phosphate island and his secretarial position
there, and had been living in a remote spot on this other island of
which I speak--one of the loveliest tropical islands, surely, that can
be found anywhere, although, in common with many others, it is fast
becoming 'civilized' and spoilt. He had spent some months here, but had
moved on again into the blue--where, I don't know.

I then knew who he was, of course, and made some inquiries about him in
the town. One man said, 'Do you mean that damn fool Englishman who
talked like a book?' Another said, 'Oh, he's gone long ago, and a good
riddance, too.' A third talked at great length of Asterisk, and spoke of
him as 'the most interesting man I've met in years, and the most
unhappy.' But his impressions, he said, were only impressions. Their
meetings had been casual ones, usually at the Restaurant du Port, on the
monthly steamer day.

I decided to go to the country district where Asterisk had lived, to see
for myself his house, and the spot he had chosen for it. It was a long
journey, more than thirty-five miles around the island, but it was then
the cool season of the year, and it chanced to be one of those perfect
tropical days when journeys of whatever sort are delightful.

A light film of cloud had settled around the shoulders of the mountains
far in the interior, but their jagged peaks jutted through into the
clear air above, and the lowlands along the coast were in full sunshine.
Far away, against the blue, battlemented cliffs, I could see, at times,
flocks of snow-white terns gleaming and disappearing in sunlight and
shadow like bits of silver paper, and the waterfalls tumbling over the
headwalls of valleys were so remote that they seemed to be hanging
motionless. Not a sound, of bird, or beast, or man, broke the noonday
stillness. There was nothing to be heard but the faint roar of the surf
on the reef, and that is not sound but the very voice of Silence to one
who has lived long on tropical islands.

The house, I discovered, was a long way from the road. I followed a
foot-path pointed out to me by a native of the district. This led me
through a stretch of low, partly swampy ground, pitted with the holes of
land-crabs, and densely shaded by immense map trees with their
buttressed trunks and looped and twisted roots which seem to writhe and
turn as you gaze at them. Then I waded a river and soon came to rising
ground. Another five minutes brought me within view of the sea again,
and there, on a point of land jutting into the lagoon, I found
Asterisk's dwelling.

It was just what it should have been for that spot--a little gem of a
house, built in the native style, with walls of plaited bamboo, a roof
of thatch, and low, overhanging eaves furnishing a pleasant veranda all
round, floored with coral sand. It contained but one room which had been
screened with gauze mosquito netting, but this was already rotting away,
and strips of it hung down, swaying to and fro in the breeze. The thatch
roof also was badly in need of repair, and there were many places where
the rain had soaked through. The grass of the lawn was now growing tall
and rank, and weeds and bushes were springing up everywhere.

Whatever furniture there had been was sold or given away, I suppose,
when Asterisk left; but on a nail driven into one of the posts
supporting the roof, hung a discarded linen coat and an old pandanus
hat, and in a corner was a walking-stick that had been cut from the
bush. They were Asterisk's, undoubtedly. Some one has spoken of 'the
souls of things.' They have them, or rather, they take on aspects of the
souls of their owners. There was something bizarre, outlandish, about
that old coat and hat, and something primly school-masterish in the way
they hung from the nail, that told me at once whose they had been. As
for the walking-stick, merely to look at it gave me a restless feeling.
I wanted to grasp it and go striding off somewhere, lashing furiously at
twigs and bushes and the heads of grasses as I went.

I walked a long way down the beach--there was no one, either white or
native living anywhere in that vicinity--and came slowly back to the
house. Viewed in the mellowing light of late afternoon, it looked very
forsaken and desolate, so I turned my back on it and looked out to sea.
I had my copy of Asterisk's letters with me, and choosing a shady spot,
sat down to glance through them again, and immediately I had a sense of
the nearness of his eager, hopeful, restless, dissatisfied spirit:

    I have not yet stopped shuddering at Sydney. I fear very much
    that London would displease me also. I look at illustrated
    papers and see pictures of the smug crowds, particularly the
    crowds....

    I could be very happy in Devonshire, perhaps, as long as it
    didn't rain, but unfortunately I couldn't spend the rest of my
    life in Devonshire in summertime....

    Oh, England is a beastly place. Just think of the rules, the
    chains and fetters of brass.... Do you really think there is
    one person in London who could like or even tolerate a really
    free man and an unconventional life? And then, when one thinks
    of the country--_sacre nom d'un nom d'un nom!..._

    At present I simply long to be in London. I am fast coming to
    the conclusion that fireside travel is much pleasanter than the
    reality. There are fewer disillusionments and one can pick one's
    company....

    I should really love to go into a 'retreat' for two whole years,
    to wipe myself, to try and get my mind free from my beastly
    body. If only such places existed without the interference of
    some nonsensical creed I would go. I want to live. I want
    neither to be praised nor blamed....

    I was thinking the other day of my curiously futile life, and
    the phrase flashed across my malaria-befuddled mind, 'The
    aspirations of the irresolute in common with the aspirates of
    the illiterate are often dropped, often misplaced, always
    misunderstood.' This is a fair sample of my mental condition. I
    am forgetting how to talk, how to think, how even to eat....

    I am irresistibly drawn eastward sometimes.... I am sure that
    it is only amongst the very old things of the world that one can
    really find that blessed state where things are not classified
    as good or evil, 'done' or 'not done.'...

    I think that the ideal South Sea Island must be left as a
    beautiful dream,... I feel sad about it, but an unsatisfied
    longing is better than a shattered dream....

    For a few pounds or even for nothing as a supercargo on a
    schooner, I can reach in a few days realms of bliss. And with
    the saved money I can live as I want to live, and know for
    myself what I am convinced is there awaiting me....

Thus it was always with Asterisk--forever hopeful despite all
disillusionments, thinking that the place where he was not was the place
where 'further beauty and fuller peace' awaited him.

As I turned the pages I came upon one letter in which he had sent his
friend copies of two poems he loved--rondeaus of Charles d'Orleans. They
are both exquisite things, but this one chimed in best with my mood of
the moment, with the drowsy spirit of the afternoon, and my thoughts of
Asterisk:

    Laissez-moy penser  mon aise,
    Hlas! donnez m'en le loysir.
    Je devise avecques Plaisir
    Combine que ma bouche se taise.

    Quand Merencolie mauvaise
    Me vient maintes fois assaillir,
    Laissez-moy penser  mon aise,
    Hlas! donnez m'en le loysir.

    Car afin que mon cueur rapaise,
    J'appelle Plaisant-Souvenir,
    Qui tantost me vient resjoir.
    Pour ce, Pour Dieu! ne vous deplaise
    Laissez-moy penser  mon aise.

The refrain seemed to ring pensively in the air, to die away slowly, and
to dissolve at last in the golden peace of the afternoon. I remained
seated for a long while, watching the changing colors on the surface of
the lagoon, thinking of Asterisk, marveling that he had left such a
lovely spot, wondering where he had gone and what shape his dream would
now take to lure him on.

Just before I came away I found one other relic of his. When I had
opened the door of his house some scraps of paper scattered on the
floor, fluttered out on the doorstep. I picked one of them up. It was
the fragment of what appeared to be a letter he had written and then
destroyed. The following words were written on it:

       plans are somewhat uncertain. Meanwhile may
    never be realized, and yet

That was all, but it was enough to convince me that Asterisk had written
them.

What may never be realized? His dream? It must have been that he meant.
If so, I hope that he still says, 'and yet----' I hope that he has not
abandoned his quest. But on what farthest star, I wonder, is the true
home of the searcher for beauty, happiness, and the free life?




CHAPTER VI. PRAIRIE WINTER
(_An Unfinished Masterpiece_)


It is a poem, my own, and I call it a masterpiece because that is what I
hoped it would be. It will never be finished now--that I know. I also
know that you, indulgent reader, cannot be expected to view it with my
eyes, or to be haunted, as I am, by its promise. Perhaps I am mistaken
in thinking you indulgent? And when, presently, timidly enough, I
exhibit my fragment, you may say, 'Well, of all things! And he thought
this worth preserving! Why hasn't he thrown it away long ago?'

I have! Oh, I have! If you could see the paper it is written on--soiled,
wrinkled, torn, scorched, I should not need to tell you how many times I
have tried to get rid of it. It has been thrown into enough wastepaper
baskets to furnish a modern office building with such receptacles; but
always it managed to bounce out, and to get itself smoothed out and put
carefully away again. Not having the courage actually to destroy it with
my own hands, I have crumpled the paper into a little ball and laid it
on piles of fuel ready to be lit, in fireplaces. But when the fires were
lit by my various landladies' chambermaids, the little ball rolled off
and somehow escaped. Once I folded the paper so that it couldn't roll,
and tucked it neatly between two billets of wood; but the maid--a
particularly observant and thrifty one--of that lodging-house,
discovered it while lighting the fire, and when I returned to my room,
there it was, laid under the paper-weight on my desk. How often, I
wonder, have I buried it deeply in an old trunk used as a receptacle for
manuscripts rejected by editors, and fragments of manuscripts discarded
by myself? But inevitably it rises like potential cream through this
skimmed milk of my fancy, and is to be found sooner or later on top,
reproaching me as the fragment of 'Kubla Khan' must have reproached
Coleridge till the day of his death. I don't mean to compare my fragment
with his. One man plans a palace or a cathedral, and another, less
gifted, plans a dog kennel or a chicken-coop, but if they leave their
work unfinished, the reproach to either is the same in kind although not
in degree.

I must, somehow, exorcize forever the memory of this thing, so as to
gain the leisure and peace of mind for the complete composition of some
other--and I hope, authentic--masterpiece. Therefore, since I cannot now
show you what the poem might have been, may I not merely tell you how it
came to be what it is? I assume--I must!--that permission has been
granted.

                 *        *        *        *        *

One autumn afternoon, so many years ago that I am reluctant to remember
how many, I was disturbing the dust which had settled on the shirt and
collar boxes in George Kinsel's clothing store. This was my task--or one
of them--before and after school hours, on Saturdays, and during summer
vacations. The other duties were to sweep out the store in the morning,
to build the fire in the wood-burning furnace, to run errands, and when
farmers and their wives came to town, to help or rather, to offer to
help--wait on trade.

George Kinsel was a stockman by profession, and had a large cattle and
hog ranch on the rich bottom lands bordering the Skunk River, about four
miles from town. He had bought the clothing store as a speculation, he
said, but the real reason was, I think, that he might be assured of a
pleasant loafing place in the winter of his age. The store was the
favorite rendezvous for many of the farmers and townsmen, and Mr. Kinsel
was always to be found there of an afternoon in seasons of bad weather.
He still owned his ranch, but had retired from active business, and now
lived at the Commercial Hotel, spending his time between the ranch and
the store. Although he was nearly seventy, a stranger would not have
suspected it. He was sound of wind and limb and as sleek as one of his
own fine steers. His skin was smooth, clear, and ruddy, and his shock of
thick white hair seemed to have whitened prematurely. In the mornings he
usually rode out to the ranch, coming back to town at three or four in
the afternoon. Having left his horse at the livery stable he would come
on to the store, and I can still smell the fragrant country odor he
brought with him, and hear his hearty, 'Well, boys, how's business? Sold
any fur-lined underwear to-day?' as he settled down in his chair.

Billy Davidson and his cousin, John Davidson, managed the store. They
were then in their late thirties and knew everything there was to be
known about the country-town clothing business. They had followed it
from boyhood, always at Prairie Hills, and every one in the county knew
and liked them. The farmers for miles around bought their clothing and
boots and shoes from the Davidson boys, and had been doing it for so
long that they were not willing even to be waited on by a new clerk,
more particularly by such a young and inexperienced clerk as myself.
Sometimes when a farmer's wife came in to make purchases for her husband
or children, Billy would say to me, 'There's Mrs. Kelly, Jimmie. Go see
what she wants.' I would go, trying to look competent and pleasant, but
I knew in advance what the result would be. I would say, 'Is there
something, Mrs. Kelly?' whereupon she would fold her hands across her
ample stomach, glance down coldly at me, and reply, 'I want to see
Billy,' or 'I want to see John.' I would then slink back to my duster
and the collar boxes.

The Davidson boys did their best for me. 'Walk right up to them,
Jimmie,' Billy would say. 'Don't snoop along like you was going to be
whipped. And don't say, "Is there something, Mrs. Kelly?" like that. Say
it this way': and he would put into the question all the assurance of
his years of training and his consciousness of popularity. Well, I did
my best, but the result was negligible. Not once in a month would a
customer trust me to wait upon him or her, and I recall vividly how
crushed and humbled I used to feel after these rebuffs. Occasionally
when both the Davidson boys were busy, some farmer would permit me to
sell him some shoelaces, or a pair of corn-husking gloves, or a collar
button, but that is about as far as tolerance of my services went.

The result was that I developed a flourishing inferiority complex. In
those days, to be sure, we didn't know there were such things, but we
had them nevertheless--at any rate I had one. It was small and sickly at
first, but it battened upon every one of Mrs. Kelly's or Mrs.
Grosvenor's cold, disparaging looks, and gathered rich and vital
nourishment from each of Mrs. Ed Schlosser's or Mrs. Sam Akerman's
emphatic rebuffs. The refrain, 'I want to see Billy,' or 'I want to see
John,' rang everlastingly in my ears. They never wanted to see me, and I
began to wonder what I was good for, or whether I was good for anything.

Then I discovered that there was one thing I could do--I could write
poetry. I was sure it was poetry because a Des Moines paper had printed
one of my compositions, and I had the immense satisfaction of hearing
Mr. Kinsel read it aloud as he sat in his chair by the hot-air register.
'Well, now, that ain't so bad,' he said--'not so bad at all,' and
immediately I rushed down to the furnace room to exult in solitude. I
had not attached my name to the production, which added sweetness to the
triumph. 'Wouldn't he be surprised,' I thought, 'if he knew that the
author of that poem is right here in Prairie Hills, throwing wood at
this very minute into his furnace?' Thereafter I wrote poetry with a
vengeance, and Mr. Kinsel and the Davidson boys thought I had become
studious of a sudden, and was working at my arithmetic lessons.

Meanwhile my clerkly sufferings went on, but they were alleviated by the
social side of life in the clothing business. The store, as I have said,
was a favorite loafing place, particularly in the winter time, and those
who made use of it were known, collectively, as 'The Kinsel Club.'
George was the permanent president, and the members most faithful in
attendance were Doc Nickerson, Phineas Cragie, the lawyer, Charley
MacManus, the livery-stable keeper, old Mr. Brandt, the proprietor of
the Commercial Hotel, and Scott Cassidy, another cattle man, reputed to
be the hardest drinker in the county. In fact, Scott was the only member
of the Club who drank steadily, persistently, year in and year out. He
had kept it up since boyhood, and people were always saying, at least
some people were, that he couldn't possibly outlast the year. But he had
a cast-iron stomach and lived a healthy, outdoor life, and so the
prophets were always being disappointed. Hard as he drank no one ever
saw him drunk. Whisky was his favorite beverage, but its only apparent
effect upon him was to make him more than usually susceptible to music.

We had a great deal of music at Kinsel's store--at any rate, we called
it music. Indeed, it was music in so far as the Davidson boys were
concerned. They both had beautiful voices. John was a high tenor, and I
never tired of hearing him sing, 'I Know a Bank Whereon the Wild Thyme
Grows.' Billy was a baritone, and when he sang, 'Every Morn I Send Thee
Violets,' we all listened in respectful silence, and heartily agreed
with Mr. Kinsel who said they couldn't do it better than that in Chicago
or New York City. We had part-singing too. John Davidson and Johnnie
Wilderman, who worked in Bruce Baldwin's barber-shop, were the first
tenors, Orpheus Banks, the colored chore-boy at the Commercial Hotel,
and I were second tenors; and Billy Davidson and Morse Eldridge the
first and second basses.

What concerts we used to have! It gives me almost as much pleasure to
think of them as it did to partake in them. I sometimes--in fact, quite
often--'played hookey' from school in order to be on hand, and I am sure
that I gained more edification to my soul than I would have, had I
remained walled in with blackboards, learning the names of the State
capitols and how to bound Jasper County. About two in the afternoon
Johnnie Wilderman would come in, and shortly afterward, Morse Eldridge
from the drugstore. Orpheus Banks was usually kept busy until three,
washing up the after-dinner dishes at the hotel; but the moment he was
free he would race over with a look of eager anticipation on his jolly
black face. Then Mr. Kinsel would say, 'Well, boys, all present? How
about favoring the Club with a little music?' and Scott Cassidy,
settling back more comfortably in his chair, would shift his quid, spit
luxuriously down the hot-air register, and say, 'That's just what I was
thinkin', George! Tune up, boys! Tune up! Let's have "Swingin' in the
Grape-Vine Swing" for a starter.'

Then we began, for we required no urging at all. We had a large
repertoire. Charley MacManus, who had never been out of Iowa, liked sea
songs, and we gave him 'Nancy Lee' and 'Sailing, Sailing, Over the
Bounding Main.' Old Mr. Brandt always called for 'Juanita,' and 'In the
Evening by the Moonlight,' and beat time with his hand as we sang.
Phineas Cragie liked 'Honey, Honey, Bless Your Heart,' and that was my
favorite too. But there was one song that showed our virtuosity at its
best. I've forgotten the name of it, but the chorus began with the
basses singing:

                        O-o-oh come, come, come, come,
                TENORS: Come where the lilies,
                        The sweet fragrant lilies,
                        Come where the lilies bloom so fair.
               BASSES: Bloom so fair, oh, come and
           FULL CHORUS: Down in the meadow,
                        The green shady meadow,
                        Come where sweet perfume fills the air.

This song often made Scott Cassidy cry. 'Stop, boys! Please stop!' he
would say. 'It's too pretty; I can't stand it.' A certain heart-wringer
for Doc Nickerson was 'The Old Oaken Bucket,' and the moment we began

    How de-e-ar to my he-e-art are the sce-e-nes of my childhood,

his eyes would become moist. He didn't actually weep, but he came very
near it. He said that 'wildwood' was the most beautiful word in the
English language, and that 'deep tangled wildwood' made him think of the
timber land along the Skunk River.

But to return to--or rather, to approach--the masterpiece: on the day I
have already mentioned Morse Eldridge and Johnnie Wilderman were
lounging on the counters in the rear of the store. We were waiting for
Orpheus Banks, who was still busy with his dish-washing at the hotel. It
was a dismal afternoon in late November, with a north wind blowing flaws
of sleet against the windowpanes, but I had the furnace going full
blast, and within doors we were snug and comfortable. Billy and John
Davidson were unpacking and ticketing some cases of felt-lined
overshoes, and I was at my usual task of dusting. The Kinsel Club was in
session around the hot-air register in the rear of the store, and
Phineas Cragie was holding the floor. Mr. Cragie owned the building
which housed the store. Upstairs, he and Doc Nickerson and Henry
Hillman, the fire-and-tornado insurance agent, had their offices. There
was one extra room furnished as a lodging, which was let to strangers in
need of such accommodation, and Mr. Cragie was telling the Club of a new
arrival at Prairie Hills who had just rented this room. Mr. Kinsel had
remarked that he couldn't figure out who these various strangers were.

'You're right, George,' Mr. Cragie replied. 'I've often wondered about
it myself. That room of mine is never empty for more than a month at a
time. As soon as one goes along comes another. Where do they come
_from_, and where do they go after they leave here? I guess they haven't
money enough to stay at the hotel, but they're never dead-beats. They
always take their meals at Jay Champ's restaurant, and Jay's told me his
experience has been the same as mine: he's never lost a nickel by any of
'em. They're quiet, decent men, and I've noticed this, too: they're
great readers. They sit in their room half the time, reading books they
get from the library or bring with 'em. In the afternoon they take a
walk, along the river, maybe, or down the railroad track past the
Chautauqua grounds. Then they come back and read some more. In three or
four months off they go, and that's the last you ever see or hear of
'em. Who in the world are they? And why do they come to Prairie Hills?'

Mr. Brandt thought there was nothing very mysterious about the matter.

'They're just natural-born wanderers, Phin. In a country the size of
this, there's bound to be a lot of men like that--not the marrying kind
and not the business kind. They don't fit in anywhere in the
settled-down life most of us have to live, and they have sense enough to
see that they don't. So they just travel around watching the show. If I
wasn't saddled down with my hotel I'd like to do just that.'

'They're not the religious kind either,' said Charley MacManus. 'Do you
remember the one who had your room last winter, Phin? I've never forgot
and never will, how old Hattie Gimling tried to save him at the revival
meetings. I happened to be sitting right behind him. There was the
choir, singing 'Almost Persuaded,' and Hat and the rest of her crowd of
soul-savers was going the rounds of the sinners trying to drag them up
to the mourners' bench. She knew better than to tackle me, but I guess
she thought this stranger looked easy. Anyway, she sat down beside him
and started in with her begging and pleading, and he didn't pay any more
attention to her than if she hadn't been within a thousand miles. That
got Hat. If he'd showed that he knew she was talking to him I guess she
wouldn't have felt so mortified, but he sat like a stone image. I don't
know when I've enjoyed anything like I did that. She gave in after a
while and snuk away looking awful silly.'

They were in the midst of this discussion when Mr. Cragie's new lodger
himself appeared, and stopped near the front door to examine the
contents of a show-case.

'Go see what he wants, Jimmie,' said Billy Davidson, and I went forward
with my usual misgivings. This time I knew that I should not hear, 'I
want to see Billy,' but I fully expected that he would say, 'I want to
see the proprietor.' Instead of that he greeted me very pleasantly and
asked me to show him a winter overcoat.

I was so taken aback by this sign of trust that I must have shown it by
my manner, for he said, 'Well, what's the matter? Haven't you any winter
overcoats?'

'Oh, yes, sir,' I replied, and immediately began showing him our stock.
He tried on a coat, and I ventured to use one of John Davidson's
favorite sales-remarks. 'That will wear like iron,' I said.

'It will?' he said, glancing back at me over his shoulder. 'Iron gets
rusty when exposed to the weather. Do you mean this coat will get rusty
too?'

'Oh, no! I don't mean that. I mean----'

'You mean that you don't know what you mean. Choose your words more
carefully, young man. And don't make such absurd remarks to your
customers. But no matter,' he added with a faint smile. 'I can see that
it's a good coat. How much is it?'

'Twenty-two dollars,' I replied, hardly believing it possible that I was
about to make a sale of such magnitude. But I was not long in doubt. He
brought forth a leather wallet and counted out the money.

'Take off the tags,' he said. 'I'll wear the coat.'

He put it on at once and left the store, and I have not forgotten my
satisfaction when Mr. Kinsel--fortunately my 'selling-talk' had not been
heard in the rear of the store--said, 'That's the way to do business,
Jimmie. Billy, we'll make a clerk of him yet.'

One evening, shortly afterward, I was alone in the store. Billy had gone
to supper, and John was at the barber-shop. I was working on another
poem: it may have been 'The Old Wind-Mill' which was modeled on James
Whitcomb Riley's 'Old Swimmin' Hole,' or perhaps it was 'The
Whip-Poor-Will,' for it must have been at about this time that I was
trying so hard to immortalize this 'most musical, most melancholy' bird.
Whatever the poem, I was interrupted in the midst of composition.
Phineas Cragie's new lodger entered, and before I knew there was any one
about, he was standing beside me.

'What are you doing, sonny? Writing a school composition?'

'No, sir.'

'What is it, then?'

'It's a poem,' I replied.

I wouldn't have admitted this, not for any consideration, to Mr. Kinsel
or the Davidson boys, but it seemed quite easy and natural to tell this
stranger.

'A poem? Let me see it, will you?'

When he had read it his only comment was, 'Hmm!' Then he said he wanted
some shoe polish.

I was immensely disappointed, but tried not to show it. I picked up my
old friend in adversity, the feather-duster, and resumed my usual
labors. He sat on the counter, his hands clasped over his knee. At
length he said,

'Do you like to read poetry?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What have you read?'

I said that I had read all of Longfellow, and Whittier, and James
Whitcomb Riley.

'Any of Keats or Shelley? Any of Milton or Tennyson, or Wordsworth?' and
he went on to quiz me at length. I was ashamed of my ignorance. I didn't
know there were so many English and American poets. Finally he said,
'I'll tell you what: come up to my room this evening after the store
closes, and we'll read some poetry. I have some books that will interest
you.'

That was the beginning of a friendship which meant more to me than I can
say. I have never since met any one with a purer love for poetry. What a
teacher he would have made! What a teacher he did make for me! That
winter we read everything from Chaucer to Kipling which he thought I was
able to understand and appreciate; and now when I read Milton's 'Comus,'
or Wordsworth's 'Solitary Reaper,' or Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,'
or Tennyson's 'Passing of Arthur,' the music always comes to me through
his voice.

On Sundays we took long walks into the country, each time in a new
direction. He loved the prairies, and told me that he thought the most
beautiful country in all America was to be found in Iowa and Illinois.
One February afternoon we took the road that leads southward from town.
It was a cold gray day with flurries of snow, and he made it seem colder
still by quoting from Keats's 'The Eve of Saint Agnes.' However, he had
on his twenty-two-dollar overcoat, and I had one, a little cheaper but
quite as warm, which Mr. Kinsel had given me as a Christmas present. We
walked for a long way in silence, and coming to a sheltered spot on the
south slope of a hill, sat down to rest. The wind blew in icy gusts over
the crest of the hill, rustling through the dry grass with a mournful,
seething sound. I don't know what I was thinking, or thinking of, but
presently I said aloud:

       'Like hissing foam the windy, withered grasses crawl.'

My companion looked up quickly.

'What?'he said. 'Say that again.'

       'Like hissing foam the windy, withered grasses crawl.'

'Who wrote it?'

'Nobody.'

'Where did you hear it, then?'

'I didn't hear it anywhere. It just popped into my head all of a
sudden.'

'It did? Do you mean that? Why, Jimmie, it's a beautiful line! Keats
himself might have been proud of it! But what do you know about hissing
foam? You've never seen the ocean, have you?'

I confessed that I had not.

'That's curious,' he said. Then he repeated the line in his deep,
sonorous voice, and it really did sound beautiful.

'It's precisely right!' he said. 'The grass does seem to crawl with the
hissing sound of foam. See here! You must write a poem around this!
That's the way poetry is made. You first catch a glimpse of it in just
this way. Wait a minute! How will this do for a title--'Prairie Winter'?
Jimmie, I believe you've gotten something first rate here--none of your
'Old Wind-Mills' or 'Poor Whip-Poor-Wills'--something really good.
Where's your pencil?'

Neither of us had a pencil, and he insisted that we should go home at
once. 'You must strike now while the iron is hot,' he said. 'Don't fold
your hands and wait for the rest of the poem to come to you. No poet
ever did that.'

He strode on so fast that I had difficulty in keeping up with him, and
every little while he would repeat the marvelous line. 'That's
beautiful! Splendid!' he would say. When we had reached his room he
brought forth pen, ink, and a large sheet of clean, shiny, note-paper,
and at his suggestion I wrote 'Prairie Winter' at the top.

'That's the only hint I mean to give you,' he said. 'The rest of the
poem must be yours.'

He then told me to write, midway on the page, the one line which was to
suggest the others, which was to appear like a mournful refrain at the
close of each stanza.

This same paper now lies on the table beside me, but it is no longer
clean and shiny. It is yellow at the edges--torn, wrinkled, scorched, as
I have said, and grimy with the accumulated soilure of many years. But
soilure is all that it has accumulated. Not a line--not so much as a
single word, has ever been added to the original manuscript which is
almost worn out with many erasures. My friend left Prairie Hills in the
spring of that same year, and I have neither seen nor heard of him
since. He told me that I needn't expect to hear from him. 'I'm not the
letter-writing kind,' he said. I went with him to the train on the night
of his departure. He boarded the smoking-car, and having found a seat,
raised the window to have a last word with me.

'Jimmie,' he said, 'we'll not meet again, very likely. I want you to
promise me one thing: that you'll finish "Prairie Winter.'"

'I'll try,' I said. 'I'll try my hardest.'

And I have tried. I tried all of that spring. I tried several years
later when I went away to school. I've tried in Chicago, Boston, New
York, London, Paris. I tried during the war--half-heartedly, I
confess--when sitting in trenches on the western front, listening to the
hissing of the wind in the withered grass of No Man's Land, and the less
pleasant hissing sound of shell fragments and machine-gun bullets. I
tried during the spring and summer of 1918, while cooling my heels in
various German prison camps. I tried after the Armistice, when the
statesmen of Europe were composing--and alas! finishing--that other
masterpiece, the Treaty of Versailles. I tried, still later, in
Copenhagen, and in Bergen, Norway. And only a few weeks ago, at Tahiti,
I made a last feeble effort. Yes, I think I may say with truth that I
have tried. And I _can't_ finish it. But now, I believe--at least I
hope--that I've finished _with_ it.




CHAPTER VII. UNDER THE ARCTIC CIRCLE


It was a curious experience to have in Iceland, for in that country it
is not only easy to forget the modern world, but inevitable that one
should. It is by far the most sparsely populated country in Europe, and
the Industrial Revolution which has so altered the rest of the world has
scarcely been felt there. Life flows quietly on much as it did centuries
ago, and if you chance to carry in your pocket a volume of the ancient
sagas, you will find yourself living so vividly in the Iceland of a
thousand years ago that it seems you have actually strayed back there in
the flesh.

Those familiar with the Icelandic sagas know what a clear and living
picture they give of the life of the early settlers in that ancient
Commonwealth. Men and women living then seem more real than one's
contemporaries. One hears their speech, sees them going about the work
on the farms, riding to some great wedding feast or to springtime or
autumn _leet_; and so simply and clearly are the stories told that one
not only shares the thoughts, but all but shares the passions of those
who took part in them.

I had been reading at this time what is to my mind the finest of the
sagas, 'The Story of Burnt Njl,' traveling meanwhile on horseback
toward the North Country, watching the gradually increasing splendor of
the northern lights as autumn wore away to winter, until it seemed that
I had always been living this solitary, happy life. The silence was like
a ravishing music, and the croaking of ravens and the bleating of sheep
were parts of it, their tiny forms, black against the sky or faintly
white against the mighty shoulders of the mountains, like notes in the
score. At length, after a leisurely journey, I emerged on the north
coast and found quarters at a farmhouse almost under the Arctic Circle.

All through boyhood the Arctic Circle had been a dream-nourishing name
to me. It had a splendor, not of earth, to light me to bed at night and
to keep me awake after I got there. It was no mere geographical
abstraction, but something--well, something quite otherwise. I thought
of it as an arc rather than a circle, standing upright like a gigantic
portal leading to the vast kingdoms of the North, through which I passed
to great and memorable adventures. And there, on the threshold of the
Polar Sea, I did have one adventure, memorable enough in a sense, but it
was not at all what I had hoped for.

There was a village some five miles distant along the coast from the
farmhouse. Shortly after my arrival in the North Country, I decided to
spend a day in walking there and back.

It was a beautiful autumn morning, Indian-summer-like in its warmth and
stillness and silence. I would not have believed that such days were
known so late in the year at that high latitude. On my left hand was the
sea, slate-blue in color and not a sail on it anywhere. On the right
hand a great heath slanted up toward distant mountains which were
outlined in exquisite purity in the clear air. Presently I came to a
sheltered spot close by the road, carpeted with heather and filled to
the brim with sunshine. Being in no hurry I sat down there to read
another chapter or two in the 'Njl Saga,' and the story so deeply
engaged my interest that I read on and on, and was surprised upon
looking up to find that the brief day was already nearing its end. The
sun was just disappearing behind the mountains, and one isolated peak,
all golden with sunset light, threw a huge cone-shaped shadow across the
heath and far out over the sea.

I walked on, thinking of the events of the tragic tale I had just been
reading, marveling at the freshness of interest after all these
centuries, when I was startled by the sound of a motor horn close behind
me. As I stepped quickly aside, the car slowed down and came to a halt,
and a man in the rear seat called out, in English, 'Want a ride?'

I didn't, as a matter of fact, but I climbed in, or rather seemed to be
lifted in by the scruff of the neck by one of the old trolls that used
to wander the mountains and moorlands of Iceland after set of sun.

'Well!' I said to the man who had greeted me, 'this is the first motor
car I've seen in a long time. I'd almost forgotten that there are such
things.'

He looked at me in astonishment. 'For the Lord's sake!' he said, 'do you
speak English? I supposed you were an Icelander, but I hailed you anyway
because I knew you'd understand what a ride meant. Where you from--not
the States? Is that a fact! So am I! Say, this beats all, don't it? The
world's a small place. Think of meeting some one from home way up here!'

He went on to tell me that he was traveling around the coast from
Reykjavk by the Danish steamer. The vessel had put in to discharge some
cargo at the village to which we were bound and he had found a car
there. Having nothing better to do he had hired it for a couple of hours
to have a quick glance at the country.

'But this road only goes eight miles,' he added with disgust. 'Then it's
nothing but a pony trail, and they tell me it's one of the main roads on
the north coast! Ever see such a country? It's about five hundred years
behind the times. I haven't had a decent bath since I left Copenhagen.
You know, they're just waking up to the fact that they've got a lot of
power going to waste in all these rivers, and it was an American who
pointed it out. They don't know they're alive, these people; but now a
few places are putting in hydroelectric stations. That's why I'm
here--I'm in the electrical-supply business. What's your line, if you
don't mind my asking?'

I couldn't help smiling, inwardly, at the way he took it for granted
that I must be selling something. The implication was that no one would
come to Iceland unless compelled to for business reasons. I left him at
the wharf and watched the little steamer pull away from shore and vanish
in the gathering dusk; then I walked by starlight back to the farmhouse.
I tried hard to recapture my mood of the earlier part of the day--to get
back into the spirit of tenth-century Iceland, but it was useless. The
cheery, matter-of-fact voice of my chance companion still sounded in my
ears, and the words, 'What's your line, if you don't mind my asking?'
seemed to linger in the air, echoing and faintly rechoing against the
Arctic Circle.




CHAPTER VIII. GLAMOROUS PLACES


[I]

The world--of getting and spending, of laying waste our powers in
struggle toward trivial or ignoble ends--is too much with us, as
Wordsworth observed. It is even more oppressively with us, I think, than
it could have been with the folk of Wordsworth's time. Now, much of the
getting is on credit, the spending before earning, and this, the
economists tell us, is as it should be. Thrift is no longer a virtue;
simplicity of life is a crime against society; and a man, if he is to
sleep with an easy conscience, must be able to say upon retiring, 'I
have consumed more to-day than I did yesterday,' for the machines, our
masters, demand that he should. Enough of this sorry world! But can we
ever have enough of that other world which a few men, to our everlasting
delight, have fashioned and are fashioning to meet our higher needs?
Never, surely; at any rate, I never tire of it, and the older I grow,
the oftener do I resort there, the happier become my sojourns, and the
deeper and more satisfying my refreshment.

But 'explored' is a better word, perhaps, than 'fashioned,' for some of
the greatest--who are always the humblest--of these benefactors seem to
doubt that theirs is really a work of creation. It has merely been their
privilege, they say--they know not why or how--to reveal to us small
fragments of this World of Art. But they are never sure of the
authenticity of their several revelations, and the reason for the doubt
is, that when two or three of them have visited, presumably, the same
country, charted the same coasts, explored the same rivers, climbed the
head-walls of the same valleys, they return, inevitably, with reports at
such variance to each other.

But we who read these reports, who follow them, later, on their
journeys, are better able to judge which of them are explorers in the
great line. We know immediately, it seems to me, when one of them has
seen and reported truly--glamorously, it may be, but none the less truly
on that account. To be sure, the distinguished authors of the Oxford
Dictionary define glamour as 'delusive or alluring beauty.' Keats said
that beauty is truth, and in a definition of the properties of beauty
one would rather trust a poet's instinct than a philologist's reasoned
deductions. If, therefore, glamour is beauty, and beauty is truth, how
can it be delusive? The Oxford Dictionary must be in error.


[II]

One of these discovered countries; one of the lands now authentically
revealed in this sense, is Joseph Conrad's Patusan. It may have been
explored before his day; indeed, I seem to remember having read of it
under other names, in the narratives of other men who professed to have
been there. But they were either the Doctor Cooks of their profession,
or men lacking the gift for imaginative exploration, and so their
records serve only to show how the work of discovery should not be done,
or to gather dust on the top shelves in libraries. But the Patusan of
'Lord Jim'--Conrad's, Marlow's Patusan--who can doubt that it exists?
There is no doubt in my own mind, for I have been there again and again.
But few lands that I have seen, heard, smelled, or tasted with the
physical senses are so real to me as Patusan.

I recall vividly my first glimpse of it. I was having lunch with a
friend in a noisy restaurant on Washington Street, in Boston. We were
old friends, past the need for talking much, and leisure was so precious
in those days that our reading was done chiefly at mealtime. On this
occasion we were seated on opposite sides of the table, he with his book
and I with mine. Presently he said, 'Listen to this,' and he read me the
following passage:

    The coast of Patusan is straight and somber, and faces a misty
    ocean. Red trails are seen like cataracts of rust, streaming
    under the dark green foliage of bushes and creepers clothing the
    low cliffs. Swampy plains open out at the mouth of the rivers,
    with a view of jagged blue peaks beyond the vast forests. In the
    offing, a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand out in
    the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall breached
    by the sea.

'Do you see the place?' he asked, looking up from the page.

See it! I saw it as clearly as though I were there in the flesh, and I
was conscious of that feeling of elation which becomes almost painful in
its intensity, when beauty of whatever sort is revealed to one.

'What is it, a travel book?' I asked. 'Who wrote it? Where is Patusan?'

'Yes, in a sense it _is_ a travel book,' he replied. He turned the
leaves and read again:

    Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the
    chief settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river
    about forty miles from the sea, where the first houses come into
    view, there can be seen rising above the level of the forests,
    the summits of two steep hills, very close together, and
    separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of
    some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact the valley between is
    nothing but a narrow ravine; its appearance from the settlement
    is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the
    two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the
    full, the moon, as seen from the open space in front of Jim's
    house, rose exactly behind these hills, its diffused light at
    first throwing the two masses into intensely black relief, and
    then the nearly perfect disc, glowing ruddily, appeared, gliding
    upward between the sides of the chasm till it floated above the
    summits as if escaping from a yawning grave in gentle triumph.

Thus it happened, one very hot July day, many years ago, that I had my
first glimpse of Patusan. Or rather, two glimpses, one by day and one by
night. I think it was the moonlight view which then worked the deepest
enchantment, and you may remember that Conrad--or Marlow if you
choose--was bewitched by it, too. He spent a month at Patusan, saw the
moon wax and wane, and could never have enough of the spectacular effect
of its rise from the depths of the ravine. He describes it again and
again, and always from the same, or nearly the same, vantage point.

I have said that Patusan, since Conrad's visit, is a land authentically
revealed. Not wholly revealed, of course; the charts or maps of the
glamorous world show no country in its entirety. There is always _terra
incognita_ beyond and those who will may make explorations of their own.
But such journeys must always be disappointing for most of us. I
sometimes go in imagination, far beyond the chief settlement at Patusan,
traversing country which Conrad never saw, but I make no remarkable
discoveries there. The villages farther up the river are picturesque, to
be sure, but they have scarcely a trace of glamour, whether by day or by
night. I come upon the charred remnants of fires where, quite possibly,
Jim and his faithful servant, Tamb' Itam, camped during their excursions
up-country, but Conrad did not see them there, and so they remain, the
remnants of supper fires, nothing more. But always as I retrace my steps
I am aware of a quickening of the pulses, a deep thrill of expectation.
I pass as through an invisible wall into the country Conrad knew, and
_I_ know by the change in me, by the marvelous change in the aspect of
everything around me, that the hinterlands of Patusan will never really
be seen by any one, now that Conrad may return no more.

It would be futile to regret this. He gave us enough, surely, to satisfy
any but the least reasonable of men. You may travel whithersoever you
will in the realm of books, and find no country of such melancholy
beauty, no people--whether groups or individuals--so vividly realized as
those of Patusan. It seems to me the very kingdom of Romance, to which
all other lands along those coasts are but tribute-paying dependencies.
And if you have never been that way before, you may know the place by
this: A chain of islands sits, broken and massive, facing a wide
estuary, displayed in a sheet of pale glassy water reflecting faithfully
the contour of the shore. Near the entrance to the river is a spit of
white beach, backed by a low cliff wooded on the brow and draped in
creepers to the very foot. A village of sooty, flimsy mat hovels is
perched here over its own inverted image, upon a multitude of crooked
piles the color of ebony; and high in the colorless sunshine, a solitary
bird, all black, hovers, dropping and soaring above the same spot, with
a slight rocking motion of the wings.


[III]

There is a small, independent principality, not a stone's throw, in so
far as glamorous realization is concerned, from the indefinable
boundaries of Patusan, and somehow, medival Paris is its capital--a
Paris of a single aspect, and for one night only: an intensely cold
winter night in the year 1456.

But during the early part of the evening, although snow was falling
heavily, it was not so bitterly cold as it became toward midnight. At
first,

    the air was raw and pointed but not far below freezing; and the
    flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was
    sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a
    footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in
    heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the
    bridges like slim white spars, on the background of the river.
    High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the
    cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue
    wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The
    gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping
    toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows,
    swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a
    dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

You recognize Stevenson's Paris. He too had the seeing eye, although he
never again saw to such splendid purpose, or reported so truly as when
he gave us 'A Lodging for the Night.' There are times when I suspect
that it is not fiction, and that Stevenson may have been Franois Villon
reincarnate. To be sure, he tried to conceal the fact, if it was a fact.
One remembers how he sometimes played the moralist in public; played it
even--and how savagely, in 'Familiar Studies'--over the ghost of poor
Franois the First. One remembers, too, the Vailima prayers which are
still to be found in art shops, suitably printed and framed for hanging
in the guest bedroom. But was not Villon something of a moralist upon
occasion? And surely no one but he could have written of that search for
lodgings nearly five centuries ago, and of the midnight visit to
Enguerrand de la Feuille, Seigneur de Brisetout, Bailly du Patatrac--a
Villon seeing himself with the detachment which comes with reincarnation
into a Scotch-Covenanter family, but telling of what he sees with the
relish and the vividness of detail which can only be the result of
richly savored personal experience.

However, I may be mistaken. Perhaps this Paris is really Edinburgh, and
Villon really Stevenson, and the Seigneur de Brisetout really
Stevenson's father, talking like a Dutch uncle to his wayward son.
Perhaps--but enough! I am not a psychographer, or whatever it is they
are called. I wish to lay bare no man's soul, so I pass on these hints
to some eager amateur of the dubious science of psychic anatomy.

I visit this Paris at least once every year, and of late the visits have
been even more delightful than they used to be; for I am now living at
Tahiti where there is nothing to remind one of winter. During the rainy
season it requires a conscious effort merely to breathe the warm,
moisture-laden atmosphere, and physical movement becomes all but
impossible at certain hours of the day. Sometimes when I am quite
literally at my last gasp, physically and mentally, I manage, by a
tremendous effort of will, to drag myself to my bookcase. I take from
the shelf the 'New Arabian Nights' and fall exhausted on a sofa. But
those small, winged, tireless reminders that hell's torment is here and
now and forever, sting me to a last effort. I stagger from sofa to
cot-bed, and with the mosquito curtains drawn, give myself up for a
moment solely to the business of keeping alive. But this is necessary
only for a moment. I have a sovereign cure for all the ills of the
tropics, even in the rainy season. I open my book and no longer hear the
shrill lament of frustrated mosquitoes, or the drumming of rain on the
iron roof. Silence falls; night falls; Tahiti vanishes as though it had
never been, and I find myself standing, knee-deep in snow, near the
cemetery of Saint John.

