A. Safroni-Middleton

“ Samoan girls with wild, bright eyes, round, plump, brown faces, and curved figures as perfect as sculptural art, pass and repass up the forest tracks. They are singing Samoan songs that intensify the romantic, dream-like atmosphere of the tropical night—an atmosphere not even to be dispelled by the wailing cry of the native babies, who give short, wild, smothered screams as they lose and then suddenly recover the breasts of sleeping mothers in those thatched homes by the palms and banana groves. The vast night sky, agleam with stars, shines like a mighty mirror. ”

“ I don’t know which has won in the race to populate the lonely and beautifully secret-keeping isles of those far-away seas, but I think the good old flag is still to the front, flying to the breeze, represented in the sparkling, dancing eyes of the romping children on the wooded South Sea slopes—pretty violet eyes they have too, some grey and some grey-brown, little laughing angels of innocence, as they gaze up at you and go tumbling head over heels, revealing their tiny plump white-splashed backs, and the good old missionary sprees hidden in the dark of the unrecorded! ”

“ All the visionary beauty of woman shone on her brow and in the fear of her parted lips as she called his name.
Slowly, as though in some terror of the fascination and dread over which her soul had no control, her pale hands clung, pulled at the canvas folds of the doorway’s old curtain. Again and again she pushed and pulled till slowly that fragile curtain, which divided the wandering Sestrina from the sleeper, was swept aside, revealing Hawahee’s handsome form and sleeping face. He tried to rise. He knew that he dreamed, and yet he knew that his dream was the unseen reality of the truth! ”

“ Now the gods and goddesses had not long left the lonely forest when old Silence trembled in his cave at hearing the jabbering and scampering about of unusual things amongst his solemn trees. An extraordinary thing had happened, for, as the light of the sun stared down through the branches of the coco-palms, six newly-created men yawned, jumped to their new, soft, brown clay feet, and gazed on each other in mute astonishment. ‘Who am I? Who are you?’ It sounded like echoes answering each other in a cave, as each one gabbled forth, ‘Who am I? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Samoa still rises silently in moonlight out of the sea of my dreams. I can hear the barbarian orchestra clanging away down in the native village, as Samoan girls and youths, and two or three white men, waltz under the palms just below the plateau, where groves of orange-trees hang their golden fruit amongst dark leaves. As I play the violin the semi-savage people whirl to the wild rhythm of the forest ballroom music of a tribal waltz. ”

“ Only the far-away sigh of the winds reached her, the voices of the shell-gods were silent at last! Again she listened—a startled look leaped into her eyes, for she could hear the distant voice of Pelé rumbling across the pine and palm tracks. It was a noiseless sound, just as one hears when placing the ear against the pearly entrance of a large sea-shell. As though she was haunted by the presence of some unfathomable terror, she wrung her hands, and began to creep tiptoe up the slopes.
“Hawahee! Hawahee! save me! I am a woman, I am weak, and you are strong,” she cried. ”

“ You once loved the songs of my homeland, as I once loved and cherished the wild, impassioned songs of your sunny isles. Ambushed in your warm, impulsive clasp, I have heard the moaning waves wailing, breaking over the coral reefs, tossing their arms with laughter, like the dusky children of those wild shores. You have haunted me in long, long dreams through the night, as I slept by the banyans of the moonlit shore. Soft-footed you crept out of the shadows and sang your magical melodies into my sleeping ears. And Pauline would come too, the beloved maid of the Western Seas. ”

“ The moon at once shone out in the sky and the old leader put his hand up to the orb and filled his arms with beautiful moonlight ere he struck the cloud with his magic breath and the thick, dark mist dissolving fell as sparkling rain softly to the isle far below. The bright moonlight clinging to the falling drops made ropes of moonbeams dangle to the forest tree-tops, on which the laughing stars slid as they went down, down—as beautiful youths, to fall into the outstretched arms of the surprised maidens. And that’s how man and woman first came to the Samoan Isles! ”

“ The sun had risen and set thrice when the maids danced on the shore, all singing some song which they had learnt from the soft murmurings of a seashell. Each had clad her form in a small lava-lava that was made of seaweed and fastened by threaded grass about the loins. Standing on the big lumps of red coral, they all dived into the ocean, to come forth laughing, as the sea-water fell glistening from their tresses that half hid their soft feet. ‘Oh, how lovely this world really is!’ they said, as they lifted seashells to their ears, and, singing again, dived headlong into the ocean. ”

“ Sestrina’s gaze met his own. Again she inclined her head, and placed her hand over her eyes.
“Hawahee, remember I am weak, I am a woman!” she sobbed. Her voice seemed to awaken the Hawaiian fanatic from some lovely impassioned dream. He suddenly stared over his shoulder, a startled look in his eyes. Beads of sweat stood on his brow. He too had something to remember—he was a leper! And as he remembered, he distinctly heard the warning, moaning chimes of the shells and the gods of the temple of the valley. They both knelt there, listening, fright and misery expressed on their brows. ”

