I extemporise Stirring Music on my Violin at Native Weddings—Dethroned Queens and Kings—Meet Papoo

I am now going to tell you about Samoa and Samoan folk just as my eyes saw them. My ship sailed away, but I was not on board of it. The Samoan climate suited my health, and I found decent fellows living there who made jolly companions. One of them was a reformed German missionary who had mended his ways, left off the drink and toiled honestly on a coco-nut plantation which helped him to eke out a living for his accepted wife and family. They were pretty little children too—I knew them all well, thirteen altogether, some with blue-black eyes and some grey-black eyes. All had a tiny splash of white on their tiny plump bodies; their mothers were as brown as pheasants’ eggs and mostly fine-looking women.

For a week I lodged with a dark old Samoan who had a kind of bungalow on the beach. The walls were lined with the most beautiful South Sea shells. He traded with them, and I believe did a good business with sailors and traders. He certainly made more headway than I ever did in my tea shop. Well, I found my violin was a real fortune to me. I got in with all the wealthy Samoan chiefs and attended Samoan weddings; far away in the depths of the forest it was I who played and composed on the violin at those South Sea forest festivals. Stirring music! The hotly blushing bride, dressed in her bridal robe—her hair only!—which ruffled as the breeze of the cool forest kissed her innocent nakedness, was given away to the modest Samoan happy youth, and you must forgive me, dear reader, whoever you are, and remember I was only a romantic boy, when I tell you that my whole soul envied that youth! I was young and inexperienced in the ways of Western and Southern life, and I at first thought that the Samoan ladies were rather loose in their morals. I am older now, and I tell you this—the morals of the South Sea men and women place the morals of our Western life completely in the shade.

Certain phases of life in London could never occur in the South Seas, and even were the women inclined to traffic with their comeliness, the South Sea Samoan chief’s war-club never misses!

At night I would steal up the steep shore hills under the mangroves and coco-palms and creep into the tiny dome-shaped dens, which were the homesteads of the native men and women of those South Sea isles. They all got to know me and trust me, and I often would share their meals as they sat squatting around their big earthen steaming pots wherein they cooked fish and peculiar-smelling vegetables. The heat of those dens was terribly stifling to me with my clothes on, and I would very soon make tracks and get outside, and from those steeps I would gaze out seaward at the vast calm Pacific trembling into silver under the South Sea moon, as the phosphorus-sparkling waters at intervals curled and broke to silvery waves up the shore, by the mirroring palm-sheltered lagoons. On the beach through patches of moonlight passed the loafing half-caste traders and huddled groups of Samoan women with their tiny black children running round and round them like big black rats.

Laoleo, a Marquesan, was my special comrade on those nights out. He was the son of one of the South Sea queens who had seen her day—far away on one of the lonely Atolls, her beauty faded and mouth mumbling and toothless, she sat dreaming of her glorious past, and found life still sweet in living over the memories of all that had been. Laoleo’s father was in my time a dethroned king. I saw him once as he sat by his den. He was fat and squatty, only had one big yellow tooth, a large head, cute twinkling eyes and fearfully wrinkled brows, and when he wrinkled them up, as he thought of his past, he looked like some grim personification of the dark ages cast into human frame.

I shall never forget the great prayer-chanting night. Laoleo took me into the inland scrub one night, and there, in the forest by their dens, chanting to their ancient gods, sat the old naked chief and his big brown wives and daughters, some with their ridis on, but most of them attired only in their hair and modest smiles.

It was a beautifully calm night. Overhead from seaward crept cooling winds, drifting damp odours from wild flowers and orange-tree scents from the shore lagoons and palm-forest glooms. Round and round whirled the nude maidens of that strange world, swaying their bodies in lyrical beauty and over their heads in rhythmic movement their long curved brown arms. The men squatting around slowly moved their big brown bodies to and fro, chanting weirdly all the time. By his big domed den sat the dethroned king, Laoleo’s father. There he sat rehearsing his grand past, his large thin feet on a little mat, his chin pointing towards heaven, his face once more alive with revived majesty as his warrior chiefs around him swayed their clubs, calling down the spirits of the mighty dead to bless that old king and their own brave selves. Young Laoleo and I stood in the shadows watching them all. As for me, I felt a bit nervous—they all looked so different sitting round there with inspired eyes bright with memories of their glorious past, wondrous battles and beautiful cannibalistic feasts, memories of the bygone days when they nibbled their choice old friends, found them of sweet dispositions and wept over tender memories.

Through the spread tree-tops gleamed pale stars, and peeping through the hut doors hard by, among the coco-palms, through big leaves gazed the wistful eyes of their small brown naked babies—like tiny shadows of unborn children peeping from infinity into the dim regions of moonlit reality.

How the memories return to me as I write on. It was on that very night which I have just described that I, the son of a proud English gentleman of ancient family, fell in love with a South Sea Island woman, ten years older than myself. You shall hear something of my downfall. I loved and lost, and cried in my heart as I lay alone in my hut on a lone Pacific isle over the grief, the breakdown that has stricken men since the days of our first grief-stricken parents, old Adam and sad Eve. I have not told you before, but several days preceding the events which I have just spoken of, Laoleo and I were down in one of the shore grog shanties, talking and yarning to the batches of beachcombers, as they loafed in the sultry glooms by the coco-palms, smoking and spitting and playing cards—some of them the black sheep of the civilised world, who were never known to be really sober—when an exceedingly beautiful Samoan girl of twenty-six years of age came in and sat just by my seat as I played the fiddle. She was accompanied by her father, an old chief. She had an attractive, insinuating face, and as she sat there, half-leaning against a post, her brown naked soft velvet figure looked like some beautiful sculptural work of art. Silently she sat as I played on, her shining eyes gazing astonished at my white sunburnt face, and not till I had finished the fiddling, and the drunken old half-caste trader had finished his jig and swaggered up to the bar for another dose of stuff called brandy, did her eyes blink and her lips part in a smile of pleasure that revealed her white teeth. She gave me such a look as she sat there, dressed only in a narrow tappa loin-strip, that I quickly riveted all my attention on an attempt to tune up my violin, so as to hide the hot blush that flamed to my ear tips.