Although my physical body is still at Tahiti under the mosquito
netting--and streaming, it may be, with perspiration--my spiritual body
is already numb with cold, and I enter gratefully through the closed
door of the little house backed up against the cemetery wall. There they
all are, just as I found them upon entering last year: Dom Nicolas, the
Picardy monk, straddling a chair, his back to the blaze, 'his skirts
picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth,' a pool of
firelight showing between his outspread feet; Villon and Guy Tarbary
huddled together over a scrap of parchment, the first draft of Villon's
'Ballade of Roast Fish'; Montigny and Thevenin Pensete playing cards on
the other side of the room, the gloom on Montigny's face growing deeper
and more ominous as he loses hand after hand. Tarbary is laughing over
Villon's joke about the medlars on the three-legged medlar tree.

    'Oh, stop that row,' said Villon, 'and think of rhymes to
    "fish."'

    'Doubles or quits,' said Montigny doggedly.

    'With all my heart,' quoth Thevenin.

    'Is there any more in that bottle?' asked the monk.

    'Open another,' said Villon. 'How do you ever hope to fill that
    big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And
    how do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you
    fancy, can be spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or
    do you think yourself another Elias--and they'll send the coach
    for you?'

    '_Hominibus impossible_,' replied the monk as he filled his
    glass.

    Tarbary was in ecstacies. Villon filliped his nose again.

    'Laugh at my jokes if you like,' he said.

    'It was very good,' objected Tarbary.

    Villon made a face at him. 'Think of rhymes to "fish,"' he said.
    'What have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it
    at the great assizes when the devil calls for Guido Tarbary,
    _clericus_--the devil with the hump-back and the red-hot finger
    nails. Talking of the devil,' he added in a whisper, 'Look at
    Montigny!'

    All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be
    enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to one side; one
    nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog
    was on his back, as people say in terrifying nursery metaphor;
    and he breathed hard under the grewsome burthen.

    'He looks as if he could knife him!' whispered Tarbary, with
    round eyes.

    The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open
    hands to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom
    Nicolas and not any excess of moral sensibility.

    'Come now,' said Villon--'about this ballade: how does it run so
    far?' And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to
    Tarbary.

It may be, as has often been said, that a man's only hope of
immortality, so called, lies in the nature of the work he may be able to
leave behind him, but if he be an artist, I believe his best hope for
survival as an individual is in whatever chance there may be that some
other artist will surprise him in the midst of his work at such a moment
as this. Villon's poems survive, to be sure, but he himself lives for me
because Stevenson traveled across the centuries to find him composing
his 'Ballade of Roast Fish.' And he would be no less real if that ballad
and all of the others had long since been lost and forgotten. I often
wonder in what company I look on at this scene, listen to this dialogue.
There must be many and frequent visitors to this Paris of a single
night: are they too so fully convinced of the reality of these men? Or
is glamour the delusive medium it is said to be by the philologists? For
my own part, I confess that after the affair of Thevenin's murder, as I
follow Master Francis through the silent streets in his belated search
for lodgings, I am seized with the melancholy conviction that _I_ am the
ghost, not he. In that 'bright, windy phase of the night's existence,'
his own existence has the imperishable reality which glamour gives it.
The very snow of that yesteryear has lain on the streets, unsullied and
unmelted, these four centuries and more, and his own footprints in it,
speaking so eloquently of fruitless quest until they lead, at last, to
the Seigneur de Brisetout's door.

And when, after his incomparably brilliant, impudent, and able defense
of the profession of knavery, the door opens again and he swaggers out
into the pale winter dawn, the thought of the impending separation
strikes a malarial chill into my blood.

'God pity you!' says the lord of Brisetout.

'Good-bye, papa; many thanks for the cold mutton,' Francis replies.

The door closes with a dull boom, and the bolts are shot into place. The
poet stands for a moment in the middle of the road and stretches
himself.

'A very dull old gentleman,' I hear him say. 'I wonder what his goblets
may be worth?'

Then he vanishes, and I find myself sprawling under the mosquito
netting, shivering with heat and cold at the same moment, as though I
had been taken by the scruff of the neck by the devil 'with the
hump-back and the red-hot finger nails,' and flung at one easy toss back
to the tropics, into my own century.

We shall never know what the goblets may be worth, but this story, it
seems to me, is worth whatever it may have cost its creator. Perhaps he
worked over it for weeks and months; perhaps he threw it lightly off, at
one sitting. However that may be, he was inspired, for the space of it,
as it is given to few artists, even the greatest, ever to be inspired.
General Wolfe, according to legend, said that he would rather be the
author of Gray's 'Elegy' than the victor at Quebec. Humble men may have
their hopeless preferences, too, and I would rather have written 'A
Lodging for the Night' than write all the novels to win all the prizes
offered by all the publishers in this year of grace, 1927.


[IV]

The discoverers, or creators, or what you will, in this tradition are
not all dead. A few of them are living to-day, and in America there is
at least one--Willa Cather.

What is Miss Cather? A realist? I suppose so, for she has written of the
workaday world, of places and people she herself has known and loved.
And yet there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Nebraska of
'O Pioneers' and 'My ntonia' belongs to the glamorous world of which I
have spoken. Hers must be a high and unique gift, for she has the power
to make us doubt in which of these worlds we are, so strangely do they
partake of the qualities of both. I believe it would be hard to find in
all the realm of art, a picture of a country town in the grip of winter
to be compared with this one:

    One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover,
    anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be
    blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying
    about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray
    prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about
    haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if
    they had been moved in overnight, and others, as if they were
    straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.
    None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling
    wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a
    deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat
    red railway station and the grain 'elevator' at the north end of
    the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end.
    On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden
    buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the
    drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The
    board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock
    in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner,
    were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were
    all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a
    few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their
    long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought
    their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl
    flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the
    hitch-bars along the street a few heavy workhorses harnessed to
    farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station
    everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in
    until night.

Is there glamour here? To me it seems a picture composed of the very
stuff of glamour, and at the same time, how faithful it is to reality! I
go again and again to Hanover, and Blackhawk, Nebraska, even in the
winter time when they are to be seen at their bleakest, in the cold
light of snowy afternoons.

It is fortunate that Miss Cather's youth was spent where it was. She saw
the prairies before their wild beauty had wholly passed. Hundreds of
others, men and women, had seen them as well and long before her time.
But she alone, it seems to me, has been able to recreate them, to make
others feel their immensity--how lonely and silent they were, and how
lonely people felt there as they gazed from the doorways of sod-houses
and dugouts over a land that was nothing but land; 'not a country, but
the material from which countries are made.' It was changing, of course,
as she watched it. The stream of incoming settlers was growing larger
year by year. But the prairie was still the great reality. The human
figures moving across it, although dwarfed to insignificance on the vast
plains, were still conspicuous because they were so few.

It rarely happens that any country, or section of a country, has an
interpreter so sensitive to its beauty as to seem a mere passive
instrument for all the seasons to ring their changes on. Miss Cather has
loved with such passion and sincerity both the large aspects of nature
and the intimate, significant details, that she is able to accomplish
with ease the most difficult of artistic tasks: she can recapture the
very spirit of time and place, and make you feel as she felt on certain
memorable days of her childhood and youth.

'My ntonia' is a continuous record of such days: April mornings when
'the buffalo peas were blooming in pink and purple masses along the
roadside, and the larks, perched on last year's dried sunflower stalks,
were singing straight at the sun'; midsummer days 'of breathless
brilliant heat, when it seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in
the night, and under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy,
heavy-odored cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and
green'; windy autumn days when as far as the eye could see the whole
country seemed to be in motion; cloudless winter afternoons when 'the
air had the burning taste of fresh snow, and the cornfields got back a
little of their color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest
possible gold in the sun.'

But there is one of the autumn days which I remember with particular
pleasure, and Miss Cather's account of it shows, I think, that the light
of glamour is the light of truth itself. Jim Burden is recalling his
childhood when he and ntonia used to wander together over the prairie,
and he gave her lessons in English:

    One afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm
    grassy bank where the badger lived. It was a day of amber
    sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air. I
    had seen ice on the little horse pond that morning, and as we
    went through the garden we found the tall asparagus with its red
    berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy green.

    Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and
    was comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked
    earth, in the full blaze of the sun.... While we were lying
    there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest,
    frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and
    tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it, fell back,
    and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antenn
    quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and
    finish him. Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked
    to him gayly and indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to
    sing for us--a thin, rusty little chirp. She held him close to
    her ear and laughed, but a moment afterward I saw there were
    tears in her eyes. She told me that in her village at home there
    was an old beggar woman who went about selling roots and herbs
    she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a
    warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a
    cracked voice, like this. Old Hata she was called, and the
    children loved to see her coming and saved their cakes and
    sweets for her.

    When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a
    narrow shelf of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting
    homeward; the chill came on quickly when the sun got low, and
    ntonia's dress was thin. What were we to do with the frail
    little creature we had lured back to life with false pretenses?
    I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put
    the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief loosely
    over her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see
    Squaw Creek, and then turn and run home. We drifted along
    lazily, very happy, through the magical light of late
    afternoon....

    We had been silent a long time, and the sun sank nearer and
    nearer the prairie floor when we saw a figure moving on the edge
    of the upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly,
    dragging his feet along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a
    run to overtake him.

    'My papa sick all the time,' Tony panted as we flew. 'He not
    look good, Jim.'

    As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted up his head
    and peered about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and
    pressed it against her cheek. She was the only one of his family
    who could rouse the old man from the torpor in which he seemed
    to live. He took the bag from his belt and showed us three
    rabbits he had shot, looking at ntonia with a wintry flicker of
    a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.

    'My _tatinek_ make me little hat with the skins, little hat for
    win-ter!' she exclaimed joyfully. 'Meat for eat, skin for
    hat,'--she told of these benefits on her fingers.

    Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist
    and lifted it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard
    the name of old Hata. He untied the handkerchief, separated her
    hair with his fingers, and stood looking down at the green
    insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he listened as if it
    were a beautiful sound.... We stood there in the friendly
    silence while the feeble minstrel went on with its scratchy
    chirp. The old man's smile as he listened, was so full of
    sadness, of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.
    As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong
    smell of earth and drying grass. ntonia and her father went off
    hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow
    home.

Times change and people and places change with them in the world of
getting and spending. I should not be surprised to learn that there is
now a filling-station or a moving-picture theater on the very spot where
this scene took place. Well, if there should be it doesn't greatly
matter. Miss Cather's prairie still exists in the glamorous world, and I
go there often on this same autumn afternoon. And always I find three
lonely figures outlined against the sky as evening comes on--two
children and an old man, listening as if it were a beautiful sound to
the faint chirping of a little green insect.




CHAPTER IX. LEVITICUS REDIVIVUS


I doubt whether many people could be found in these unregenerate days,
even among the clergy, who could recite, offhand, the eleventh chapter
of the Book of Leviticus. Imagine, then, landing at a tiny atoll in the
South Pacific, to find the brown-skinned inhabitants gathered in the
shade, quoting from memory, one after the other, this fragment of Old
Testament history. And not only the eleventh chapter, but the entire
twenty-seven, and going on, I believe, with increasing zest, through
Numbers, Deuteronomy, Judges, Kings. I had this experience, and I
confess that I was surprised. It happened at the island of Reka-Reka,
where, as I was to find, Sampson's battle with the Philistines is as
fresh a topic of conversation as though it had happened last week, and
where the genealogy of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, sons of Noah, is the
familiar nursery rhyme of children in arms.

I had never heard of Reka-Reka until the day when I first saw it, a low
fringe of land rising from the sea about eight miles to leeward of the
trading schooner on which I was traveling. We were on our way to the
Gambier Islands at the time, but being close in, the captain altered the
course.

'We might as well call there,' he said, 'but I'm not sure that it will
be safe to send a boat ashore. Bad reef. But maybe we can manage it on
the lee side.'

'How are the natives--friendly?' I asked, for this happened at a time
when I was new to the South Seas, and had more or less conventional
ideas about their inhabitants.

'Friendly? Lord, yes! You might go ashore with Willie if you want to. If
you can manage the landing it will be worth your while. Ain't that so,
Willie?'

Willie, the supercargo, a weather-mellowed little Scotchman of fifty,
agreed gravely that this was true.

'Aye,' he said, gazing toward the land. 'They're queer places, some of
these islands, but not so queer as the ideas folks at home have about
them. I suppose a good many think these natives are still pure heathens,
and like enough they are in some ways. But they're terrible religious,
and fair marvels at the Scriptures. You see, they have but the one book,
the Bible. It was translated into their language by some of the old
missionaries, and they've read it and studied it and learnt it by heart.
For downright knowledge of it they haven't their equals anywhere, not
even in Scotland.'

I was much interested. I had often--who has not?--discussed with friends
the choice of a book to be taken if one were to be marooned for life on
a lonely island and could have but one volume. There is always a wide
variety of opinion as to the one likely to prove most satisfactory in
the long run, and it ranges from a one-volume edition of Shakespeare, to
the New York City Directory, or a Montgomery-Ward catalogue. Here was an
island where the inhabitants had but one book, the Bible, and if Willie
were to be believed, their knowledge of it would put to shame the most
erudite professors of Divinity.

When we were close in-shore the schooner's whale-boat was lowered, and
with Willie at the steering oar, and four Polynesian sailors pulling
like mad, we were caught by a huge comber and carried safely across the
reef. No one met us at the landing-place. The village was a mile and a
half distant, toward the windward side of the island. Leaving the
sailors behind, Willie and I set out in that direction.

The land itself was a mere fringe of coral gravel, not more than a
quarter of a mile wide, well planted to coconut palms, and completely
encircling the lagoon. Willie told me that the rats ate most of the
nuts. The natives cared little about their potential wealth, and made
only enough copra to provide for their modest needs. Occasionally they
would dry a few tons of it to be exchanged for tinned beef and salmon, a
few bolts of print-cloth for the women, and dungaree trousers and cotton
undershirts for the Sunday wear of the men; but that was about the limit
of their purchases.

'Not much use calling here,' he added. 'I suppose I've landed at
Reka-Reka ten times in the last fifteen years, and the business I've
done wouldn't amount to one hundred pounds, all told.'

A few chickens, startled at our approach, took the air with a whirr of
wings, like so many partridges, and circling far above us, settled in
the tops of the trees. It was curious to see once-domesticated fowl so
strong in flight, so far from even the semblance of a barnyard. But it
was no more curious, I suppose, than that people should be living on
these fragments of land, thousands of miles from any continent. The
chickens, of course, had been brought here, but how had the people come,
in the first instance, and what was the land of their origin? And how
lonely their lives, looking out at dawn over the same empty sea,
watching, at dusk, the brightening constellations reflected from the
placid lagoon--cut off from the rest of the world almost as completely
as though they were inhabitants of another planet. But they were widely
traveled, Willie said, within the limits of their own archipelago.

'There's only about forty people here, and they belong for the most part
to three families. You might think they would be poor stock, a rundown,
degenerate lot, but they're not. There is no inter-marriage. The girls
are taken by the men of other islands, and the men here often make long
voyages in search of wives. I know of places in more civilized parts of
the world where they are nothing like so careful about in-breeding. If
one of these natives was to marry his cousin, he would be ostracized by
the rest of his family, and so far as I can learn, they were even more
particular about this in the old days than they are now. You've probably
heard how good they are at reciting their family histories? They can
tell you their descent from away back. Well, naturally, they take a lot
of interest in the family histories of the Old Testament folks, and I've
learned, mostly from the natives themselves, that marriages between some
pretty close blood relations are told about in the Bible. They are great
hands at finding these out, and they spend a lot of time puzzling over
the genealogies. And the other things they find to argue about in the
Scriptures! Knotty problems! It would make your head swim to hear them
sometimes. But wait! They couldn't have seen us coming in, and like as
not there'll be some kind of a Bible class in session.'

He was right. There was. We approached the village, a cluster of a dozen
or more huts, under cover of some shrubbery, and looked on for a moment,
unobserved. The village street was wide and well shaded, and in the
center of it, on a circle of mats spread out on the clean coral sand,
men and women were listening to an old patriarch who was declaiming with
grave eloquence. Most of them were at work while they listened, the
women plaiting straw for hats, or making shell wreaths which are worn
around them on windy days; the men polishing the long poles of their
fishing-spears, fashioning pearl-shell hooks, used in bonito fishing, or
braiding coconut fiber for canoe lashings. All of them were silent and
attentive, save only the younger children playing about the outskirts of
the crowd, just such bundles of energy as are all children the world
over. Willie was as pleased as though this were a spectacle which he had
arranged for my particular benefit.

'You see?' he whispered. 'What did I tell you? They're quoting
Scripture. I expect they've been at it all day. I don't suppose you
would have believed this if you hadn't seen it?'

Just then we were discovered by one of the children and came forth from
our hiding-place. The meeting was interrupted for a few moments while
Willie gave them the news of the other islands. Then he turned to me.

'It's as I expected,' he said. 'There's no copra ready, but we might as
well stay for an hour or so. The chief wants to know whether you mind if
they go on with the speaking?'

'Mind!' I said. 'Please tell him that I should like very much to
listen.'

'I have told him already. It's a contest they're having, the three best
Scripture scholars on the island. They're in Leviticus now, but they've
come all the way from Exodus since the morning. As I said, they're fair
marvels at it.'

I understood little or nothing of the language, but I enjoyed listening
to the musical flow of the words. One after the other the three
contestants recited from memory, chapter after chapter, the old chief,
with a well-thumbed Tahitian Bible on his lap, acting as judge and
checking the mistakes. By his side were three half-shells of coconut
nuts, and when a contestant made an error, a pebble was dropped into his
shell. There was an old lady sitting near me, her eyes shut, making
cats-cradles with a piece of string stretched over her hands. One would
have thought she was all but asleep, but every now and then she would
lift her head quickly and say, 'Tera!' (There!) noting an error in the
recital before any one else had marked it.

I was beginning to wonder how many chapters there were in Leviticus,
when there was a brief recess. Green drinking nuts were brought for
refreshment, the youngsters shinning up the trees like monkeys on a
stick and dropping the fresh nuts all around us. The chief spoke to
Willie at some length. When he had finished, Willie turned to me.

'They want you to recite,' he said.

'Recite! What? Not from Leviticus?' I replied in alarm.

'No, no! Of course not. Some story about America. You know how these
natives are: they have any amount of legends about their history and
they think we have too. It doesn't make any difference what you
say--none of them understand English. But recite something. It will
please them and they expect it. Don't you know any poetry?'

I knew a good deal of verse of one kind or another, but as it usually
happens on such occasions, my mind was a blank. I could think of nothing
at the moment, and in considerably less than a moment everything was
quiet, every one waiting for me to begin. Then, as luck would have it,
there came into mind the first stanza of a ballad which was legendary
enough, and although I was ashamed to recite it on such an occasion I
was compelled to for lack of something more appropriate. So I began,

    A capital ship for an ocean trip
    Was the walloping Window-Blind;
    No wind that blew dismayed the crew
    Or troubled the captain's mind.
    The man at the wheel was made to feel
    Contempt for the wildest blow,
    And it often appeared when the weather had cleared
    That he'd been in his bunk, below.

Once started the whole of the ballad reeled itself off without a halt,
to the end. The Reka-Rekans seemed to be pleased. I noticed, however,
that the chief's mind was still on the Scripture contest, for he
continued to read his Bible; but he looked in my direction several
times, nodding with smiling approval. I felt, as I say, thoroughly
ashamed of myself. There was I, a member of a so-called superior race,
imposing in this cheap manner on an audience of so-called savages. They
thought I was telling some old tale of my forefathers, and although they
could not understand, they gave me courteous attention. Willie made me
feel guiltier still when he told me that he explained to the chief that
the story was about a vessel whose sailors went mad with thirst at sea.

The contest was then resumed, but an hour before sundown Willie and I
were compelled to return to the schooner. We had a good deal of
difficulty in getting off the reef, but managed it at last, and when
well off-shore the sailors rested on their oars, waiting for the vessel
to come up. Willie was silent, busy with his own thoughts, which were
amusing ones to judge by the expression on his face. Then he chuckled
softly.

'I didn't want to tell you before,' he said, 'but you know, it _was_
Leviticus you were supposed to be reciting--the eleventh chapter. The
old chief--now wait! Let me explain! You don't understand! You see, in
some of these islands a man is nothing at all if he doesn't know the
Bible. It's about the only way they have of judging him, intellectually,
I mean. You must have made a good impression on the chief because he
simply took it for granted that you are a scripture scholar. He wanted
you to recite a part of that chapter so they would know how it sounded
in English. You say you expect to stay in this part of the world for a
while, and maybe you'll come back to Reka-Reka some time. If you do--you
see?--you'll have some standing with the elders. They'll think you're as
good a Bible scholar as they are, if not better.'

I forgave Willie in the end, but I doubt whether I would ever be
forgiven by the Reka-Rekans if they knew. Later, as a silent apology to
them, I read the whole of Leviticus, and I was interested to find that
the fourth chapter is concerned with the sacrificial offerings to be
made by those who have committed sins of ignorance.

This could only have happened in the South Seas. As the French, who own
Reka-Reka, might say, '_Dans l'Ocanie on fait son impossible._'




CHAPTER X. SOME ISLAND GRANDMOTHERS


[I]

One snowy December afternoon I paid a visit to an American grandmother
who lived alone in one of those spacious old houses, built in the early
eighteen-eighties, which are still occasionally to be seen in
middle-western towns. I had come to bid her good-bye before setting out
on another journey to the South Seas, and I found her sitting by a
bright fire, with a book on her lap, and several others on the floor
beside her.

'You see?' she said, holding up the volume; 'I'm having a fireside
journey to your islands; but I wish I were going with you! And I would
go if I were ten years younger--you'd have to take me!' She gave a
wistful sigh as she looked out at the wide, snowy street. Then, glancing
at her book, she became her eager, cheery self again.

'There's something I wish you would do for me,' she said. 'I should like
to know all about the old ladies of those islands--the grandmothers, and
the great-grandmothers if there are any. These men,' indicating the
books at her side, 'speak mostly of the young women, and they must be
delightful creatures by all accounts. But so must the grandmothers be,
and you must cultivate them. Then, when you come home again, we will
have just such another afternoon as this, and I shall expect to hear all
about them.'

