Miss Elizabeth Baker, the well-known playwright, give* us here a
record of an attempted escape from the dreariness and rigours of England to the enchantment of the South Seas. The reader will learn from this entertaining narrative why, after all, she has ceased to live in the South Seas and has returned to England. Moat of us dream dreams of escape. To those who are still in the dream stage, Miss Baker's disillusionment may bring some doubts and therefore, perhaps, some consolation.
IT was a damp, sunless autumn in England that year. The mornings were drowned in mist which rose re- luctantly for a few hours midday, to disclose a dun- coloured earth and sky, and then closed in again for the night. London was soaked in rain and mud. The wind sighed in perpetual dreariness as if a million Mrs. Gummidges were for ever groaning for " the Old 'un."
Inside the book was perpetual summer. The skies were always blue ; the trees never lost their leaves and stood shivering in icy blasts but remained thick and green the year round. There were golden sands on which one could lie in the shade of palms and gaze on a sapphire sea. There was an opalescent lagoon in which you bathed. The wind never sighed but sang dulcet airs. There was rain certainly—or else how account for the evergreen vegetation ?—but it fell in an orderly manner, according to the calendar, and not just when it chose, as in England. Luscious fruits dropped into your lap and everything planted in that rich soil yielded a hundredfold, and that within a few weeks. Other countries, of course, might offer similar delights, but elsewhere the delights were so apt to be counteracted by serious drawbacks such as lions and tigers and other wild beasts, prodigious serpents, cannibal spiders, voracious insects and intimidating diseases. But on this South Sea Island, shaded by coco palms, decked with hibiscus, there were none of these drawbacks. There were mosquitoes, it is true, but they were not malarial, and the reader was assured they need not be considered. The native residents added to the general picturesqueness by going about in coloured beads and wreaths of hibiscus, and not as in England per- petually in mackintoshes. Instead of hanging on to straps in trains they sat about in groups beneath mangoes and frangipanni, playing the tom-tom and making night melodious with sweet choruses. There was no fear of being run down by motor-cars or of being told there was only room outside the 'bus on a wet night and only room inside it on a fine one.
We looked up from the book out into the mud-coloured landscape and then back into the book.
" Let us go' there," we said.
So we went.
We had a few surprises on the journey. It was not quite the sailing of a " painted ship upon a painted ocean " that we had imagined. Either the writers about the Southern Seas go some other route not known to steam- ship offices or they have always been more fortunate in their weather. Within a day's run of the equator on either side we found it could be surprisingly chilly. There was much more of emerald than sapphire about the ocean, and though it was a beautiful emerald we can give quite a good show of that round Old England, and we had expected sapphires. It appeared to be the wrong season for phosphorescent fish, and though it was thrilling to see sharks stealthily slipping here and there in the clear water, they are not peculiar to the Pacific and were a dis- appointing substitute for sun fish. But within twelve hours of our island the prospect became more in accord with the book. It was warm enough even for us. The women changed hurriedly into the thinnest raiment they could wear with decorum—and happily the latitude allowed by modern fashion is wide- and all the males:appeared in dazzling white duck. Un- fortunately the time of our arrival was not of the best, for the rainy season was still, on and fulfilling its place in the calendar very thoroughly. We approached close to the shores without seeing them, for land was hidden in as thick a mist of rain as ever hangs over the West Coast of Britain or the Thames Valley. However, it rose more rapidly and at more frequent intervals than it does in those localities, and in the intervals we stood with other admiring passengers along the ship's rail gazing upon a wondrously green isle, banded by opalescent lagoon and gleaming sands, shaded by palms, basking in golden sunlight beneath a sky the colour of harebells. There was no hibiscus in sight, but no doubt beyond that belt of bush it was a riot of vivid colour. The air was as soft as any book could invent. The surf boomed drowsily. It was impossible to believe that the same world could hold this fairy isle and the mud-soaked isles of Britain. When we drew near to the landing stage the laughing brown natives came out of the book and greeted us in the friendliest fashion. It is true they wore dungaree or khaki instead of beads, but quite a number sported the famed hibiscus in their hair or wreathed round their old felt or straw hats.
" Are you really going to live there ? " asked fellow- passengers, half in wonderment, half in envy.
We said we were.
" What shall you do with yourselves " We did not know except that we meant to lounge beneath coco palms, eat fruit and perhaps crown ourselves also with hibiscus.
