A Writer's Notebook (38 page)

Miss Thompson. Plump, pretty in a coarse fashion, perhaps not more than twenty-seven: she wore a white dress and a large white hat, and long white boots from which her calves, in white cotton stockings, bulged. She had left Iwelei after the raid and was on her way to Apia, where she hoped to get a job in the bar of a hotel. She was brought to the house by the quartermaster, a little, very wrinkled man, indescribably dirty.

The lodging house. It is a two-storey frame house with verandas on both floors, and it is about five minutes' walk from the dock, on the Broad Road, and faces the sea. Below is a store in which are sold canned goods, pork and beans, beef, hamburger steak, canned asparagus, peaches and apricots; and cotton goods, lava-lavas, hats, rain-coats and such like. The owner is a half-caste with a native wife surrounded by little brown children. The rooms are almost bare of furniture, a poor iron bed with a ragged mosquito-curtain, a rickety chair and a washstand. The rain rattles down on the corrugated iron roof. No meals are provided.

On these three notes I constructed a story called “Rain”
.

Red. He has been a sailor in the U.S. Navy and coming down to Pago had bought his discharge. He was by trade a butcher, but during the three years he had been at Pago had done little work. He was as near a beachcomber as I saw. He was a man of twenty-six, perhaps, of middle size, slender, with good features but a sullen look, a small red moustache and three days' growth of beard, and a fine head of curling red hair. He was dressed in a sleeveless singlet and a pair of dirty drill trousers. The proprietor of the eating-house being ill, Red was running it in return for his keep. He talked of going back to the States to get work, but you felt he could never summon up resolution to leave the island. He asked vaguely if any work was to be got at Apia. The eating-house consisted of a little green bungalow at the back of Pago, almost on the edge of the bush, among breadfruit trees, coconuts and mangoes. It had a modest room in which was a bar, but no drinks were served there, since Pago is dry, and two small tables covered with a red cloth. There were shelves behind the bar, and on these a few dusty tins of canned beef, tomato soup and preserved apricots. Next door was a small slovenly bedroom, and behind the bungalow, in the open, protected only by the veranda roof, were the stove on which Red did the cooking and a rough table to act as pantry, larder and whatnot. When the ship came in and brought eggs these were to be had, but otherwise nothing save hamburger steak, which he made every day, and coffee. For dinner Red made soup out of the remains of the joints from which he had made the hamburger steak. The clients were the very few strangers who dropped in at Pago on their way to Australia, a few sailors from the U.S. station, and a number of natives. Red was a man of few words. It was difficult to get him to speak. He refused the offer of cigarettes or cigars in a surly way. When at last he became more communicative it was to talk of women, of the place, to lament that it ruined one and made one fit for nothing, and to show one a collection of dirty postcards.

The
Manua
. A schooner of seventy tons, with paraffin auxiliary; she does, when there is no head wind, between four and five knots; she is a bedraggled craft, painted white long ago and now dirty, dingy and mottled. She was built for shallow waters and rolls terribly. “One day,” the skipper told me, “she'll turn turtle and we shall all go to the bottom of the Pacific.” The cabin, about eight foot by five, serves as a dining-room and sleeping quarters for passengers, and the supercargo makes out his accounts in it. It is lit at night by a paraffin lamp.

The crew consists of a captain, a supercargo, an engineer and his assistant, a Chinese cook and half a dozen kanakas. The boat smells overpoweringly of the paraffin with which she is run. The kanakas wear blue cotton trousers and nothing else; the cook is dressed in dirty, ragged whites. The captain wears a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck, an old grey felt hat, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers. The engineer is dressed like engineers all over the world, a very old tweed cap, old dark pants and an old grey flannel shirt, the whole a mess of grime and dirt.

There are three tiny cabins, with a couple of berths in each, quite dark when the door is shut and with hardly room to stand in. The skipper has a rather larger cabin, with a single berth and a porthole. It is airy and comparatively roomy. The native passengers, in lava-lavas, are crowded aft and forward; they have baskets made of green coconut leaves in which are their provisions and little bundles done up in large coloured handkerchiefs containing their personal belongings.

We left Pago at about half-past four. A number of natives had come to see their friends off, and there was much weeping among those who were going and those who were staying behind. We went along the coast under our power, and the schooner rolled heavily, but presently, the wind favouring, the sail was hoisted and she rolled less. There were no waves, but a long heavy swell.

Supper was served by the cook at half-past five. A soup made of heaven knows what, balls of mince meat strongly flavoured
with garlic, and potatoes, and to finish, canned apricots. Tea and canned milk. Our party consisted of a Scotch doctor and his wife, going to Apia to take up an appointment at the hospital, a missionary, an Australian store-keeper going to Burns Philip's store at Apia, Gerald and myself. After supper we went on deck. The night fell quickly and the rolling grew less. The land was now only a darker mass against the sky. The Southern Cross was very bright. After a while three or four members of the crew came up and sat down smoking. One had a banjo, another a ukulele and a concertina. They began to play and sing, and as they sang they clapped their hands in time. A couple of them stood up and danced. It was a strange, barbaric dance, in which there was something savage and primeval, a rapid dance, with quick movements of hands and feet and strange contortions of the body; it was sensual, sexual even, but sexual without passion; it was animal, naïve, weird without mystery, natural in short, and one might almost say child-like.

It was a curious emotion to sail through this silent sea under the stars and the passionate sky, while the kanakas played and sang and danced. At last they grew tired and stretched themselves out on the deck and slept, and all was silence.

The skipper. He is a little plump man, without angles, with a round face like the full moon, red and clean-shaven, a little fat button of a nose, very white teeth, fair hair close-cropped, with short fat legs and fat arms. His hands are plump too, dimpled on the knuckles. His eyes are round and blue and he wears gold-rimmed spectacles. He is not without charm. He never speaks without an oath, but a good-natured one. He is a jolly soul. He is American, of thirty perhaps, and he has spent all his life on the Pacific. He has been first officer and then captain in passenger ships plying along the coast of California, but he lost his ship and with it his certificate and has now come down to the command of this dirty little tramp. It has not interfered with his good humour. He takes life easily, he is fond
of his whisky and fond of the Samoan girls, and he tells vivid, funny stories of his success with them.

The supercargo. He is a clerk in the charterer's firm, R. & Co., of San Francisco, a little wiry man, quite young, from Portland, Oregon. His head is shaved, and he has large brown eyes and an amusing face. He seems to be on springs, always alert and merry, hard-drinking; and in the mornings he is torpid from the night before. “Gee, I had a hell of a night,” he says, “never again, I'm going on the wagon from now on.” But by noon he has recovered, his head aches less, and with a drink he is as bright and cheery as ever.