Tai-o-hae by Night—The Bowels of the Old Hulk—The Figurehead—A Mad Escape—South Sea Grog Shanty Barmen up to date—Men who shave their Beards off—Mrs Ranjo’s Blush—The Potentialities of a Bit of Blue Ribbon—A Picture of the Grog Shanty’s Interior—Pauline appears—Waylao appears—The Wonderful Dance of the Half-caste Girl—The Mixture of Two Races—The Music of a Marquesan Waltz

GRIMES was a blessing in those days; he was something new to me in the way of man so far as my experiences went.

We’d go off together and get some job on the plantations, get a little cash, then loaf by the beach, and by night sit together beneath the palms and dream.

The surroundings of Tai-o-hae by night were something that, once seen, clung to the memory like some scene of enchantment.

I wish I had the power to give a picture of that spot as night crept over the mountains, bringing its mystery. We would sit beneath the feathery palms and watch the snow-white tropic-bird wave its crimson tail as it swooped shoreward. Far away the sun, sinking like a burning brand into the ocean, fired the sky-line waves. The chanting chorus of cicadÆ (locusts) would commence tuning up in the bread-fruits, as the O le manu-ao (twilight nightingale) and one or two of its feathered brethren sought the heights of the giant palms to warble thanksgiving to the great god of Polotu, the heathen god of Elysium. So the natives told us when they crept from the huts hard by, and made fantastic, heathenish incantations with their faces to the sky, while the birds warbled.

One songster was like an English blackbird. It would sit on the topmost bough and pour forth its song, “recapturing its first fine careless rapture,” and looking like some tiny Spanish cavalier serenading the starlit walls of heaven, as the sky darkened and the wind ruffled the blue, feathery scarf that seemed to be flung carelessly about its throbbing throat.

Then we would hear the forest silence disturbed by the faint booming of the native drums in the villages, beating in the stars as, in one’s imagination, those far-off starry battalions were marshalled slowly across the sky.

The moon rose, brightening the pinnacles of the palm-clad mountains, bringing into clear relief the wild shores and quiet lagoons. The scene, for miles, would appear like some vast canvas picture done in magical oils, daubs of moonlight, mysterious splashes of rich-hued tropical trees standing beneath the wonderful perspective of stars twinkling across the tremendous dark blue canvas of night.

Far away, tiny twirls of smoke rose from the huts of the villages and ascended into the moonlit air.

But to me the sight of all was where some great artist of night seemed to have toiled to transcendental perfection on a bas-relief just visible by the promontory of that little island world: a figure cut out in perfect lines of emblematical grief, the sad symbol of aspiring humanity, a beautiful, legendary woman, her carved arms outstretched, appealing eternally to the dim, greenish-blue horizon—the old hulk’s figurehead.

Only the curl and whitening of a wave by that wreck told of something real. Just up the shore stood the grog shanty, a ghostly light gleaming through its windows, and one pale flush streaming through the half-open door up the tall, plumed palms that half leaned over the corrugated tin roof. That was real enough; for who ever heard of a grog shanty on the oil painting of a tropical landscape with wild song issuing from its inwards and echoing to the hills?

Such was a characteristic scene of Tai-o-hae by night before my eyes, while Grimes snored beside me. For we slept out for several nights, preferring the beach to the bowels of that old hulk. I’ll tell you why. An escape, a Frenchman—from Noumea, I think—went raving mad one night down in that hold. Suddenly we were all awakened by terrible yells; we jumped from our bunks and rubbed our eyes. I grasped an iron stanchion, determined to sell my life dearly, for I thought that the natives were aboard seeking “long-pig” for some cannibal feast. We soon realised the truth, for the poor escape had been peculiar for several days. He rushed up and down that dark hold shouting “Mon Dieu! Merci!” for he thought that he was about to be guillotined.

Uncle Sam, Grimes, I and several others chased him up and down the hold, trying to catch him as he struck the vessel’s side with his fists. His eyes rolled fearfully. He’d gone stark mad. We tried to appease him, told him it was all right, that we would not guillotine him. It was no use; he fastened his teeth in Uncle’s Sam’s arm, thinking he was some Noumea surveillant who would lead him to that monstrous blade.

He bolted up on deck as we all gripped him. Jove! his clothing was left in our hands as he broke away in his wild delirium. He climbed aloft and up there he stuck.

We had a terrible night of it. He yelled forth, in his native tongue, heart-rending appeals for mercy, awakening the native villages for miles around.

He died next day. The weather was hot, so they buried him quickly in the quiet cemetery near the calaboose.

