GABRIELLE OF THE LAGOON
A ROMANCE OF THE SOUTH SEAS
BY
A. SAFRONI-MIDDLETON
AUTHOR OF
“SAILOR AND BEACHCOMBER”
PROLOGUE
Though it was night and there was no moon, a dim, weird light lay over the isle and pierced to the depths of the forests. It was in the Solomons, where the dark, picturesque surroundings of palm and reef, the noise of the distant surfs, made a suitable setting for anything unexpected. Even the silver sea-birds had weird, startled-looking eyes down Felisi beach way. And when the wild brown men crept away from the grave-side of one whom they had just buried in the forest, the winds sighed a fitting music across the primeval heights. But there was nothing strange in that; men must die wherever one goes, and it was a common enough occurrence in that heathen land where the ocean boomed on the one side and inland to the south-west stood the mountains, looking like mighty monuments erected in memory of the first dark ages. Across the skies of Bougainville the stars had been marshalled in the millions. It seemed a veritable heathen faeryland as the night echoed a hollow “Tarabab!” But even that heathenish word was only the tribal chief’s yell as he stood under the palms conducting the semi-religious tambu ceremony. The tawny maidens and high chiefs, with their feather head-dresses, all in full festival costume, were squatting in front of the secret tambu stage, some mumbling prayer, others beating their hands together as an accompaniment. And still the dusky tambu dancer moved her perfect limbs rhythmically to the rustling of her sarong-like attire, swaying first to the right then to the left as she chanted to the wailings of the bamboo fifes and bone flutes. The orchestral-like moan of the huge bread-fruits, as odorous drifts of hot wind swept in from the tropic seas, seemed to murmur in complete sympathy with the pretty dancer. One might easily have concluded that Oom Pa, the aged high priest, was the “star turn” of the evening as he stood there enjoying his thoughts and performing magnificently on the monster tribal drum.
There was something fascinating and super-primitive about the whole scene. The very scents from decaying forest frangipani and hibiscus blossoms seemed to drift out of the damp gloom of the dark ages. The presence of civilisation in any form seemed the remotest of possibilities. Even the fore-and-aft schooner, with yellowish, hanging canvas sails, lying at anchor just beyond the shore lagoons, looked like some strange-rigged craft that sailed mysterious seas.
But as the assembled tribe once again wildly clamoured for the next dancer to come forward and exhibit her charms, a murmur of surprise rose from the back rows of stalwart, tattooed chiefs—a white girl suddenly ran out of the forest and jumped on to the tambu stage!
One aged chiefess who was busy mumbling her prayers looked up and gave a frightened scream. Even the aged philosophical head-hunter Ra-mai, who had one hundred and eighty skulls hanging to his credit in his palavana hard by, gave a mellow grunt, so great was his surprise. A white girl, lips red as coral, hair like the sunset’s gold, standing by his old pae pae! It was something that he had never dreamed of. The tawny maidens squatting beneath the coco-nut-oil-lamp-lit shades on the right of the buttressed banyans, lifted their hands in astonishment. For a moment the white girl stood perfectly still. All eyes were upon her. She stared vacantly as though she were in a trance. Then she moved forward a few steps, her feet lightly touching the forest floor as if she were a visionary figure veiled in moonlight. Only the sudden renewal of the wild clamouring and guttural cries of “O la Maramam tambu, papalaga!” (“A white girl will dance before us!”) seemed to rouse her to her senses, reminding her of the reason she had responded to the swelling chorus of tribal drums.
The barbarian musicians had begun to bang and blow on their flutes in an inspired way as they urged her to dance. Her sudden hesitation was very evident to every onlooker. And as she stood there by the monster tambu idol, its big glass eyes agog and wooden lips stretched in hideous laughter, she had a strange, unearthly beauty. The winds sighed in the palms; she wavered like a blown spirit-girl that had been suddenly swept out of the night of stars into the midst of those Pharaoh-like chiefs. Some of those warriors watched with chin on hand, others stared upon her with burning eyes.
Those old chiefs and their women-kind had seen many strange sights and experienced many shocks since German, British, Malayan, Hindoo, Chinese and Dutch settlers had set foot on their shores; but still they were quite unprepared for the sight they witnessed that night. The handsome Malayo-Polynesian half-castes nudged their comrades in the ribs and murmured the native equivalent to “What-o!” To their delight, the white girl had mounted the pae pae and had begun to dance and sing. The whole tribe watched and listened, spellbound. The haunting sweetness of the melody seemed to bring all ears under its influence. It was something in the way of song that those wild people had never heard before.
Only the pretty faded blue robe falling down to her brown-stockinged ankles and the long tortoise-shell comb stuck in the rich folds of her golden-bronze hair told of her mortal origin. And there was no mistaking the reality of that indisputable bang on the heathen bandmaster’s drum. That dusky virtuoso was certainly inspired by human passion.
