A Writer's Notebook (37 page)

The Pacific. On some days it offers all your fancy pictured. The sea is calm and under the blue sky brilliantly blue. On the horizon are fleecy clouds, and at sunset they take strange
shapes so that it is almost impossible not to believe you see a range of mountains. The nights then are lovely, the stars very bright, and later, when the moon rises, it is dazzling in its brilliancy. But more often than you would have expected the sea is rough, capped with white crests, and sometimes it is as grey as the Atlantic. There is a heavy swell. The most wonderful thing about the Pacific is its solitariness. You pass day after day without seeing a ship. Now and then a few seagulls suggest that land is not far distant, one of those islands lost in a wilderness of waters; but not a tramp, not a sailing vessel, not a fishing-boat. It is an empty desert, and presently the emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding. There is something frightening about the vast, silent emptiness.

Passengers. Gray: A tall Jew, powerfully built and very strong, but ungraceful and clumsy of gesture; he has a sallow face, long and thin, a big nose and dark eyes. His voice is loud and strident. He is aggressive and a bully and he always wants to have his own way. He is irascible, sensitive and perpetually on the look-out for slights. He keeps vaguely threatening to give someone a hit on the nose. He's fond of poker. He's not above having a look at the cards of the person sitting next to him if he gets the chance. He constantly abuses his cards and curses his luck, but almost every time he plays, he rises a winner. When he loses, he loses his temper too and insults the table, then goes away and won't speak to anyone for the rest of the evening. He's very sharp in money matters and will cheat a friend out of sixpence if he can. But a sentimental tune on the gramophone, the obvious beauties of the moon over the Pacific, wonderfully affect him and his voice trembles as he says: “Hell, isn't that swell.”

Elfenbein. He is travelling to Sydney for his firm. He is much younger than Gray, short, sturdy, with a big head covered with crisp dark hair receding very far over the temples;
he is clean-shaven, and he has prominent brown eyes. He comes from Brooklyn. He is as noisy, vulgar and loud-voiced as Gray, but he is kindly, and notwithstanding a roughness of speech which is a sort of defensive armour, sensitive and emotional. He is self-conscious of his race and when the conversation touches it looks away, silent and embarrassed. He has tremendous vitality. He bellows unceasingly. He is sharp on money and will not be “done”. At Pago-Pago he took some old shirts on shore and traded them with the natives for toy canoes, bananas and pine-apples.

Marks is the opal king of Australia, a little man of nearly forty, with hair going grey and a much lined small face. He is a natural buffoon and loves to make himself ridiculous. He goes in for all the ship's sports with gusto. At the dress-parade he got himself up like a Hula girl and played the part with immense animation.

Melville. A tall man, with a saturnine countenance, long, dark, curling hair, turning grey, and strongly marked features. He is going to Australia to produce American farces and musical comedies. He has travelled all over the world and talks enthusiastically of Ceylon and Tahiti. He is very affable when spoken to, but naturally silent. He sits reading French novels all day long.

The engineer told me about Ah Fons. He started life in Hawaii as a coolie, became a cook, bought land, imported Chinese labour, and in the end became rich. He married a Portuguese half-caste and had a large family. They were brought up as Americans and he felt himself a stranger among them. He had a deep contempt for Western civilisation. He thought of the wife of his youth in China and the life of the seaport in which he lived then. One day he called his family together and told them he was going to leave them. He disappeared into mystery.

There is the making of a story here, but I never wrote it because I discovered that Jack London had already done so
.

Pago-Pago. The ship makes her way along a beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation; the coconuts grow thickly along it and among them you see the grass houses of the Samoans, and here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Presently you come to the entrance of the harbour. The ship steams slowly in and docks. It is a great landlocked harbour big enough to hold a fleet of battleships, and all round it rise, high and steep, the green hills. Near the entrance, getting such breeze as comes from the sea, stands the Governor's house in a garden. Near the quay are two or three trim bungalows and a tennis court, then the quay with its warehouses. To receive the ship come a little crowd of natives, a number of U.S. sailors, and some officials. Ships come from the States once in three weeks and their arrival is an event. To barter with the travellers on their way to Sydney the natives bring pines and huge bunches of bananas, tapa cloths, necklaces, some made from the backs of beetles, others of brown seeds, kava bowls and models of war canoes.

There is not a breath of air in Pago-Pago. It is terribly hot and very rainy. From out of a blue sky you will see heavy grey clouds come floating over the mouth of the harbour, and then the rain falls in torrents.

The natives. They are brown, copper-coloured is the usual epithet, and mostly they have dark hair, often curling, but often straight. Many dye it white with lime, and then, with their regular features, they have an appearance of extraordinary distinction. They often dye it, men, women and children, various shades of red, and then in the young it has an agreeably frivolous air. Their eyes are rather far apart and they are not set deeply in the head, which gives them a little the look of
archaic bas-reliefs. They are tall and finely-built, and often you see types that remind you of the Ægina marbles. They walk with long steps, with ease and dignity, slowly; and when they meet you on the road they call out a greeting, and their faces light up with smiles. They are quick laughers. Most of the children and boys have
yaws
, disfiguring sores, like torpid ulcers. You see many cases of elephantiasis, men going along with a huge heavy arm or a grossly mis-shapen leg into which the foot has sunken away. The women wear lava-lavas and over this a loose gown shaped something like a chemise.

The men are tattooed with an elaborate pattern from the waist to the knees and round the wrists; the women on the arms and thighs with little crosses rather far apart. Men often wear a flower of the hibiscus attached to the ear; the scarlet looks like a red flame against their brown faces. Women put the white sweet-smelling
tiare
in their hair, and its fragrance scents the air as they walk.

The missionary. He was a tall thin man, with long limbs loosely jointed, hollow cheeks and high cheek-bones; his fine, large dark eyes were deep in their sockets, and he had full sensual lips; he wore his hair rather long. He had a cadaverous look, and a look of suppressed fire. His hands were large, rather finely shaped, with long fingers, and his naturally pale skin was deeply burned by the Pacific sun.

Mrs. W., his wife, was a little woman with her hair very elaborately done, with prominent blue eyes behind gold-rimmed
pince-nez;
her face was long, like a sheep's, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness. She had the quick movements of a bird. The most noticeable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating the nerves like the clamour of a pneumatic drill. She was dressed in black, and wore round her neck a thin gold chain from which hung a small cross. She was a New Englander.

Mrs. W. told me that her husband was a medical missionary, and as his district (the Gilberts) consisted of widely separated islands, he frequently had to go long distances by canoe. The sea was often rough and his journeys were not without danger. During his absence she remained at their headquarters and managed the mission. She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement, unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond description. She said that when first they went to the Gilberts it was impossible to find a single ‘good' girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about the dancing.