During two years of desultory wandering which followed, I kept a
notebook in the form of a letter to this grandmother, meaning to send
it, or better, to bring it to her at last. But I waited too long. I
still have the notebook, and knowing that it would please her, I shall
give here some extracts from it, very nearly as they were set down at
the time.


[II]

If you will take your atlas, I will tell you where I am, and what I have
been doing this long afternoon. Do you find the Paumotu, or the Low
Archipelago? It is scattered over a thousand miles of ocean, so it must
take up a little space on your map. Follow it down a little more than
halfway toward the southeastern extremity, and see if you can find an
island named Taueri, or it may be marked, Saint Simon, or Resolution
Island. It is a tiny fragment of land with only a handful of inhabitants
living in a village of about a dozen houses scattered along the lagoon
beach. The ocean beach is wide and lonely, and there, this afternoon, I
met a very charming South-Sea-Island grandmother.

I was having a leisurely stroll, and had gone two miles or more beyond
the village, when I heard some one singing, and the song was '_Au Clair
de la Lune_.' It gave me something of a thrill to hear that old song on
an atoll, so far from the home of its origin, and I was even more
surprised when I saw the singer, a native woman of about sixty. She was
dressed in one of those black mother-hubbards introduced by the
missionaries many years ago, as a more seemly costume for women than the
native one. They are still worn by island grandmothers in these
out-of-the-way places, and when tastefully made they suit them very
well. This grandmother was plaiting coconut-palm fronds, to be used in
thatching a little hut near by. Her husband was building the house in
which they were to live while making copra at this end of the island.

This she told me after bidding me good-day in French, with charming
dignity and courtesy. Then she motioned me to sit down beside her. She
told me that she was not a native of Taueri but of Manga Reva, an island
far to the southeast, where formerly the French missionaries had
excellent schools both for boys and girls. She had lived there till the
time of her marriage when she had gone to Tahiti, and later to Taueri.

I don't remember how the subject came up, but within a quarter of an
hour we were talking of ghosts and spirits--_tupaupau_ as they are
called here--as easily and naturally as we might have spoken of fishing
or mat-weaving. She recited story after story of supernatural
happenings, some of which she had witnessed, and told them with a
forcefulness of effect which I cannot hope to convey to you. But one of
them I can set down very nearly in her own words:

'My uncle, my mother's brother, was named Tan. He was one of the best
divers in Manga Reva. He could not dive so deep as some, but he could
stay longer under water and gather more pearl-shell than any of them.
One day the men went to dive in a distant part of the lagoon, and I was
with my mother in the village, braiding fronds like these.

'Suddenly my mother said, "Au! What is this?" and I saw that the frond
we were braiding was sprinkled with drops of blood. My mother asked me
whether I had cut my hand and I said no. "Come," she said. "Something
has happened to one of our family," and we hurried to the place where
the men were diving for pearl-shell. On the way we met those who were
carrying my uncle home. His body and one of his legs had been terribly
torn by a shark, and he was dead.'

She told me too, of the spirit of her mother, who had died shortly
afterward. She said that she often saw her mother's ghost, sitting on
the beach combing her hair, or braiding fronds, or gathering ripe
coconuts in the groves. All through the afternoon we sat on the beach
looking out over the vast plain of the sea, ruffled to a deeper blue by
the southeast wind, I listening to tales that seemed easily credible in
that lonely spot. The grandmother believed them, there is no doubt of
it. I wished that I might have assumed her personality for a moment to
learn how it was that she was able to persuade herself to such beliefs.

Toward sunset I went back with her to the village where I met her
husband, a stalwart old man with a thick shock of iron-gray hair, and
two of her family of five sons. All of her sons were married, but three
of them lived on distant islands. Her house is a tiny one, the usual
thatched hut of plaited palm fronds, containing but one room and
furnished with the usual sewing-machine and two or three chests for
clothing. On the walls were several colored lithographs illustrating
incidents in the life of Christ. Back of the dwelling-house was a small
out-kitchen opened at the sides. Here the grandmother, with the help of
her two daughters-in-law, prepared supper while we looked on from the
doorstep.

There was not a great variety of food, but one doesn't expect it on an
atoll hundreds of miles from a steamship route. We had fish, hard
biscuits, and coffee, with a tin of bully-beef, opened, undoubtedly, in
my honor! Tinned beef is a costly luxury in this part of the world. I
thought how keenly interested you would have been could you have looked
in on us at supper. The fish was raw for the most part, and we ate it
with our fingers, dipping the morsels into a bowl of sauce made of the
grated meat of ripe coconuts and flavored with salt. Coconut
milk--without the salt of course--is delicious in coffee, far better
than condensed milk. It colors it a rich, golden brown, like the best
jersey cream.

Supper was soon over, and as there were only four dishes to wash, and
one knife which had been used in cutting up the fish, the women were not
long at their task of clearing up, and joined us on the lagoon beach.
The grandmother brought with her a cake of black Tahitian tobacco and a
long strip of dried pandanus-leaf. She peeled off a leaf of the tobacco,
dried it over a coal, and rolled it in a piece of pandanus-leaf, making
thus a cigarette for each of us. Smoking is not a new thing among
Polynesian women, although, as at home, not all women indulge in it. One
cigarette lasts for about half a dozen puffs which is quite long enough
for any one not used to native tobacco.

At first there was a good deal of talk (in the native tongue, not in
French); then, as the dusk deepened, every one became silent, looking
out over the lagoon to the far side of the atoll, where several small
islets could be seen outlined against the evening sky. Presently one of
the daughters-in-law began to sing in a clear sweet voice to which I
could have listened with pleasure indefinitely. Although she is the
mother of two children, I don't think she can be more than eighteen.
Hers was just the voice for the place, and the air had the weird cadence
of all Polynesian songs. After a few moments the grandmother spoke to
her sharply and put an end to the singing. Then she laughed, and turning
to me, she asked whether I knew what her daughter-in-law was singing
about. I said no.

'Well,' she replied, 'she was making up a song about you, the little
vixen! and this was how it went:

    'A man has come to Taueri who is very fond of fish;
    It is well that there are many fish in the sea,
    For a man has come to Taueri who is very fond of fish.'

While the grandmother was making this translation, the daughter-in-law
ran away to her own house, shouting with laughter. It was a good joke on
me. I thought she was singing some ancient song of the islands. As a
matter of fact, being very hungry, I had eaten a great deal of fish.

So ends the day. I am writing this in my notebook by the light of a fire
of coconut husks. There is not a sound to be heard but the eternal
booming of the surf on the windward side of the island. The others have
gone to bed, but I can't bring myself to follow them. Such a night as
this was not meant for sleep. A moment ago a shooting star appeared
almost overhead and vanished halfway down the sky.

    Now glides the silent meteor on, and leaves
    A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.


[III]

From the deck of this ninety-ton schooner I can see on the horizon the
summit of the highest mountain of an island which we left yesterday
afternoon. The _Fenua Ro'atu_, the Polynesians call it--The Land Very
Far Away--which they shorten for convenience' sake to Roatu. It is not
so named on the charts, however. Its British discoverer rechristened it
Lord Some One-or-Other's Island, but none of its inhabitants know this,
and I have forgotten now, what forgotten lord it was whose name rests so
uncouthly on that lonely spot.

I first heard of it from a white man who has spent many years in this
part of the world. He is something of a philologist And something of a
poet as well, and has a large collection of native legends and songs.
Some of these he had translated into French, but it was a task
impossible to accomplish well, he said. He told me that his translations
were by no means literal ones. I saw some specimens of his work, and the
one I liked best was the following, called the 'Song of Roatu,' which I,
in turn, translated into English:

    Go no further, wanderers, go no further;
    This is Ro'atu, the farthest land, long-sought-for,
    Where the bright fish leap in the lagoon
    And the breadfruit ripens in the sun.

    Go no further, wanderers, this is the land;
    Behold it gazing forever at its image in still water.
    This is the land of long sunshine
    And of gentle rains at night.

    Here the plantains flower and bear fruit and flower again;
    In the green gloom of the valleys
    There is heard only the music of running water,
    And the windy grasses nod on the high plateaus.

    These are the voices of Roatu:
    The shouts of the children at play,
    The roar of the surf on the reef,
    And the wind in the fronds of the palms.

I was charmed by this little song which was sung, he told me, to music
as weird and lonely as any he had ever heard.

'You should go there sometime,' he said. 'It is still quite unspoiled,
and there are very few islands of which that can be said any more.'

I did go, at last, and for the opportunity I was indebted to an old
friend, Chan Lee, skipper of the Toafa, who little cares how far he goes
in search of island commodities. He is an affable old Chinaman, but he
never talks of his business, and during this voyage, never on any
occasion did he tell me whither we were bound. This suited me precisely.
It gave an added zest to our haphazard wanderings not to know where we
might fetch up.

One evening--it must have been about nine o'clock--I was lying in my
bunk reading 'Don Quixote,' when Chan came down the companionway.

'You want see nice island?' he said. 'Fine weather now. Bimeby go
shore.'

I went on deck at once, for we had been nearly a week at sea since our
last call, and I had not even guessed at a possible destination. It had
been raining during the early part of the evening, but now all the stars
were out. A light breeze was blowing off-shore, and we were moving
across what seemed to be an immense bay. On one side the coastline was
barely visible, but on the other the jagged outline of the mountains
stood out clearly against the sky.

Such a landfall, made on a cloudless tropic night, is assuredly one of
the happiest of experiences. This is particularly true if the approach
is to an island far from any others. And it is not the distant view
which you remember most vividly, but the near approach, when the land
breeze blows, now cool and damp from the depths of the valleys, now warm
and laden with the unfamiliar odors of the littoral. You hear the
barking of a dog, or a faint halloo from shore; lights are seen moving
among the trees; the shadows of the mountains deepen on the water, and
from this deeper gloom the shoreline begins vaguely to emerge. During
this time the place is still a creation of fancy. A narrowing strip of
water still divides the reality from the ideal conception, and until
that is crossed both the place and the people who inhabit it have an
existence apart--unreal, unspoiled, soon to vanish.

And yet not always, or at least not wholly to vanish, and I had a
premonition that this would be true of the island at hand. It was as
familiar to me in the ideal sense as many a well-loved landscape at
home. The moment I saw it, dim and shadowy under the stars, I knew it
for the island I had dreamed of since boyhood. Chan told me that it was
Roatu, and then he was moved to make what was for him a very long
speech.

'Vely plitty island,' he said. 'I like come here. Plenty food, plenty
quiet.'

For an hour we coasted along a barrier reef where the surf broke gently.
Then, through a narrow pass we entered a lagoon so calm that it seemed a
nether sky, with the white smoke of the Milky Way making a faint
radiance in the water, like the blurred reflection of a streamer of
moonlit cloud. We passed a rocky headland and crept in-shore. No lights
were to be seen now, for the shoulder of a mountain cut off the view of
the inner beach where the village lay. As the anchor was let go I heard
a shout from the darkness close at hand, and at the same moment torches
were lit in a fleet of canoes awaiting our approach. The effect was
spectacular and marvelously beautiful. The lagoon was lighted far and
wide, and I saw that we were lying in a narrow bay, steep mountain walls
enclosing us on two sides. A little to the left a river entered the bay,
and high overhead a deep notch of starry sky marked the direction of the
valley from which it came.

Other canoes rounded the promontory, and the surface of the water was
dotted with the heads of small boys swimming out to us from shore. Chan
gave these water-sprites the freedom of the vessel. Indeed, there was no
help for it, for they clambered up the sides without waiting for an
invitation, overrunning the schooner from stem to stern. They had
brought with them, in a canoe, some torches of their own, made of
bunches of dried palm fronds tied to the ends of sticks. As soon as the
sails were furled they swarmed with these up the rigging to the
cross-trees, where they lighted them and leaped far out, disappearing in
the water like a succession of small meteors.

Two old ladies--I am sure they were grandmothers--were sitting in a
canoe close by, chatting comfortably as they looked on. Of a sudden some
boys in the water grasped the outrigger of their canoe, bore down on it,
and spilled them both out. This seemed to be a quite legitimate joke to
play on Roatu grandmothers. Every one yelled with delight, and certainly
these two grandmothers were well able to take care of themselves. They
came up, sputtering and scolding, and although hindered by their
mother-hubbards, they righted the canoe, swished the water out by
jerking it back and forth, and clambered in again. They laughed and
scolded in the same breath, but they were more wary after that, laying
about them with their paddles whenever a head bobbed up near by.

When we went ashore, a great fire was lighted near the beach in the
midst of a grove of very ancient palm trees, and the village gathered
there to listen to the reading of a small packet of letters we had
brought. There must have been nearly a hundred people present, exclusive
of the children. Those who had received letters read them aloud, for the
news received in one family was of interest to all of the others. But
little comment was made by the listeners. Some of the women cried a
little, thinking, perhaps, of sons and daughters who had left the island
at the time of their marriage, whom they had not seen in many years, and
of grandchildren, nephews, and nieces whom they might never see. But
they had little conception, I think, of the loneliness of their lives as
it appealed to an outsider. It was something they had always known, and
most of them, doubtless, thought theirs the common fate of mankind the
world over.

When the letters had been read, I went to the house of the chief of the
settlement, a man named Rogotangi. I had a letter to him from one of his
relatives whom I met on another island, and he no sooner learned that I
wanted to make a sojourn of several weeks, than he was going to bundle
all of his family out of his house and turn it over to me. I protested
against this excess of hospitality, and at length persuaded him to let
me sleep on the veranda, a small corner of it being all the house-room I
needed. His house was the simplest kind of island dwelling and stood at
the end of the village street near the church. Upon our arrival there we
found two old women, the mothers of Rogotangi and of Temehau, his wife,
seated cross-legged on the floor with a kerosene lamp between them. One
of them was braiding straw for hats, and the other was making a
_tifaifai_, a kind of a bed quilt. They were the most inquisitive, as
well as the jolliest pair of grandmothers I've met thus far. Rogotangi's
mother spoke French, after a fashion, and it was she who did the
quizzing. They wanted first to know why I had come to the island. Then
they asked my name, my mother's name, my father's name, and those of all
brothers and sisters. What was the color of my mother's hair? Was she
fat or slender? Was I married? Were my brothers and sisters married? How
many children did each of them have and what were their names? How far
was it to my home? etc., etc. Their curiosity was insatiable, and
whenever I gave them the slightest opportunity they proceeded with the
examination.

Meanwhile I settled down to the dreamiest sort of life. I lounged in the
shade; I explored the valley, or made day-long excursions to the high,
fern-covered plateaus which extend far inland, and look like smooth,
gently sloping lawns when viewed from a distance. The evenings I spent,
partly in watching the children at play, and partly in cultivating the
grandmothers, according to your instructions. Near the church was a
smooth grass plot, a favorite resort of the children in the cool of the
day. I learned there something about their games. Some of them may date
back to immemorial times, but most of them are those common to children
the world over. The boys and girls both walk on stilts, and the short,
bound-on sticks we used to call 'duck-legs.' They play tag, which they
call 'per-haru,' the catching-game; and 'per pari' is only another
name for prisoner's-base. Besides these they play blind-man's-buff,
jack-stones, and hop-scotch. To decide who shall be 'it,' they count out
in an archaic little rhyme, centuries older, it may be, than our
'Eeny-meeny-mynee-mo.' The very small children have a game which is also
very familiar. They call it 'imi piri'--seeking for the hidden thing. A
child takes a pebble, hides it in one hand, and holds out both fists
while he recites a little rhyme, challenging the others to guess in
which hand the pebble is held. This is the rhyme:

    Vini vini Vairao,
    Taputai, farero,
    Teihia ra t'au piri?

and aside from two nonsense words, it means: 'Parakeet from Vairao,
where is my hidden pebble?' The one who is to do the guessing then feels
of the challenger's ears and strikes the fist on the side of the warmest
ear.

Having so many pastimes common to all children, I was surprised to learn
that they were ignorant of one of the most fascinating of them
all--soap-bubble blowing. Apparently they had never heard of it. It was
high time, therefore, that this ancient diversion was introduced; and
fate, surely, was in the event, for Soo Long, storekeeper, and the only
Chinaman on the island, had a box of clay pipes. Judging from the
appearance of the box they were in, they must have been lying on his
shelf for years, awaiting their destiny as makers of magic.

Think of introducing such a pastime in a village full of Polynesian
children! What better fortune could one ask? I prepared a bowl of soapy
water and carried it to the steps in front of the church, the children
crowding around to see what was going to happen. It was a calm evening,
with an imperceptible current of air which carried the bubbles slowly
upward, glowing with all the colors of the sunset, until they burst high
overhead among the fronds of the palms. For a moment the children gazed
at them with a rapt expression on their faces, as though they had
divined at once, instinctively, that a soap-bubble is an ideal form of
beauty--a symbol of perfection. Then they were but clamorous children,
eager to make bubbles for themselves; so I distributed the rest of the
pipes and sat down to watch them. I shall never think of this village
without seeing it in the mellow light of a waning afternoon, the air
filled with soap-bubbles, and small children, shouting with delight,
chasing them over a smooth lawn. They seemed creatures of pure
enchantment, and the island itself only a huge bubble, created but that
moment out of a dream.

Fortunately it was an island solid underfoot, where people ate, and
slept, and fished, and made copra, and washed clothes--particularly the
latter. The women were at their outdoor laundry on the river-bank every
morning at dawn, and there were always some grandmothers among them,
beating the clothes with their wooden paddles almost as vigorously as
the younger women. They are a cleanly race, these islanders. Most of
them bathe morning and evening--in the streams, rarely in the sea--and
the women seem to be forever washing clothes or ironing them. The irons
they use are heated by a fire of bark from the coconut palm. The trees
in the vicinity of any Polynesian village bear witness to the passion of
the natives for clean, freshly laundered clothing. You will not find one
that has not been chipped and scarred for bark on all sides, to the
height of a woman's head.

The ironing appears to be largely a grandmotherly task. Having sprinkled
down the clothes, and started the little fires going in their irons,
they spread an ironing-cloth on the floor and sit cross-legged before
it. This appears to be the most awkward and uncomfortable position
possible for such work, but evidently it is not. Polynesians are more
supple-limbed than we are, and their joints have freer play. The women
always iron while sitting on the floor, and it is surprising to see how
long they keep at it without showing the least sign of fatigue.

I remember that you wanted to know what these island grandmothers talk
about. About everything under the sun, I should say; I marvel that they
have anything left to discuss in these little settlements where most of
the inhabitants were born and have lived all their lives. And yet I have
often seen a pair of grandmothers sitting over their ironing, all the
afternoon, talking as volubly and with as much animation as though they
had just met after years of separation. Each of them must know all there
is to be known about every one else in the village, and what they find
to gossip about with such interest remains a mystery to me.


[IV]

A year ago to-day I was chatting with you in your sitting-room,
listening to the pleasant crackling of the fire, and looking out at the
snowy street where there was not a single passer-by all the afternoon.
Now, looking up from my notebook, I see, across the waters of this
little land-locked bay, mountains green to their summits, enclosing a
deep valley half hidden in tropical vegetation. What a variety of
experience one may have at the cost of a little movement! However, in
this case the movement has been to a considerable distance, something
over six thousand miles.

After a year's experience among Polynesian grandmothers, I feel
competent to set up as an authority on the subject. What numbers of them
I've met, some grave and reserved in speech and action, some jolly, and
full of life and spirits, some a little shrewish and harsh-tempered, but
most of them with the gentleness and charm of manner which they have in
common with grandmothers the world over.

But I know that you like accounts of specific experiences rather than
these generalizations, so I will tell you of one of the most interesting
of them while it is still freshly in mind; for I have been celebrating
this anniversary by paying a visit to a lady who is a unique kind of
island grandmother. She is not Polynesian at all, but an American--can
you imagine it?--an American grandmother tucked away in this remote
corner of the world which seems to belong to some other planet.

The captain of the trading-schooner on which I have been traveling since
November, told me about her. She is the wife of another skipper, an
American long since dead, who brought her to the islands forty years
ago. He built a home for her on this island, and here she has been
living ever since, without ever having returned to the little New
England town where she was born. I was keenly interested, of course, the
more so because I couldn't imagine what sort of an effect this lonely,
mid-tropical environment would have in the making of an American
grandmother. Would she be true to type, or would forty years of exile
have made her a grandmother of a wholly different kind? I was thinking
of this as I rowed ashore this morning to pay my respects.

Thirty or forty years ago this village was a flourishing little
settlement, with a colony of English, French, and American merchants and
planters, a good school, a club, and cool, spacious government
buildings. There was life and movement here, and ships in the harbor,
and lively talk on the verandas of an evening, over cigars and coffee.
Now it is deserted, silent, falling in ruin. The long sunny street is
empty for hours at a time. The jungle has crept down over the old
plantations, and the sound of the human voice comes with a strange and
startling effect in the uncanny silence of the place.

I soon found the house I was looking for. It might have been lifted out
of almost any New England village. There must have been a shingle roof
at one time, but this had been replaced by one of thatch which gave it
an odd appearance, heightened by two hibiscus bushes, full of red
blossoms, on either side of the doorway. They should have been lilac
bushes, of course, and the house seemed to be conscious of this. It
seemed to be making a wistful appeal to one to overlook these exotic
makeshifts, as much as to say, 'I hope you'll excuse this outlandish
covering I've got over me, and these strange-looking bushes. It ain't
what I've a right to expect; but Lord! here I am, and I've got to do the
best I can with what I can find.'

To one side of the house is a little garden filled with all sorts of
tropical flowers, and there I found my grandmother, with a spade in her
hand, 'puttering around' among her plants and bushes. That was just the
expression she used when she first spoke to me. She is a little woman,
about five feet two or three, barefoot, almost as brown as a native, and
with white hair which she wears in a single braid down her back. She
gave me a very cheery welcome.