Ra-mai, who was a kind of religious genius, dropped his festival calabash and rubbed his eyes, for the girl was swaying as though she were fastened on to the winds, her eyes wide open, staring upon him. The old priestly warrior swore, long after, that she was a spirit-maid whom he had loved a thousand years ago, and who had returned that night, as white as a deep-sea pearl, to show men how great a priest and warrior he really was. But he was a poetical old fellow and had a high opinion of himself where female beauty and frailty were concerned. But if there was an element of surprise over her sudden appearance before them, the astonishment of these natives was intensified by her dramatic exit from their midst. Just as the guttural cries of the chiefs and the weird monotones of the chanting tambu maidens had caught the tempo of her dance, she gave a scream, stood perfectly still and stared on those wild men with a terrified look in her eyes. Then, before anyone could realise her intentions, she had leapt from the pae pae, had run away into the forest and vanished like a wraith!
The whole tribal assemblage looked into each other’s eyes in astonishment. Such an exhibition of red betel-nut-stained teeth had never been seen in a midnight forest festival before, for they all stared open-mouthed.
“Tabaran [a spirit] from shadow-land!” said one.
“Not so. Didst see the light of vanity in her wondrous eyes as the young chiefs praised her beauty?” said another.
“’Tis a white girl suddenly up-grown and full of fever for love,” said an old chief with wise wrinkles on his brow. And then yet another said: “Had it been a full-moon sacred festival, ’twould have been well to slay her for such boldness, the cursed papalagi!”
Then the festival broke up. And that night the handsome chiefs, and even the aged priests, tossed restlessly on their bed-mats as they lay in their village huts dreaming of a goddess-like creature who had flitted through their tambu ceremony like a dream.
On the day following the tribal festival when the white girl had so astonished the heathen priests in the village called Ackra-Ackra a runaway ship’s apprentice emerged from his half-caste landlady’s wooden lodging-house. He was off for a stroll, for the tenth time or so, over the slopes that divided the banyan forests from the small township of Rokeville. He was stagnating and so had little else to do except to make the colour of the picturesque scenery harmonise with his meditations. He was a tall, handsome fellow, about twenty years of age. His brass-bound suit looked decidedly faded by the hot tropical sun, and the flannel collar of his only shirt had begun to look slightly grimy. All the same, he had that look of refinement which is inherited from good ancestors. A romantically inclined maid would have thought him extremely attractive. A bronze-hued lock seemed to ooze from beneath the rim of his cheese-cutter cap, for when funds were low in distant lands, and scissors scarce on ships at sea, his hair grew quite curly. One of his eyes was a deep blue and the other a golden-brown. This eccentric combination of colour may have had something to do with the romantic adventures that fell to his lot through his leaving ship in Bougainville. It was quite three weeks since he had made a bolt from his full-rigged sailing-ship in the harbour, consequently his cash in hand had seriously diminished. He had already become terribly sane whilst pondering over the natural consequences of being cashless.
Hillary L——, for that was his name, hated plantation work and all muscular endeavours that did not contain some element of romance. But still, he had long since realised, through his many adversities at the end of long voyages, that wherever one goes one must toil for a living, however romantic the scenery may appear.
“Blasted wicked world this! Wish white men could dress like the natives and chew nourishing nuts for a living!” he murmured, as he thoughtfully saluted the German official who was leaning against a dead screw-pine, on the top of which blew the Double Eagle flag.
Hillary was no fool; he could always be polite at the right time and place. He’d been stranded, with fourpence-halfpenny or so in his possession, in about ten islands during the last twelve months, and he knew that if things got to the worst he could apply to the German consul for a free passage to British New Guinea or to Samoa. Hence his politeness. He was British to the backbone, and as the Teutonic official murmured that it was a nice day Hillary nodded and then lifted a cloud of the finest coral-dust with his offside boot. He could hear the German spluttering and coughing in a fearful rage, wondering why the hot wind had suddenly lifted so much dust. Hillary’s contempt for anything in the German line was quite unaffected. The natives whispered: “Germhony mans nicer feller when he looker one way, but all-e-samee, he belonga debil mans.”
The young apprentice was one of a type that commercially was not worth a tinker’s dam. If he were a party to any scheme connected with finance, one could safely predict that that scheme was predestined to complete failure. But in the imaginative world Hillary could be pronounced a decided success.
It was the same wherever he went. The old sea-boots on the shelf of the seaport’s slop-shop danced a jig on some ship far at sea; the oilskins swelled to visionary limbs as sailormen opened their bearded mouths and climbed aloft, singing the chanteys that he could distinctly hear as he placed his ear to the shop’s dirty window!
