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  Just occasionally, however, things turn out in real life as they do in stories. Hilaire Belloc has written somewhere of that dream of all of us, “the return of lost loves and great wads of unexpected wealth.” And I do not think that any single moment will ever bring me, as it had never brought me, as keen a thrill as that with which I read on a green telegraph form, a few hours before the sailing of the ship, above the signature “Peters,” the news that one of the big American magazines had bought, and princelily, the serial rights of my last novel. I could not believe that it had really happened; that for half a year I was to be free from all need to worry about money; that I could stay in Tahiti as long as I might choose, that I could do the conventionally romantic thing and watch from the quay my ship sail on without me.

  That evening I walked slowly and alone along the waterfront. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine. A car drove by; a rackety old Ford packed full on every seat, so that the half-dozen or so men and women in it were sitting anyhow on each other’s laps, their arms flung about each other’s shoulders. In their hair was the starred white of the tiare. One of them was strumming on a banjo; their voices were raised, their rich soft voices, in a Hawaiian tune. Here, indeed, seemed the Eden of heart’s longing. Here was happiness as I had never seen it and friendliness as I had never seen it. Here was a fellowship that was uncalculating and love that was unpossessive, that was a giving, not a bargaining. I wondered how I should ever find the heart to leave.

  Which is how most of us feel on our first evening in Tahiti, and yet, one by one, we wave farewell to the green island in the sure knowledge that in all human probability we have said good-bye to it for ever.

  §

  The conditions of the old South Sea sagas have been reversed. They told, those old stories, of men happening by chance on Eden, and suddenly abandoning their plans, and their ambitions, deciding that “slumber is more meet than toil,” and letting their ship sail without them.

  To come as most men deemed to little good,

  But came to Oxford and their friends no more,

  And that is over. You cannot at this late day happen unexpectedly upon a South Sea Island. The hydrographers have seen to that. Instead, the islands attract from a distance of ten thousand miles those whom modern life has disenchanted. It is with the half-confessed intention of never coming back that they set out. After they have been there ten days they assure you that no power on earth will induce them to go away, and yet within a very few weeks you will run across them in a shipping office.

  Not, I think, for any of the obvious reasons.

  I know all that can be urged against the tripperishness of Tahiti. It has a tourist agency, a cinema, six hotels and three ice-cream parlours, with the night-club idea of a good time so thoroughly introduced that all that the average Tahitian wants is to wear a print dress copied from a Californian fashion-plate, be stood cocktails all the afternoon, taken to a cinema in the evening, and driven afterwards along the beach in a closed Buick. The whole island lives for the monthly arrival of the mail boat from San Francisco. During the twenty hours that the liner is moored against the quay every truck and car that comes in from the districts is packed. From dawn to closing time the tables of the Mariposa Café are crowded. There is not a seat vacant in the cinema, and afterwards there is dancing and singing and much drinking, so that the superior-minded tourist will raise his eyebrows scornfully. “I don’t want to see this,” he says. “I want to see the real island life.”

  But in point of fact the thing that he is seeing is the real island life. Except in remote islands the old Polynesian life has disappeared, and it is reluctantly against their will that those few still lead it. They would all prefer to be living in an imitation of the world that they have seen portrayed for them on the films. For that is the paradox of the islands: that we should go there a little wearied, a little disenchanted by the conditions of modern life to find a people whose one ambition is to establish in their green fastnesses the precise conditions that we are fleeing from.

  While I was staying in Moorea there was a native girl who used to paddle across the lagoon most mornings in her canoe. She did a certain amount of work about the place, but most of her time she spent with a ukulele across her knees, humming Polynesian tunes, telling us Polynesian legends. It is of her that I think when I try to picture Loti’s Rarahu. She was simple and friendly and affectionate. In the accepted sense she was not beautiful. She would have looked ugly in a photograph or in European dress. But when she danced, or sang, or swam she achieved a perfect harmony with that setting of palm trees and golden sand. She belonged there. And it was exquisite to watch het swimming under the water; the brown arms and shoulders, the scarlet and yellow pareo, the long black hair floating behind her like a comet’s fan. Here was the eternal Rarahu. And this, I told myself, was the Polynesia that existed before traders and missionaries came to tamper with it. This was what made Captain Cook’s mariners desert their ship and hide in the green valleys.

  As it was, of course. But it was a life that no longer contented the Polynesian. She was bored, insufferably bored. Her relatives kept her like a slave, she told me. They would not let her go to Tahiti. All her cousins were there enjoying themselves, going to cinemas, driving in Ford cars; and here she was, wasting her best years in an island where there was no cinema and not a single car. What was there for her to do? It was a shame, wasn’t it? And it would have been useless for me to tell her how worthless a thing was that town-life in comparison with her own. She had seen the American magazines, and on her rare visits to Papeete had been taken to the cinema. She had absorbed the night-club idea of what is a good time.