'Well, I'm right glad to see you!' she said. 'Joe' (the captain) 'told
me he was going to send you over this morning, and the last hour I've
been keeping one eye on my work and the other on the gate. Come into the
house! I'm just puttering around out here. Land sakes! How long's it
been since I've seen anybody from home! You'll have to excuse my
English. I've almost forgot how to talk it, a body has so little
practice here.'

I thought she spoke it with surprising fluency, and now and then she
came out with words and expressions in a homely vernacular pleasant to
hear. The little sitting-room was scrupulously clean. There was an
old-fashioned bureau in one corner, and a carpet-covered sofa in
another; a center table, covered with knick-knacks, in the middle of the
room, and a chest of drawers against a wall. All the furniture was in a
sad state of repair, and small wonder, for it had been doing service for
forty years in a climate none too favorable to the preservation of it.

I spent the morning and stayed to lunch--roasted breadfruit, bananas
fried in oil, and a delicious dish of curried shrimps and rice. Beside
the grandmother and I, there were her two granddaughters, Nancy and
Helen, aged about nine and eleven. The names may call to mind pictures
of children whom they would be likely to suit, but these two are like
none of the Nancys or Helens you could imagine. They are black-eyed,
black-haired, dark-skinned little creatures in whom it was impossible to
see a trace of New England. The grandmother told me something about
their mother.

'My son married her right out of the bush, you might say. A body
couldn't help loving her, she was such a wild, shy, pretty little thing.
She died about two years ago, and I've had the children with me ever
since. Dear, dear! How am I ever to bring them up properly? You can see
for yourself what little savages they are. I've tried and tried to teach
them manners, but it's useless. They have too much of their mother in
them. My son and his wife always lived native fashion because she
couldn't learn any other. I don't know what's become of him--he's always
been a trial. He's somewhere in the islands, I suppose, but I haven't
seen him since I took the children.'

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, 'Ain't it queer how things
work out? Little I thought when I was a girl that I would ever have two
little heathen like these for grandchildren.'

I said that they must be a great comfort to her nevertheless.

'Oh, they are!' she replied. 'I don't know what I'd do without them; but
when I look ahead--what's to become of them? There are no white men for
them to marry--not one I should like to see as the husband of either of
them. What's left for them?' She shook her head ruefully. 'And my own
flesh and blood!' She stared vacantly out of the window, clasping and
unclasping her slim brown hands--capable hands, but hardly capable of
dealing with such a problem as this. Then she looked at the children and
brightened up at once. 'Pshaw! Here I am bothering you with my old
woman's troubles, and like enough you have plenty of your own. Would you
like to hear them sing? They have very pretty voices.'

I said I should like it very much, so she spoke to them in native, and
after a moment of shyness they began. It was an odd, wailing little
song, one of their mother's songs, the grandmother said. 'I've tried to
teach them "Over the River and Through the Wood," and "Good-Morning
Merry Sunshine," songs I used to know when I was a little girl, but they
either can't or won't remember them.'

Late in the afternoon I returned to the schooner and have been sitting
on deck ever since, writing a few words in my notebook, and then
stopping to look toward the beach where a group of native children were
at play. A little while ago they swam out to the schooner, and Nancy and
Helen were among them, swimming with ease and grace like the
accomplished little water-sprites they are. Then they returned to shore,
laughing and shouting to each other all the way. Just now I heard their
grandmother calling: 'Nan-cy! He-len! _Har mai roto i te far!_' (Come
into the house!) '_!_' they shouted back--'_Aru!_' (Presently; in a
moment!) They are gone now, and as we are sailing at dawn to-morrow, I
don't suppose that I shall ever see them again.




CHAPTER XI. A PERSON FROM PORLOCK


I have often thought it strange that in all the one hundred and thirty
years since he came from Porlock, no one should have tried to discover
who this 'person' was. An investigation now would prove difficult; it
should have been made a century ago. In the early eighteen-hundreds, to
be sure, there were nothing like so many beaters of the hedgerows and
copses of Letters as there are to-day, but there were some, and how did
they miss starting this fat rabbit which was browsing along the roadside
between Porlock and Linton, in Somersetshire--and who knows in what
other directions?--to the irreparable damage of the rich preserves of
literature? Why wasn't he ferreted out? Why wasn't he caught, drawn, to
the life, by the pen of some nineteenth-century Swift; quartered, as he
so richly deserved to be, in the stocks of public infamy, and then
hanged high on Dunkery Beacon as a warning to all the other rabbits,
actual and prospective?

He committed one of the worst offenses recorded in the history of
English Literature and escaped, scot-free. That is why I wish some one
would pursue his ghost. His memory is, and has been for years, execrable
to me, but one knows so little about him--he is such a ghostly ghost,
that there is nothing to grapple with the hooks of a really active
disdain. I should like to know what his appearance was, in life, his
name, and something of his intimates and associates in the village of
Porlock. But above all, I should be grateful for the following
particulars: when this wretched shade still walked the earth in the
flesh, what was his business? Why did he choose a particular day in the
summer of 1797 to set out--for some purpose in connection with this
business--along the road which leads from Porlock to Linton? And why,
apparently, was it _nobody's_ business to stop him before he reached a
certain lonely farmhouse at Nether Stowey, on the Exmoor confines of
Somerset and Devonshire?

But perhaps I go too fast, and take too much for granted on the part of
my reader. He may have forgotten even the little that is known of the
person from Porlock. Let me remind him at once, then, that Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was the occupant of the remote farmhouse at Nether Stowey, and
on that summer day, in 1797, he was engaged in writing 'Kubla Khan.'

I never read the poem without reading as well the note which Coleridge
appended to it, in which he explains the circumstances of its
composition and why it remains a fragment. And the more I marvel at the
richness of fancy displayed in the former, the more I wonder at the
noble spirit of resignation so manifest in the latter:

    In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health,
    had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton,
    on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In
    consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been
    prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair
    at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or
    words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here
    Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden
    thereunto, and thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed
    with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a
    profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which
    time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have
    composed less than from two to three hundred lines--if that,
    indeed, can be called composition in which all the images rose
    up before him as things, with a parallel production of the
    correspondent expressions--without any sensation or
    consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to
    have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen,
    ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that
    are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called
    out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him
    above an hour; and on his return to the room, found, to his no
    small surprise and mortification, that though he retained some
    vague and dim recollection of the purport of the vision, yet,
    with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and
    images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the
    surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas!
    without the after restoration of the latter....

Few men and no women in the history of English Literature have suffered
such a loss as Coleridge suffered on this occasion, but he was such a
thoroughly good and gentle man that he could take his loss in this calm
spirit. But he was a man after all, and had he not shown resentment
against the person who had robbed him of the rest of 'Kubla Khan,' one
would think him too charitable to be human. But observe with what
restraint he speaks of his loss. Observe, too, what a deadly weapon
restraint can be.

The Porlock Person came, as we have been told, on a summer day in 1797.
Could it have been a day in July? Could it have been one of the days
between the second and the sixteenth of July? If so, then there were
accessories before the fact of the robbery--unwilling and very contrite
ones we may be sure, but accessories nevertheless and they should be
brought to the bar of judgment.

The first is Charles Lamb. He visited Coleridge during the week of July
ninth to sixteenth. But merely to mention the name of Lamb is to acquit
him at once. No, no! I would take my oath on it that Elia was not
guilty. Had he been at Nether Stowey when the person from Porlock came,
we should have had the whole of 'Kubla Khan.' He would not have
permitted any one, whatever his business, to disturb Coleridge in the
midst of composition. Let me quote from Lamb's letter, written from
London early in that July, in which he tells Coleridge that he may be
able to visit him. Coleridge had urged him repeatedly to come to Nether
Stowey, but Lamb, always short of leisure, had not been able to accept.
But at last he writes:

    _July, 1797, Thursday_

    MY DEAREST FRIEND:

    I discern a possibility of my paying you a visit next week. May
    I, can I, shall I come so soon? Have you _room_ for me?
    _leisure_ for me? and are you pretty well? Tell me all this
    honestly--immediately. And by what day coach could I come
    soonest and nearest to Stowey? A few months hence may suit you
    better; certainly, me, as well. If so, say so.... Here I will
    leave off, for I dislike to fill up this paper (which involves a
    question so connected with my heart and soul) with meaner
    matter, or subjects to me less interesting. I can talk, as I can
    think, nothing else.

    C. LAMB

The man who wrote this letter--who showed such forethought, delicacy,
and consideration in accepting an invitation from his friend--would have
known how to protect that friend from interlopers, and I am sure that he
would have protected him, had the great occasion risen between the ninth
and the sixteenth of July.

The second and third of the possible accessories to the theft were
friends as dear to Coleridge as Lamb himself--William and Dorothy
Wordsworth. They were with him at Nether Stowey while Lamb was there,
and during the whole of the week before. As we know, Miss Wordsworth was
devoted to her brother and it is to be expected that she would make her
own interests as well as those of everybody else, even, perhaps,
including those of Coleridge, subservient to William's. Therefore, if
the Porlock person came during the week of July second to ninth, it is
more than likely that she did not see him in time to prevent the
robbery. Or, if she saw him, she may have been so engrossed in her
brother as to have had no thought for Coleridge's danger. As for
Wordsworth himself, although he could be a keen enough observer upon
occasion, when engaged in composing he would be blind to the external
world, seeing nothing but the fancies which flashed upon his inward eye.

His poem, 'The Old Cumberland Beggar,' was composed in 1797. Could he
have been working upon that, I wonder, at the time of the robbery? It is
possible. Perhaps, after luncheon--Coleridge being slightly
indisposed--Wordsworth and his sister had taken a walk along the road
toward Porlock, and, upon reaching a sheltered spot, had seated
themselves there. While they are thus resting, without speaking,
enjoying the drowsy peace of the afternoon, the very person passes, and
Miss Wordsworth says, 'I wonder who that can be, William?'

Wordsworth is deep in thought and doesn't hear. Presently he says,

'Dorothy, do you remember the old beggar we used to meet so often in our
walks?'

'The old Cumberland beggar? Oh, yes. Of course you mean to write of him,
William? I've often wondered why you haven't done so before this.'

'I've been waiting until I was quite sure of him, and of the moral
implications of his story. The subject has ripened gradually. I am ready
now, I think.'

'Then why not begin at once? Shall it be a long poem?'

'Not particularly. I can easily finish it in an hour's time. This is a
delightful spot, but do you think I shall be safe here from
interruption?'

'Do begin! You may depend upon me. I shall see to it that no one
disturbs you.'

If only Mrs. Coleridge had been as vigilant in protecting her husband's
interests as Miss Wordsworth invariably was in protecting her brother's!
But for some reason she was not, and there's an end of the matter.

Wordsworth opens his notebook, and after a moment of reflection, begins:

    I saw an aged beggar in my walk;
    And he was seated, by the highway side,
    On a low structure of rude masonry
    Built at the foot of a huge hill, that they
    Who lead their horses down the steep rough road
    May thence remount at ease. The aged man
    Had placed his staff across the broad smooth stone
    That overlays the pile; and from a bag
    All white with flour, the dole of village dames,
    He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one;
    And scanned them with a fixed and serious look
    Of idle computation.

One feels in this poem a kind of mellow beauty, like that of a late
November afternoon, but it does not seem to me to be poetry in the high
sense, and I would not exchange the fragment of a line in the fragment
of 'Kubla Khan' for the whole of it. Reading it, one is in no doubt that
Wordsworth had, at some time, observed patiently and minutely, the old
Cumberland beggar. Why couldn't he have had a single, brief, divining
glance for the Somerset robber who was even then approaching Coleridge's
doorstep?

Perhaps he did see him and instead of stopping him had merely observed,
with the artist's eye, some picturesque rustic effect of gait or dress
or carriage. Perhaps he even wrote a poem about him, or made notes for
one to be composed later. If so, then this poem must be hidden somewhere
in the Complete Works. Here is a small but possibly fruitful field for
study for some one who loves curious research.

If it was not 'The Old Cumberland Beggar,' then it may have been 'The
Reverie of Poor Susan,' that Wordsworth was composing on this summer
day, for that poem, too, was written in 1797. Do you remember it?

    At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
    Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
    Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
    In the silence of morning the song of the bird.

And as these lines were being written, it may be that the Porlock Person
had opened the door of Coleridge's study.

'Well, Mr. Coleridge, here you are at your writin'! I hope I'm not
disturbin' you? So this is where you make your poetry books! Nice little
place you've got here, but it's a tidy way from Porlock. I'm all of a
sweat, like. Ain't it hot for the time of year? I didn't have nothin'
much to do this afternoon, so I just thought I'd drop in to see you
about that----' etc., etc.

I don't mean to say that he talked like this. Probably he spoke the
Somerset dialect, and it may have been something like John Fry's, in
'Lorna Doone,' when he strode into the inn at Dulverton, and shouted,
'as loud as though he were calling sheep upon Exmoor,' 'Hot mooton pasty
for twoo trarv'lers, at number vaive, in vaive minnits! Dish un up in
the tin with the grahvy, zame as I hardered last Tuesday.' But whatever
the dialect, I imagine that what he said must have been substantially as
given above.

And there were the Wordsworths, sitting under Coleridge's lime tree in
the garden, Miss Dorothy looking from her brother to her sewing and back
again, and the poet bent over his manuscript, writing,

    Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
    Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
    And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
    The only one dwelling on earth that she loves.

Had it been:

    The stars of midnight shall be dear
    To her; and she shall lean her ear
    In many a secret place
    Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
    And beauty born of murmuring sound
    Shall pass into her face

he should be forgiven at once, by me at least. But 'The Reverie of Poor
Susan'! And we have her to thank as well as the Porlock Person for the
loss of 'Kubla Khan'!

But now, unquestionably, I go too fast, letting imagination excite
indignation in this fashion, convicting the Wordsworths on evidence
which is not even circumstantial. Summer was three months long in the
eighteenth century just as it is to-day, and for anything I know to the
contrary, the robbery may have occurred in June, or August, or during
the last two weeks of July.

And here Coleridge himself admonishes me for the spirit of this inquiry.
My copy of his Collected Poems lies open on the table beside me as I
write. The window, too, is open, and the warm breeze--as though it felt
the impulse of his humane and charitable spirit--has fluttered over the
leaves of the volume to his Preface to the poems. My eye falls upon the
concluding paragraph:

    I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings; and I
    consider myself as having been amply repaid without either.
    Poetry has been to me its own 'exceeding great reward': it has
    soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my
    enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the
    habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all
    that meets and surrounds me.

There speaks the man whom all his friends loved so deeply; who, as we
know, both from their testimony and from his own writings, had this rich
and generous nature. We all have so many sins to answer for that we
should try to think indulgently of the sins of others. But we also
have--most of us, surely--our own Porlock Persons to deal with, and they
are so lacking even in the rudiments of thoughtfulness and consideration
that it is hard to think of them with any kindness. They disturb our
meditations, rob us of our precious hours of leisure, interfere with our
work, and although this matters nothing, in our cases, to the world at
large, it matters a great deal to us. And indeed, it seems to me that to
violate any man's privacy--that is, to call upon him unasked, without
warning--is to commit the worst in the whole category of inexcusable
offenses; and if he be a great artist, as Coleridge was, then the
offense becomes a crime, for he is robbing posterity as well.

No one has described the circumstances of such a violation more vividly
than Joseph Conrad, in his autobiographical narrative 'A Personal
Record.' His Porlock Person was a woman, and you may remember that he
calls her 'the general's daughter.' In all probability she is still
living--if any one may be said to be living who has been singed and
scorched and burned to a cinder by such a blast of ridicule--but in this
case I am glad that I do not know her name, and I hope that no one will
pursue her to reveal her identity. Granted that she has read Conrad's
account of their meeting, unless she is incredibly thick-skinned she has
already suffered enough for her sins. Let her rest in anonymity and
peace, if any peace remains to her in this life. I for one feel certain
that she will never again pay a visit, unannounced, to anybody.

She too came on a summer day, and there are other circumstances
connected with the visit which make Conrad's experience strikingly like
that of Coleridge. Both men were engaged upon creations of pure fancy,
in which the original idea had come to them through reading. Coleridge
found his in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage,' and I remember reading somewhere
that Conrad found his in a newspaper item. But there was this important
difference in the details: Coleridge, as he says, had been given in a
dream the complete form and substance of 'Kubla Khan,' and the precise
language with which to clothe the images which rose up before him in his
vision. Conrad, on the other hand, had labored in a bloody sweat of the
spirit for his own creation, 'Nostromo.'

    For twenty months [he says] neglecting the common joys of life
    which fall to the lot of the humblest on this earth, I had, like
    the prophet of old, 'wrestled with the Lord' for my creation,
    for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid
    Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the sky, and for the
    breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and
    women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are,
    perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterize
    otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in
    which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour
    after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the
    exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and
    gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be
    found in the everlasting somber stress of the westward winter
    passage round Cape Horn.

He was writing the very last chapters of 'Nostromo'; Cape Horn was all
but weathered, and just at the moment when he needed every ounce of his
energy, all of his courage for the struggle against the impending and
inevitable sense of defeat, all of his resources, physical and
spiritual, all his gathered-up capacity for concentration upon the final
problems of his task--the general's daughter appeared. To be sure, that
is the moment when she would appear. Porlock Persons have a genius for
timing their visits thus.

    And so the general's daughter came to me--or I should say, one
    of the general's daughters. There were three of these bachelor
    ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighboring
    farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The
    eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village
    children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers
    for the conquest of courtesies. The second skirmished and
    scouted all over the country; and it was this one who pushed a
    reconnaissance right up to my very table--I mean the one who
    wore the stand-up collars. She was really calling upon my wife
    in the soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual
    martial determination she marched into my room swinging her
    stick--but no, I mustn't exaggerate. It is not my specialty. I
    am not a humoristic writer. In all soberness, then, all I am
    certain of is that she had a stick to swing.

A question now arises which one asks with reluctance: Where was Mrs.
Conrad? She too failed her husband at the critical moment, just as Mrs.
Coleridge had failed hers. Neither artist gives the slightest indication
that he thought his wife to blame. Indeed, Conrad says, in speaking of
his labors during those twenty months:

    I suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of
    times. Yes, I suppose I slept and ate the food put before me,
    and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions.
    But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made
    easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
    affection.

There could have been no question of the tirelessness of the affection.
But the watchfulness? Women will take issue with me here. 'What!' they
will say, 'do you expect a woman with small children to care for and the
household tasks to supervise, to keep constant guard over her husband,
day and night, for twenty months?' No, one does not expect that, but it
would be a fine thing if one could, confidently, expect it. Where is the
good of watchfulness at all if it is to be relaxed even for a moment?
For it may be the critical moment as it was in Coleridge's case; and had
Conrad not been so near to the end of his task, the result might have
been equally fatal in his case.

Conrad's house was not protected in any way from possible intruders. No
ditch or wall surrounded it; the doors and windows of his study stood
open to 'that best friend of my work, the warm still sunshine of the
wide fields,' and through one or the other of them came the general's
daughter. She said, 'How do you do?'

    I had heard nothing--no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a
    moment before a sort of premonition of evil; I had a sense of an
    inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and
    then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
    fall from a great height... I picked myself up quickly, of
    course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair, stunned and
    dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being uprooted out
    of one world and flung down into another--perfectly civil.

    'Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?'...

    Observe! I didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or
    throw myself on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in
    any other way at the appalling magnitude of the disaster. The
    whole world of Costaguana (the country of my seaboard tale),
    men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, _campo_ (there
    was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand I had not placed
    in position with my own hands); all the history, geography,
    politics, finance... all that had come crashing down about my
    ears. I felt that I could never pick up the pieces, and in that
    very moment I was saying, 'Won't you sit down?'

He doesn't take credit to himself for his restraint, but attributes it
to his quarter-deck training in the British merchant marine. Well, the
bachelor lady sat down, and, after looking about her 'with a slightly
amused serenity,' she made precisely the remark which all Porlock
Persons make:

'I'm afraid I interrupted you?'

They ask this question, not from any sense of delicacy, but merely I
believe, to reassure themselves, from the manner of their unfortunate
victims, that they have arrived as inopportunely as they had hoped.

Conrad said, 'Not at all.'

Then she said, 'And you sit like this, here, writing your--your----'

Conrad admitted that he did. She thought this must be 'perfectly
delightful'; but, before she had time to think anything else, succor
came.

The general's daughter had a dog which had remained outside. We can
easily imagine what kind of dog a Porlock Person would have, and we can
imagine what it would be doing as it ran briskly here and there, nosing
into every hole and corner in the garden. Conrad, too, had a dog, or
rather his little son had one, a gift from Stephen Crane, a warm friend
of the family. A dog chosen by Stephen Crane as a gift to the son of his
fellow craftsman would be the implacable enemy, of course, of a Porlock
Person's dog, and this one was no exception. He espied the general's
daughter's dog from afar, and went for him, 'straight and swift, like a
cannon-ball.' Conrad, the soul of courtesy, went at once to the rescue
of the general's daughter's dog. 'Afterward,' he says, 'the lady went
off, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she had
lightly made, and with the awfully instructive sound of the word
"delightful" lingering in my ears.'

But before concluding this paper in which I have spoken harshly, and
perhaps unjustly, of Porlock Persons, I have a confession to make: Once
I came very nearly being a Porlock Person, and the artist I purposed
visiting was none other than Conrad himself. Cold shivers go up and down
my spine every time I think of the narrowness of his escape, and my own.
I couldn't have been the general's daughter, for that visit must have
occurred in 1902, or 1903, and it was much later that I made my
unheralded approach. Leaving the Porlock of my native heath, in Iowa, I
crossed three thousand miles of ocean, purchased a second-hand bicycle
in London, and shortly thereafter was bowling along a road in Kent, in
the direction of Conrad's dwelling. But in justice to myself I will say
this: I had not been moved all that distance by idle curiosity. To me
Conrad was, and still is, the greatest artist of his time. I revered and
all but worshiped him, and I longed to see the man who had so stimulated
my mind, who had stirred my emotions so deeply, and to whom I owed
innumerable hours of the purest kind of pleasure. I wanted to see him
only for a moment, and I hoped to find a few words in which to express
to him my profoundly felt gratitude.