The silk, blue-fringed chemise hanging on a nail by the oil lamp clung, as he gazed, to the limbs of some laughing girl; fingers travelling down the yellow keys of the second-hand piano mysteriously strummed out some melody that told of the briefness of life, youth and beauty. This poetical weakness was a veritable Old Man of the Sea on his back. But still, he was no fool, and, like most of his type, he could be strong where most men are weak.
As he turned round and looked on the desolate scene, and stared at the sunset out at sea, his face expressed an emotion that words cannot describe. The parrots rose in a glittering cloud as he stood their meditating, gazing on the small burial ground that he had suddenly stumbled across. It was where a few white men had been buried on the lonely beach-side, miles from the township. The crosses of coral stone were sunken very deep, the names nearly oblitered. “What a godforsaken, tragic place,” he muttered as he read:
Everything seemed tragic in those parts. For as he wandered along the beach a voice startled him as a weird face suddenly poked out of the mangroves:
“Noice even’ng, matey?”
“Yes,” responded the apprentice as he looked into the face of a sun-tanned remnant of a white man who stood by a fern-sheltered, thatched den. It was only old Adams, an ex-sailor, leading his Mormon-like existence. He was a kind of Solomon Island aristocrat of independent means. He was apparently attired in a wide-brimmed hat and beard only, for the climate is muggy in the Solomons. He did wear thin cotton pants, but they were so drenched with perspiration that they clung to his legs like a skin. He borrowed a shilling from the apprentice, shot a stream of tobacco juice seaward, then entered his hut, but before slamming the door behind him he looked back and said: “I’d git back to me ship if I was you; the Kai-Kai chiefs are on the b——taboo lay round ’ere, and they’d give their ears for that curly mop of yourn!” The door slammed. Once more Hillary was alone. As he walked away he could distinctly hear old Adams swearing at his four wives, who was apparently rushing round the hut looking for his clean shirt. They were dusky women, probably the daughters of tribal kings, and had given their birthrights to Adams so that they could be the wives of a noble papalagi. Such was the queer, mixed population of that solitary locality where the apprentice mooched along. And Rokeville, the shore township, was not much more dignified; but what it lacked socially was amply made up for by its Arabian-Nights-like atmosphere. Its one street, a silvery track made of coral dust, went winding down to the shore. And when the full moon peered over the ocean rim, touching with dim light the feathery palms that sheltered the tin roofs of the scattered coral-built houses, it looked like some staged faery town of a South Sea isle. Often by night some strange-rigged ship would hug the coast-line for hours while its crew of blackbirders crept ashore and kidnapped native men and women from the villages. Before dawn that stealthy craft had sailed away, crammed up to the hatches with cheap labour for the plantations and heathen seraglios of nowhere. By day things looked as real as possible. There was nothing faery-like about Parsons’ wooden grog shanty, that stood, sheltered by three tall palms, at the head of the township. Through its ever-open doorway by day and night passed the German, Scandinavian, Norwegian and Yankee shell-backs, who drank strong rum at the bar, banged their fists and narrated their Homeric deeds. That shanty was the commercial centre and stock exchange of Bougainville. It was haunted by about a dozen nondescript, aged Chinese, Dutch and Japanese seamen who wore pigtails, pointed beards or scraggy whiskers: on the brightest tropic day they succeeded in adding a touch of romance to the shore landscape, for when rum was scarce they leant their ragged backs against the palm stems and looked like old figure-heads from Chinese junks and Spanish galleons stuck up on end, till they spoilt the picture by pulling their tangled beards as they spat seaward. They also drank rum and existed, apparently, by watching the white seahorses charge the purple-ridged line of coral reefs that made the natural pier of that seaside resort. Consequently the young apprentice preferred the wild scenery of the mahogany forests and the blue lagoons where the brown maids dived, to the mixed society of that delectable township. To him there was something fascinating, almost poetic, about the mahogany-hued Papuans and Polynesians. But his ideals quite saved him from falling in love with a brown maid. And it must be confessed that the Solomon Isles was not an Olympian locality, where dwelt cold, passionless Hellenic beauties, and many a dusky Nausicaa and luring Circe had tempted bold sailormen to destruction by their songs and demonstrative exhibitions of their charms. But some of the maids were innocent enough, for as Hillary wandered by Felisi beach he caught sight of a tiny Polynesian baby girl. She was busy pulling wild flowers that grew amongst the thick tavu-grass. Her tiny body shone with a hue like a new Australian sovereign as sunset bathed her little figure with its hot light. Her alert, savage ears heard the apprentice’s footsteps in the scrub. Just for a moment her thick curls tossed and sparkled among the tall fern-grass as she sped away into the forest as though she quite expected a white man to shoot her at sight!
