O Le Langi’s Influence—Heathen Magic—Poetic Aspirations—Ramao and Essimao-Samoan Types—Robert Louis Stevenson and the “Beautiful White Woman”—O Le Langi becomes a Part of the Forest—“Here Lies O Le Langi”—A Great Truth. Here, by a tiny pagan hut,
A kid, star-eyed and brown,
Chews off the milky coco-nut
That grew just up the town!
As I, my back turned t’wards the sun,
Stare out across the seas
Wherefrom strange melodies come in and run
Across the Island’s trees.
AH, sublime poet O Le Langi! It was your elemental poetic genius, more than the inspirations of the poets of my own land, that first turned my thoughts to the magic of the seas, skies, travelling stars, and the strange look in men’s eyes. ’Twas you who made me hear the ineffable sounds of music, the visionary sights and the wonders of night and moonlight in the forest. Yours was the mercy that lent me the ear to hear the pleading voice of the unfledged song in the red-splashed bird’s egg, till I carefully climbed back and laid it once more in the mossy nest high in the banyans. It was you who inspired me to stand on the palm-clad slopes, by the sapphire-hued Pacific waters, and see the glorious mist of God’s breath pervade the circumambient life of this mirror of a universe that shadows forth His infinite dreams. ’Twas you who led me into the magic parlour of infinite splendour where birds, goddesses, and gods 215sang and lifted their goblets of nectar, toasting in song their joy and thanksgiving to the laughing, flying hours—hours that peeped through the magic door of the sunrise. I too stood by that wondrous shanty door, where the palms sang, and stretched my shadow-arm to the skyline, while with goblet in hand I dipped and filled it to the brim with the sparkling foam from the golden sunsets of the wine-dark seas! Yes, Langi, I also drank the intoxicating ecstasy of those foaming hours of crimson and golden light. Yet, Langi, I, sceptic that I was, once doubted you when you stood by the moonlit waterfalls of the forest and swore that you saw the silvery flowing beards and big jagged knees of the gods. In the blindness of my worldly vision I swore that it was nothing more than the foaming moonlit waters falling down the fern-clad crags of the mountain’s side: no knees, no gigantic rugged faces of gods at all! I even doubted that the dark, Old-Man-Frog’s hind-legs, as he swam deep in the still depths of the star-mirroring water of the lagoon, touched with his webbed feet and scattered the constellation of stars that were the proud eyes of your mighty ancestors who ever watched over you from the skies out to the north-west. Ah, how blind I was! But I became a true pagan after that. It was I who taught you to sing the songs of Cathay and the melodies of medi?val romance of Long Ago. Who will believe that we heard the winds tolling the bells of Time, faintly, far away in some infinite belfry of the stars, as the violin wailed and your aged, cracked voice chanted? Yes, long ago, when strange, blue-eyed Danes and Homeric sailormen from the semi-fabled seas threw silver coins into our old collecting-calabash! I thank you and Heaven, O Le Langi, that once I was rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Notwithstanding the beauty and truth of the Christian apostles, it was you, old heathen, 216who invested me with a glamour, threw over the shoulders of this dilapidated catastrophe Me, a magical cloak, the texture whereof I am unable to explain. That old cloak of many colours and glorious illusions has long since been torn to a thousand shreds. But out of each old heap, the débris of shattered illusions, have blossomed, from the seeds of old enchantments, other flowers. Beautiful too are the flowers of disenchantment! But away with such rhapsodizing, for I must return as gracefully as possible to my immediate memoirs.
About this time I had a recurrence of yellow jaundice. My liver was a healthy one; but on my first visit to Samoa, a year before, I had foolishly eaten of some red-berry fruit that turned out to be most poisonous. I had, in consequence, suffered a serious illness. Indeed, I had turned a yellowish-green, and finally had taken a voyage to Honolulu to seek special medical advice. Whilst in Honolulu my visage became so distressingly yellow and my aspect so melancholy that the chief undertaker, Rami Sarhab, gave me fifteen dollars a week to act as chief mute and mourner at the royal burial ceremonies. But even in this capacity my services failed lugubriously; for I felt such pain in the abdomen, was so intensely sad, that the envy expressed in my eyes and on my bilious-green physiognomy for the deep, painless slumber of the defunct was conspicuous to all eyes, as I walked ahead of the hearse, endeavouring my best to mourn over the dreamless sleep of the departed. Thank Heaven, my second attack of jaundice left me in a few days. A local native physician, Rimoloo, recommended me to drink deeply of the water from boiled yams and breadfruits flavoured with Holland gin; and my delight on changing colour at the fourth gallon can be better imagined than described to those who have drunk of the aforesaid mixture.