  It is hard for the European and the American to escape a wistful longing for the Polynesia that is rapidly disappearing. If only, we think, we could put back the clock two hundred years; if only we had sailed the Pacific in the Bounty instead of the Makura.

  The last week of my first visit to Tahiti I spent forty miles from Papeete, at an hotel run by an Hawaiian, that was more a family boarding-house than an hotel. There was not a white man within five miles of us. We are at a long table, some dozen of us, for though there were not more than four bedrooms, it was a patriarchal establishment, and stray cousins would arrive with banjos and ukuleles to stay for a day, for five days, for a month; to sing and fish, and at night stretch themselves on the verandah. You never knew whom you would find next morning at the breakfast table. It was a Tahitian house. We lived on Tahitian food: on poi, that is, the baby octopus; on raw fish soaked in coconut; on little crabs that have to be eaten with one’s fingers if one is to get the flavour of the sauce; on shrimps served in a sweet curry, a preparation of coconut and ginger; on feis and yam and bread-fruit baked in a native oven. By day we would bathe and fish. By night we would sing and dance on the verandah.

  One morning we went, some eight of us, for a picnic into the interior, to a pool five or six miles up the valley, where in the old days the queen would bathe with her handmaidens. It was a circular pool some fifteen yards across, and the stream that fed it had worn the rock quite smooth so that you could slide for thirty feet down a sharp decline into the water. It was a couple of hours’ trudge. As we drew near the pool the girls let down their hair, twining fern wreaths for it; the moment we arrived they pulled off their European petticoats and frocks, wrapped their red and white pareos beneath their arms, and scampered up the path to see who would be the first into the pool, while the boys without bothering to take off their clothes plunged in as they were, in their shirts and trousers, laughing and shouting to one another. It was a race to see how often one could get out of the pool, clamber up the hilly path to the top and slide down again.

  Then someone suggested that it was time for food, and while the girls prepared a fire, the boys went up the valley in search of feis and bread-fruit. By the time they were back the fire had been lit. They tossed the fruit among the redhot ashes, and cutting a bamboo shoot they filled one end with the shrimps, the other
with the small fish that they had chased and caught with their five-pronged spears on the way up the valley. They squeezed the juice of a lime over the fish, placed the bamboo in the centre of the fire, covered the fire with leaves and earth and twigs and went back to bathe and shout and laugh till the meal was ready.

  It was a delightful meal; the best picnic food that I have ever eaten, and as I sat there on the rocks among those light-hearted, care-free people, the girls in their wreaths and pareos, the boys with their clothes still dripping from their bathe, it was with an intolerable sense of loss that I remembered that in five days I should be saying good-bye to all of this, perhaps for ever; saying good-bye not only to these cool valleys and this happy people, but to rarer things I could not afford to lose; to candour, innocence, simplicity. Where else could they be found? And how much longer would it be possible to find them here? In a few years’ time civilisation would have made an end of the island life. A few years and Papeete would be rivalling Waikiki. What Papeete was now, Tautira would become. There would be houses and neat gardens and proficiency. A calculating people bent on “getting on in life.”

  It may be that it is as profitless and sentimental to lament the passing of Tahiti as it is to lament in Europe the passing of the peasant and the migration to the towns. The truest excellence is in simplicity. But between the simplicity of the peasant and the simplicity of men such as Turgenev is set the gradual evolution of centuries of thought. It may be that the simplicity of the peasant has to be destroyed, that life has to become complicated and obscure before the ultimate simplicity can be reached; that the only significant simplicity is based upon sophistication, upon experience and growth; that the passing of Tahiti is inevitable, that it is idle to regret it. It may be so. I think it is so. But I know that to the end of my life I shall be unable to recall without regret those tranquil moments in that valley; the green and yellow of the trees, the grey pool in front of us, the sound of water, and the girls with fern wreaths in their hair.

  §

  It is only at moments now that one catches glimpses of the old Polynesian life, and it may well seem that a visit to the South Seas must be as disenchanting an experience as life can offer. One does not travel ten thousand miles for the sake of finding the “Green Grotto” in a different setting.

  But it is not quite like that; it is not that at all. For though the islanders may have a night-club idea of a good time, they do see to it that the time is good. They have none of that attitude of modish boredom that most townsfolk assume in restaurants and theatres. The Tahitians, into everything they do, throw a refreshingly primitive gusto for enjoyment. They would never go to a cinema because they had an odd half-hour to put in, because they had nothing better to do, because there are worse places to talk quietly and hold hands. They go there to see the pictures and to enjoy the pictures, and if volume of sound is any criterion of enjoyment they succeed. A bull-fight is the only public entertainment of which I can conceive as being noisier.