“I wonder what I’ll sight next; why, it’s like some fairy spot,” Hillary murmured as he watched the child disappear. Then he climbed over the reefs till he came right opposite the shore islets, where the natives swore their gods danced under the stars.
At this spot there happened to be a wide lagoon, and on the still waters, just where the mighty banyans leaned over and made a delightful shade, floated a canoe. “The very thing!” Hillary exclaimed. In a moment he was paddling about on the lagoon in the small primitive craft. Strange birds shrieked over his head, their crimson and blue wings flashing along as they resented his intrusion into their lovely solitude. Some had eyes like sparkling jewels and long, hanging coral-red legs and feet.
“What a bit of luck! I could paddle about here for ever!” was his comment as he swished the paddle, turned the prow of his canoe and went off full speed down the narrow creek-like passage that led to the wider stretch of water inland. “It’s like being alone on an uninhabited island,” he thought. Suddenly a hush came over the waters. Only the solitary “Kai koo-seeeek!” of a parakeet disturbed the silence. So still was the water of the lagoon that he seemed to float about on a mighty mirror. The huge buttressed banyans reflected in the deep, clear water by the banks hung upside down, twisted shapes in an abyss of blue. He could even discern the flock of shrieking, sky-winging lories as their images went wheeling silently over the wooded heights, so clearly was the forest fringe reflected in the depths.
“Good Lord!” he gasped, as he stared on that shadow-world; and no wonder, for on the rim of the hanging cloud, high over the leaning trees of the reflected sky, sped an ornamental canoe! Its paddle was swiftly curling, like a fast-flying bird’s wing. He nearly upset his small craft, so great was his astonishment, for, looking towards the bend where the banyans hid the expanse of inland water from view, he saw that the reflected figure in the canoe was real.
It wasn’t the canoe but the paddler that made him exclaim. “It can’t be an apparition with those hibiscus blossoms stuck in her hair,” he thought as he rubbed his eyes and stared again. The blue robe, open low at the neck, was the apprentice’s only excuse for his ridiculous idea in thinking that a beautiful princess of some unknown white race had suddenly appeared on the lagoon. She softly dipped her paddle and, shattering the blue sky and twisted boughs with one blow, came speeding towards him!
“Am I awake?” he muttered. She had waved her paddle, welcoming his presence as though she had known him for years. At first he hesitated, thinking that one word, one sign of recognition from him would make her vanish back into her native skies. But at length he too lifted his paddle and waved most enthusiastically!
As Hillary came closer he saw that there was sorrow in the girl’s blue eyes, as needs there must be, since Beauty is Sorrow’s legitimate child. A far-off gleam shone in them and glinted in her hair, which tumbled down to the warm white curves of her neck and round to her throat.
It was the pretty retroussé nose that looked so human.
Hillary took a deep breath and gazed again.
“Fancy meeting you here!” he said as in his embarrassment he pulled his dirty kerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face to hide his confusion; then, remembering, he hastily replaced the rag-like kerchief in his pocket.
“Fancy meeting you!” said the girl as she gave a silvery peal of laughter.
The young apprentice’s heart began to thump. He stared into the girl’s eyes as though she had mesmerised him. A wild desire thrilled his soul as she leaned forward, still paddling softly as she returned his gaze.
“Do you live here?—out here in the South Seas?” he murmured as he almost dropped his cheese-cutter midshipman’s cap into the water.
“Of course I do! Do you think I live up in the sky?”
“Shouldn’t be surprised if you did,” he responded, gaining his nerve. Then he told the girl that he thought she might have been a princess migrating or on tour in one of the intermediate steamers.
The girl stared at hearing this sally. The look that came into her eyes made the apprentice understand the cause of the girl’s apparently bold familiarity. She was quite unworldly. She seemed to read his thoughts, for she ceased paddling and, looking almost seriously into his face, said: “I’m Gabrielle Everard. I’ve lived in these islands with Dad since I was a child. Dad took me away to Ysabel and Gualdacanar about a year ago.”
“Did he really?” said Hillary as he metaphorically nudged himself to find her so pleasant and confidential.
“Mother dead?” he murmured as the sea-wind drifted across the waters, sighed in the shore banyans and blew the girl’s tresses about her throat.
“Mother’s dead, of course! Always has been so far as I can remember,” she responded, looking into the young man’s face intently, wondering why on earth his voice should sound so tender and concerned when he asked about her long-dead parent.
They paddled side by side. The strange girl’s eyes had done a grievous thing to Hillary’s soul. The feathery palms and old trees, catching the sea-winds, seemed to whisper cherished things of romance and long-forgotten lover to his ears. It took him that way because he was an amateur musician.
“What a beautiful voice you’ve got!” said he, as she dipped her paddle in perfect tempo to some wild melody that she sang in a minor key.