So that I didn’t fancy sleeping on the hulk for some time; that night’s adventure got on my nerves.

But to return to the grog shanty. While Grimes slept on under the coco-palms I would creep into that bar, sit among those rough men and listen to the sounds of O! O! for Rio Grande, Blow the Man Down, etc., bellowed forth, as they spent the best part of the night recounting their manifold adventures. I was fascinated by the sight before me, for that motley crew resembled some strange postage-like stamp collection of men who had once been recognised as genuine currency by governments, but had long since gone through the post and had become valuable and rare—some of them.

Mr and Mrs Ranjo, the grog shanty keepers, were delightful as they dodged from bar to bar, for they had one bar for derelicts and another for those mysterious, hurried individuals who arrived with cash. In the saloon bar old Ranjo would put on his holiest and most obsequious smile, as he praised his whisky, remarking: “Ho yes, Hi see, sir, Hi halways thinks as ’ow honesty is the best policy.” Saying this, he would swish his bar towel and hand another mixture of paraffin and methylated spirit to his customers, who were erstwhile bank managers, disillusioned ecclesiastics and men who had hurried from far countries and shaved their beards off.

Mrs Ranjo would blush in the saloon bar over the very story that she herself would have told the beachcombers in the next bar. It seems absurd, but that blush and old Ranjo’s “Ho” and “Hi see” increased the price of the drinks in the saloon bar by one hundred per cent.

So one will see that culture existed also in the South Seas. A tweed suit or a massive watch-chain secured immense respect and unlimited trust from the Ranjos; and that was everything, for one must remember that they owned the grog shanty. And this fact at Tai-o-hae or anywhere else in the South Seas gave them a social distinction of the highest rank; indeed they were as king and queen of beachcomberland, and appreciation from them was equal to conferring a knighthood.

No wonder these men were fascinated by the smiles of the Ranjos. To them, in their derelict times, a grog shanty was like that bit of blue ribbon with its many hidden potentialities—the ribbon that flutters at some pretty girl’s throat, or in her crown of hair, that insensate adornment that is the first magnetic glimpse that awakens the romantic dreams of some impassioned boy, yes, and even the staid man of the world. But I must leave blue ribbons alone, also my reasons for mentioning them, till later, and tell of one memorable night.

I was sitting in the grog shanty dreaming of old England, and wondering what my people would think could they see me playing my violin to that weird crew. I felt sure that it would have damped their ardour over any idea of my retrieving the family’s fortunes during my travels.

Well, as I sat there I noticed a handsome man (whom I will call John L——) stumble out of the bar as usual on his way home, drunk. He was seldom sober, had little to say and was regarded as a mystery by all. From hearsay I gathered that he had arrived in the Marquesan Group about ten years before, bringing a pretty mite of a girl with him. Probably he was one of those individuals who had hurried away from his native land so as to retain his liberty—or his neck. Anyway, the little girl interested me most. This little waif’s name was Pauline, and she had, at this period, arrived at the stage when girlhood meets womanhood. Her mother was dead. We all knew that, because when John L—— was drunk he would sweep the stick he carried about, and sweep imaginary stars from the low roof of the shanty as he cursed the heavens and God. Even the Ranjos paled slightly during those fits of ungovernable frenzy, when he yelled forth atheistic curses till he fell forward and sobbed like a child. It would strike me with sorrow as well as horror to witness those paroxysms.

John L—— and his daughter lived in a little homestead situated up near the mountains that soared in the background of Tai-o-hae. It was a wild spot this fugitive had chosen for his home in exile; only the South Sea plovers passed over that place on their migrating flight to the westward.

To me the memory of that homestead is like the “Forsaken Garden,” a remote spot of that South Sea isle, its ghost of a garden still fronting the sea:

It isn’t a hundred years ago, though, but it seems so to me. I could half think that I dreamed that white wooden homestead by the palms; that it was some ghostly hamlet hidden up there in the wild South Sea hills—a beautiful phantom-like girl trembling inside—and Destiny knocking, knocking at the door. Ah, Pauline!

But to return to John L—— as he staggered away from the shanty into the darkness. I recall that his farewell sounded more like a death-groan than anything else. Almost every incident of that night is engraved on my memory. I still see the haggard, haunted face as he departs, and the shellbacks look into one another’s eyes significantly. I can even remember the swaying of the palm leaves outside the open door as I saw them drift apart, revealing the moonlit seas beyond, and John L——’s white duck-suit jacket fluttering between them as he staggered homeward. His thin-faced companion holds his arm—he’s a sardonic-looking individual—and I, as well as the shellbacks, wonder why he tolerates such a sinister comrade.

