A. Safroni-Middleton

“ Miss Waylao,” I say jokingly through the door chink as I spy Benbow’s daughter.
No answer comes. But as I stroll away I look back and just catch a glimpse of the girl’s face as she gazes after me through the little lattice window. I wave my hand, and she responds with a smile.
It seems a romantic isle to me as I stroll along. The very trees bend over me like wise old friends, wailing the lore of ages as the winds creep in from the empurpled seas. The exotic odours of forest flowers intoxicate my senses; they seem bright, living eyes of woods as they dance to the zephyrs. ”

“ The dark saffron-hued canvas sails bellied to the soft warm winds as the outward-bound schooner went out on the tide, as he stood on deck and faded away on the wine-dark seas.
I could write many chapters on such men, their ways, virtues and sins. They were strange, unfathomable beings of Time and Space: men who followed their own wishes, who reigned as king over their own life: men who were disciples of the great transcendental school of the genuine old idealists—those spiritualists of the Truth, the wise and the beautiful, happy in the glad excitement of the wide and wonderful. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As though a ghost had crept from the forest to warn Waylao, her shadow crept in front of her. Abduh’s monstrous silhouette also dodged in front of him, so grotesque, so hideous that it might well have been the true index of his mind expressed in his shadow to warn the mad girl. Suddenly they arrived at the hollow in the volcanic rock. It was the entrance to the mosque. Once in ages past that great cavern by the sea had been moulded by Nature’s volcanic passion—and now the children of those wild lands were lured into those old bowels wherein glowed the passions of a greater hell. ”

“ I said, as I shook my head, and then at finding that Waylao was not my wife, they gazed with deeper interest.
“You after Marama? She belonger you? Runs away from you? You love, she no love you?”
To please those pretty Fijian beauties, I placed my hand on my heart and sighed. I shall never forget the great murmur that went up from that flock of dusky mouths, or the gaze of those dark eyes that gleamed at the thought of some romance in the arrival of the travelling maid, her disappearance—and then my coming on the scene. ”

“ As Waylao and I listened to her story, I imagined that girl to be some terrible symbol, some sad, beautiful personification of all the castaways of the earth. The very winds seemed to shriek triumphantly, as though they still roared out the hate of pious men, and coming from the far-off cities across the seas, rushed up that shore and shook the forest trees violently with pursuing hands. I felt as though the world of reality had long since been shattered back into its hell by the final cataclysm, the crash of the spheres ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Men change completely. Environment makes all the difference. Undress the artist, take the hope of praise for his enthusiastic efforts from him, make him a tribal chief, and lo! his mental efforts are reversed. Some primitive tribe applauds his ferocious, cannibalistic appetite, his cruelty, his merciless, sardonic grin as some harem wife shrieks at the stake. And he who, by God’s mercy, escaped the British gallows, roams some South Sea forest and finds himself; becomes a poet, the wonders of Nature, the music of the Ocean turning his exiled thoughts near to tears. ”

“ The scandal swept with magical rapidity from village to village, from shore to shore. Indeed scandal was as rampant in the South Seas as in the cities of civilisation.
The rumour spread and spread, and took on wondrous shapes and hideous detail. Some pitied the girl, and cried: “What! Waylao? Well, I never! Poor Waylao!”
Others cried: “Shame! Shame! Oh, the sinful wretch to do so! Kill her! Kill her!”
Old Ranjo tucked his shirt-sleeves up and struck fearsome imaginary blows into the air of his saloon bar, blows that his heart yearned to inflict on the girl’s betrayer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I know that, notwithstanding her rough surroundings, she is innocent as a child; I know she loves her pet canary. I envy that canary as she babbles on, and I catch glances from her fine lustrous eyes, dark with a blue depth in the pupils, a depth that sparkles at times as though a far-off star shines in their heavens.
In a few moments we part. I hear a musical ripple of laughter as she disappears in the mission-room where resides Père de ——, the old priest, who has known and educated Waylao since she toddled. ”

