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  Indeed, by that criterion, cargo is an inexact description of the Louqsor. It does carry passengers, a few. Built twenty-five years ago as a troopship, it now runs on the Messageries intermediate service between Noumea and Dunkerque. It is an old-fashioned ship. The steering apparatus is arranged on the outside, so that all night long a chain is rattling outside your cabin porthole. There is no cold storage, so that your meat has to be carried fresh. The front part of the ship is like a farmyard. There are sheep and bullocks and pigs and chickens. You feel as though you were travelling on the Ark. The great feature of the ship’s life is the slaughter, twice weekly, of a bullock; a spectacle for which most of the passengers and any available deck hands assemble. The cabins are not large, the dining saloon is also the smoking-room, the bar, the library, and the music-room. When it rains there is no part of the deck on to which water does not leak. There is no promenade deck. If you want to take exercise, you have to take it between barrels of kerosene and wine on an unawninged deck. There are only two baths, one for women, the other for the male passengers and officers. It is not the kind of ship that a tourist agency would charter, but of the thirty or so ships on which I have travelled during the last four years it is by a long way my favourite.

  Romance and glamour are bound up with it. From its decks I saw for the first time the mountains of Tahiti. With its engines throbbing, six months later I set out from Marseilles for the long voyage southwards and westwards through Panama to the Pacific. But it is not for these things alone I love her. I have known no ship where the life on board is more personal, familiar, sympathetic; where one feels more at home, where everyone on the ship; sailors, white and black; passengers, saloon and steerage, give the impression of belonging to one family. There is a delightfully free and easy atmosphere. You sit about in pyjamas all the morning; you stand on the bridge watching the slow swaying of the prow as she cuts her way through the blue waters. When we crossed the equator the entire ship was devoted to aquatic revelry. Sailors and passengers chased each other with hose pipes and buckets of water along every deck. And yet in spite of this casual atmosphere discipline is never relaxed. The captain remained dignified and reserved, the master of his ship. As, indeed, all French captains do. We are told often that the French are indifferent sailors. They may be. That I am unable to judge. But this I do know that their captains in the merchant service compare very favourably with the British ones. Most of my travelling has been done on French boats, on the boats of the C.G.T., and the Messageries Maritimes. I have scarcely ever travelled on a first-class English liner—the Atlantic ferry boats are hotels rather than ships—but on the smaller liners there is an unfortunate tendency among British captains to consider as their chief concern the entertainment of their passengers. They behave as though they were the conductors of a pierrot troupe. That I have never seen happen on a French ship.

  On the Louqsor life followed a calm routine. One woke with the sun at six. There was a leisurely dressing and petit déjeuner. By half-past seven I was in a corner of the dining saloon, a pen in hand, with four hours of work ahead of me. We lunched at eleven-thirty. At twenty past twelve the clock was put back to twelve. Through the heavy heat of the day we siestaed in long canvas chairs, sleeping a little, talking a little, reading desultorily. From five to half-past six I took my exercise on the lower deck, a solitary walk, through which I planned my next day’s writing. After dinner there was nothing to do but to sit out on deck listening to a gramophone. Not an exciting life, but the most harmonious atmosphere I have ever known at sea. When I saw the Louqsor limping away towards Moorea, I felt—it is a clichéd phrase but there is no other adequate—that it was taking something of myself away with it. I never expected to see its weather-beaten prow again.

  It was an extraordinary coincidence that its arrival in Fort de France should have coincided with my own. Not the most extraordinary that I have known. The most extraordinary happened in the spring of 1928, when P. T. Eckersley, the Lancashire cricketer, was on the Berengaria with me, on his way to the West Indies for a cricket tour. It was a be-galed and be-fogged journey. On the first day out of Cherbourg the seas were so heavy that the engines were slowed down. We reached the Hudson river six hours late, to find an impenetrable mist laid low upon it. For two days we were marooned. A melancholy two days in prohibition waters. For everyone it was a dismal time. But for no one was it more exasperating than for Peter Eckersley. The connection he had meant to make in New York would be lost. It would be a week before another boat would sail. He would be late for the first Test Match. Gloomily he paced the unvibrating decks.