“Have I? Why, Dad says I’ve got a voice like a cockatoo!” she responded merrily.
“The wicked, unmusical old bounder!” said the apprentice; then he swiftly apologised.
“Oh, you needn’t be so sorry that you’ve said that. I don’t care a cuss!”
Once more Hillary metaphorically rubbed his hands. “Jove! What an original, fascinating creature the girl is, to be sure,” was his secret comment. Had the young apprentice known that the girl before him had danced on a heathen pae pae (stage) and sang before those cannibalistic tribal warriors the night before, he would most probably have been more fascinated by her presence than ever!
“Gabrielle! Gabrielle! What a name! Beautiful!” he murmured to himself as the girl dipped the paddle and sang on. By now they had arrived near the sandy shore of the inland lagoon.
“Must you go?” he said.
“Well, yes; but I can easily see you again, can’t I?” Hillary L—— made no articulate response. “And this is the Solomon Isles, remote from civilisation, far away in the cannibalistic South Seas!” he murmured deep within his happy soul.
But mad as Hillary was, he half realised that the girl before him was more of a child than a woman. She laughed, even giggled a little, like a happy child. Only five years had passed since she had played with the native kiddies, who many times had persuaded her to dance and sing their heathen songs as they pretended to be heathen chiefs and chiefesses performing on a toy pae pae. She had revelled in those dances. But no one would have dreamed by looking at her that she was not a pure-blooded white girl. Her father had married a beautiful three-quarter caste girl in Honolulu, so Gabrielle had a strain of dark blood in her veins!
The young apprentice couldn’t fathom the look in her eyes as he stared. Passion was just awakening in her soul, stealing like a tropical sunrise over the hills of childhood. To him she appeared like some spirit-creation that might at any moment take wings and fly away; so when she turned the prow of her canoe dead on to the soft sand and jumped ashore, he made a frantic dash and jumped, landing just behind her. He was determined to know when and where she would meet him again. But he had no need to fear; she did not fly away. She simply tied her canoe to a bamboo stem and, turning round, looked him full in the face with those glorious eyes that were to be for him two stars of the first magnitude. Then she placed her fingers in the folds of her hair and taking out one of the hibiscus blossoms, handed it to him, much to his surprise. He realised that it was more the act of a child than a woman of the world.
“I’ve read in books that girls give men flowers that have been fastened in their hair,” she said. This remark and act of the girl’s, and the look in her eyes, had a strange effect on Hillary’s susceptible mind. He almost felt the tears well into his eyes. It was all so unexpected, and told him in some great poetry of silence what the girl’s heart was made of, the utter loneliness of her existence and the way her childish dreams were flowing out to the great realities of life. He placed the flower in his buttonhole, then gazed on the girl as only an infatuated youth can gaze, and said: “Will you meet me here again, by this lagoon? Any day and time will do for me.”
“I’m sure to be this way again,” she said, and before the young apprentice could stop her she had flitted away under the coco-palms.
Before she got out of sight she turned and waved her hand. In his excitement he responded by waving his cap. Then she disappeared under the thick belt of dark mangroves by the swamp track that led inland in the direction of her father’s bungalow.
“What a girl!” That was the only audible comment he made as the girl went out of sight. And where did she go? She ran away over the slopes that lay just behind the township of Rokeville, back to her home and her trader father.
Old Everard, her parent, was a kind of freak too. He was a tall, clean-shaved, thin-faced man, with blue-grey eyes and a beaked nose; his mouth had a melancholy droop about it; the face in repose looked strong at times, but when he grinned and revealed his tobacco-blackened teeth it looked characterless, almost weak. At times he was extremely garrulous, at other times either reticent or insulting to anyone who might be unfortunate enough to come near him. Gabrielle seemed to be the only person in Bougainville who understood him. He didn’t take much interest in his daughter, though she might have done so in him. All he did was religiously to exercise his parental control by sending the girl on his selfish errands, mostly for rum and whisky. At other times he demanded that she should attend to his comforts when delirium tremens shook his spine. He was an ex-sailor. Trailing from the mainyard of his ship whilst anchored off the Solomon Group, he had lost a leg, and during his convalescence in Honolulu had married, finally settling down in Bougainville.
His homestead was a three-roomed bungalow, and he kept things going by the money he had saved during his seafaring life; he was also interested in copra plantations at Bougainville and at Ysabel. His temperament was choleric. He was known in the vicinity by the nickname “Shiver-me-timbers.” This cognomen was derived from the fact that he always stamped his wooden leg, making it shiver in his impatience, when he wanted a drink, consequently his wooden leg was never at rest. He looked like some wooden-legged Nemesis as he sat there that evening; and if any glamour still lingered in Gabrielle’s brain from her chance meeting with the young apprentice, it was swiftly dispelled by the stumping of that wooden member as she rushed indoors.