“ In a moment he had dived, clutched the girl and brought her to the surface—coral and all. “Waylao, you would leave us alone to sorrow over your death. Have we not sorrowed enough?”
So did he speak as Waylao opened her eyes and gazed into those of her rescuer.
“Forgive me, I longed to die,” she cried, as Aiola, the Hawaiian girl, opened her bodice to chafe her breast.
“Kilia!” (leprosy) cried the Hawaiian maid as she rubbed Waylao’s bosom and the skin all peeled softly off on to her hand—Waylao had contracted the plague, she too was a leper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then I explained: “You be great Marquesan chief, all ladies look at you and say: ‘O handsome Hermionæ, we love you, we love you! How beautiful you are!’ Then you fall into their arms, kiss them like this.”
Here Grimes and I embraced, and showed him exactly how to do it.
He screamed with delight, like a big child. Grimes and I nearly burst with laughter as he mimicked the scenes he pictured. Like all Marquesans, he was alert, and swift of comprehension, and extremely imaginative.
“Love me? Fall at my feet? Hubbie jealous? White womans love me? Me love wife when white man no look?” ”

“ I looked on the world for the last time. They led me forth: I heard the last bird singing in the coco-palms. I felt that I deserved death by that atrocious blade; I could not remember the crime, but it was sufficient that I had displeased Man. The knife looked down at me, wriggled, seemed to grin and clink out in this wise:
“Ha! Ha! Ha! Thou hast displeased thy fellow-beings—they who never sinned—thou must die!”
In some mysterious way my mother, Pauline and Waylao became mixed up, became one personality. ”

“ Once more the roof of Benbow’s cottage vibrated as the chorus of I owe Ten Shillings to O’Grady struck the silence of those South Sea hills. In the middle of the songs came the hubbub of various calls for rum, terrible oaths and enthusiastic encores. It sounded like some mighty gramophonic record coming on telegraph wires through the earth’s centre, rumbling and humming from far-off civilisation, from the other side of the globe, ay, from London town itself, as the thousand echoes struck the silent hills of heathendom. The native children also flocked across the slopes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He often spoke of Waylao in sorrow, and of the sins and the passions of the dusky Southern race. Through his hospitality I met Pauline more than once. She loved to hear me play the violin. The world took on a different atmosphere as she sang old English songs her father had taught her. The beauty of those songs was intense, and I became home-sick as I listened to her voice, accompanied by the monotone of the breaking seas below and the wild oaths of sunburnt seafaring men in the grog shanty hard by. None but exiles know how an English song touches the heart and awakens dreams in a man. ”

“ In looking back, how different seem the dreams that were once ours. The present seems a daub, it has no perspective of its own, it is like the raw colours of the aspiring artist ere he spreads them on the canvas and the picture slowly shapes itself from his creating brain. How beautiful are the paintings of rosy horizons of To-morrows—how transfigured, how rare and beautiful are those wonderful masterpieces of—Sad Yesterdays.
Ah! Waylao, you are the embodied phantom of my dreams. To-day I sit in sorrow and mix my colours, and toil away as I paint you, both as you were and as you appear now. ”

“ They knew that the inevitable hour was drawing near when life would be more than a living death, for would they not see their own dissolution? They cared not for the risk of a schooner sighting that signal. It would take Waylao away to safety, but it would not take them. No; the Hawaiians had resolved to go on a longer journey should their hiding-place be discovered. When O Le Haiwa-oe saw Waylao take the signal down, his eyes filled with tears, and in a moment he had run out to the edge of the promontory and placed the canvas sail fluttering to the breeze. ”

“ When Waylao reached the Indian’s side she looked into his eyes as though she would read his soul. But I suppose that the instincts of woman failed her in the supreme moment and she did not appear to doubt the veracity of his explanation. I can well imagine that his voice was musical and sounded divinely truthful. How could she be expected to doubt so noble, so manly-looking a lover?
Most of us place our confidence in the most unworthy objects. It’s a pity that faith, which Providence lends us, is not double-sighted in women—and in men too. ”

“ Besides, I’ve smashed about so much in this grey, swashbuckling world of Grand Old Liars, knighted thieves, rogues and successful hypocrites, that the background of my life in early boyhood seems a dim fairyland, whereover I roamed at will from wonder to wonder, laden with the wealth of cheek and impudence enormous. Reaping such wonders I fail to find in pages of romance experiences that outrival those of my boyhood, which leads me to imagine that I can paint down, out of the Past, some of the sparkling atmosphere that buoyed me up in the wide travels of my youth. ”

“ The handsome chief, the beautiful, clinging woman and the stricken crew of the hulk were escapes—fugitives from the dreadful lazaretto on Molokai, the leper isle.
The Hawaiian chief and his lover—for such they were, though stricken with the scourge—had no sign as yet visible on their faces.
The sympathetic look that Waylao gave them, the pleasure she revealed at their presence, touched their hearts. It was long, long ago since human beings had welcomed their presence. ”

“ 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. ”