  And then just about tea-time on the second day there was a faint quiver through the ship. Everyone ran to the taffrail to see, feet below it seemed, a ship that had collided with us. It was a seven- or eight-thousand-ton affair, but it looked an absurd midget alongside the majestic Berengaria. It was a David assaulting a Goliath. We mocked it as the Philistines mocked David, when suddenly Eckersley gave a gasp.

  “Good heavens! I believe that’s the ship I should be on,” he cried. It was; the ship that should have taken him to the West Indies and the first Test Match, that he had no chance of catching now, lay alongside of us thirty feet below. In his cabin were his trunk and cricket bag. He had only to lower them over the side and follow after. Yet there he had to sit waiting for the mist to rise, for the midget steamer and the vast liner to drift apart, for the Berengaria to move westward to the bleak climate of New York, and the little fruit boat to the sunlight and the palm trees and the level fields.

  That, I think, was the most curious coincidence I have ever known. But the episode of the Louqsor was a quaint one. So quaint that I half wondered whether the arrival at the same hour as myself of this ship with which, in one way or another, is bound up most of what in the last three years has mattered personally to me, was not an omen, a symbolic beckoning back of me towards Tahiti. On the top of the gangway there was the black notice-board, “Le’ Louqsor’ partira pour Colon à neuf heures” And in five days’ time the word Colon would have been rubbed out, the word Papeete substituted. In five days’ time. And three weeks later there would be the jagged outline of the Diadem.

  We dined that night with Alec Daunes, the second captain, and his brother-in-law; the only two officers who had not changed since I had made the trip. And all the time we talked about Tahiti.

  “There’s nothing like it,” Daunes insisted. “I’ve been at sea for twenty years. I’ve seen most parts of the world, east and west. But if I were left two thousand dollars a year I’d go to Tahiti, and as long as I lived never ask anything else of life.” Then, persuasively, “Why not come on with us to-morrow? You’ve not got your trunks unpacked yet. Why not come?”

  It was tempting; more than tempting when we were back on the ship for a last drink before we said good-bye. It was hard to believe, when we were grouped round the familiar table in the familiar cabin, that I had ever left, that I could ever leave, that ship.

  “Come on now,” they pleaded. “We’ll send one of the men back to the hotel to fetch your trunks. Stay on here. It’ll be so simple. When you wake up next morning, we’ll be out of sight of land.”

  It was very tempting. And Eldred, I believe, was ready enough to yield. I resisted, though.

  “Tahiti. I’ve said good-bye to it, I think, for ever.”

  Which, two years previously, was the last thing that I could ever have imagined myself saying.

  II

  Tahiti

  I Shall never forget my first sight of Tahiti.

  For months I had been planning to go there. For weeks I had been dreaming of going there. But on the eve of my arrival I craved for one thing only: a magic carpet that would carry me to London. I had been travelling for eight months and I was very tired: tired of new places and new settings. My ears were confused with strange accents and my eyes with changing landscapes. To begin with there had been the Mediterranean. Naples, Athens, Constantinople. A few hours in each. A hurried rushing
to the sights: then the parched seaboard of the Levant. Smyrna with its broken streets, and hidden among its ruins the oasis now and then of a shaded square where you can drink thick black coffee beside fat Syrians who puff lazily at immense glass-bowled pipes. Smyrna and Jaffa and Beyrout. An island or two. The climbing streets of Rhodes, the barren ramparts of Famagusta. Then Egypt and the mud houses. And the tall sails drifting down the Nile. Then Suez and the torment of the Red Sea when the heat is so intense that perversely you long to be burnt more and at lunch eat the hottest of hot pickles neat, till the inside of your mouth is raw: a torment that lapses suddenly into the cool of the Indian Ocean.

  There had been Ceylon. The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, with its scarlet and yellow Buddhas so garish and yet so oddly moving, as though there had passed into those pensive features something of the brooding faith of the hands that chiselled them; and the lake at Kandy after dusk, when the fireflies are thick about the trees; and the streets of Kandy on the night of the Perihera, when gilt-shod elephants lumber in the wake of guttering torches.

