Grimes and I fishing—Fish enjoy the Joke—Grog Shanty Chorus and Incidents—The Drunken Settler—The Steaming of Romantic Brains—On the Old Hulk—I cannot sleep—My Romance of the Figurehead—The Hamlet in the Mountains—The Phantom Burglars of the Enchanted Castle

AFTER our adventure with Rimbo the priest and the half-caste girl, Grimes and I returned to the shanty, considerably impressed by the scene we had witnessed in the forest. The idol and the pillared trees of that natural temple, the beauty of the half-caste girl kneeling at the altar of dark superstition, haunted us.

For several days we were very moody and spent our time fishing in the shore lagoons, which were connected with the ocean by narrow creeks. It was perfect sport. Almost every minute we’d pull in large vermilion-striped denizens of the deep. The fish, as they came into view on the end of our lines, seemed to enjoy the novelty of the game, their slit mouths wide open, their bulged eyes agog at the joke of it all—so it seemed!

As we sat in the grog shanty that night Grimes became confidential, and confessed to me that he was a bit gone on Waylao. I wasn’t surprised to hear that something was wrong with him. His fund of conviviality seemed to have quite dried up and he had become something of a dreamer. The boisterous, quick steps, the hilarious jigs had changed into sentimental songs, which he accompanied on his banjo. Nothing surprised me in those days. The soberest-looking men would suddenly get entangled with widowed or discarded native queens, who were ever ready to overstep the Marquesan moral code—and that’s saying something!

I heard wondrous tales in that grog shanty. Strange men would rush in from nowhere, stare fiercely as they drank their rum, tell us how they had ascended heathen thrones and been hastily disillusioned. Nor do I exaggerate when I say that it was not unusual for a white man, who had ascended the throne of some isle by a strategic marriage, to be suddenly disturbed in the wedding chamber by half-a-dozen irate heathen monarchs who had married into the same dynasty about a week before!

So one will see that the heathen countries differ little from the civilised, where men aspire, enter asylums and shout through some night of memory: “I am God, and there is no other God but me!”

Had some Homer roamed the South Seas in those days he could have memorised many a wondrous odyssey. Nearly every grog shanty from Fiji to Honolulu was crammed with fearsome experiences. The scenic effect on entering a bar in those days was this—a crew of fierce-bearded chins that were thrust forward in murderous defiance towards some opposing crew of fierce-eyed, scrubby, untubbed men who strongly challenged a mighty assertion.

“You’re a b—— liar!” would be the yelled response, accompanied by thundering choruses of oaths and descending fists on the bar demanding rum. Indeed such a scene was before me as I sat meditating in that shanty by Tai-o-hae. Crash! came the grand interruption. Like unto a fierce covey of barbarian drum-sticks, up went a flock of hairy fists, that, descending, struck the grog bar with indisputable authority. The half-bred trader swore to the truth. Dare one doubt him that the ’Frisco schooner’s skipper bought twenty barrels of pork, which turned out to be pickled Fijian natives who had fallen in the last tribal clash?

Then the man who had sailed with Bully Hayes laid down the law to the Tahitian descendants of the Bounty mutineers who had called him a crimson liar.

The waxed-moustached Frenchman, with his eternal politeness, shrugged his shoulders with surprise as Mrs Ranjo explained that she was connected by blood with the Spanish throne.

“Mein gotts, you vash sees the vey we vash does dat in Germhanies,” came the eternal Teutonic phrase. The midshipman who had bolted from the windjammer in Sydney drank like a lord and sang The Song of the Thrush, and afterwards a sad old English song which made some of the men look quite doleful. It did not require The Lost Chord to move the hearts of those men—when rum was cheap. It’s wonderful how an old song or a familiar cry touches the memory of a home-sick man, and at that moment a dissipated, wrinkled old sailorman from London town shouted in a rather melancholy voice: “Flies, flies—catch ’em ali-eeeeve—oh!” which reminded his pal, Bob Slimes, of home; he stared vacantly into space for a moment—then burst into tears!

Outside beneath the moonlit palms, to the trrrrrip-tomp-pe-tomp-te of a banjo, and a fiddle made out of a bully-beef tin, a few select shellbacks danced with Marquesan maids from the village hard by.

“Aloha! Awai! Awai, papalagi!” came the musical encores of the dusky girls, followed by a weird clamouring, shuffling and hushed laughter. It sounded as though we heard the echoes from some heathen underworld as the white men answered the muffled screams of the girls who were trying to teach them to dance the heathen can-can that had been forbidden by the missionaries.