“ One night the flocks of parrots and strange birds—that none had ever named—suddenly rose in a screeching drove above the palms of that lonely isle. Up, up they rose, fluttering beneath the white South Sea moon. They had been disturbed from their roosts by the agonised scream of the demented human being who had so mysteriously arrived on their little world. It was Waylao’s screech that had disturbed them. Humanity had come with its manifold woes and terrors to their world, and so the very birds of the air groped and fluttered blindly with fright up in the moonlit sky. ”

“ For in my forest wanderings, about two days before the evening I have mentioned, I had met Mabau. She did not know at first that I had perceived her in a lonely spot. She knelt on her knees before a rotting, cast-off wooden idol. Sunset had fired with red and gold the tops of the coco-palms and forest trees; overhead a few birds were still whistling. As I approached, and the dead scrub cracked beneath my feet, the heathen-hearted little maid looked hastily over her bare shoulder and, seeing me, arose swiftly, as though for flight. ”

“ In short, Clensy saw the world, nay, the universe itself, as a vast deification of himself, whereas he was only the tiniest, humblest miniature of creation’s conscious yearning to make the leaf green; his own life no more than a sunbeam’s warmth on a wild flower.
And Sestrina? the maid of southern blood, the light of the tropic suns and stars in her veins? She did not rave when she thought of Clensy, she made no god or goddess of her physical sensations. ”

“ As we sat in the magic canoe, she did softly step into it and give a magic sign. It was with much sorrow that I did notice that the taumualua carry no paddles, for, Papalagi, I feel that the goddess may be for voyaging beneath the sea instead of moving over the waters. But just as I did look into my kinsman’s eyes in sorrow, the goddess did stand upright between us. She was as tall as a mast and as straight. Uplifting her robes and stretching her curved arms out like unto sails of a ship, the night wind did at once commence to softly blow. ”

“ By the shore grog shanty, that lies just by the hollows, is something in the ocean that looks like the weather-beaten figurehead of a sunken Chinese junk. Suddenly it moves; at last two hands rise from the depths and start to rub with cleansing vigour the matted hair and crooked-nosed face. It is the gnarled, wrinkled physiognomy of Ranjo, the store-keeper of the grog shanty. He, too, is having his morning bath. As he stands there reflecting, immersed to the shoulders, he is deep in thoughts that are as vital to him as the problem of the visible universe. ”

“ Yes, to be ashore on some far-away isle, clasping the savage maid in your arms by the coco-palms, gazing in the delicious orbs of the Universe—infinity in beams of eyelight. To breathe the present, yet be alive in the past, far away down the centuries of the modern dark ages! To walk by primeval forest and tumbling moonlit seas where they break over coral reefs. To rest by camp fires and huts, talking with bush women and men, and girls with sparkling eyes, eyes clear as heaven with her moon and stars. ”

“ Why not feel the lovely, strong clasp of the arms of love? Have I not secretly longed for such love—and have I not heard the hidden voices of his dreams steal to me across the moonlit yam patch? Why have the gods given me this strange desire? Am I different to the women who walk the great living world that I am separated from by those far-away skylines of the ocean and by cruel fate. O Atua, O Pelé, do I not remember the old things of my childhood, of the longings and sweet, kind ways of the world of the past? ”

“ I often stood on those slopes by night and watched the dim lamps far below on Apia’s only street. As I write I seem to live again in the past. Once more Tamafanga and I stand together beneath the palms and watch the stars shining over the distant sea. All the birds of the forest are silent, only the songs of a few sailors in the beach shanty break the stillness. As I dream on, Vaea’s mountain-peak rises to the skies as the moon looms up far out at sea. Only the beautiful tavau-trees and plumed palms move as the sea winds touch them. ”

“ Just over the side I watch the mirrored masts and rigging glide along with us as though a ghostly ship is following; and the hours fly and dawn breaks greyly, and once more the tramp steamer is surrounded by blue sky-lines, till sunset sinks to a wild blaze in the western arch of the sky. The sailors go on watch. The cook washes his pots and pans ere he cuts his corns and turns into his bunk.
The wind’s voice murmurs mournfully in the rigging and round the bridge awnings; as the night grows older it swells to a tremendous voice that is really me! ”

“ The wisest men who ever lived are only little children crying in the dark for light as they throw pebbles into their little ponds of dreams and imagine they are sounding the depths of infinity, of human nature and the mystery of life and death. Men know nothing! The present is a chimera, the past a remembrance of it, and the dim future the uncertainty that is the soul of religion. Why, even that bedraggled old cockatoo on the palm outside my window might easily be some reincarnation of a dead disillusioned philosopher. ”