Well, I cycled on, and despite the exercise and the fact that it was a
warm July day, my feet grew colder and colder. At length when I was only
a short distance from his house, panic seized me; I turned and cycled in
the opposite direction as hard as I could go; and I didn't stop till
both he and I were well out of danger.

I suppose there are Porlock Person potentialities in all of us. We are
not to blame for this, but we _are_ to blame if we allow them to become
active qualities of our nature. Whenever we are tempted to call upon an
artist--whether musician, poet, novelist, painter, sculptor--let us set
out in the opposite direction instead. But if we feel that we really
_must_ see him, let us first send him a letter of warning, using Lamb's
letter to Coleridge as a model. Let us even improve upon the model, and
write, 'A few months hence may suit you better; a few years hence,
better still. If so, say so.' Then, we may be sure, we shall have no
unfinished 'Kubla Khans' on our consciences, and we shall never be held
up to ridicule as the general's daughter was.




CHAPTER XII. SETTLING DOWN IN POLYNESIA


Some time ago, my friend C. B. and I, after various wanderings here and
there about the world, decided that it was time we were settling down.
We had often discussed this project, but hitherto a love of changing
scenes and new faces had prevented our making a choice of any one spot
in which to live. I was the more reluctant, for there were many horizons
yet to be crossed, many lands which we had visited only in the
imagination. How was it possible, I contended, life being so short, to
rest content with the same circle of hills, the same outlook, however
pleasant, over land or sea? But at last C. B. took a firm stand.

'You may do as you like,' he said, 'but I shall wait no longer. Every
month finds us less inclined to come to a decision in this matter. No,
unless we forego this roving life now, we shall always be homeless
wanderers, and we shall spend our last days, very likely, in some dingy
_pension_ in Paris, or in one of those old men's homes where they take
you and your little savings on spec, hoping you will die before it is
all spent on your maintenance.'

'Well,' I replied, 'growing old in Paris wouldn't be such a misfortune
even though we did have to live in a boarding-house. Or if it should
happen to be America, I know of several old men's homes where we might
be very comfortable.' But I had put him off with arguments of this sort
before, and at last he convinced me that he had the right of it.
Therefore we began a discussion of plans. We had long ago fixed upon
that part of the world where we would live when the time came for
settling down. We are both lovers of islands, and those of eastern
Polynesia attracted us more than any of the others we had seen. The
climate was healthy; there were no tropical fevers of any sort; the
fishing was good; we could swim at all seasons of the year--in short, if
there was one place where we might hope to be happy without further
wanderings, we believed it was to be found on some island in the eastern
Pacific. So we got our belongings together, not forgetting our books,
and set out for what we then believed was to be a last period of
wandering.

Several months were spent in voyaging, as opportunity offered, among
both atolls and high islands, and at length we came to one of the latter
which seemed to us the most beautiful of them all, and the most
desirable as a place to live from every practicable point of view. It is
fairly large, as islands go in that part of the world: twenty miles
across in the widest part, and some one hundred, and fifty around the
coast. All the inhabitants live on the low land bordering the sea. The
interior is a wilderness abandoned to wild cattle, goats, and pigs--a
region of deep valleys, high, fern-covered plateaus, and steep,
unscalable, cloud-capped mountains. No trails cross it, but there is a
road around the coastal land. The island is drained by no less than
eighty streams, and surrounded by a barrier reef which lies from a few
hundred yards to a mile or two off-shore, so that wherever you go along
the road, you have the music of running water mingled with the
everlasting booming of the surf on the reef.

We lived for several weeks in a town on the western side of the
island--as pretty a place as one could hope to see, with a harbor filled
with shipping, all sail, which is used in the inter-island trade in
fruit, fish, copra, and pearl-shell. The streets are broad, well shaded
and well kept, the villas attractive, and the gardens and lawns
surrounding them filled with such a variety of flowers and
flowering-shrubs, and trees, that one could look at them for hours,
always finding something new of interest. One evening, after dinner at a
little hotel on the water-front, we were walking along a road on the
outskirts of the town, when we passed a large villa and were hailed, in
English, by a man who was taking his ease on the veranda. He asked us to
come in, which we did, and passed a very pleasant evening with him. He
had heard, he said, of our purpose in coming to the island, how we hoped
to settle there, and he thought it his duty to give us some advice. He
urged very strongly that we reconsider the matter.

'Let me tell you what my own experience has been,' he said. 'I came to
this place forty years ago, and at first I thought I could never be
thankful enough for the chance which had brought me. I am sure that I
was, and am still, as much a lover of islands as either of you. There is
scarcely a fragment of land in all this part of the Pacific that I have
not explored from one end to the other. I had a little money--not a
great deal, but a small sum went farther in those days than it does now,
and I invested it carefully, here and elsewhere, but chiefly among the
Low Islands. I now own two atolls of that group, both of them well
planted to coconuts----'

I interrupted him here. 'You own two islands?' I said. 'Would you, by
any chance, consider selling one of them?'

'Willingly,' he replied. 'I will sell to-morrow, to-night, this minute.
If you are in the market for an island you have come to the right shop.'

It amuses me, now, to think how far short we were of having enough
capital to buy an island with eighty thousand bearing coconut trees on
it. His price was forty thousand dollars, and between us C. B. and I had
two--two thousand.

'Well,' said our host, 'I'm afraid I can't sell this evening. But to
return to what I was saying a moment ago, I have long since realized
that I made a mistake in coming here. I have done well enough. I live
pleasantly and comfortably, but I have entirely dropped out of the lives
of my old friends at home, and I've largely lost contact with what is
taking place in the outside world. I thought I could keep in touch by
means of newspapers, books, reviews, but believe me, they offer a very
poor substitute for personal contacts. The years have slipped by, and
now I am well into my sixties. When I look back over my life, what have
I to remember? You may be surprised when I tell you that it is largely
only such evenings as this--pleasant chats with strangers from outside,
who bring with them, whether they realize it or not, a breath of cold,
invigorating air from the higher latitudes. I mean no disparagement to
you or the others when I say that a man's memories of forty years should
have higher lights than these.'

Then he told us, at length, of the disadvantages of living in exile,
even in so delightful a spot: of the monotony of the life, the
loneliness, the lack of stimulating associations. But we had considered
all of these, we said, and were willing to make the sacrifices, knowing
that we could not have the islands and the other things at the same
time. It was late when we left his house. He walked with us down to his
gate, and before we parted, he said,

'What a pity it is that one man's experience can never be of the
slightest use to other men! I am sure you are making a great
mistake--one you will both live to regret, and yet I'm powerless to
prevent it. Well, good-night. If I can be of service at any time, you
have only to let me know.'

We thanked him and walked in silence through the deserted, moonlit
streets to our lodgings.

The following morning we set out on foot to the eastward, having decided
to make a complete circuit of the island in the search for a future
home-site. The road curved this way and that, sometimes going inland for
a mile or two, but for the most part skirting the lagoon beach. During
the first three hours of the journey we passed many orderly plantations
and Chinese truck-gardens hanging to the steep slopes of the hills, and
strips of rice swamp at the mouths of sunny valleys, but at last the
well-beaten road gave place to a grass-grown cart-track, and the houses
of European and Chinese construction to the little thatched dwellings of
the native population.

Toward the middle of the afternoon we came to a stream broader and
deeper than any we had yet crossed, flowing out of primeval forest. A
foot-path led inland along the bank, and being hot from our walk we
decided to follow it until we came to a good swimming place. Limes, wild
oranges, and bananas were growing along the banks shaded by lofty trees
that mingled their branches over the stream, and the green filtered
light was as though the silence of the deep valley and the humid,
motionless air had been stained and dyed by the aura of innumerable
growing things. We had been walking for a quarter of an hour when we
came to a deep, still pool, about thirty yards long by half as wide. At
the farther end of it a score of naked brown children were running to
take concealment in the bush. We were sorry to drive them from their
bath, but knowing they would come back, we stripped to our
swimming-trunks and dove into the cool water.

It was a delightful place for a mid-afternoon plunge--clear, deep water,
a sandy bottom, and far overhead the green vault made by the overhanging
trees. While standing in shoal water near the bank, we saw a chubby
four-year-old baby crouched behind a screen of fern, hoping to escape
notice as she watched the clumsy antics of the white men. The alarm had
caught her on the opposite side of the river from where she had left her
frock and her hat of split bamboo, and she hadn't the courage to cross
and get them. C. B. walked toward her, holding out his hands. She was so
young that she had not yet lost the confidence of babyhood, and after
hesitating for a moment she came forward and was soon shouting with
pleasure as he took her for a ride on his back across the pool. Then, by
twos and threes, the others appeared and stood along the bank while they
made up their minds that we were harmless. Presently a boy leaped into
the water with a yell, and the others quickly followed. The baby let go
C. B.'s shoulders and struck out alone to join in the play, while we
climbed the bank, dressed, and sat down to watch them.

After a few moments they took no further notice of us. They were playing
a game as old as the human race and older, for monkeys may be seen at
it, without the water feature, in many a tropical jungle. An old tree,
close to the bank, sent out a long, drooping limb which curved gradually
to within a yard or so of the stream. Four or five children took their
places at the lower end of the branch, and others, stationed above,
began to jump rhythmically so that the limb swayed with increasing
violence. As it sprang up and down, those below needed all their
strength to hold on, and finally one or more would let go and disappear
with great splashings in the pool. Then they took their places in the
line above, trying to dislodge the others.

It was a charming scene: the great tree crowded with children whose
brown bodies appeared and disappeared among the foliage, the broad pool
mottled with light and shade and dotted with heads and vanishing legs
and arms, with half a dozen fat babies playing in the sunny shallows--it
was one of those simple, beautiful pictures which linger in the memory.
We were reluctant to leave, and it was almost dark when we came out
again on the road.

We walked on until it was quite dark and the tracks of the stars were
shining across the lagoon; and there being no settlement within view we
decided to spend the night in the open. After a supper of biscuit and
chocolate and bananas, when we had stretched out with our haversacks
under our heads, I told C. B. of a question which had come into mind
that afternoon. Was the native up-bringing, freed from all schooling and
restraint, possible only for these brown children of the islands, bred
in surroundings where almost no struggle is needed to survive? Would a
white child, reared under the same conditions, develop the same
easy-going temperament, or would the restless and aggressive spirit of
our race triumph over environment? How many of the qualities which make
us the world's masters for the time being, are inherent in the spark of
life handed down from one generation to another? How many are merely the
result of being reared in an environment of increasing materialism,
competition for food, mechanical achievement, and the like?

'That recalls an experiment I used to dream of making,' he said. 'My
idea was to seek out an uninhabited island in this part of the world, a
small, fertile place where living would be easy. I would need a dozen
children for my experiment--baby boys and girls young enough to know no
word of speech. I would want white children, brown children, and
Chinese--young civilization, no civilization, and the oldest
civilization of them all. I would put up a comfortable shelter for them,
stocked with what is necessary, and a place for myself at the other end
of the island. In the beginning my children would need a certain amount
of attention, of course, and as they grew up I would teach them the
rudiments of fishing, and how to gather yams, breadfruit, plantains, and
the like. Beyond that I would teach them nothing, and in all my
intercourse with them I would be careful never to use my voice. You see
what I am driving at--to let them bring themselves up in a state of
nature, without handicaps other than those of race and birth.'

'Did you ever seriously think of making this experiment?' I asked.

'I said I used to dream of it. But what an enormously interesting one it
would be! What, for example, might one expect my isolated children to
develop in the way of speech? And in a primitive environment, with
conditions equal for all of them, which race would excel?'

'The Chinese,' said a voice, so close at hand that we both jumped up and
looked around. Leaning against a tree behind us stood a white man--we
made him out to be white a moment later when he invited us to his house.

'I'm sorry,' he said; 'I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but you took it into
your heads to camp right at my doorstep, so I couldn't avoid hearing
what you were saying. I was dozing here in my chair when you came, and
your voices wakened me.'

It was then our turn to make apologies. His house was so well screened
by shrubbery that we had lain down within half a dozen yards without
having seen it.

'I was much interested,' he went on, 'in what you were just discussing,
but it would interest me still more'--turning to C. B.--'to drop in on
you during the early days of your experiment while you were playing
nursemaid to a dozen American, Polynesian, and Chinese babies. As I
said, I think the Chinese would come out on top, but don't let me get
started on Chinese Civilization. I'm an enthusiast on that subject, and
enthusiasts are always bores. Come out on the veranda--it's cooler
there, and we'll talk of something else.'

We could see, even by starlight, what a delightful spot he had chosen
for a dwelling-place. He himself had built the house. It stood on piles
at the edge of the lagoon, and the veranda, shaded by overhanging trees,
extended over the water with steps leading down to a small boat-landing.
The view was across a wide bay to the wooded hills beyond, and on the
land side, from the door which gave on the road, you looked up a valley
toward the mountains of the interior. Our host lit a lamp and set it on
a table adzed out by hand from a slab of native rosewood. There we saw
journals of learned societies side by side with reviews in English,
German, and French, and shelves stocked with alluring rows of books. The
walls were hung with curious ornaments: pieces of Chinese embroidery,
Malay knives and sarongs, necklaces and brass-wire anklets from
Portuguese East Africa, and Bolivian capes of dyed Vicua wool--the
fruit of wanderings in strange lands.

While we were talking of the islands and their people, I asked our host
what had brought him here in the first place. This was a subject
endlessly interesting to us, in connection with the white men we met in
Polynesia. Some of them had curious tales to tell of the reasons for
their coming, and this Englishman's struck me as being the most curious
of any we had heard thus far. He had been living in China, and one
evening, in Hongkong, he met a traveler who had just come from this
island.

'That was the first time I had heard of the place,' he said. 'This man
told me something of the native language, how beautiful it is, and how
rich in many respects. I asked him for specimens of it, and among others
he gave me the following. They may seem sheer gibberish to you, but they
haunted me like the thought of buried treasure:

    _Aaoaraa-moa:_ the hour of the crowing of the cock.
    _Hui hui mania:_ a great calm without wind.
    _Ahiahirumaruma:_ cloudy evening.
    _Moana farr:_ the unfathomable sea.

You will admit, I think, the beauty of the meanings, but you may think
I'm a little mad when I tell you that these words, and some others like
them, decided me to leave China for Polynesia. I wanted to know all
there is to be known of this language, and to make the story short, I've
been studying it on the spot ever since. I can't tell you what an
absorbing task it has been! For it is treasure of the richest sort,
buried treasure, too, a great deal of it. In these days the natives are
forgetting the stately speech of their forefathers, coining all sorts of
hybrid words out of English and French, and Chinese, which have nothing
to commend them but the fact that they're useful.'

Then, opening his notebooks, the result of twelve years of research, he
brought us under the spell of his own enthusiasm for this Polynesian
dialect. Many of the words were like little poems, telling of the peace
of starlit nights, of grateful noonday shade, of the sea in all its
moods, of the shadows of clouds on grassy uplands. But vastly more
interesting to me than the bright, colored words, was the man, who for
twelve solitary years had been so happily playing with them, like a
child with shells on a deserted beach. He must have been fifty or
thereabouts, an age when most men, without the ties of family, feel
loneliness creeping upon them; but he seemed not to feel it, and happily
unconscious of the need of interests other than those he had in the
islands, their people, and their strange and beautiful speech. And it
was so unselfish and glowing an interest that one could not doubt its
genuineness or its absorption for him. Nevertheless, remembering the
other Englishman we had met a few days earlier, C. B. was moved to ask
whether he thought the islands suitable places for white men to live in.

'Suitable!' he said. 'I should think they are! But wait--I must qualify
that, of course. Most men have gifts which could find no outlet here,
and to me the greatest unfaithfulness is unfaithfulness to one's self.
In each of us there is, perhaps, the gleam of an ability, a power, a
gift, to do something a little better than some one else has done or
could do it; or it may be only the faculty for feeling some emotion a
little more keenly than another may feel it. I have found among these
islands the best uses for my own small talents, and it seems to me that
I haven't the right to consider them as nothing. As for you, for
another, who can say? There is an old island saying: _O te puo te muhu
na to taata ana'iho o te it i te faaroo_, which means, "The sea-shell
murmurs for him alone who knows how to listen." If you know or can
learn, how to listen, I think you might be very happy here. If you
can't--well, the world is wide----'

He lit his pipe, and smoked in silence for a moment. Then he said, 'By
Jove! I'd almost forgotten! Are either of you sleepy? Because if you're
not, you must come with me to the next village. It's only a mile down
the road, and they are having an all-night _himin_ there--a sort of a
song service, you know. An old chap in the village, named Pohu, has
passed the word around that he's going to die at midnight; so all of his
friends and relatives are to be on hand to sing him to glory. I think
you might be interested.'

We said that we should be greatly interested. 'But how does he know that
he is going to die to-night?' I asked. 'It seems to me that he is rather
confident about the hour.'

'He is,' our host replied--'too confident, to my way of thinking. If it
was any one but Pohu I wouldn't say so, for it is really surprising how
often some of these people forecast the time of their death. They seem
to have a presentiment, a "hunch"--whatever you like to call it. But
Pohu--I'm not so sure of him. He predicted his death about a year ago,
and all of his friends gathered to feast and sing at his passing. But he
failed to keep his promise. It was very odd. No one would have anything
to do with him for days afterward. If he doesn't die this time he will
have lost caste completely.'

The village being in the direction of our journey, C. B. and I took our
haversacks with us, intending to start from there the following morning.
It was about ten o'clock when we left the Englishman's house--a very
calm night, so that we heard the singing from a long distance. We were
continually pulling ahead of our host in our eagerness to arrive. Here
was something new in our experience. Never before had we seen a man
presiding at his own funeral, listening to the music, and then
obligingly dying as the pall-bearers came to carry him away.

In nearly all Polynesian villages there is what is called a _himin_
house where public gatherings are held--a sort of town-hall used for
many community purposes. In this village it was a long building with a
thatched roof and walls of plaited bamboo. It was lighted with kerosene
lamps, and near the building, under a grove of mango trees, were several
tables loaded with food, and with lamps set here and there along them.
When we arrived, people were passing back and forth from the _himin_
house to the refreshment tables, taking what they liked to eat and then
returning to sing.

The house was well filled; the men, women, and children sitting on the
floor in rows, facing one end of the room. At that end, on a small
raised platform, sat the dying man, in an old-fashioned red-plush
rocking-chair, with a pillow under his huge bare feet, and another
behind his head. He was dressed in a coat of white drill and a
waist-cloth reaching to his knees. Children were sent to a neighboring
house for chairs for us, and as there was only one place to put them,
close to the platform, we sat half-facing the prospective deceased and
half-facing the mourners.

Some of the children who had been swimming with us in the river that
afternoon were present with their parents. Among them was the little
girl whom C. B. had given a ride on his back. She came up very shyly and
gave him a flower, and ran back to her mother. Then another little girl
gave me one, whereupon the audience broke out into half-suppressed
laughter. It didn't seem much like a funeral. I was glad of a legitimate
opportunity to smile, for I had been looking at Pohu who rolled his eyes
about in such a mournful way, and seemed so fully aware of his
responsibilities as a prospective corpse, that it was difficult to
remain grave. He was enjoying himself, there wasn't a doubt of it. He
reminded me of the type of men to be found everywhere, among primitive
as well as civilized people, who will take any chance, however desperate
or absurd, suffer any humiliation, if only they may be lifted for a
moment into the public gaze.

But supposing he was to die as he had promised? This thought must have
been in every one's mind, and as the evening wore on the interest became
more tense, the singing more earnest. Deep silence followed the
intervals between the songs, and after eleven o'clock there were no more
excursions to the refreshment tables. I would have given a good deal to
have known what they were all thinking. Evidently they were anxious, but
whether for fear he would die or fear that he would not it was
impossible to know.

Pohu lay back in his chair, his eyes closed, his large hands folded. He
was a huge man, with fat jowls and a big stomach. He could not see the
clock, but he must have heard it ticking during the silences. It was one
of those cheap American clocks with the word 'Regulator' printed on the
glass door. All at once, during a hush following a song, Pohu's lips
moved, and his thin, squeaky voice filled the room: 'Eaha te
hora?'--what time is it?--he asked. Some one told him that it was a
quarter to twelve. He didn't open his eyes, but I could see his chest
rising and falling, and every little while he raised a fat forefinger
and let it drop listlessly again. I watched that finger, fascinated, as
the minute-hand crept on to join the hour-hand. It seemed an index of
his failing vitality. At last it remained motionless. Pohu was no longer
breathing, it seemed to me, and after an interval of deep silence on the
part of the mourners, one of them--his sister--rose and walked to his
side, looking down at him intently. Then she sank to the floor, with her
head in her arms, and began rocking back and forth, moaning in the most
heart-rending way. Her other sister and Pohu's wife took up the lament,
and yet other women. In the midst of it a song was started, and every
one who was not keening, joined in. The building rocked with that weird
chorus which must have been heard by Charon himself, awaiting the
on-coming soul at his dark ferry on the Styx. But _was_ it an on-coming
soul? The Englishman thought so, for he gripped my arm, and in order to
make himself heard, almost shouted in my ear, 'I believe he's done it
this time!' C. B. was sitting on the very edge of his chair, gripping
the sides of it as though he were afraid of falling off. I looked at the
clock. It was seven minutes past twelve. And so ended our first day as
prospective homesteaders in the South Seas.

But it was not the end of Pohu. He came to life again, shortly after the
time he had set for dying. The mourners were in the midst of the
triumphant death-song when he opened his eyes, sat up in his chair, and
looked around with a sheepish smile. The singing and keening stopped
immediately, of course, and Pohu, after a moment of hesitation, had to
acknowledge that he was again mistaken about the hour of his demise.