The university man shifted his eyeglass, flushed and quoted a verse in Greek as the naked leg of some dusky dancer outside poked through the shanty door, giving those pious old shellbacks a fearful shock, as one can imagine. It was only a leg, terra-cotta colour, rounded with full, perfect symmetry, five polished nails shining like pearls on the wagging toes, and it caused a deal of critical comment. From the saloon bar came guttural and musical voices of customers who had seen better days, and still had some cash in hand. “Yesh, old man—hic, hic—you’re right, it’s sheer bosth. A man’s a man even if he did bolt with a woman—and the brass.” Here came much confidential whispering. Polished oaths were intermingled with the faint echoes of the operatic strain, Ah che la Morte, then silence again as someone fell to the floor!

Like a death groan the song moaned and faded—it was the voice of Pauline’s father, who had tried to sing some half-forgotten song of other days. Could one have peeped out of that shanty door into the moonlight, he would have been seen once more on his regular night route, staggering beneath the palms homeward, the eternal white jacket fluttering afar as the ever watching, sinister, white-faced man kept by his side, swaying and tottering like some awful-looking, sardonic mimic as they returned to that lonely home in the hills.

“Toime, gentlemen, please!” It was the only call of closing time in Tai-o-hae, and came from the umpires outside as two burly, sunburnt men of the sea closed together. The struggle soon ceased. A faint hurrah announced the victor, as crash! his opponent fell to the sward. It was nothing much, just a little forcible argument between two passionate men on some point that neither remembered when the winner had been proclaimed, and once again they drank—fearless comrades at the shanty bar!

Those rough men had a strange fascination for me. I do not hint that they were samples of the highest order, but I emphatically assert that that shanty was a good old honest slop-shop of life. Therein one could go and pick up a good bargain in the way of man—bad as well as good. It was as though Fate had made a glorious fizzling stew, a stock-pot of bubbling, singing life, always at boiling-point. Flavoured with the finest “familiar juice,” a connoisseur could sniff at the shanty door the odoriferous steaming poetry, the delicious fragrance from the boiled-down wild-bird-like songs. It was the steaming of romantic brains, the intoxicating odours of forgotten moonlit nights—a woman’s kisses years away, old memories, dead certs and dead dreams. For those old birds would sometimes come to the surface, flutter their wings and sing unearthly songs, strains of haunting beauty, only for a moment as they opened their grog-blossomed beaks, flapped their despairing, broken wings and then sank once again into the depths of the boiling groggy soup!

They were at this despairing, flapping stage when slowly the hubbub of the shanty faded. One by one the men went back to their ships. Songs ceased, and wild ejaculations of spontaneous merriment died out. The two pearl fortune hunters from the Paumotus had bummed their last drink and were snoring lustily on the atrociously hard wooden settee. Mrs Ranjo put out the first two rows of candles as old Ranjo struggled into bed with his boots on.

As Grimes and I stole out into the night we followed the last two lurching, ragged shadows as they went arm in arm back to their ship to sleep. They looked like two enormous frogs, staggering and hopping in drunken glee, their hind legs akimbo. We were the last to arrive on that derelict hulk, for it was there that I too retired to sleep.

But I could not sleep that night. I stole from my bunk and crept up on to the old hulk’s deck, watching the dim horizons, and wishing that the western stars might answer that old figurehead’s eternal appeal, the call of those beseeching hands, that the tattered sails might spread, and, ghost-like, steal away, taking us across that moon-enchanted sea, across phantom oceans beyond the sky-lines of mortal dreams. Ah! how glorious to go out of the realms of Time and yet be alive, bound for the beyond, voyaging on an old raft, alone with those ragged old shellbacks, singing rollicking chanteys with them—till we crashed up against the shores of Immortality. As I stood there dreaming I half fancied it had happened; that I saw that huddled, sinful crew of sailormen, with awestruck, staring eyes, creeping up those hallowed shores. It was a mad fancy, I know. I knocked the ashes from my pipe and stole below, once again, into the bowels of the hulk. Uncle Sam, Grimes, the Irishman, the Scotsman and the bank manager were still sleepily arguing as they pulled off their boots. One by one they jumped into their bunks, where the dead sailors, the old hulk’s crew, had once slept and dreamed. Select, in the far corner by the fore-peak, the university man lay fast asleep, his dirty white cuffs still on.

I lay and stared through the port-hole at the infinite expanse of blue sea outside. The world, somehow, did not seem to be made for sleep by night. I crept from my bunk once more; all was silent below excepting for double-bass snores. I stole up on deck.

