A Writer's Notebook (43 page)

Two men are living together in Fiji, loathing the sight of one another, not speaking and yet bound together by their
work. Every evening the two men get stupid and sodden with drink. One night there drops in an old priest, a Frenchman, who has been on the island for years; and they give him dinner and the night's lodging. He talks to them of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. They listen to him amazed. They ask him what made him come out to these parts. He tells them that he was sensual and pleasure-loving and almost regretted having become a priest; he felt himself made for a normal life, and because he loved so well all its good things he cut himself off from them. Now he is old and everything is over. They ask him if he thinks it was worth it. They see in him dimly a nobility of life which had never dawned on them. Their eyes meet and one holds out his hand to the other.

My meeting with the old priest suggested this sketch for a story. But I never wrote it
.

Bau. It is a tiny island at the mouth of the river and within the reef, so small that in half an hour you can walk right round it, and separated from other land only by about half a mile of water. It was formerly the capital of Fiji, and the chief I stayed with told me that then the houses were so crowded together that one had to sidle through the streets. The men have land on the other shores and go to work on them every day, coming back in the evening. The children play about in the water all day long. The houses are made of grass, square or oblong, without windows and with wooden doors. Most of them are separated off by curtains of tapa into two compartments. The chief who received me was a nephew of the last king and a member of the legislature, a fine old fellow, tall and strong; and he bore himself with dignity. He was dressed in a pair of short white pants and a net singlet.

The sitting dance in Fiji. Girls, four of them, sit in a row on the ground, dressed in white, with green wreaths round
their necks and the flowers of the frangipanni in their hair. The leader starts a weird song which is taken up by the rest and by men sitting behind them, and they sway their bodies and make rhythmical movements of the hands and arms. The dance is joyless and sombre.

The
Talune
. It is a ship belonging to the Union S.S. line, and does the trip from Auckland to Apia via Fiji and Tonga. It is thirty-six years old, twelve hundred tons, and very dirty, overrun with rats and cockroaches, but steady and a wonderful sea boat, with one very primitive bathroom, no smoking-room, and dingy cabins. It was laden with bananas when I took it from Suva to Auckland, and there were crates of them packed close, high up, on deck, aft; and it was crowded with passengers, children returning to school in New Zealand from Apia and Suva, soldiers on furlough, and the nondescript crowd that travels on the Pacific. The second class was reserved for natives, so that all manner of strange folk went first; the strangest was a tall, very thin man with a red face and large features. He wore a long black frock-coat and was remarkably clean. He went about by himself, talking to no one, smoking incessantly and spitting; he had two large parrots in cages. He was an enigmatic figure and it was impossible to guess whence he came or whither he was going, what his occupation was or his antecedents. He gave one vaguely the impression of an unfrocked priest.

Tonga. The Adventist. He is a little deaf old man who has lived on the island for thirty years. He lives alone, in poverty, scarcely known by his neighbours, whom he despises as outcasts. He looks upon himself as specially favoured of God. Everything has gone wrong with him. His wife has died, his children have gone to the bad, his coconuts have failed. He regards his misfortunes as a cross that God has given him to
bear as a sign of his special grace, and yet it is obvious that most of them are his own fault.

Papeete. Sharks surrounded the ship as she entered the passage in the reef and followed her into the lagoon. The lagoon was very quiet and still and the water clear. A number of white schooners lay along the wharf. A crowd had assembled to see the ship come in, the women in bright colours, the men in white or khaki or blue. On the bright sunny quay the crowd, so brilliantly coloured, was a sight charmingly gay.

There are stores and office buildings along the beach and a long line of old trees, with heavy green foliage, and here and there, making the green more vivid, the rich scarlet of the
flamboyant
. The buildings, the post office, the offices of the Compagnie Navale de l'Océanie, haven't the severe, business-like dullness of most such buildings in the Pacific; they have a florid tawdriness which is not altogether unpleasing. The beach with its fine trees has something French about it and reminds you of the ramparts of a provincial town in Touraine. And Papeete as a whole, notwithstanding its English and American stores, its Chinese shops, has a subtly French character. It has an engaging trimness, and it is leisurely. You feel that people
live
there, and the desire for gain is not quite so much in evidence as in the English islands. The roads are good, as good and as carefully kept as many roads in France, and trees, giving a grateful shade, have been planted along them. By the beach, shaded by a huge mango tree, with a vast bamboo by the side of it, is a brick washing-place of exactly the same pattern as those I saw near Arras in which soldiers, resting, were washing their shirts. The market place might be in any village of some size in France. And yet the whole has an exotic note which gives it character peculiar to itself.

Besides Tahitian, English and French are spoken indifferently. The natives speak French trailingly, with an accent that reminds you of that of the Russian students in Paris. Round
each little house there is a garden, wild and uncared for; a tangled mass of trees and gaudy flowers.

The Tahitians wear trousers for the most part, shirts and huge straw hats. They seem lighter than most Polynesians. The women wear the Mother Hubbard, but great numbers wear black.

The Hotel Tiare. It is about five minutes' walk from the Custom House at the end of the town, and when you step out of the gate you walk straight into the country. In front is a little garden full of flowers and surrounded by a hedge of coffee shrubs. At the back is a compound in which grow a breadfruit tree, an avocado pear, oleander and taro. When you want a pear for lunch you pick one off the tree. The hotel is a bungalow surrounded by a terrace, part of which serves as a dining-room. There is a small sitting-room with a waxed parquet floor, a piano and bentwood furniture covered with velvet. The bedrooms are small and dark. The kitchen is a little house by itself and here, all day long, sits Madame Lovaina superintending the Chinese cook. She is a very good cook herself and very hospitable. Everyone in the neighbourhood in want of a meal comes to the hotel and gets one. Lovaina is a half-caste, very white, a woman of fifty, perhaps, and of enormous proportions. She is not merely fat, she is huge and shapeless; and she wears a pink Mother Hubbard and a small straw hat. Her face has kept its small features, but she has a vast expanse of chin. Her brown eyes are large and liquid; her expression pleasant and candid. She has a ready smile and a hearty, fat laugh. She takes a motherly interest in all young people, and when the boyish purser of the
Moana
got very drunk I saw her stir her immense bulk and take the glass out of his hand to prevent him from drinking more, and she sent her son to see him safely back to his ship.

The tiare is the national flower of Tahiti, a little star-shaped white flower which grows on a bush of rich green leaves, and it has a peculiarly sweet and sensual perfume. It is used for making wreaths, for putting in the hair and behind the ear, and when placed in the black hair of native women it shines with a dazzling brightness.