I fall from Space—Court Violinist—Arrive in Fiji—With the Great Missing. I wonder why men o’er the buried weep,
When ’tis the wandering dead who cannot sleep?
I WAS hanging by one foot from a mystical cloud, lesiurely travelling across the tropic sky, then I lost my grip and fell! I distinctly recall the awful sensation of that noiseless dive through space, ere I arrived with a crash! I had apparently fallen through the roof of a grog-shanty on a Pacific Isle. Many may doubt the aforesaid assertion of mine, and say that such a mishap was a physical impossibility. But I would say that it is only the impossible that does occur. I felt the spasm of that sudden headlong contact of my skull against some hard object very acutely. Opening my eyes I saw astonished traders standing around me, still holding their rum mugs between the bar and their lips as they stared, open-mouthed, down on my recumbent form. I looked through the doorway and saw feathery palms, and moonlit seas softly beating over the coral reefs of a strange shore.
“It looks as though I’ve fallen on another world,” thought I. But no such luck for me! The fact of the case is this. Our ship, from Honolulu, had arrived off the Fiji Islands that evening. I was with O’Hara, whom I had re-met in Hawaii. And, in my hurry to get ashore, I had hired a canoe, and whilst I was being paddled ashore, the canoe had turned turtle! It appeared that 274I had sunk twice beneath the water before O’Hara and the native boatmen rescued me. They thought I was done for when they dragged me up the shore and carried me into the grog-shanty.
The native bar-keeper had gone off immediately to fetch a well-known Fijian medicine-man who dwelt in Tumba-Tumba village. What on earth the medicine-man did before he succeeded in restoring my heart-beats, I don’t know. O’Hara swore that he delivered mighty blows on my hips with a flat war-club, lifted me repeatedly up to the shanty’s roof by one leg and let me drop with a crash! The native doctor was evidently cruel to be kind, for his strange acts saved my life, and were the direct cause of the strange sensations and my experience as above recorded.
As the reader knows, O’Hara was an old pal of mine, and, being an Irishman, was impulsive and entertaining. When I was down in the mouth he proved a medicine-man of the spirits, for he made me laugh insanely when I was sane, and dosed me with romantic Irish songs and rum when credit was scarce. As I have stated, it was after leaving New Guinea that I had the good fortune to come across my old comrade again in Honolulu. Though I had a good musical engagement, and was getting on in the world, so far as the world’s opinion goes, I let everything go to the winds through not keeping a square chin when O’Hara asked me to go a-roving with him. As usual, he nearly succeeded in getting us both hanged when we arrived at Apamama and I became Court violinist to King Tembinok. It is one thing to be loyal to a chum in adversity, but to be expected to do the things that O’Hara wished me to do when Tembinok’s tawny wife fell in love with him was quite another matter. I remembered the Fae Fae excursion and our flight from Tahiti.
275“No, thank you!” I said, when he had the cheek to come and ask me——
But, there, it’s not my wish to deal with that business here. I am out to tell of quite a different adventure that befell us after we arrived in Fiji. Financially speaking, I had done very well in Honolulu. I had secured a good engagement as violinist to King Laukauhammer, as well as my salary as conductor of the royal bodyguard band. In all I managed to save a thousand dollars. Though I am not a man who can see anything in this world to get a swelled head about, my vanity was considerable when the King presented me with the Court shield of the Kalakaua dynasty—an equivalent to the Cross of the Chevalier of Honour—thus making my seventh South Sea knighthood in less than twelve months, not counting, mind you, the proffered kingship at Temelako, New Guinea, where, on playing my violin under a palm tree, outside a heathen seraglio, I was embraced by a widowed queen and compelled to enter the tribal palace palavana by royal command. Also I had, to the King’s delight, composed special marches, and scored them for the strange, primitive instrumentation of the King’s private military band. For a while I had lived sumptuously at the best hotel in Beratania Street. Then I had decided to start off in search of any adventure that was opposed to the orthodox route as mapped out in the twelve commandments of civilized life.
I recall that O’Hara and I sailed as first-class passengers on the S.S. “Alameda,” which was bound for N.S.W., via Suva, Fiji. The voyage was momentous for its monotony, not one storm or passionate incident. O’Hara and I cursed everything, wished the sea yellow, the sun blue, and that the crew might mutiny and pitch the skipper overboard or cast us adrift on endless waters. Night after night we unbuttoned our clothes and thankfully 276“turned in” to rehearse a death-like existence in our small, coffin-shaped bunks. After arriving in Fiji and those things happening already narrated, we put up at the best hotel in Suva, scorning Smith’s bar and the old fan-tan shanty at Buta. For a while we enjoyed the company of the élite—well-to-do traders, ships’ mates and derelict skippers, stranded runaway apprentices, and strange men of better days who appeared to have lost their memory and their reason for being in Fiji at all.