As I stood there, perfectly alone with the night, so tremendously vast and lonely did the heavens appear that I became, as it were, half-etherealised, inspired by some intense, sad religion. I felt half sorry for God. Staring up at that vast, mirror-like expanse, I half fancied I saw the Great Poet of the Universe enthroned in eternal loneliness, encircled by dark infinities, surrounded by His shattered dreams—the stars.

Only that legendary woman, that derelict’s figurehead, and I seemed to be intensely awake in the whole world. The poetry of existence hung like a mysterious shroud about me. That figure seemed to be my glorious dead romance. She was no insensate, legendary form, but a woman of immortal beauty. The crumbling wood became mysteriously imbued with light, the marble-like shoulders reddened, she blushed to the brow. I smelt ancient scents of burning sandalwood; a faint breath of warm wind stole across the silent tropic sea; her glorious hair was outblown. As I leaned over, the bosom heaved and the eyes shone with etherealised beauty. It was not wonderful to me when she moved, and her arms were outstretched to mine. I felt the fragrance of those lips breathe incense into my soul. The stars shone in her hair. I became half divine. I heard the cry of mortality; it seemed afar off, yet it cried in the swinging monotone of the seas on the reefs. I wondered on her romance: who was her lover, who the artist that had fashioned those beautiful lines, the curves of that graceful throat, her head thrown back? Ah! where was that poet lover as she, the legendary woman of his soul, lived on—rotting in the warm, tawny arms, the impassioned clasp of the wild, amorous, glorious South?

How strange it all seemed—his dust somewhere—and that figure from his soul still pointing its allegorical hands to the far-off stars, still obeying the eternal impulse of his work.

As I stared at that figure I seemed half to remember—perhaps I was that dead artist! What had brought me in all the world to that mysterious corner of the South? I’m mad enough, thought I.

Leaning forward, I struck a match on the poor crumbling shoulder and then deliberately placed the tiny blue flame against the wraith’s crown of spiritual hair—puff! a bright blaze, a fizzle, and lo! she had vanished—gone! my beautiful romance!

I lit my pipe, half chuckling at the thought of my splendid madness, the glorious insanity that a tiny match flame could so easily dispel.

I looked shoreward. The moon was hidden behind a wrack of cloud massed to the southward. Though the mist seemed to hang in perfect stillness in the heavens, it made me stare in breathless admiration as the palm-plumed mountain range and inland peaks slowly rose, grandly, silently to the skies. Like some slow-travelling castaway’s raft, the cloud wrack crept beneath the moon. It seemed only by a miracle that those jagged peaks did not burst through that crystalline dome of starry heaven.

That old hulk was not the only romantic spot in the heathen-land. By a mossy track, not far from the rugged feet of the mountains, stood that which now appears across the years to have been a phantom-like hamlet. It was a native village of tiny huts. One little, grey, wooden building stood with its verandahed front facing a gap in the granite hills.

Once or twice I went into that little homestead and played the violin, for the settler, John L——, was fond of fiddling.

I slept there one night, or tried to, but the weirdness of that little homestead gave me no sleep, for from that enchanted homestead’s window one could see the distant ocean, looking like a witch’s vast cauldron, full of boiling, bubbling, fire-flecked, silvered foam. It was a silent, windless night that I spent there, yet between the intervals of the nightingale’s “tin lan lone, loe lan ting,” up in the bread-fruit trees, came weird sounds that thrilled me with fear. It was a faint, far-off kind of rasping. It sounded as though two burglars were busily filing at the gates of some enchanted castle of dreams wherein I slept! “Sea-saw—sea-saw” it went, with a frightening sound, then silence at regular intervals. Yes, as though those two burglars, who would rob that castle of romance, paused in their nefarious work, wondering if they were heard. I was wide awake, but still the sounds continued! As a zephyr of wind came and wailed a plaintive accompaniment in the she-oaks, those mysterious raspings sounded as though a phantom violon-cellist had come to perform at the castle gate. First came the low bass’s mellow note, and then it seemed that the performer’s bow was swung over to the “A” string sounding some weird, falsetto harmonic! I leapt from bed, determined to rout the troubadour of such an unseemly hour. I discovered that, like most romantic ideas, the cause of it all was human—and even so had a low origin, for it was Pauline’s father, drunk, snoring on the verandah, while his weird comrade even in sleep followed his deep bass snore in a falsetto, obsequious-like echo.

That was the only occasion that I slept in the white girl Pauline’s home.