After their departure I played the fiddle once more, as that wonderful collection of the drifting brigade sat listening. Serious faces, funny faces, bearded, expressionless faces, sensitive, cynical, philosophical, humorous, tawny and pasty faces, all holding rum mugs, and looking like big wax figures clad in ragged duck-suits, dirty red shirts and belted pants, wide-brimmed hats or cheesecutters, sitting there on tiers of tubs, while Ranjo swished his towel and served out drink. Over their heads were suspended multitudes of empty gin bottles, hanging on invisible wires. Each bottle held a tallow candle that dimly flickered as the faintest breeze blew through the chinks of the wooden walls and open doorway. And as I fiddled on with delight, it seemed as if that bar was some ghostly room stuck up in the clouds, and that in some magical way those fierce, disappointed, unshaved pioneers of life had stolen a constellation of stars of the third and fourth magnitude, which shone, just over their sinful heads, in a phantom-roofed sky of ethereal deep blue drifts—tobacco smoke.

Against the partition Ranjo had fixed a huge cracked ship’s mirror, which had once adorned the saloon of a man-of-war, and which now revealed in a kind of cinematograph show all that happened within, and all who might enter.

The fiddle, the banjo and the mouth-organ were in full swing. Grimes had come into the shanty and was sitting beside me, and the French sailors from the man-of-war in the bay had just sung the Marseillaise for the last time and gone aboard. Suddenly the scene changed, silence fell over the shanty. I swear that I had only drunk a little cognac, so as to be sociable with Grimes, when something like an apparition stood before me, framed in the shanty’s doorway! It was a white girl.

A deep gleam shone in her blue, star-like eyes; her lips were apart as though she were about to speak; she seemed like some figure of romance, a strip of pale blue ribbon fluttering at her warm, white throat.

The wild harmony of oaths and double-bass voices of good cheer ceased. Each beachcomber, each shellback, stayed his wild reminiscences. The new-comers, who were sympathetically treating the old-comers, fairly gasped as they turned to see the cause of the sudden silence. That tableau of astonishment and admiration on the grim, set faces of those bearded sailors made one think of some mysterious contortion of the Lord’s Last Supper; and they—a crew of sunburnt disciples looking at the materialised divinity of their dreams.

The swashbuckler who spoke all day long about his pal Robert Louis Stevenson, and swore that he was the main character of that author’s latest book on the South Seas, dropped his glass smash on the floor and muttered: “What a bewt!”

As for me, I felt the first thrill of romance since I went to sea, arrived in a far country with a black eye and took up my residence in a wharf dust-bin.

The girl looked unreal, like some beautiful creation that had just stepped hurriedly out of the distant sky-line beyond the shanty’s door. Her crown of rebellious hair seemed still afire with some magical glow of the dead sunset. Nor was I quite mad, for as the escaping tobacco smoke of that low-roofed den enshrouded her in bluish drifts, as the winds blew up the shore, she did look ghost-like, and her delicately outlined form seemed robed in some diaphanous material cut out of the vanished glory, the golden mist of the western skies. Hibiscus blossoms, scarlet and white, were wantonly entangled in her mass of loosened tresses that fluttered to the zephyrs, as though magical fingers caressed her and would call her back to the portals beyond the setting suns. Ah, Pauline, you were indeed beautiful. When I was young!

Her clear, interrogating eyes seemed to say: “Is dad here?”

I saw her lips tremble. She wavered like a spirit as I watched her image, and mine staring in the mirror beside her.

None answered that gaze of hers. We all knew that her father had just gone staggering home, blind drunk, crying like a demented man.

Even Queen’s Vaekehu’s valet de chambre (a ferocious-looking Marquesan who haunted the shanty, cadging drinks) looked sorry for the girl.

Though it was years ago, I recall the sympathetic comments of those men, the look in their eyes, expressing all they felt.

That picture of astonishment, the breathless stare of admiration on the upturned, bearded faces, resembled some wax-work show, a kind of Madame Tussaud’s fixed up in a South Sea grog shanty. But I know well enough that those unshaved, apparently villainous-looking men gazed on the avatar of their lost boyhood’s dreams. So grim did they look, all mimicked in the huge ship’s mirror as they still held their rum mugs half-way between their lips, staring through the wreaths of smoke, in perfect silence.

“Gott in Himmel!” said the Teuton from Samoa.

“Mon Dieu!” said the awestruck gendarme from Calaboose Hill.