217While enjoying the congenial companionship of O Le Langi I deserted my study of instrumental music and harmony and turned my thoughts to poetry. A trader at Matautu, Savaii Isle, had presented me with a volume of A. L. Gordon’s poems and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The perusal of these volumes amidst romantic surroundings intensified the ardent love I have ever felt for Nature in all her wildest moods. Indeed, I have often stood before an aged, dying forest-tree and felt some affectionate kinship with its sensate sorrow over its approaching dissolution. Strange as it may seem to some, I must confess that old wooden ships, deserted huts, stuffed birds, and the like have appealed to me far more than the tender melodies of beautiful songs and the thrills of romantic books. Even the thick mahogany wood of my arm-chair calls up vistas of some mammoth tree of the southern forest. What song-birds settled on its boughs to stay and sing awhile on their flight! And what wild men, women, and weary children on the strange, long tribal march camped beneath their shelter—the shelter of boughs that now encircle my recumbent, dreaming form in this inn’s carven arm-chair!
I remember that, after reading Whitman’s poems, I began to write words to the many melodies that I was continually composing. I was surprised at the ease with which poetical ideas seemed to come to me. My brain teemed with suitable poetic similes. But my workmanship was execrable. Many of my lyrics were inspired by home-sickness. I recall that I wrote about thirty songs. Probably three of them were good. I know that I set a high value on those sentimental lyrics and that I placed them in my tin box with my prized volume of E. Prout’s Harmony and Counterpoint, so that they might be safe until that day when I could submit them to a publisher. But no publisher’s musical editor ever 218had them inflicted upon him. My ship, a year later, was wrecked off the Solomon Isles; and I stood under the shore palms, with all my beloved inspirations at the bottom of the ocean, and passed in review, so I grimly imagined, by the tuneful mermaids of the coral seas. Many of the stranded sailors’ effects were washed ashore the next day, but were immediately snatched up by the thieving natives, who bolted off with them into the mountain villages. Perhaps those wild tattooed men got hold of my sacred tin box. And if any talented cannibal sings my old songs, and is well up in the mysteries of harmony and counterpoint, he has undoubtedly made greater headway in that difficult art than I had in those days. But still, it is something that I should be able to claim to be the first who introduced E. Prout’s volume of Harmony and Counterpoint into the cannibal Solomon Isles.
I remember that O Le Langi asked me to translate the words of many of his legendary poems into my own language. My heathen poet’s face lit up with pride when I sang some of his songs in my own tongue, and with equal pride made a forcible accent on the rhymes so that he could hear how the lines went. O Le Langi at once enticed me to go with him round the coast to Mootua, so that I might let his rival scribes hear how nice his poems sounded when translated into the great Papalagi’s language. He was so delighted with the obvious jealousy that was expressed on the wrinkled faces of his rivals that he struck his chest thrice and flung one hand behind his back. I discovered that this act of Langi’s was a direct challenge to them to compose the words of a song as well as he. One of the older scribes, at once accepting the challenge, stepped forward and, swelling the magnificent hieroglyphic tattoo of his chest, chanted an impromptu legend. Though I could not understand all the words of this legendary improvization, 219I remember that the melody was so effective that I extemporized with ease an accompaniment on my violin. This brought forth a volley of applause from the whole tribe, who had rushed from their huts to listen to the wonderful magic wood-scraping of the white Tusitala (maker of songs). For a while I quite expected there would be a fight between the rivals. But things smoothed down. I was finally awarded a calabash of kava, which I courteously placed to my lips, and then, whilst the chiefs were talking, poured the contents into the fern grass at my feet. At this moment the high chief’s daughter, a sea-blue-eyed maid with a veritable forest of bronze-hued hair, fell on one knee before me and started to sing a weird melody. For a moment I was considerably embarrassed. I soon, however, recovered my wits, and then I took her hand and bade her rise. My imagination clothed me with a majesty which I had gathered from my old novels. And I distinctly recall the admiration in the eyes of the onlookers as I slightly lifted my helmet hat and then bowed as though I were some mighty king paying court to a princess of a neighbouring dynasty. She handed me a beautifully carved tortoise-shell comb from her hair, and the glance that accompanied the gift cannot be divulged in mere words. I responded by diving my hand into my breast pocket, and then handed her a really valuable silver match-box. She blushed deeply, for the munificence of my return gift was obvious. That same night O Le Langi and myself were the chief guests at the festival board of the fale fapule (chief house). And as I sat at the head of the long low table and the steam rose from the mighty dishes of roast pig and many indigenous fruit dishes, Essao’s eyes, for that was her name, gave me swift, bright glances that told all that a romantic Samoan maid’s eyes can tell when her heart warms to 220a stranger. But, notwithstanding my ardent nature and the lure of her bright eyes, I was saved from early matrimony, for when the head chief caught me bowing gallant acknowledgments to his daughter’s eyes, his brow wrinkled up into a tortuous map of disapproval.