We hired a native but down by the seashore. According to the book this was the most sensible as well as the most attractive form of residence on South Sea islands. Being made of coconut thatch for roof and walls of native bark in narrow slats placed perpendicularly, it was said to be cooler than the European type of bungalow built of concrete. Our but was as native as it could be with the floor and verandas made of shingle brought from the beach. The but was new, and it was a shock to hear that it had been built as a week-end cottage, being some three miles from the main village. Who could have anticipated meeting anything so sophisticated as a week-end cottage on that remote island ? Such things we had regarded as peculiar to the Home Counties.
Our but was most picturesque. It was also discon- certing. Rats swarmed in the thatch and bred huge families there. We adopted a cat to cope with them, which he did by rushing up and down the thatch, night and day, chasing them and incidentally churning up the thatch more disastrously than did the rats themselves. All kinds of creatures besides the rats and ourselves chose the but as a residence. Lizards, the little shining green ones, and the spawling ungainly " croaker " variety, ran in and out of the slats and flattened themselves over the beams of the roof. Centipedes and mantises, spiders and cockroaches, ants and hornets frolicked in their different ways and made themselves as much at home, or even more so, than we did ourselves. At first I was much intrigued at meeting so many strange creatures and had little aversion to them, and I never much objected when lizards fell down my neck, big handsome gold and black cockroaches banged into my face, huge spiders had to be -chased out of my clothes before I could dress, and great dragon flies, buzzing threateningly, blocked up the door- ways ; but when long sinuous mantises crawled up my arms, hornets entangled themselves in my hair, spiteful centipedes might at any moment be discovered in beds or boots and ants of all sizes and colours spoilt the food, life became a little difficult. The book had said nothing about these things. Indeed, housekeeping in a native but was a difficult business altogether. The shingle; which looked so picturesquely primitive when we first saw it, was disconcerting as a floor. It secreted vast quantities of debris and refused to be swept. How can one sweep shingle ? The slatted walls certainly let in the air—when any—but they also let in a lot of other things, Whirling leaves and drifting sand came in with wind and.` rain and mingled themselves on our floor with the falling thatch, which the harried rats and Snowdrop, our cat, perpetually scattered. We put down large mats of native grass, but it was impossible to forget the debris which con- stantly drifted beneath them, and they themselves were never free from a top dressing of sand. Our shingle floor was also the happy hunting ground for insects innumer- able, and in addition was discovered to be actually alive in itself. We found it was formed largely of tiny crabs who, in the dead of night, when humans were supposed to be asleep, came to life and made tracks, with mysterious tap-tappings, plink-plinklings and plop-ploppings, for their homeland on the beach. Charming little creatures they were, all delicate carving and dainty colourings, but as a floor not to be recommended, for table or chair would suddenly describe an awkward angle because a portion of the floor had deserted in the night and left a hole. Finally we had to chain the floor down with a top layer of concrete.
The view from either side of the but was exquisite. Inland there were acres of coco palms and orange groves stretching to the foot of peaked hills whose tops, clothed in vivid green, towered into an azure sky. Seaward through a frame of coco palms one gazed across coral beaches to a blue lagoon, a belt of tossing white surf, and the vast Pacific shimmering blue and gold to a misty horizon.
I suppose there are people, philosophers and poets and such, who can sit for days looking out over coco palms without being bored. Why merely sit, asks someone ? It was too hot to do anything else. It is amazing to one going to the tropics for the first time to discover how hot they can be. Possibly the native but was cool, as coolness goes in that latitude, but if it was cool, I often thought to myself during those first weeks, what in the name of the Equator was hot ! I stuck my lounge chair in the doorway, in a draught (if any) and stared inland, and when bored by the coco palms there, took my chair and stared at those at the back. To sit on the shingle veran- das was not very successful, because they were constructed to accommodate natives who squat. Rain instead of running off our thatch came through and the veranda became untenable. If only one could have climbed those peaked hills and had a change of view ! But there was no path, no track. Rarely did even a native penetrate the forest of fern, banyan, liana and innumerable twisted, sinuous forbidding growths which clothed those soaring heights. Report had it that once now and again—at Christmas time—some white man would clamber up, hand over hand, like his hairy forefathers (which was the only way of getting up). Why he chose Christthas, by the way, when the sun is at its hottest, is one of those mysteries which make life so fascinating. Perhaps being of British blood it annoyed him to sit and look at a hill which people said he couldn't climb, or perhaps it was merely a reaction to home habits when on Christmas morning so many males go for a walk or do something strenuous to get up an appetite for the Christmas dinner. In the comparatively cool period of the island year when the South wind blows we ourselves essayed an ascent of that formidable and challenging mountain, only to sink beaten on one of the lowest slopes and drink innumerable (To be conehuled.)
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