“A hangel form!” gasped Grimes, as the three swarthy Marquesan women, who wore loose ridis and had no morals, grinned spitefully to see such admiration for a white girl.

“Did you ever!” sighed several more, as I laid the fiddle down and felt a warm flood thrill me from head to foot.

Pauline vanished as swiftly as she came. Went off, I suppose, to seek her drunken parent.

I half wondered if I had dreamed that glimpse of a white girl, a glorious creation here in the South Seas, by the awful beach near Tai-o-hae. It seemed impossible.

Then the hushed voices subsided. Once again came the wild crescendos of ribald song from those lips, as the shanty trembled to the earthquake of some crashing finale of a wild sea-chantey and thumping sea-boots.

“Grimes, have another,” said I. So we drank again, and then again.

What a night of adventure and romance that was, for another came out of the night like an apparition and startled us.

I rose to go, and as I wished Grimes good-night two little native children, peeping in at the shanty door like imps of darkness, shouted “Kaolah!” and suddenly turned and bolted in fright as I tossed them a coin. I turned to see what was up, and there stood Waylao.

I noticed that her eyes had a wild look in them. On her arm hung the old wicker-work basket wherein she always placed her mother’s stores. I suppose she had come to the shanty to do some shopping, for Ranjo sold everything from bottled rum to tinned meat. I guessed that her mother had sent her off hours before, with those usual strict injunctions to hurry back home with the soap and the flask of rum.

Some of those rough shellbacks had known her since she could first toddle down to the beach. None were surprised to see her at that late hour. She was as wild as Tai-o-hae itself to them. She had even gone up into the mountains when the shellbacks had bombarded the cannibal chief Mopio’s stronghold; yes, when he had captured Ching Chu the Chinaman and bolted off with him as though he were a prize sucking pig. They had found the Chinaman trussed like a fowl, the wooden fire blazing, while that half-mad cannibal chief, who was the horror of the little native children in the villages, was about to club his half-paralysed victim. But Uncle Sam had whipped out his revolver and blown off the top of the cannibal’s head, in the nick of time.

“Hallo, girlie, how goes it?” “Give us a curl,” “Ain’t she growing,” said the beachcombers.

“Why, Wayee, you’re getting quite a woman,” said Uncle Sam, as he chucked her affectionately under her pretty chin.

“Give us a dance, there’s a good kiddie,” said another.

“What-o!” reiterated the whole crew, as they lifted their rum mugs and drank to those innocent-looking eyes.

Wayee, who had so often entertained those rough men by dancing and singing, at first quietly shook her head. She gazed at the men with steady eyes. Her picturesquely robed figure, her pretty olive-hued face and earnest stare, that was imaged in the mirror beside her, reminded one of the white girl who had just peeped in like an apparition and then vanished. Indeed, meeting Waylao by night in the dusk for the first time, one might easily have mistaken her for a pure-blooded white girl. She was one of that type of half-wild beauty, a beauty that seems to belong to the mystery of night and moonlight. All the passionate beauty of the Marquesan race and the finer poetic charm of the white race seemed to breathe from the depths of her dark, unfathomable blue eyes. The curves of the mouth revealed a faint touch of sensualism, so faint that it seemed as though even the Great Artist had hesitated at that stroke of the brush—and then left it there.

Sometimes her eyes revealed a far-away gleam, like some ineffable flush of a dawn that would not break—a half-frightened, startled look, as though in the struggle of some dual personality a dim consciousness blushed and trembled, as though the dark strain and the white strain struggled in rivalry and the pagan won.

“Come on, Wayee,” shouted the shellbacks, determined to make the girl dance to them. She still hesitated. “Don’t be bashful, child,” said Uncle Sam in his finest parental voice. It was then that the new robe of self-consciousness fell from the girl. The old child-like look laughed in the eyes. In a moment the men had risen en masse and commenced to shift the old beef barrels up against the shanty’s wooden walls, making a cleared space for the prospective performance. Looking up into the faces of those big, rough men, Waylao was tempted by the pleased looks and flattering glances of their strong, manly eyes. As one in a dream she stood looking about her, for a moment mystified. Then softly laying down her little wicker-work basket, she tightened the coloured sash bow at her hip. A hush came over the rowdy scene and general clamour of the shanty. A dude in the next bar, craning his neck over the partition, stared through his eyeglass—Waylao had lifted her delicate blue robe and commenced to dance.

The regular drinks, getting mixed up with the between drinks, had made those old shellbacks violently eloquent.