  And afterwards there had been Siam. Bangkok with its innumerable bright-tiled temples and the sluggish waterways that no hand has mapped; those dark mysterious canals, their edges crowded with huddled shacks, their surface ruffled by the cool, slow-moving barges in which whole families are born, grow up, see love and life and die. Siam and the jungles of the north through which I trekked day after day, slithering through muddied paddy fields, climbing the narrow bullock tracks that cross the mountain. There had been Malaya, green and steaming when the light lies level on the rice fields; and Penang where I had lingered, held by the ease and friendliness of that friendly island, cancelling passage after passage till finally I had had no alternative but to cancel the visit I had planned to Borneo.

  “I’ll spend a month in Sydney,” I had thought. “Then I’ll push on to the Pacific.” But I had been away six months before I left Singapore, and each place that I had been to had meant the forming of new contacts and relationships, the adapting of myself to new conditions. And as the Marella swung into Sydney Harbour and I saw lined up on Circular Quay a smiling-faced crowd of relatives and friends, that sudden sensation of nostalgia which is familiar to most travellers overcame me. England was at the other side of the world. I was lonely and among strangers. That very afternoon I was enquiring at the Messageries about the next sailing for Noumea. And as a month later the Louqsor rolled its way eastward through the New Hebrides, I lay back in my hammock chair upon the deck, a novel fallen forward upon my knees, dreaming not of the green island to which each day the flag on the map drew close, but of the London that was waiting a couple of months away.

  And then I saw Tahiti.

  But how at this late day is one to describe the haunting appeal of that island which so many pens, so many brushes have depicted? The South Seas are terribly vieux jeu. They have been so written about and painted. Long before you get to them you know precisely what you are to find. There have been Maugham and Loti and Stevenson and Brooke. There is no need now to travel ten thousand miles to know how the grass runs down to the lagoon and the green and scarlet tent of the flamboyant shadows the road along the harbour; nor how the jagged peaks of the Diadem tower above the lazy township of Papeete; and beyond the reef, across ten miles of water, the miracle that is Moorea changes hour by hour its aureole of lights. And there has been Gauguin; so that when you drive out into the districts past Papara through that long sequence of haphazard gardens where the bougainvillea and the hibiscus drift lazily over the wooden bungalows, and you see laid out along their mats on the verandahs the dark-skinned brooding women of Taravao, their black hair falling down to their knees over the white and red of the pareo that is about their hips, you cry with a gasp of recognition, “But this is Gauguin. Before ever I came I knew all this.” Everything about the islands is vieux jeu. And yet all the same they get you.

  For that is the miracle of Tahiti, as it is the miracle of love—for though you have had every symptom of love catalogued and described, love when it comes has the effect on you of something that has never happened in the world before—that the first sight of those jagged mountains should even now touch in Stevenson’s phrase “a virginity of sense.”

  Spell is the only word that can describe adequately that effect. Tahiti is beautiful, but no more beautiful than many islands—Penang, Sicily, Martinique—that touch the heart certainly, but far faintlier. There are no fine houses and no ample roadways. For the most part the sand is black, so that scarcely anywhere do you find those marvellous effects of colour, those minglings of greens and blues and purples that will hold you entranced for a whole morning in Antigua. There is no reason why, when you sit at dusk on the balcony of Moufat’s restaurant, you should have that sensation which only and on occasions supreme beauty stirs in you of being in tune with the eternal. For it is upon a dingy square that you are looking down, nor would the arriviste care to be recognised in Bond Street in any of the dilapidated cars that are drawn round it. And it is the backs of houses—grubby affairs of wood and corrugated iron—that are on your right, and to the left there are the meaner of the Chinese stores, dingy, ill-lit, with bales of crudely printed cloths, and imitation silk, and the tawdrier of Indian shawls. There is not a single object for your eye to rest on that possesses the least intrinsic artistic value. Yet there are those who would rather dine on the rickety balcony at Moufat’s than see the Acropolis by moonlight.

  You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person. And I had fallen in love with Tahiti before ever I had set foot in it.