Even a wooden leg would seem to have its part to play in the universe: there was something imperative about its tapping voice. That fate-like tapping had smashed up many of Gabrielle’s young dreams; possibly that wooden leg was a soulless agent of the devil.
“Here’s the whisky, Dad,” said she, as the cockatoo looked down from its perch and shrieked: “Gabby-ell! Gabby-ell! Kai-kai-too!”
In a moment that weird symbol in wood, that represented all that was unromantic to her ardent soul, ceased its ominous “tip-e-te-tap-tap” as the old sailor looked up and spied his daughter.
“Thankee, thankee, kid!” he growled as he put forth his hand. Such was the domestic atmosphere that the girl had rushed back to.
After the young apprentice had waved his farewell to Gabrielle he strolled away under the palms. “Well, she’s a beautiful creature. Who’d have thought of meeting her in this wild place? She’s ethereal, too beautiful to make love to,” he sighed.
Possibly the contrast between Gabrielle Everard and the Solomon Island mop-headed girls etherealised her natural beauty in his eyes. This was a fatal outlook for Hillary, considering the girl’s impulsive nature and his chances in the love affair that he had unknowingly embarked upon. And possibly this outlook of his was the result of outward glamour having greatly influenced his indwelling life. He had succeeded in making himself the more unfitted to cope with his immediate surroundings by poring over such writers as Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Rousseau and Ruskin. But still, these writers, with their mad denunciations and rhapsodies, had helped to awaken in Hillary’s soul that adoration for the beautiful, that love for living art that nourishes a delight in God’s work. The young apprentice did not digest the whole contents of those volumes; he was too young to grasp their full meaning, but his mind had grasped enough to make him a kind of derelict missionary of the beautiful. When the moods came to him he would bury his nose in the pages of Byron, Shelley, Keats, etc. And the influence gathered from those poets possibly filled his head with vague imaginings over beauty and innocence, feeding the fires of wild aspiration that cannot be realised in this world, and were never realised and acted up to by the poets who wrote the poems.
As he walked on thoughts of the strange girl on the lagoon would haunt his brain. He had quite made up his mind to secure a berth on the sailing-ship that was leaving for New South Wales in a few days, but Gabrielle Everard’s eyes seemed to have magically changed the future for him.
It was almost with relief that he gave his arm to the drunken shellback who suddenly appeared from nowhere, struck him on the back and spat a stream of tobacco juice across Hillary’s poetic vision, taking him completely away from himself. Then the shellback faded away, went off shouting some wild sea chantey as he rolled over the slopes, bound for the sailor’s Morning and Evening Star—the distant light of Parsons’s grog shanty. It was getting dark. That night Hillary seemed inspired. He sat outside the wooden building where he lodged and played his violin to the shellback, traders and natives who came over the slopes to listen. Mango Pango, the pretty Polynesian servant, grinned from ear to ear, showing her pearly teeth, as she danced beneath the palms that grew right up to the verandah of his landlady’s homestead. Even the congregated sailormen ceased their unmelodious oaths as they pulled their beards and listened to his playing.
Hillary wasn’t a master on the violin; his career had been too erratic for him to get the necessary practice to accomplish great things in instrumental playing. But still he could perform the Poet and Peasant overture and most of the stock pieces, besides playing heathen melodies that sent the natives into ecstasies of delight. His sailor critics swore that his extemporised sea-jigs were the most classical of compositions that they had ever heard. For when he played the South Sea maids threw their limbs about in rhythmical swerves, till the soles of their pretty bare feet sometimes seemed turned toward the South Sea moon! Mango Pango, Marga Maroo and Topsy Turvy were dancing to their heart’s content as the hills re-echoed the shellbacks’ laughter and the wild chorus of O, For Rio Grande when the concert was disturbed. For notwithstanding the wild surroundings, the hilarity and awful oaths, piety roamed those savage isles.
As the strains of the Poet and Peasant overture trembled from Hillary’s violin a tall, handsome savage, attired in European clothes, stepped out from beneath the palms and complimented the young Englishman on his artistic performance. He was an educated savage, and naturally conducted himself in public just as a late missionary from the North-West Mission School at Honolulu should do. He was certainly an attractive-looking being, possibly through his mother being a Papuan and his father a handsome Malayan. Even the shellbacks pulled their whiskers and beards, and put on their best behaviour as he stood there and spoke as becomes a Rajah and late missionary who has “saved” thousands of souls; for he studied the philosophy of the Psalms so that they might fit in with his views. And it might be mentioned at once that he did not allow idealistic views to disturb the nice equilibrium of his earthly requirements. When he was excited his speech lapsed into the native pidgin-English. But he spoke perfectly as he addressed Hillary, saying: “You play exceedingly well, young man, and your rendering of Spohr’s concerto strikes me as superb. For perfect intonation and verve your performance outrivals the rendering by Monsieur De T——, whom I heard play it at the Tivoli, Honolulu.” So spake the civilised heathen.