“Go it, kiddie! Kaohau! Mitia!” yelled their hoarse voices, as they wiped their bearded mouths with their hands. Their eyes bulged with pleasure. What had happened, they wondered. Her eyes were aglow like stars. She commenced to sway rhythmically to Uncle Sam’s impromptu on the mouth-organ. O! O! bound for Rio Grande trembled to the strain of Waylao’s tripping feet, as the silent hills re-echoed the wild chorus.

Attracted by those phantom-like echoes, pretty little dusky gnomes crept out of the forest, and there, in semi-nude chastity, with half-frightened eyes they peeped round the rim of the grog shanty door. Then off they bolted, for lo! they suddenly saw their own demon-like faces and curious, fierce eyes revealed in the large cracked mirror of that low-roofed room. They were native children, truants from the village huts close by.

Suddenly the hoarse bellowings of the beachcombers ceased. The big, inflated cheeks of those old yellowing shellbacks suddenly subsided, and looking like squashed balloons resolved back into wrinkles. Even Uncle Sam ceased his unmelodious impetuosissimo on the mouth-organ, as he looked at the fairy-like figure that danced before him. The superstition, the magic of some old world, some spell of the wild poetry of paganism seemed to exist and dance before them. Waylao’s lips were chanting a weird native melody. The atmosphere of that grog shanty was transmuted into the dim light of another age. Those graceful limbs and musically moving arms, the poise of the goddess-shaped head of that dancing figure, seemed to be some materialised expression of poetry in motion. Her face was set and serious, her eyes strangely earnest looking, yes, far beyond her brief years. She seemed to be staring at something down the ages.

The open-mouthed shellbacks sat on their tubs and stared. Ranjo stood like a statue in bronze, holding a towel as he gazed on the scene. His low bar-room had become imparadised. Instinctively, in the polished utterance of his saloon-bar etiquette, he breathed forth: “Ho! Hi say! ’Er heyes shine like a hangel’s!”

Waylao heard nothing. The low-beamed shanty roof and its log walls, with the men enthroned on tiers of tubs around her, had crumbled, like the fabric of a dream. A magical forest, with wild hills heaved up slowly and grandly around her, a world that was brightened by the vaulted arch of stars and a dim, far, phantom moonlit sea. Her lips were chanting a melody that seemed to bewail some long-forgotten memory of love-lit eyes, eyes that gazed beneath the unremembered moons of some long-ago existence.

The awakening passion of womanhood had stirred some barbarian strain in the girl. It awoke like some fluttering, imprisoned swallow that heard the call of the impassioned South. It beat its trembling wings in the blood-red heart of two races—the dual personality, the daughter of the full-blooded Lydia and the blue-eyed sailorman, Benbow.

The poetic power, the wonderful visualising imagination of a dark race, that had peopled their forests with marvellous pagan deities was awake, revelling in her soul. The tropical moonbeams that poured through the grog shanty’s vine-clad window crept across her dancing eyes and head of bronzed curls as she swayed and chanted on.

“Well, I’m blowed! if it don’t beat all,” ejaculated the half-mesmerised shellbacks. Waylao’s performance had created an atmosphere that affected them strangely. “Is visions abart,” said Grimes in an awestruck voice.

“My dear Gawd, ain’t she bewtifool!” he murmured to himself as he licked his parched lips and called for a “deep-sea” beer.

At the sound of the men’s voices the spell was broken. The half-caste girl abruptly ceased to dance. With the sight of reality so grim-looking around her, and the disenchantment of her own senses came a sense of shame. For a moment she gazed at the men before her with a bewildered stare, then stooped and picked up her little basket.

“Waal, Wayee, I guess I never seed yer dance like that ’ere afore,” said Uncle Sam.

“Why, blimey, kiddie, if I had yer in London town I’d put yer before a top-note audience, and make yer blooming fortoone and [sotto voce] me hone fortoon too,” said the late jockey, Mr Slimes.

Grimes went to the bar and ordered a glass of the best lime-juice; he handed it to Waylao with a trembling hand. His clumsy courtesy was almost pathetic; his half-opened mouth reminded me in some mysterious way of the pathetic spout of a tea-pot. The shellbacks winked and nudged each other, for the look in Grimes’s eyes was unmistakable—he had fallen in love.

Grimes noticed the manner of the men. He returned to his tub, and gave them that inimitable, contemptuous Cockney sidelong glance, which is accompanied by a little jerk of the head, that defiance, that imperturbable disdain, and the genius required to inflict it upon one whom one may hate, which is the sole prerogative of Cockneys. Men of all races throughout the world have sought to imitate that Cockney glance, but only to end in inevitable, miserable failure.