It was while we were stopping at this hotel that O’Hara and I discovered that our improvidence necessitated our looking for cheaper diggings. An old shellback, seeing how things were with us, took us into his confidence, recommended us to a good lodging-house, a sort of Sailors’ Home, on the Rewa river. First, one must know that this Sailors’ Home was primarily the “Charity Organization of the Southern Seas!” For, beneath its kind roof, sheltered by giant breadfruit trees, men hid from the Suva police—men who were mostly fugitives from across the world, and who had flown from the cities in haste to save their necks or their liberty. But this fact did not deter O’Hara and myself from wishing to go there. Personally, I have always thought that one has a perfect right to save one’s neck. Man has only one neck, one life, and not always one chance whilst alive of doing better for himself.
The idea that there was really a lonely wooden establishment hidden in the deep seclusion of a certain forest, where hunted men found refuge from the law, was most fascinating to me, and this fascination was the main incentive that took O’Hara and me there.
When that old shellback stood on the Suva parade, put his finger secretively up to the side of his corrugated nasal organ, and gave us a significant wink of magnificent import as to all that he could tell about that Charity 277Organization, O’Hara’s heart seemed to fairly burst with glorious anticipation. His curly hair seemed to bristle forth the possibilities before us; his face flushed till his bright blue eyes seemed to breathe forth the poetry of romance. Nor was I myself far behind in my eagerness to get to that mysterious residence of secretive men of past crime. Besides, I was out in the world to take notes, and was determined to take them.
We lost no time. We packed up our goods and trekked. By noon of the next day we had been paddled in canoes across wide lagoons and up a mighty river by friendly natives. Then we plunged into the bush-land.
The very silence of that South Sea forest and the gleam of the sea horizon—just visible through the woods of mighty breadfruits—gave one’s imagination the atmosphere of heathenland mystery. We could hear the mountain drums beating the sunset down somewhere up in the native villages. To the N.N.W. were the wild, tribal, haunted mountains of Vuni-cunu, running in a westerly direction, finally meeting the ranges of Muanivatu. Around us stood huge tropical trees—banyans, breadfruits, big bamboos, limes, and the ndrala laden with scarlet blossoms. The airs of the deep glooms, heavy with the wild perfumes of dying hibiscus and many strange, exotic forest flowers, sent pungent odours to our nostrils. Not so far away tumbled the cool, swirling waters of the river, hurrying on their homeward journey from the mountains that formed a grand, wildly picturesque background to the district where the large, shed-like building of the Charity Organization of the South Seas was situated.
Sheltered by feathery palms and one or two mighty buttressed banyans, that dark, vine-overgrown building looked like some peaceful hermitage, some primitive monastery 278that sheltered aged missionaries. True enough, missionaries dwelt therein; but what missionaries they were!—men who relieved unhappy men who had shaved their beards off and arrived in haste overburdened with cash! Yes, they rested there in security till the hot scent had blown over, and once again they could continue on their way across the wine-dark seas, outbound for the enchanted realms of No-Extradition Ports, where dwell the Great Missing!
Could one have put one’s ear to that Organization’s low-roofed door, one would have distinctly heard a chorus of muffled oaths and snatches of wild song droning from the lips of the mysterious inmates of that Arabian Nights-like establishment. Could one have opened that door on the sly and peeped in, one would have seen a sight worth seeing if only for its anthropological interest. All types were there, from the genuine “hard up” honest sailorman down to the reformed native from Timbuctoo. There they sat: sun-tanned men from the seas, ex-convicts, libérés from New Caledonia; handsome faces, bleared and serious-looking; hideous, sallow faces with pugnacious pug noses—Chinese, half-caste Malays, and one or two runaway ships’ apprentices. Most of them were leaning over the large bench-like table, shuffling cards and drinking fiery rum, as ever and anon they glanced beneath the rims of their wide-brimmed sombreros, and stared with hunted-looking eyes toward the shanty’s door. They were ever on the alert! O’Hara and I had been in that place only two days when two runaways arrived from Suva—one of whom hailed from London Town, the other from Noumea. They usually arrived without portmanteaux, under the cover of night, tapped at the door, paid the bribe demanded, and so came under the flag of brotherhood and the protection of that Charity Organization’s kindness.
279O’Hara was tremendously excited about it all, and so was I. We got to love exciting cases. One day, as O’Hara and I were watching the antics of a covey of native children romping like puppies in the forest ferns, we heard the sound of voices.
“What’s that?” said O’Hara.
“Sounds like the paddles of a canoe and voices on the beach,” I replied.
We listened again, and distinctly heard sounds as of a woman weeping. Going up the little slope, we peeped through the banyan trunks; sure enough, there were new arrivals seeking the Organization’s shelter. They were two in all, the third person, who was leading them across the dense fern scrub, was Bill Bode, the second in command of the shanty. One of the fugitives was a tall, aristocratic-looking man; the other a young and pretty girl. It was very evident that the latter felt depressed as she looked in wonder at the sombre forest surrounding us.
The shadows of night were falling when we crept softly down the tracks and once more entered that mysterious shanty’s door.
That building con............