Nevertheless, when O Le Langi and I left the village that night, Essao gave me her tenderest secret glance and managed to present me with a flower from her hair. Though I did not see her again, I wrote many verses about her beauty.
I think that it was about this period that I wrote several of the poems that were later on published in my little booklet of Australian and South Sea Lyrics. This little booklet of verse, to my surprise and pleasure, was highly praised in the literary journals in England, and also brought me letters of encouragement from such men as Henry Newbolt, William Michael Rossetti, and Robert Bridges.
But to proceed with those adventurous happy days when the light of the great poet O Le Langi’s eyes shone upon me. Whilst stopping with Langi I was down with severe fever. I was staying at the time in a native homestead quite near to the aged scribe’s residence. Langi was very kind to me, and secured the services of a native woman to attend to my wants. This Samoan lady had a child who was about four years old. He was an intelligent little fellow and had ocean-blue eyes and curly hair. When I sat up on my bed-mat, tinkling melodies on my violin, Ramao, for that was his name, would somersault with delight; then once again peep inside the F holes of my instrument to see where the music came from. Every day he would run off into the forest to pluck flowers for me, and would make my bed with soft moss, attending to my wants with the unremitting solicitude of a lovable, innocent child. Heaven knows 221where he learnt the weird songs that he sang to me as he sat by my bedside, swaying to and fro like some elfin-child. Lying there stricken with fever, I would stare into his beautiful, original eyes till the whole world seemed to be singing in its happy childhood. I realized that the age of four was the golden age of mortal existence, the age that understands the grandest philosophy of life, the age when all the infinite possibilities are as near consummation as they can well be in this world. Much that had puzzled my wretched civilized brain as I listened to O Le Langi’s long discourses became clear to me. Langi was not such a fool after all; it was I who was the heathen! The iron laws of my country had sent me to school so that my God-given wisdom should be strangled by dogmatic heathenish teachers. I recalled how the great and splendidly religious Langi had crashed his club down on his threshold, and in magnificent declamatory style had said:
“Pah! Foolish white-skinned man, he come here with his mouldy skull full of worms so that he may teach us also to grow old, scraggy, and full of wretched wisdom. He hears not the voices of the gods murmuring in the children’s babblings.” Then that aged scribe had laid his wrinkled hand on my head, and in sonorous, melancholy tones had said: “O Papalagi, I say, your people looker beyond the mountains at the stars for the wisdom of the great waters when ’tis only to be heard in the sweet-toned shells that are scattered on the sunny shores of childhood.”
So spake Langi. And I, who knew that we are born in fullest possession of the divine faculties only that we may grow old and sad, had at once become a true disciple of that glorious old heathen. Indeed, I almost succeeded in realizing that the peoples of the civilized world were my humble attendants, and that O Le Langi, crammed 222with mythology and strange tales about sad old crabs, was a heathen Solomon arrayed in the splendour of the stars. Langi could stand on the mountain peaks of supreme “ignorance,” whisper into the ear of the universe, and, listening, hear those Truths that only murmur in some great speech of silence to the soul.
I know that the light of little Ramao’s eyes also filled my soul with some strange, intuitive wisdom. When the little fellow opened his eyes wide and said:
“Oh, listen, Papalagi, to the O le mao bird as it sings to the light of the mountain stars,” I did not hear a night-bird singing to its mate in the banyan trees, but I heard a soft-feathered transmutation of a blue day of ages ago singing tenderly, sadly, to some memory of its birth in the rosy eternity of the east. Ramao’s presence in that hut, where I lay sick with fever, cast a poetic glamour over my existence. One evening he rushed into the hut, and, stooping down by my bed-mat, swiftly covered my shoulders with the tappa-rug. Then he turned to the doorway and gave a whistle, and softly called out:
“Essimao, come in and see wonderful white boy who play on magic wood.”