C. B., the Englishman, and I were the only ones who found either relief
or amusement in this anticlimax. The others were seriously angry, and
listening to their denunciations of Pohu, I realized what primitive folk
the Polynesians still are for all their century and a half of contact
with western civilization. His relatives gathered around him, giving him
a tongue-lashing that he will remember, very likely, until the time
comes for him to die in earnest. One of his sisters, a woman of thirty,
gave him a slap on the face that nearly bowled him out of his chair.
Then the audience left him there, alone, and in no doubt that he had
sailed far into the north of village opinion. We learned afterward that
he was ostracized for weeks, beside losing his position as elder in the
village church.

As for C. B. and I, 'settling down' became a permanent occupation with
us, and I can't imagine a pleasanter one for men of itinerant habits. We
made the circuit of this island, and later, of many others, in the
search for an ideal home-site. We found one every quarter of an hour.
There were so many that it was impossible to make a choice. Therefore,
we wandered on, and in the midst of a multitude of small, delightful
adventures by the way, we didn't much care whether we ever made it or
not.




CHAPTER XIII. TAHITI'S COCONUT-RADIO SERVICE


Not many devotees of the radio, however well informed they may be, know,
I imagine, that the inhabitants of the island of Tahiti have had, for
centuries, a remarkable wireless service known as The Coconut Radio.
There is not a village on the island which does not have both receiving
and sending stations, and so efficient is the service that the events of
one village are often known in some other village thirty or forty miles
away, before they have actually taken place.

This promptness in island news-spreading is due to the fact that all
stations on the coconut-radio circuit are in charge of a group of
extraordinary old native ladies who serve without a thought of reward,
purely for love of the work itself. They have plenty of time to give to
it, for most of them have long since raised their families, so that
their household duties--never irksome even at their heaviest in the
South Seas--have been reduced to next to nothing. To see one of them
sitting of an afternoon in the doorway of her little thatched hut, you
would never suspect the importance of the part she plays in island life.
Her eyes are half closed, her hands folded in her lap, and her face, in
repose, usually wears an expression of settled melancholy, as though,
like Mrs. Gummidge, she were always thinking of 'the old 'un.' She seems
neither to see nor to hear anything that is taking place in her
immediate vicinity, to say nothing of in the village at large, but this
is mere seeming. Nothing escapes her, and you yourself will not escape
if you chance to be passing her dwelling. She has seen you from a
distance, and as you approach she raises her head and hails you with a
shrill '_Ia ora na!_' (Health to you!)

Now you are caught, and you may as well stop and deliver.

'_Eiha te parau api?_' (What's the news?) she asks eagerly, and her
little black eyes bore into you like gimlets. On an island so remote
from the world as Tahiti, everything that happens is news, even though
it is nothing more than a chicken crossing the road, so it is useless to
say that you have no news. She knows better, and if you should go on
without unburdening yourself, she will invent something after you have
gone, and broadcast it to all stations on her side of the island, giving
your name for authority.

Such an old woman is known in the island tongue as a _Vahin faatia
parau-api_ (a news-spreader), and a particularly gifted one is called a
_Vahin faatia parau-api-rahi_ (a powerful news-spreader). It seems to
me that they are all of this latter sort--at any rate, all those were
with whom I have had experience. It is amazing how, without budging from
their door-steps, they manage to disseminate immediately, to long
distances, the news they have heard, or thought they have heard, or
wished they had heard.

I remember once riding on a bicycle through a country district about
thirty miles from the town of Papeete. I was passing a little thatched
hut known as one of the most powerful sending-stations on the
coconut-radio circuit, when I heard an excited hail: '_Haere mai ta
maa!_' (Come and eat!) Now this is sometimes a mere perfunctory
greeting, but sometimes it is a genuine invitation, especially when
given around mealtime. I have noticed, however, that the old lady
wireless operators never mean it to be taken as an invitation. One
rarely sees them at a meal of any sort, and I believe that they live
almost entirely on gossip.

I stopped and replied, in the expected manner, that I was not hungry.

'Where are you going?' she then asked. I told her that I was on my way
to the district of Tautira, to visit a friend, whom I named. When she
had wormed out of me every little detail about my proposed visit: how
long I expected to stay, what I meant to do afterward, what I had in the
parcel fastened on the back of my bicycle, etc., she gave me the news of
all the villages within fifteen miles. Then she was silent for a moment.
I was trying to think of some excuse for getting away, when she said,
'Don't you think it's about time you were getting married?'

'Married!' I said. 'Why?'

'Every man ought to get married some day,' she replied, 'and if you
don't soon, very likely you never will. Now there's Nuna-Vahin in
Tautira--she has two fine daughters, and either of them would make you a
good wife. They are neat and tidy, and both of them speak a little
English. The older one is a wonderful cook, too, and she would soon
learn to cook American fashion. You'd better go and see Nuna while you
are in Tautira.'

I thanked her for the advice and went on my way. I had fifteen miles
farther to go, and rode along in leisurely fashion, enjoying to the full
the drowsy silence of the afternoon. There was not a breath of wind, and
the lagoon reflected perfectly the shapes of every cloud, the
overhanging palms, and the forms of sea-birds skimming over the still
water. No one but myself was abroad at that hour. I could almost swear
that no one passed me on the road, but when I reached my friend's house
at Tautira--although I had not informed him of my coming, he was
expecting me, the table was laid for two, and supper was all ready.

'How did you know I was coming?' I asked.

'By coconut radio, of course,' he said. 'The message came through nearly
an hour ago. But what's this I hear about your going to marry one of
Nuna-Vahin's daughters?'

Then he gave me all the details. Not only was I going to marry one of
Nuna's daughters, but I had already asked for the older one. The
proposal had been accepted, and the purpose of this present visit was to
complete the arrangements.

My knowledge of Tahitian is scant, and I had some difficulty in
explaining matters to Nuna-Vahin and her chosen daughter. On this
occasion I was not able to decide whether they regarded with favor or
disfavor, the efficacy of the coconut-radio service.

Another remarkable instance of the speed with which it works happened
several years ago. A coconut radio, of course, can't operate where there
are no coconut trees, and so its activities are confined to the island
itself. News from the outside world comes through an ordinary wireless
station at Point Venus, where the lighthouse is, and where Captain Cook,
in 1769, observed the transit of Venus across the sun's disc at the time
when he named this group of mountain peaks thrust up from the sea, 'The
Society Islands.'

One day a message came through the Point Venus station to the effect
that there had been an earthquake on the coast of Chile, some four
thousand miles distant, and that the inhabitants of the islands in the
eastern Pacific might expect a small tidal wave as the result of this
submarine disturbance.

This bit of slightly disquieting news lost nothing in its transmission
from station to station on the coconut-radio circuit. At Faaa, a
district just beyond the town of Papeete, the tidal wave was reported to
be thirty feet high, and advancing across the Pacific at a speed of one
hundred miles per hour. Shortly afterward when the news had reached
Taravao--a settlement some thirty-five miles farther on--the tidal wave
was said to be sixty feet high and traveling at five hundred miles per
hour.

The old lady operators stuck to their posts until they had received,
embellished, and passed on the news. Then, seizing their coconut-shell
baskets of smoking materials, they tucked up the skirts of their
mother-hubbards and ran to the mountains, and you wouldn't have believed
that such old women could have shown such speed and agility. They
scrambled through all but impenetrable thickets, and shinned up all but
unscalable cliffs. They were over the hills and far away almost as soon
as their own messages; and they were not alone in this retreat. Most of
the inhabitants followed them: fathers carrying pigs, chickens, taro,
tinned beef, and the like; mothers carrying babies, dish-pans and
bundles of clothing, children with bedding-rolls, mats, baskets of
oranges, bananas and mangoes; Chinese store-keepers bent double under
enormous burdens--away they all went, and most of them kept going until
they had reached the summits of the highest hills. Within an hour after
the report had first reached the island, the lowlands were as empty of
life as a seaside resort in the winter time. In the village where I was
then living I met but one other resident, an American who had come to
Tahiti to escape the effects of prohibition at home. He was moving
unsteadily along the deserted street, a bottle in either hand, and his
glazed eyes fixed upon some indefinite point in space.

'Hello!' I said; 'aren't you afraid of being drowned?'

He paused and leaned over backward in order to get me in truer
perspective.

'Drowned?' he said. 'Naw! I ain't afraid o' nothin'! Let 'er come! Wha's
differnce? But say! I wish thish ti'al wave was whiskey. Tha'd be a good
way to die, huh?'

He cackled asthmatically and nearly fell over in his merriment. Then he
waved a bottle at me.

'You tell 'em I said let 'er come! I'm orready, jus' soon's I finish
thish licker.'

'She' didn't come, however--at least she didn't come to Tahiti, and
during the following week the inhabitants trickled back to the lowlands.
Within a few days all the old ladies were again at their stations, and
working harder than ever to make up for lost time. They were bursting
with news of what had happened--so they said--during the sojourn in the
mountains. Some of the malicious ones spread abroad the most scandalous
reports of goings-on up there, which caused more mischief than a tidal
wave could have effected, no matter how high it might have been.

There is a certain amount of scandalous news-spreading by coconut radio,
and I sometimes think this has its good results. Consider for a moment
the matter of family skeletons. With us, in America, and the same is
true in European countries, these skeletons are hidden in the darkest
and most secret of family closets, and people, their lives long, are
tortured by the apprehension that some outsider may catch a glimpse of
them. At Tahiti, on the other hand, every one knows every one else, and
thanks to the coconut radio, everything about every one else. Family
skeletons are made to frisk and caper like jumping-jacks, in the clear
light of day, and the result is that most of them are seen to be
mirth-provoking rather than shocking. I think it would be a good plan if
all family skeletons were to be thus exhibited. It might be a little
humiliating at first, to some of the families concerned, but what a
relief the realization would be to them afterward, that there was now
nothing more to conceal, and to have the closets aired and lightened
with windows, and used for more healthy purposes.

It is pleasant to live in a place where the inhabitants laugh, not only
at, but with each other. One finds glum individuals here and there, but
as a race they have been blessed with generous gifts of gayety and
light-heartedness. Do you remember William Blake's 'Laughing Song'?

    When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
    And the dimpled stream goes laughing by;
    When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
    And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

    When the painted birds laugh in the shade
    Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread,
    Come live and be merry and join with me
    To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha ha he!'

This song might almost be the Tahitian national anthem. The valleys ring
with the chorus of 'Ha ha he,' and 'Ha ha ho,' and 'He he, ho ho, ha ha
ha,' and in the younger folk this laughter gushes forth, pure and limpid
as spring-water, upon the slightest provocation. One is often puzzled at
hearing natives laughing immoderately about something which would give a
white man cause for only a faint smile; but most of us northerners, with
our impaired digestions, our regrets for yesterday and our anxieties for
to-morrow, have long since forgotten how to laugh.

Of course, not even the younger sort of Tahitians laugh perpetually. If
they did, I should leave by the next steamer, for endless mirth would be
no more endurable than endless gloom. But in this easy-going island
world, where nothing moves with speed except the news over the coconut
radio, both the days and the nights seem unusually long; there is ample
leisure for everything: for laughter, for occasional outbursts of
passionate weeping, for family quarrels and for family reconciliations,
for going to church and for going fishing. There is a time for sitting
down--but here is a pleasant feature of island life: there is never any
particular time set for getting up again.

During my sojourn here, I have seen the bottoms of more feet than I have
seen in all my life before: slippered feet, bare feet; toes up, heels
up; feet dangling over the ends of sofas and veranda railings, resting
on the gunwales of canoes, perched on the backs of chairs; large feet,
small feet, most of them brown and all of them in attitudes of repose.
One hundred and twenty-nine years have passed since white men first
seriously began to teach the islanders habits of regular, sustained,
want-increasing and want-satisfying industry, but they have not profited
greatly by the instruction. To be sure, one occasionally hears in their
churches the old missionary hymn, 'Work for the Night is Coming,' but
not even the coconut-radio operators could ferret out news of a man or
woman of pure Polynesian blood who really believes in the doctrine.

For my own part, I am glad that this is so; and sometimes in America,
when I am weary of rushing about, and of seeing others both working and
playing with such frantic haste--hurrying in and out of shops, offices,
trains, museums, hospitals, cemeteries, theaters, parks, churches,
clubs, libraries, and the like, it has been refreshing to think of
Tahiti, and to speculate as to what the natives were not doing at that
particular hour. I do not mean to imply that they never work. On the
contrary, when there is occasion for it they will toil as hard as any
white man. But they have also practiced for centuries the art of being
idle, and in knowledge of it they are far in advance of northern
peoples.

A good deal of wisdom is to be found, I believe, at the bottom of such
practice; for when all is said and done, what does a great deal of the
world's feverish industry amount to? Stevenson, in his 'Apology for
Idlers,' said of Sainte-Beuve, that 'as he grew older, he came to regard
all experience as a single great book in which to study for a few years
ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in
Chapter XX, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX,
which is hearing the band play in the gardens.' There is an excellent
footnote to Chapter XXXIX, which is sitting under a pandanus tree,
watching the cloud shadows on the lagoon. Tahitians have it by heart,
and to see them conning it over you might think them the laziest people
in the world. You and I are such novices in the art of being idle that
we regard sitting under a pandanus tree merely as sitting under a
pandanus tree. For Tahitians it is much more than that, and their
faculties, if they could be shown objectively, would be seen, polished
and shining with the brightness of well-used tools.

Not that they spend their hours of leisure in resolving abstruse
intellectual or moral problems. On the contrary they have little faculty
for abstract thought. But their physical senses, particularly those of
sight and hearing, are always in use, and they are amazingly keen. This
explains in part, I suppose, some of the mysteries of the coconut radio.

Only the other day I made an excursion far up a valley with a group of
native children, to gather oranges. We were in the midst of this
pleasant occupation; the children were in the trees throwing down the
fruit to me, when one of them shouted, '_Pereoo-uira!_' (Motor car!) and
a little girl who was putting the oranges into baskets, said to me,
'You'd better go back to your house now.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Your friend Pupur has come to see you.' 'Pupur' is the common name
for any light-complexioned man.

'How do you know he has come?'

'That was his car,' she replied. 'I know it by the sound of the engine.'

We were a long way from the road, well beyond the range, I would have
thought, of hearing any car that might be passing. Certainly I had heard
nothing. But the children had, and when I returned to my house, there
was my friend awaiting me. He drives a Ford, and there are many of them
on the island. The sound of the motor is like that of all other Fords,
it seems to me, but this little girl had recognized it at once as
belonging to my friend. She will make an excellent coconut-radio
operator fifty years from now.

For age and the deep knowledge of humankind which is the fruit of years
of experience, are necessary, of course, to a really successful
operator. All the old ladies I have been speaking of have this
knowledge. The innumerable hours of sitting under pandanus trees have
not been wasted. They have been at their studies this long while, and as
they have no books except the Bible, they spend their ample leisure in
studying at first hand and with deep interest, the great book of human
nature. By the time they become self-appointed coconut-radio operators,
not only do they know everything there is to be known about all the
inhabitants of the island, but they are excellent psychologists as well,
able to forecast how any individual will act under any imaginable
conditions. To them, the back of a chance passer-by is full of meaning;
and so sharp-witted are they that they note at once any deviation from
the usual, in the carriage of the head, or the tone of the voice. They
know at once what this means, and often it affords them matter for news
which will keep all stations on their side of the island busy for an
hour or more. Their chief defect, as I have implied, is their
excitability. In receiving messages they are as impartial as the Fates:
good news or bad news, it is all one to them; but they have nothing like
the placidity of the three grim sisters. The moment they turn from
receiving to broadcasting, they become very human; and if it is good
news, they pass it on infinitely better, and if bad news, immeasurably
worse than they received it.

I have often been surprised at the speed with which European or American
songs are disseminated about the island. I am not sure that the coconut
radio is responsible for this, but I should think it more than likely.
Some time ago I made a brief sojourn in America at the time when the
popular song,

    _Yes, sir, she's my baby!_
    _No, sir, I don't mean maybe!_

had just been published. Upon returning to Tahiti, a few weeks later, I
found 'Yes, Sir, She's my Baby,' there before me. It was being sung all
round the island--not the English version, of course, but a Tahitian
one. Girls played it on their accordions, boys on their mouth-organs;
mothers sang it to their children, and fishermen sang it of an evening
as they paddled in their canoes along the reef.

I suppose this is merely another piece of evidence which shows how small
the world is becoming in these radio-active days. But as I have said,
Tahiti has been coconut-radio-active for centuries. Whoever doubts this
has only to come here for a brief visit. Within a quarter of an hour,
the news of his arrival will be known to every one in the port and the
adjacent villages. Within twenty minutes, the old lady operator at
Tehaupoo, the farthest settlement of all from Papeete, will be saying to
some crony of hers: 'I hear there's a new _Popaa-Marit_ (American) just
arrived by the steamer. They say----' and then she will give a minute
description of the new arrival, a complete catalogue of his physical
peculiarities and a great deal of his family history, and if he could be
listening, he would learn a great many things about himself of which he
was ignorant before.




CHAPTER XIV. PUBLIC BENCHES AND PUBLIC BENCHING


Being, by profession and inclination, a looker-on at life, I have spent
a great deal of time in places of public resort, such as hotels, parks,
ferry boats, and the waiting-rooms of railway stations. The hours thus
passed, added together, would make what a busy man would doubtless call
an appalling, and a man of my own profession, a respectable, total. As a
result of them I think I may lay claim to being, in a small way, an
authority on the matter of public benches, and it is my belief that
there are not nearly enough of them in America. There is no lack of
indoor seating accommodation; I am speaking here only of outdoor
benches, quite as essential to public convenience, and much more
essential to the public health. The East and Far West are fairly well
although by no means adequately supplied; of the South I am not
qualified to speak: but visit the Middle West, and if in any town or
city in the vast stretch of country extending from, but not including,
Chicago to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, you find so many as one
hundred benches where a looker-on at life may pleasantly and variously
engage in his calling, I would thank you for the name of the place. My
own experience has been less fortunate. I have not, of course, visited
every part of this territory, but if I may judge by many a footsore,
fruitless quest, largely in the Mississippi Valley, then I may say that
the majority of American municipalities have made most grudging
provision for the comfort and convenience of the members of my useful
profession.

'Useful?' you may say, regarding me with a faint, skeptical smile. 'Just
what do you mean by "useful"?'

Well, what kind of a city is that where every one is feverishly active?
Surely there must be idle men, if only for the benefit of the workers,
for without contrast how may these latter know how busy they are?
Lookers-on afford such contrast, and to this extent, at least, may be
said to be employed in the public service.

The reason for our lack of benches is, doubtless, the dearth of public
squares where benches may be put. Have you ever compared a map of a
North American with one of a South American or Continental city? If so,
you must have noted at once, in the former, the absence of those little
green dots--so generously sprinkled over either of the latter--which
mean pleasant oases in the desert of workaday life: grass plots,
fountains, trees, and benches for tired pedestrians, nursemaids, and
lookers-on at life. It is not strange that rubber heels should have been
an American invention; that you will find a shoe-repairing shop in every
block--often two or three in the same block--throughout American cities;
that flat feet is so common an American malady. These facts are easily
explained: city dwellers in the United States have very few places where
they may sit down, out of doors, and once they have left their homes,
offices, shops, or factories, they must remain on their feet, standing
or walking until they enter them again. To be sure, most cities of any
size have a park, sometimes two, but these are usually so far on the
outskirts as to be available only for holiday or Sunday use.

I am convinced, too, that our lack of public benches explains the great
popularity of the motion-picture theater. Some critics of our national
life believe, or profess to believe, that we are all motion-picture mad.
It is only in America, they say, that one sees such crowds of people,
particularly of a morning, filing in and out of the picture theaters.
That is true, but their deduction, that we are hopeless 'movie' addicts,
is wrong. These morning crowds, and a large part of the afternoon ones,
are composed of transients in the city. Their business done, they walk
the streets until they are worn out, and then in sheer desperation,
having no other choice, they enter either a motion-picture theater or a
soft-drink emporium. Think of the crowds of people one sees at soda
fountains, filling their stomachs at all hours of the day with horrible
concoctions of ice cream and thick chocolate syrup. Not only the
women--the men too. Do you suppose they do it willingly? You could never
convince me of this. No, I believe that they visit the soda fountains
for the same reason that they visit the picture shows--because they may
sit down there and rest for a few minutes. The fact that they actually
eat the messes put before them only proves that they are so physically
exhausted as to be ignorant of what they are doing. I wish this matter
might be put to the test. I wish that we Americans, so fond of 'drives,'
would make a nation-wide drive for public squares and benches. If we
did, I venture to predict that the movement would be opposed from the
outset--ruthlessly and bitterly opposed--by the near and remote
connections of the shoe and rubber-heel industries, the near and remote
connections of the motion-picture industry, the hosiery manufacturers,
all the chain drugstores, and the chiropodists. You could count--to a
man, of course--on the support of the members of my profession, but you
are right in thinking that it would be of small value against such
formidable opposition. We are notoriously unskilled in matters requiring
action and organization, and I confess that what we mean by 'support' is
merely looking on with approval while some one else does the work.

But once he is comfortably seated, a looker-on is not really an indolent
man at all. I will tell you how you may distinguish one of them from a
mere sitter-on-a-bench: by the alert, intelligent scrutiny he gives you
as you pass his vantage point. Your eyes meet for only the fraction of a
second, but that is long enough for you to have gained a distinct
impression of this seeming idler. You move briskly on, resisting a
desire to turn for a backward glance, and as long as an hour later,
perhaps two or three hours later, you say to yourself, 'Now what was it
about that man----?' It was this--his undoubted interest in you as
revealed by that fleeting glance. His was not the casual, incurious,
rather hostile regard to which you are accustomed from strangers. A
looker-on is incurious about nothing and only nothing, and he has
developed the faculty of bringing his attention and interest to focus
instantly upon whomever or whatever meets his eye.

He is over-scrupulous, perhaps, about striking up chance
acquaintanceships, and never does so of his own initiative. But if,
instead of passing by, you had sat down on the bench he was occupying
and had spoken to him, he would have responded at once. You comment upon
the weather, it may be, but that subject doesn't hold you for long. Soon
you are following one of a thousand by-paths leading away from it--so
far and pleasantly away that when you next hear the clock at the city
hall striking the hour, you realize with a shock that it is striking
four instead of two as it should have done.

