Old Matafa and his wife I number amongst my dearest Samoan comrades. It was with them that I stayed during my last two sojourns in Apia. The grog shanty near Tai-o-hae has possibly vanished. Could I be convinced that it still stands beneath the plumed palms, with its little door facing the moonlit sea, the dead men, out of their graves, roaring their rollicking sea chanteys, what should I do? I would long to speed across the seas, to become some swift, silent old sea-gull. Yes, to be numbered with the dead so that I might rejoin those ghosts and find such good company again.
As for Abduh Allah, the Malay Indian, I have expressed my opinion of that worthy in the book. I have no personal grudge against Mohammedanism in the South Seas, any more than I have for the Mohammedans and their white converts in the Western Seas. The islands—especially Fiji—through the immigration of men from the Indian, China, and Malay archipelagos are rapidly becoming South Sea India, the white man’s creed being converted into a kind of pot-pourri of Eastern, Southern and Western theology, doing the can-can.
When I, as a lad, arrived at the islands, the Marquesan race was fast ebbing to the grave. So my readers may take these incidents, of their dances, songs, ideas and laughter, as the last record of the Marquesans.
We are but wandering bundles of dreams!—Swagmen tramping across the drought-stricken track on the great, gold rush of this life’s NEVER-NEVER-LAND.
I recall to mind how I once met a derelict old sundowner. I was quite a lad then, tramping alone across the Australian bush on the borders of Queensland. He hove into sight as a real godsend to me, and looked an awe-inspiring being. His ancient wardrobe, his enormous bushy grey beard, made him appear like a wonderful, emblematical ship’s figurehead from some wreck on the coast with all the crew lost; an apostolic figurehead, that had in some mysterious way become endowed with life and was curiously roaming inland. Approaching IT with considerable trepidation, I played a tender, conciliatory strain on my violin. Having the desired effect, we chummed together, and, notwithstanding his peculiarities, he became a boon and a blessing to me. His enormous grey beard, clotted with spittle and tobacco juice of other years, attracted all the irritating bush flies, and gyrating bunches of hungry, fierce mosquitoes. And as I kept to leeward of him, I travelled on quite untormented by the buzz of his mighty beard. Indeed I felt like some Pied Piper of Hamelin as I fiddled away by his side, happy as one could well be, all the flies dancing, like the singing spheres, to the leeward of that beard, as we tramped southward bound for Bummer’s Creek!