  The noise starts at three o’clock in the afternoon when, shortly after the close of the siesta, a small cart covered with placards is driven round Papeete to an ear-splitting accompaniment of kettledrums. That is only a prelude. The noise inside the hall is deafening. To start with, the small urchins who occupy the front rows do not cease shrieking with laughter and excitement for one instant. There is a native orchestra, which is accompanied vocally by a considerable section of the audience. And, lastly, there is an interpreter to translate the cinema captions into Tahitian, whose voice has to make itself heard above the uproar. The cumulative effect would shame a football crowd at Stamford Bridge. How much the actual film conveys to the audience I cannot judge. Not a great deal, I fancy, at any rate in the way of continuous narrative. They do not see the various incidents as consecutive to one another. In the Paumotas Archipelago, for instance, where they can get hold of nothing except old and tattered serials, no attempt is made to arrange the instalments in any order. The fifteenth follows the third, and the first is sandwiched between the eleventh and the sixteenth, an arrangement that in no way lessens the hilarious delight of the native, who asks to be presented with a succession of sensations—a chase, a fight, a kiss—and does not care in what order the sensations follow.

  The Tahitians have more sophisticated tastes, but the part of the evening that they enjoy most is, I suspect, the twenty minutes’ break in the middle of the long film, when the most succulent episodes out of the next week’s programme—the fight, the chase, the kiss—are rushed through without explanation or caption, presumably as an advertisement, but actually as the chief attraction of the evening. The serious student of the cinema would not derive much entertainment from such an evening, but it is an experience that the spectator of the human comedy would be sorry to be without.

  As is the case with the majority of those incidents that make up the sum of island life: the market, for instance, where the natives congregate every morning to buy their provisions and exchange the gossip of the previous night. And the daily departure of the district bus; you would search Europe in vain for its equivalent. It is an uncomfortable three hours’ journey over an uneven road in a vast van lined with wooden seats; but there are many who prefer it, not only for reasons of economy, to a well-sprung Buick. It is an hilarious business. Invariably the truck is packed beyond capacity with baskets of fruit and vegetables and sacks of copra and such livestock as hens and pigs, among which the passengers arrange themselves as best they may. And they are all friends together and they shout the local scandal and the local jokes to one another. And every few minutes there is someone to get on and someone to get off, and the gossip of fresh districts to be exchanged. And there is a gaiety and gusto in that journey for which you will look in vain elsewhere.

  Little remains of the life that Captain Cook discovered. But then you can find nowhere an exact replica of conditions that existed two hundred years ago. And possibly, since we ourselves are different, we should not appreciate them if we could. Possibly all that we are wise to look for are equivalents of that which charmed our ancestors, and the Society Islands seem, from what I have seen and heard, to be the one place in the Pacific where an equivalent for the Melville atmosphere exists.

  §

  The wilder islands of the Melanesian groups are not possible. They are harassed with mosquitoes and malaria; the natives are cowardly, savage and uninteresting. Samoa is under British control, which means the drawing of a sharp colour line, and though the drawing of that line is admirable and necessary in India and Malaya, it is in search of freedom that you go to the South Sea Islands. Hawaii is too near America—only five days from San Francisco. Honolulu is nothing but a very charming American city, a holiday resort for Californians, an alternative to Del Monte. While the smaller Polynesian islands, which are little more than trading stations, are neither one thing nor another. Nothing that I have heard about the Marquesas has made me anxious to visit them.

  Tahiti and Moorea alone provide an equivalent for what the mariners of the Bounty found, and that on the surface they very adequately do. In the first place they are French, and since the French are without colour prejudice you can, without social ostracism, mix freely with one of the gentlest and sweetest natured people in the world. It is in the very centre of the Pacific, a fortnight from Sydney, ten days from San Francisco. The mail boats visit it only once a month. There is, in consequence, no casual tourist traffic. You have to stay there a month or not at all. During the month’s interval between the boats you are cut off completely from civilisation. There is no local newspaper, and no one bothers to read the wireless bulletin that is posted daily on the notice board outside the post office. You have, however, many of the amenities of civilisation. There are a number of hotels. And though they would seem in a photograph desolate and barren shacks, all you need in the tropics is a verandah, a shower-bath, and a comfortable bed.

  The climate, apart from the two or three months of the rainy season, is delightful. Except at mid
day, it is never really hot. A thin Panama hat is sufficient protection against the sun. There is no malaria, the mosquitoes are small and not really troublesome. All night there is a sufficient breeze from the mountains to warrant at least one blanket on the bed, so that you get, what you so rarely get in the tropics, a night’s rest that genuinely refreshes you. Living is very cheap, though not as cheap as it is supposed to be. The beachcomber market has been spoilt. Third-class passengers have to deposit their return fares before they are allowed to land. And those white men who have arrived practically penniless in the belief that they will be supported by native hospitality have been bitterly disappointed. Even so, living is cheap. There is little to spend money on. If you are going to settle there it is as well to arrive with enough money to build or buy a house, but a house once built, a married couple can live in very reasonable comfort on four hundred pounds a year, while with a thousand they can lead a life that six thousand would not give them in California.