'Great Scott! Is it as late as that? I must be getting on!' you say. Or
did you say it? If so, then I am afraid that you would never make a
really successful looker-on.

Only a distinguished member of the profession could have held you thus
for three hours, forgetting time and place and urgent matters of
business. Such men understand to a nicety the laws of give and take so
essential to all good talk, but their preference is for taking rather
than giving. They are the best listeners in the world, and their
interest, as I have said, is genuine and of the purest kind. I often
suspect that the ranks of the lookers-on, particularly in the higher
grades, are recruited from men of wide social experience who have
attended innumerable gatherings in polite society where people's
interest in one another is so often merely simulated. They have known
the feeling of desolation which is the result of such experience, and so
they have taken to public-benching, realizing only by degrees what a
splendid escape it offered them.

If its pleasures and advantages and the innumerable small adventures it
provides by the way were more widely known, I believe there would be a
large increase in membership in our profession. These adventures are as
various as they are numerous; there seems to be no end to them. That is
why public benchers are such contented men. They are collectors of a
sort, and collectors of whatever sort are fortunate. Consider for a
moment the collector of things--why is he never bored with life? Because
he has the choice of two infallible methods of escape from boredom--in
the contemplative reassortment of acquired treasures, or the eager
pursuit of the yet-to-be-possessed. It matters little what the
particular bent may be, or what the value, in a worldly sense, of the
collectanea. Once mounted, the rangiest Rosinante among collectors'
hobbies will throw up its head with a whinny of joy and gallop off in
pursuit of anything from a butterfly to a Renaissance bottle-stopper,
carrying its master in a flash of time across a seemingly interminable
stretch of arid hours or days, where the erstwhile scoffers at this
sorry-looking nag are plodding wearily along on foot.

But the moment one possesses them, things have, of course, the
limitations and the disadvantages of things. They may be lost, burnt,
stolen, tarnished by time, and they are so many drags upon freedom of
movement. Therefore it would seem wiser to collect something less
tangible, as we public benchers do. We accumulate nothing but experience
and fragments of experience. We have enormous collections, but in the
spacious attic where old memories are stored there is ample room for
everything, whether rubbish or golden treasure; and the best of it is
that one carries it all about so easily. In comparison with one of us,
the collector of postage stamps is weighted down with chains, old ships'
anchors, and iron balls. There is, however, this disadvantage to our
particular pursuit: the lack of guidance, of knowledge how to go about
it. I wish there were some good treatise on the art of collecting
experience, with voluminous notes and appendices compiled from the views
of the masters on the subject. But I see at once that such a work would
be beyond the powers of the most patient, gifted, and healthy of
mortals. It would exceed in scope the Encyclopdia Britannica, and were
it twice its bulk in printed words, the net result would be no more than
the illuminated initial letter of the first word on the subject. Yes, it
is plain that such a task would be impossible of achievement. All the
books ever written are but footnotes of varying significance to this
great work which will never be written.

Lookers-on do not, of course, go forth to collect experience in the
spirit of the collector of things. They merely take what comes by
chance. As an illustration of the method, or rather, the lack of method,
allow me to exhibit a small item from my own collection, and to tell how
I came by it. I select this merely because it is a recent addition,
picked up by chance in an American town a little to the west of the
Middle West.

It was more than a town, in fact. It was fast becoming a city, with a
population considerably beyond the one hundred thousand mark. I spent a
week there, and each day set out in a new direction in search of some
place in the heart of the city where I might sit down out of doors. I
found nothing but street after street after street of business
blocks--department stores, five-and-ten-cent stores, garages,
automobile-salesrooms, quick-lunch rooms, and picture theaters. Tired
with so much walking I was about to enter a soft-drink establishment
when I discovered, in one of the busiest streets, a bench undoubtedly
intended for public use, but so well hidden that it had escaped my
notice although I had passed that way before. Owing to a sharp diagonal
twist in the street, there was a small, V-shaped niche between two tall
buildings. In this was an ornamental, semi-circular stone seat large
enough to accommodate three persons.

It was an ideal vantage point. The seat was at the small end of the V,
and there, concealed from view, you could watch passers-by crossing the
open end. You had but a brief glimpse of them as they passed, but the
briefness was compensated for by the fact that they did not know they
were being observed. Directly opposite, across the street, was a large
department store, and adjoining it an hotel with the sign, 'The
Kirkland,' over the entryway. In the other direction you could see as
far as the corner where a traffic policeman was standing by his GO-STOP
signal.

I had this bench to myself for an afternoon, but the following morning I
found an elderly man seated there--a tall, thin, hale-looking man with a
white moustache and beard, shrewd, kindly blue eyes, and sunburned hands
and face. I decided that he was a stranger in the city like myself.
Indeed, he appeared to be a stranger in the century, too, not so much
because of his age--although he was evidently in his late seventies--as
by reason of the old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat he held on his knees,
the peculiar cut of his blue broadcloth coat, his elastic-sided,
square-toed shoes. I had not seen shoes of that particular style and
shape since childhood, and his cravat was of a kind my own
great-grandfather used to wear, almost never met with in these days.

I halted upon seeing him there and was about to pass on when he moved to
one side.

'Want to sit down?' he said. 'Plenty of room for two.'

I thanked him and did so, and when we had exchanged a few commonplace
remarks he held out his hand and said, 'Kirkland's my name,' in the
simple, friendly manner of the old-time American. I was flattered at
this kindly overture from a man so much older, and introduced myself at
once.

'You're not the owner of that hotel by any chance?' I asked.

He shook his head.

'No. I wish I was. But it was named for my father. He was one of the
early settlers in this part of the country. I used to plough corn over
there,' and he pointed across the street.

Had he said that he was the son of Miles Standish or Cotton Mather, or
one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the remark would
have been but little more startling, and it would have seemed but little
less credible. Despite its many modern buildings that city looked as
though it had been there forever. Behind the windows of the department
store across the street, wax ladies dressed in silk lingerie or flowered
summer gowns, gazed archly out at the throng of passers-by. At the
corner, the traffic policeman marshaled in orderly procession two
endless streams of motor cars. There was no land anywhere, no green
things growing except the potted palms in the hotel window. The very
sky, dappled with neat orderly clouds, and the summer breeze blowing in
faint warm gusts around the corner, seemed, somehow, urban. It was hard
to believe that all those tens of thousands of people, the millions of
tons of steel and stone and wood--the pavements, curbstones, wires,
street lamps, office buildings, hotels, motor cars, silk lingerie,
tennis racquets, newspaper presses, platinum watches, fire engines, had
flowed in, sorted themselves out, and gotten fashioned into a city in
the space of one man's lifetime.

'Is that possible!' I said. 'How long ago was it?'

'I was just figuring it out this morning. Fifty-nine years. I haven't
been back here in more than forty. We moved to the coast in eighty-one,
and I've been living there ever since.'

He then went on to tell me of life in the village he had known half a
century ago, and as I listened, I realized for the first time, in an
emotional sense, that America is now a developed country. I had known
this, mentally, for a long time, but the amazing, saddening fact had
never before really come home to me. Looking into the face of this still
vigorous old man, I had the feeling that this was one of the most
memorable experiences of my life. It was as though I had seen, briefly
and vividly, the boundary line between epoch and epoch which one had
long felt was somewhere near. 'Perhaps never again,' I thought, 'will I
have the privilege of talking with an American of the old pioneer
tradition. A few years hence and the last of them will have gone.'

He spoke half humorously, half sadly, of his bewilderment, coming back
to his boyhood haunts after so great a lapse of time, and finding
everything so completely changed.

'You may wonder,' he said, 'how I know just where I used to plough corn.
Well, I'll tell you. I've still got one small piece of land here, and I
puzzled it out from the lay of that. There's nothing on that piece and
never has been from the day of creation as far as I know. Would you like
to see it? I think you'd be interested, and it's only about three blocks
from where we're sitting.'

As we walked along he told me that his father had intended using this
small plot as a family burying ground, but had changed his mind
afterward. It had lain idle all these years. He had even forgotten that
he owned it, and had learned, after he had moved on west, that the title
was recorded in his father's name.

'I've just sold it; that's what I came back for. I sort of wish I'd
known what was going to happen here. All our land was right where these
big buildings are now. If I'd kept it instead of selling out when I
did--well, I reckon I could give you half a million dollars to-day, and
hardly know the difference.'

We came to the place. There was a Merchants' National Bank Building on
one side, and a large retail furniture store on the other. The lot was
about fifteen paces wide and twice as deep, and was closed on the street
side by two tiers of billboards. The sign on one of the boards read:

                       SEVEN THOUSAND MORE SINCE
                            YESTERDAY--FORD

'You can peek in behind from this side,' he said. 'There's something you
probably won't ever see again, young man--a piece of the real old
prairie.'

The midday sun glanced briefly down upon one corner of it, lighting up
pitilessly that bit of virgin soil which looked anything but virginal
now. Nothing was growing there, not so much as a weed or a blade of
grass. The ground looked sour and oily, and was littered with old
brickbats and scraps of paper torn from the bill-boards. On the fragment
of an ancient showbill were the words, COMING SOON. My companion smiled
faintly as he pointed it out.

'I'll tell you what's coming soon--a five-story building, a Shops
Building I think they call it. They're starting work on it next week. I
remember the day my father fenced off this little piece. He cut the
posts himself, down by the river. I was only a little shaver then--nine
or ten years old. The grass was almost as high as my head. There was a
hole in my pants pocket and I lost my jackknife. I tell you I was a
sorry boy that day! I got down on my hands and knees and looked and
looked but I never found it. Shouldn't wonder if it's there still,
buried a little way down in the dirt.'

We stood at the curb for a moment, talking and watching the crowds.

'You know,' he said, 'it makes me feel as old as Time to see all this.
Well, what next, I wonder?'

Across the street, a bullet-headed little Greek in a dirty apron was
standing in a doorway, calling in a harsh, rasping voice, 'Shine! Shoe
Polush, Shine!'

                 *        *        *        *        *

I recall in this connection another man met several years ago; for he
too had something to show me--something, not reminiscent of the past,
but big, he thought, with foreboding for the future.

On this occasion I was public benching for a day in Central Park, New
York. The following morning I was to sail for Iceland, and now, with all
arrangements completed, I had gone to the park to enjoy, in such quiet
as I could find, that greatest of all pleasures, the pleasure of
anticipation.

This man was not a professional looker-on but a gifted amateur. He told
me that he was a mining engineer, and had just returned to the United
States after fifteen years in various South American countries.

'I'm going to Persia next month,' he said, 'and glad of it. I feel lost
at home in these days. Life is nothing like it used to be. I wouldn't
have believed that it could change so fast.'

What worried him chiefly was that women were taking such prominent parts
in business, politics, and public affairs generally. In his opinion it
was no longer a man's world.

'The strange thing is,' he added, 'that men at home don't seem to
realize what's happening. They are in the midst of the greatest
revolution the world has ever seen and they haven't an inkling of the
fact. If they had, they'd fight it while there's still a chance.'

He drew his watch from his pocket.

'Four-fifteen. Are you busy for a few minutes? If not, I'd like to show
you something. This is just the right time.'

A looker-on, of course, is never busy, and I went with him willingly
enough. Our destination was a large hotel near the park. He led me
through an imposing lobby, up a marble staircase into an immense room
with windows reaching from the floor nearly to the ceiling, and hung
with crimson curtains. It was filled with women seated at little tables.
An attendant came forward apprehensively when he saw us.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' he began, but this----'

The engineer waved him aside.

'I know. We're not stopping. Just looking in for a moment.' Then, to me,
'Well, this is it.'

I looked at him questioningly.

'Good Lord, Man!' he said, 'aren't you frightened? You ought to be. This
room, as I happen to know, has a seating capacity for a thousand people.
There are at least eight hundred here now, every one of them
women--eight hundred women having tea! Listen!'

I did, and whether or not he had momentarily infected me with the virus
of his own fears, certainly that low, all-pervading hum of conversation
did sound rather ominous. It reminded me, somehow, of the continuous
mutter of guns one heard in France, when marching from billets far in
the rear to the firing line.

'This is something new,' he said. 'I've only been at home a month, but
in that time I've been down South, in Boston, and as far west as
Chicago. It's the same everywhere, gangs of women meeting like this.
These are not old-fashioned social teas--don't you believe it! These
women are plotting, and they're plotting against us. They mean to have
control of things. It's time men were waking up to the fact. If they
don't----'

The implication was that we were done for, and would have to move
somewhere else and start a new world of our own. There was nothing in
the least jocular in his manner. He was deeply serious. We parted a
moment later. And I watched him swinging off down the avenue in the
direction of the Grand Central Terminal. I don't even know his name, but
I've often thought of him, and whenever I read of a woman being elected
governor, or mayor, or a member of Congress, or to the judicial bench, I
see him in the mind's eye, standing in that spacious room, crushing a
pearl-gray felt hat in his fingers, and saying in a voice both
incredulous and monitory, 'Eight hun-dred women having tea!'

There was nothing I could have done to prevent them having it even if I
had wanted to, so I sailed for Iceland the following day as I had
planned. You may think Iceland a strange country for a looker-on to
visit; therefore it is well to explain that public benchers, more than
other men, perhaps, need an occasional revivifying bath of solitude.
Furthermore, change is as necessary to them as breathing. Often, without
the slightest warning, they are seized with a pang of longing for new
horizons; and it is more than a pang, for it remains, growing in
intensity until they can endure it no longer. So it was with me in this
instance. I had been reading a book--nothing about Iceland, but the name
happened to be mentioned there, and at once a vision of the country rose
up before me as though I had known and loved it in some previous
existence. I seemed to be gazing toward it from afar. The sea was in
between, calm and mirrorlike, and the shadow of the land stretched far
out over it. Everything was in the clearest outline--the mountains, the
deep blue shadows in the valleys and ravines, the walls of precipices
falling sheer to the water's edge, and the silvery gleam of the glaciers
winding down from the interior. I knew at once that I must go to
Iceland, that I would go there, and curiously enough, it never even
occurred to me to wonder whether I should find public benches to sit on.

As a matter of fact I didn't find them--at least none of the usual kind.
But Icelanders have benches which are a great improvement upon those of
most other countries. They are ambulatory, and the moment you are
seated, away goes the bench with you on it, through wide meadow-lands,
over the moorlands dappled with cloud shadows, across vast stretches of
desert country, up the steep slopes of mountains, and over the windy
passes between valley and valley; and at night it stops of its own
accord at some lonely farmhouse which you first saw hours ago and miles
and miles distant. Then, having supped, you sleep dreamlessly on a bed
of down, actually of down--eider down; and the following morning you are
away again when the eastern sky gives only a faint cold promise of the
splendor to come.

'What sort of benches are these?' you may ask.

Iceland ponies, the finest benches in the world--comfortable, adaptable,
fast moving or slow, as you choose--everything that a bench should be. I
sat on various ones during the late summer and the autumn and winter of
1922-23, and looked on at life while they were carrying me, in all,
something over five hundred miles.

Thoreau, in 'Walden,' says, 'It is something to be able to paint a
particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects
beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very
atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To
affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.'

In my opinion there is not a word of truth in this grandiose statement,
and the proof that Thoreau did not believe in this highest of arts--at
least that he made no attempt to practice it--is to be found in his own
book. Its beauty and charm lie in the fact that he was as passively
receptive to the quality of the day as Walden Pond itself. And so, I
believe, should all men be, whether sojourners, or travelers, at home or
abroad. Their minds should lie fallow both to the quality of the day and
to the quality and character of the country where the day breaks or
wanes to its close; and I can think of no land where this attitude of
placid acceptance will pay richer returns than in Iceland.

Surely there is no other country where one may have a more refreshing
bath of solitude. And the flavor of melancholy in that inviolate and
inviolable land is to the spiritual palate like the tart autumnal flavor
of wild grapes to the physical one. Never elsewhere have I so richly
enjoyed being sad. There was nothing of gloom or depression in the
feeling. It was not a human kind of sadness, but a cosmic melancholy
drawn from mountains and stones, from lakes and fjords, born of the
sound of great rivers, of the thunder of mighty waterfalls, of the
moaning of the sea around desolate headlands, of the deep, vibrant hum
of the wind blowing from the fastnesses of the North. It was as fragrant
as the odor of blue distance, and it sank deeply into the heart, for it
was, in truth, an emanation from the land itself.

The lightest part of my baggage during this time was my knowledge of
Icelandic. Many people believe that neither pleasure nor profit is to be
derived from foreign travel unless one has at least a fair knowledge of
the speech of the country or countries one is to visit. This, I think,
is a mistaken opinion. Certainly public benchers do not hold it, for
their favorite song is 'Over the Hills and Far Away,' and not many of
them are so fortunate as to have a Borrovian facility for acquiring
languages. Life is short, and the world a mosaic composed of stones from
the Tower of Babel, and if we are to wait until we have made suitable
preparation before visiting the countries we wish to see, most of us
must stay at home forever. The fact that one must be silent while
traveling, or partially so, has its advantages. One has more leisure for
observation, for absorbing and brooding upon visual impressions; and the
tongue, spared the fatiguing necessity of speech, performs its other
function all the more suitably. Gustatory adventures in strange lands
are by no means to be despised; indeed, they may be quite as interesting
as other kinds, and one has the free mind to enjoy them when not
preoccupied, as travelers so often are, with talking, with trying to
understand and to be understood. In Iceland I wandered thus among meats
and drinks, soups and sauces, in all parts of the country, and as a
result of the experience I could write, wholly from silent observation,
an illuminating essay on the subject of the Icelandic cuisine,
interspersed with an occasional lyric poem whenever a particular dish,
such as _skyr_, demanded this nobler treatment.

I reaped yet another advantage from my ignorance of the language. Having
little knowledge of the meaning of words, I gave myself up to the
enjoyment of the sound of them. This was an absorbing pastime; I had
never before realized how much pleasure may be derived from it. One
seems to partake of the emotions of the makers of language, and to catch
an occasional audible glimpse of crude ancestral sounds as they were
before they came to be definitely related to things and ideas. And I
made a curious discovery--unfortunately, one of those quite useless
discoveries so often made by members of my profession. It was this: that
speech divorced from meaning has a meaning of its own. I could write
another essay on this subject, and one chapter of it would deal with the
pictorial qualities of words considered purely as sound. When I first
heard Icelandic spoken I was reminded of decorations I had seen in
museums on Aztec pottery. I would like, at this point, in my capacity of
philologist, to take exception to the statement frequently made, that
Icelandic is an unmusical language. It is as beautiful to hear as the
land where it is spoken is to see, and I can think of no higher terms in
which to praise it. Where, for example, could you find a lovelier little
poem than this: _Vitid per hvad klukkan er?_--phonetically, Vitith thier
qvath klukkan ere. I remember my surprise upon learning that it means,
merely, 'Do you know what time it is?'

                 *        *        *        *        *

Time--the sound of the word, in English, tolls me out of these
reflections, and I am carried, like a chip on the backwash of a wave,
from Iceland to Tahiti, and cast up high and dry on the present moment.
I have wasted a whole morning--several mornings, in fact--indoors,
prattling of my profession instead of practicing it. But midday remains
to me, and at Tahiti that is a pleasant time to be abroad.

I love the hour between twelve and one when this little island world
falls under the enchantment of silence and sleep; but having been born
and bred in cooler latitudes, I can't accustom myself to the siesta.
Sleep fails to come, and so, with a book in my pocket I usually set out
for a stroll through the deserted streets.

But my own wakefulness is only seeming. I too am under the noonday
enchantment which plays curious pranks with the senses, giving to each
of them the qualities of all the others; and when a mynah bird, hidden
in the deep shade of a mango tree, drops a single drowsy chirp into the
pool of silence beneath him, I see the silver splash it makes, and the
circles moving smoothly outward over the placid surface. And I hear, as
distinctly, the barbaric music of color which comes from every roadside
garden: the chiming of innumerable hibiscus bells; the clamorous trumpet
tones of the bougainvilla; flamboyant trees yearning like saxophones,
and modest blossoms deeply embowered in greenish gloom, giving forth
arpeggios of cool tones like the tinkling of mandolins or the plucked
strings of violins.

For all this weird music, I am aware of the deepening noonday stillness.
The bell in the cathedral clock-tower, striking the quarter-past, tries
vainly to fathom it, and wider and deeper yet is the sea silence. I
realize now that the faint thunder of the surf on the reef is really a
part of this silence, thus perpetually self-conscious, aware of its own
immensity.

The sunlight, too, has a peculiar noonday quality. It is heavy, amenable
to the law of gravity. It drips from the fronds of the palms, spills in
rivulets from broad-leaved banana trees, and runs in bright drops down
the stems of the grasses. It falls like golden rain in the open spaces,
and lies on the streets in shining pools to be splashed through by
midday sleep-walkers. As for the shadows, they are more palpable still.
I expect to be enmeshed in the lacy shadow pattern of an acacia tree
thrown across the roadway, and come with a perceptible shock against the
cool, clear-cut edges of house shadows. 'If I were fully awake,' I
think, 'I could lean against one of these and rest a while.'

In this trancelike mood I move on through numerous back streets and come
at last to the water-front. The silence here is broken only by the faint
creaking of the gangplanks of schooners moored along the sea-wall. A few
Chinese fruit vendors sit in the shade of their booths, their eyes
closed, their chins resting on their updrawn knees; but as I pass, each
of them opens an eye to a barely perceptible width, and the keen
appraisement of these brief glances convinces me that sleep to a
Chinaman is merely another form of wakefulness. Not so do the
Polynesians enjoy their siesta. They lie sprawled on the decks of the
schooners, under the trees, in the porches of the closed shops--wherever
shade is to be found, and they are as nearly dead as sleeping men can
be.

At such times it seems that the world is, in truth, under a spell, a
perpetual enchantment, and that I alone am left with limitless leisure,
now, for the practice of my profession. So I choose a bench in a shady
spot, sit down, and fall agreeably to work.


THE END






[End of Mid-Pacific, by James Norman Hall]