“’Ark at ’im! an ole kanaka missionary!” whispered Bunky Lory, the ordinary seaman.
“’Andsome cove with his whiskers on,” said another, a Cockney.
There is no doubt that Rajah Koo Macka was a handsome type of man so far as the world’s idea of what’s handsome goes. He wore a fine moustache curled artistically at the ends; had fine teeth, ivory-white; and full, sensual, curved lips that were not a libel on his character. But his greatest asset was his magnetic, telescope-like eyes that could sight a sinfully inclined girl or woman miles off! Indeed he was a splendid example of a christianised heathen doing his best to be religious notwithstanding his inherently antagonistic principles. He had plenty of cash; he owned two or three schooners, and received a Government bounty for hunting down the white miscreants, those skippers who indulged in all the horrors of the black-birding slave traffic. He wore three medals on his ample breast, and besides the aforementioned bounty received a pension from some missionary society in London which had heard of his self-sacrifice whilst converting his heathen brothers from cannibalistic orgy and lust. And more, it was discovered, after many days, that he was a good and dutiful son to his old father Bapa, who still dwelt in the Rajah’s native village in far-away Tumba-Tumba, on the wild, God-forsaken coast of New Guinea. Such is a rough summary of the Rajah Koo Macka, whose ways were mysterious, more so than the wily Chinee! And though dead men may turn in their graves over the doings of men on earth, the apprentice only pulled the end of his virgin moustache, no prophetic breath of all that was destined to happen disturbing his equanimity.
The day after the young apprentice had played his violin to the shellbacks and listened to the Papuan Rajah’s eulogies over his playing, old Everard was sitting in his bungalow swearing like the much-maligned trooper. He was holding out his gouty foot whilst his daughter poured cool water upon it.
“What the devil are yer doing!” he yelled, as the girl, who had done exactly as she had been told to do, stood half-paralysed with fear over her parent’s outburst. Then the ex-sailor picked the ointment pot up and rubbed the swollen foot himself. As Gabrielle looked on and mentally thanked her Maker that her father had only one foot, he finished up by grabbing a chair and pitching it across the room, careless as to what it might hit. A fierce look came into the girl’s eyes, her face was hotly flushed. For a moment the old man opened his mouth in surprise, really thinking she meant to hurl the chair back at him. She looked for a moment like a beautiful young savage. Then she turned and rushed from the bungalow.
“Come back, you blasted little heathen!” roared old Everard as he stood up on his wooden leg; then he gave a fearful howl as his gouty foot gave him another twinge. His face was purple with passion. “I’ll break her b—— neck when she comes back, I will. She’s like her mother, that’s what she is.”
The ex-sailor’s wild sayings meant nothing. He had been genuinely fond of his wife. Like most men who have choleric tempers, his hot words had no relation to his true feelings. Gabrielle’s mother had been dead for many years. Although she had dark blood in her veins, she had been a very beautiful woman. Indeed an eerie kind of beauty seems to be the natural heritage of women who are remotely descended from a mixture of the dark and white races. And this striking beauty is most noticeable in those half-castes who are descended from the Malayan types, a superstitious people, of wild, poetic, passionate temperament. There was some mystery concerning Gabrielle’s mother: she had flown from Haiti to Honolulu in some great fear. Everard had met her because it was on his ship that she had stowed away; but she had never divulged the cause of her flight from the land where she had been born. All that Gabrielle knew was that her mother’s photograph hung on her bedroom wall, a sad, beautiful face that gave no hint of her dark ancestry. Gabrielle had been the tiny guest who had unconsciously caused her natural host to depart from this life—for her mother had died during confinement. Gabrielle Everard felt that loss as she walked beneath the palms; but, still, she felt glad that her father’s violence had inspired her with sufficient courage to beat a hasty retreat, careless of the parental wrath when she at length returned home again. “Perhaps he’ll be so full of rum when I get back that he’ll have forgotten,” was her sanguine reflection. Then she pulled her pretty, washed-out blue robe tight with the sash, and murmured: “The old devil! Good job if he pegged out!”