“ The wonderful shores of Nuka Hiva are sharply outlined in my memory, lulled by the echoing monotone of the ocean. The winds are all asleep. Even my old schooner the Molyhawk, whose every board and bunk I know, looks unreal, like some painted ship on a painted moonlit tropical lagoon. The half-reefed, hanging canvas sails seem the tired wings of Silence itself; they look unreal, as though fixed—a mirage hanging between the crystalline, moonlit sky and sea.
Only the creeping shadows, belated natives by the shore banyans, give a touch of reality that is somehow stranger than the dream. ”

“ I also seemed to have frozen and become a part of the machine which is called civilisation. The songs of sails aloft, the noise of forest winds and soundings across deep waters, had faded from my dreams into a wail of selfishness. Imagination is the soul of the Universe, and grief is its Bible; but, alas, I felt a gross craving for food.
So my ambition to outrival Paganini on the violin had subsided from its state of enthusiastic fire and had left in my heart a dull callousness. One intense wish survived: to get a sound pair of boots and a new suit! ”

“ The flush of health, the oval, dimpled face, the coral red lips and lustrous eyes might well have brought the light of admiration to the eyes of men placed in less loneliness than that which passed over the Hawaiian’s solitary days. Perhaps it was the glory of Sestrina’s mass of hair that made her look like some wonderful picture that represented the zenith of woman’s physical loveliness. But the perfect beauty of Sestrina gleamed in the earnest, spiritual light of her eyes, the expression on the tremulous mouth, and the calm pure brow. ”

“ I felt certain that the world had suddenly shifted its orbit and had taken a headlong plunge into infinite space. I turned my head and looked over my shoulder; though the night was pitch black I saw it rise—a thundering, boiling mass of ocean ablaze with phosphorescent light. Up—up—it came. The Rockhampton shivered and crouched like a hunted, frightened stag of the ocean. Crash! We had pooped a sea! A mountain of seething, boiling water rushed along the deck and swept to the galley. I felt the stern sink to the weight of the water as the jib-boom stabbed the sky. ”

“ I am a boy again, and am thrilled with such a feeling as a poet has when he treads visionary worlds and forgets his sad reality. How happy I feel as I move along in the white moonlight from wharf to wharf, gazing on each wooden ship and wondering on their past voyages, what seas they crossed ere I was born, and what the seaports looked like when they came sailing down, with weather-beaten sailors staring from the fo’c’sle head. ”

“ And it was this weird, mournful chime which came to Hawahee’s and Sestrina’s ears as they crept under the tall breadfruit trees, so that they might kneel in prayer before the altar of the shell-gods!
It was a grand, masterly fashioned work, a temple of the highest art attainable by mortal man. With the infinite patience of religious fervour, and a deep insight and belief in the divine omnipotence of his pagan gods, Hawahee had scraped and cut, through years of toil, three of the larger shells till they resembled the faces of the goddess Pelé and the gods Kauhilo and Atua. ”

“ Down in the magical world of words, before the mind’s eye and ear, we should have seen the vast tropical Pacific, and the stars over it reflected in the lagoons of the far-scattered isles clad with coco-palms as if painted by the magical silver oils of moonlight. We should have heard the cry of the traders and seen the beachcombers’ ragged clothes fluttering by tossing waters, and paddled canoes filled with the swarthy faces of wild men, on the waves that were breaking over the shores of his wonderful pages. ”

“ On the third or fourth day Waylao lifted her death-stricken face and wondered if she still lived. She stared around. Had she died, and was she still travelling onward across some purgatorial ocean of death? As she stared, she saw a tiny blot; it glimmered on the western horizon. At first she thought it was a ship; then in her delirium she thought it was the shores of Nuka Hiva in sight.
At such a possibility the love of life that is so strong in youth awoke again, and her being thrilled with tremendous hope. She might yet live to gaze into the eyes of those she loved. ”

“ Just before sunset on that same day, Sestrina came back from her swim in the lagoon and stood before Hawahee, who at once stopped chopping firewood and gazed upon her. A deep light shone in Sestrina’s eyes as she stood before the Hawaiian arrayed in the tappa bodice, rami and sandals.
On seeing the light in the girl’s eyes Hawahee’s eyes also brightened, the lines of care at once smoothed from his brow. The next moment Sestrina blushed deeply and realised, for the first time, that, however hard a woman strives to conceal the secret thoughts of her heart, her eyes must give her away. ”

“ The poetry of Sydney harbour, with its sights and turmoil of sound, lives in my memory as though to-day is far-off yesterday. I even remember, and feel again, my strange romantic loneliness as I watch the silent ships lying out in the bay. Night, like life, is on the deep, tide-moving waters; in the dark depths the fixed mirrored stars shine steadfastly like Eternity, while over them the waters ebb seaward or flow towards the shore. The outline of North Shore, like another continent, rises across the wide harbour, and exactly opposite are the spires of the grand, silent, sea-board city. ”