  As the ship swung slowly through the gap in the reef I could see the children bathing in the harbour. There was a canoe drifting lazily in the lagoon. The quay was crowded with half the population of Papeete. They were laughing and chattering and they waved their hands. As the ship was moored against the wharf and the gangway was let down, a score or so of girls in bright print dresses, with wreaths of flowers about their necks, some quarter white, some full Tahitian, scrambled up the narrow stairway to welcome their old friends among the crew. The deck that had been for a fortnight the bleak barrack of an asylum became suddenly a summered garden. The spirit of Polynesia was about it, the spirit of unreflecting happiness that makes the girls wear flowers behind their ears, and the young people smile at you as you pass them by, and the children run into the roadway to shake your hand.

  It was in a tranced state that I walked past the little group of trading schooners to where the tables at the Mariposa Café were filling up. It was five o’clock, the hour at which the offices and the stores are closed. The water-front was crowded with people returning from their work. It was a variegated crowd. There were the Frenchmen, smart and dapper in their sun helmets and white suits. The Tahitian boys with narrow-brimmed straw hats. The island girls barefooted, in long print dresses that reached half-way down their calves, their black hair flung loose about their shoulders or gathered high with a comb upon their heads. They wore most of them behind their ear the white flower of the tiare. They walked with strong, swinging, upright stride, while beside them and among them, dainty in frocks that had been copied from Californian fashion plates, were the blondes and demi-blondes, some of them pushing bicycles, others loitering in the shadow of a parasol.

  A variegated crowd, a mingling of every nationality and race. Yet they gave the impression of belonging to one family. For that is another of Tahiti’s miracles: that it cancels all differences of race and caste. In the old days, when it was the custom among the Polynesians to exchange their babies, there grew up a saying that they were all brothers and sisters on the islands, since no one knew for a surety who was the child of whom. And now, though the custom is dying or has died, its influence persists in the feeling of kinship that binds together this variously blended, variously conditioned race.

  On the verandah of the Mariposa Café, at the next table to mine, there were seated some half-dozen girls who were chattering merrily and noisily togethe
r. When I ordered a cocktail they burst into a roar of laughter.

  “Cocktail,” cried one of them. “So that’s your middle name? Mine’s rum.”

  For a moment I was puzzled, wondering into what old menagerie I had landed. But before we had exchanged five phrases I had realised that their greeting implied no more than friendliness: that introductions were an unnecessary inconvenience on the island.

  “When we like the look of anyone,” they said, “we speak. What’s your phrase, Tania?”

  “A feeling is a feeling.”

  And they all burst into a roar of laughter.

  They were always laughing, for no reason in particular, out of sheer lightheartedness. And I brought my chair over to their table. And we chattered away in a rapid mixture of French, English and Tahitian in which French, being the only language which we could all speak with any fluency, predominated.

  “And you’re sailing on the Louqsor?” they asked.

  I supposed I was.

  Ah, but I wasn’t to, they protested. We could have such fun together. They would take me out into the districts and we would eat feis, which is the wild banana, because no one who had eaten feis could leave Tahiti. And as I sat at ease and happy among those happy people, while the sun sank, a mist of gold-shot lilac, behind the crested outline of Moorea, I felt that my life would be half-lived were I to sail five days later.

  How I was to avoid sailing, however, I did not see. I have rarely been more penniless than I was at that moment. All my life has been passed upon a shoe string. The moment that money comes to me I spend it. Overdrafts and account-rendered bills are the framework of my existence. I live, have lived, and expect to die in debt. But this time I had not only been improvident, I had been unfortunate. Just as the Marella was leaving Singapore I received a telegram from London with the news that the chief commercial concern on which my livelihood depended had gone into liquidation and the residue of emoluments long overdue was being farmed parsimoniously by the public receiver. Had I received the news a day earlier I should have returned to England. As it was, my passage to Australia was booked. It looked the devil. Indeed, had it not been for the rescuing generosity of my American publishers I should have spent two of the most uncomfortable months of my existence. Even as it was, I arrived in Tahiti with a capital consisting of the unexpired portion of a ticket to Marseilles and eleven pounds in cash. I could see no alternative to continuing my journey. English short stories are an uncommercial commodity in a French island that has no printing press. The beachcomber market has been spoilt. And though I sent a cable of enquiry to the friend who manages my business, I had no reason for believing that anything but a substantial overdraft was awaiting me in London. Nor was anything unlikelier than that I should get an answer to my telegram in time.