As the girl’s temper subsided the savage look on her face faded away. Like a gleam of sunrise across the lagoons at dawn, the laughing expression of her blue eyes slowly returned. The firm resolve of the lips also disappeared. Her mouth was again a rosebud of the warm, impassioned South, a mouth that easily claimed twinship with the beauty of the luring eyes, which looked warm with desire as the lips themselves. She wore her loose blouse very low at the neck, so low that the sun had delicately touched the curve of her breast. But she was only an undeveloped woman as yet. Her ideas of the great world were vague and shadowy. She knew little of what lay beyond her own surroundings, of men’s ways, the terror of cities, human frailty, and the force and passion of human tragedies. All the ribaldry, the hints thrust upon her by the rough sailors since she had entered her teens, had been quite lost on her undeveloped mind. Her whole idea of life and its mysteries had come to her out of a few old books. They were books that had been left at her father’s homestead by a ship’s captain when Gabrielle was a child. This captain’s ship had gone ashore in a typhoon off Bougainville, and its wreck could still be seen lying on the barrier reefs about a mile from the shore.
Who could foresee the wondrous potentialities that lay within the pages of those books which the old skipper had carelessly thrown aside?—what dreams they would some day awaken in a girl’s heart, giving her strength to combat the desires that came with volcanic-like force on the threshold of womanhood? For, true enough, the heroes and heroines of those old books mysteriously leapt from the thumb-torn, yellow pages and seemed to struggle in their effort to help her regain her better self.
One book was Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; another, Christina Rossetti’s poems; The Arabian Nights and Hans Andersen’s fairy tales. That old captain (he must have been old by the dates in the books) had brought many valuable cargoes across the world, but he dreamed not that his most wonderful cargo was the magic in the books that he was destined one day to leave behind him in the Solomon Isles!
To a great extent old Everard’s daughter was the embodiment of the principles and idealisms that were in those faded volumes: in her imagination Bunyan stood there beneath the palms, seeing God in those tropic skies; Hans Andersen drank in the mystery of sunset on the mountains, and Christina Rossetti laid a visionary hand on the tiny, shaggy heads of the native children who had rushed from the forest’s depths and had started gambolling at Gabrielle’s feet. She hastened on. “Awaie!” she cried to the dusky little creatures, who looked up at her in a bewildered way, as though they had seen a ghost. “Ma Soo!” they wailed, as they sped away, frightened, into the shadows of the forest. A wild desire entered Gabrielle’s heart; she half bounded forward, as though to rush after those tiny forest ragamuffins. She felt like casting aside her civilised attire, so that she too might race off, untrammelled, into those happy leafy glooms. The cry of the yellow-crested cockatoo, the deep moaning of the bronze pigeons and iris doves in the bread-fruits seemed to feed her soul with unfathomable music. As she passed by a lagoon she saw her reflection in the still depths. The dark-toning water made her appear almost swarthy; her bronze-gold hair looked quite black. It was only a momentary glance, but that glimpse was enough to strike a wild feeling of terror into her heart, reminding her that she was connected by blood to the dark races.
At that thought her heart trembled: to her it was as though God had suddenly thumped it in some inscrutable spite. In a moment she had recovered. The strange dread of she knew not what vanished. Once more she gave a peal of silvery laughter, and even went so far as to wave her hand to the crowd of dark, handsome native men who were hurrying by on their way back from the plantations.
As she meandered along she began to think over all that had happened on the festival night when she had suddenly felt that strange impulse and astonished the natives by jumping on to the festival pae pae and dancing before them all. She rubbed her eyes. “I can’t think that I really did such a thing; I feel sure it must have been a dream.” Then she remembered that her gown was torn and one of her slippers lost when she had arrived home in her father’s bungalow. “It must have been true. Fancy me doing such a thing! I wonder what he would have thought.” So she reflected over all she had done. Then she began to reassure herself by recalling how she had often, when only ten years of age, danced on the pae pae with the pretty tambu maidens. And, as she remembered it all, she gave an instinctive high kick and burst into a fit of laughter; then she said to herself: “I’m a woman now and really must not do such things!” She started running down the forest track, and as she passed by the native village the handsome emigrant Polynesian youths waved their hands and cried: “Talofa Madimselle!” One handsome young Polynesian, gifted with superb effrontery, ran forward and stuck a frangipani blossom in her hair. This by-play made the tawny maids who were squatting on their mats by the village huts jump to their feet and give a hop, skip and a jump through sheer jealousy.
Once more Gabrielle had passed on and entered the depths of the forest. Passing along by the banyan groves on the outskirts of the villages she suddenly came across a cleared space surrounded by giant mahogany-trees—a kind of natural amphitheatre. Between the tree trunks stood several huge wooden idols with glass boss eyes and hideous carved mouths. They seemed to grin with extreme delight at the adoration they were receiving from the twelve skinny hags and three chiefs who knelt and chanted at their wooden feet. Gabrielle stood still, fascinated by the weirdness of that pagan scene. Again and again the hags and chiefs jumped to their feet and prostrated themselves before the carved deities. “Tan woomba! Te woomba, tarabaran, woomba woomba!ramis