He had brought his sister to see me. There she stood, a charming little maid of about seven years, peeping curiously at me through the half-open doorway. I called her; and, as though she had been born for the purpose of waiting on men in sickness, she straightway squatted by me and commenced to sing. Her voice rippled from her lips like the deep-stealing music of a forest stream. Rising to her feet she swayed softly, and it seemed that the rhythm of music rose and fell in tiny billows along the graceful movements of her limbs. Her laughter was sweetest balm to my fevered soul. She was a perfect little gipsy of the sea-nursed south. 223I know that if the delightful George Borrow, that true lover of the Romany Chile, had reached the South Seas and had seen Essimao place a seashell to her ear and swear that she could hear the big moani ali (ocean) beating on the shores of God’s mountain footstools, he would, I am sure, have devoted pages to the beauty of Essimao and the religious influence her presence inspired. I know that she impressed me more than all the Psalms could do. The sayings of the Apostles and the teachings of Confucius, down to those of Kant and Strindberg, etc., are as nothing to me when compared with the wisdom and charm of little Essimao and Ramao’s four infinite years. Those little philosophers made me realize, long ago, the cursed irony of the fates in decreeing that man should be born the wrong way up, so that we grow old instead of young. But my memory does not betray me when I assert here that O Le Langi was an exception, a phenomenon who had outwitted the fates, had never grown out of his wise, resplendent infancy. Like the child of four years, he was still a mighty philosopher, a true socialist, romanticist, individualist, poet, humorist, spritualist, realist, optimist, pessimist, mystic, maniac, prophet, and one who had the transcendentalist’s belief in a Supreme Being; and lo, all this encased in one skull crammed with the divine light that we are all gifted with when we are four years old. Ah, the wondrous book that an imaginative child of four years could give us could it write down its impressions, its own outlook on life and all that it imagines about this world! What marvellous truths would its great unworldliness spring upon us! Once, when I lay near to death, Ramao lay on one side of me and Essimao on the other, placing their fingers in sympathy through my hair. I felt that I had travelled so far that I had stumbled on the edge of the earth that 224is nearest the heavens. Perhaps I digress unduly in my reflections over Ramao and Essimao, when it is only children in the hey-day of life’s philosophical prime who can understand the truth of that which I say. Few may believe the virtues that I claim for my old friend Langi and these children. Langi, who had read many of the abridged editions of the standard works, cursed the outrageous vanity of white men. His nervous, sensitive nostrils would dilate, his sonorous, eloquently violent voice ringing out like the mellow poetry of old bells as he declaimed:
“Pah! What am this white Papalagi more than a pale-skinned thief of the night? Am he not the dark misbeliever who slay our mighty gods and doubt their virtues—and us?”
“True! true! O mighty O Le Langi!” I’d say, as I listened in incorrigible delight, while with chin and hand raised to the sky he spoke on:
“The white Papalagi am one great hypocrite, who loveth the earth, money, and old clothes—neither doth he smell over-sweet! Where? Where is this God who had power to fashion this white man, yet, lo, made some First Great Mistake—since I am brown?” And saying this, O Le Langi dashed his coco-nut-shell goblet to the ground, and exclaimed: “Think you ’tis wise His faults to change?” And still he would rave on in this wise: “I say, O Papalagi, had the first white man discovered my people living in one great town that had a leaning tower, and one rotunda and nicer cathedrals with great stained-glass windows, they would have said: ‘O great Samoan Peoples! God’s eyelight doth shine in thy sight; your women, too, are beautiful as the stars and flowers. O wondrous brown men, I greet you, Allelujah!’” Then, wiping the tears of tense emotion from his eyes, he wailed forth: “Alas, 225my people lived in huts, therefore were severely belaboured with rods and their daughters sold into slavery and worshipped only for their bodies’ beauty.”
Even as I write I can hear O Le Langi sigh: “Alas! Alas! Papalagi the faithful,” as his ghost peers over my shoulder to-night as I pen these memoirs. Yes, O Le Langi could see “Heaven in a wild flower and Eternity in a grain of sand.” Little Ramao, too, felt quite equal to the white men, and honestly claimed everything from the stars down to my boots and my violin. He even claimed my parents’ photographs which I kept in my tin box, for he placed them carefully in the folds of his lava-lava when I was not looking—true little socialist that he was. And, when he fell from the palm tree, whilst seeking coco-nuts, and broke his back, he died with a smile on his lips that had God’s philosophy in it.
The tears fell fast from O Le Langi’s eyes when he said:
“O Papalagi, the seas do roll on for ever, but man go back to his fathers.”
Then the winds sighed mournfully in the coco-palms, and O Le Langi softly dug his fingers into the heap of soft-scented mould, and dropped the first lump of earth down on to Ramao’s dead, smiling face.
“Aue! Aue!” wailed the stricken mother, as we turned away from the graveside. And three or four little children who had stood watching the burial procession from the shades of the flamboyant trees, cried: “Wa noo! Wa noo!” and then disappeared in some fright down the fore............