King George of Tonga died recently, 1918.
In my imagination I can still see O’Hara’s grimy, unshaven face as he sits in the gloom beside me, puffs his short pipe, and drinks at regular intervals from the water-bottle. The rats squeak.
“Don’t smoke, for Heaven’s sake,” I say, as O’Hara strikes another match on the ship’s iron side. I feel sick enough in that stuffy hold as the vessel pitches to the swell. Then, as I sit there amongst the strong, evil-smelling merchandise of our wandering argosy, I place my fiddle on my knee and go “pink-e-te ponk-e-te,” pizzicato style, as my fingers strum out an old English melody.
“For God’s sake, shut up, pal!” says O’Hara, as we hear the sailormen tramping on the deck just overhead, as they go on watch in the silence of the hot tropic night.
But all that’s past now. My Irish comrade went out of my life years ago. And I suppose the old fugitive, with his clerical hat, has long since paid his last debt, and kind men have hidden his artful face in that place where no living man will search to find him. As for the Charity Organization, it has most probably discarded long ago its primitive style and locality, and now maybe does its good work from some more palatial institution in the remoter islands of the Pacific. With the advancement of civilization things are carried on in more sumptuous style. Indeed, I would not be surprised to hear that the new Charity Organization Hermitage, that welcomes the homeless derelicts who have flown in haste from the western cities, has a gilded dome and spire peeping from a solitary forest of some remote isle of the southern seas. Possibly a secret cable runs under the Pacific, running straight from its guarding seclusion, sending out warnings to its prospective protégés. Indeed, even in those far-off days, Bones’ establishment at Fiji had depots that extended to the extreme points of the civilized world. And it was marvellous how often the keen surveillants of the Australian seaboard cities were baffled in their search for missing bank-managers, etc. So wags the world, things only apparently changing as one age appears to differ from another age. It is only the hearts of men that remain the same, as the centuries pass and fashions change, so that men may open their doors inwards instead of outwards, and so sit and dream that the moral codes of the world have become reversed. Even my rose-coloured spectacles remain the same; though they have become somewhat dimmed, I can still fix them on and gaze with hopeful eyes on the wondrous pageant of life that moves with me along the great vagabond track. And many times have I sought to lend them to sad men and women who staggered beside me, yes, as they stared blindly through their bits of smoky glass. But sometimes I shiver with dread at the possibility that I may some day grow wise and restrained, and no longer love fairy-tales, fallen, sinful men, and beautiful women of four years old. And so I often rekindle my camp-fire and sit alone, so that I may hear the forest trees singing overhead. It is then that O’Hara comes back out of the shadows; and, as I play my violin, sings some rollicking Irish song. And, strange as it may appear to some, when the log fire is burning low, a misty pageant passes before my eyes. One by one my old tribal poets, attired in all the primitive majesty of tattoo and tapu-robes, stalk by me, and pass silently down the moonlit banyan groves. ’Tis then that the call comes again; for I am the doomed rolling stone that gathered the magical moss of these memoirs and all that has made me know how little men are, and humbly realize that I have chanced to live universally instead of only roaming in my boots over the wide spaces of this beautiful world. In this wise I have found and placed carefully down any little campfire-gleams of interest which my book may possess, as well as having found my religion in some sorrow of the eternity of all things past. I still jog along, carrying my staff and my violin, and weighted swag of dreams, as I roam along the forest track. And, though I have many years to travel ere I become old, I can say in the deeper sense of its meaning: