A Writer's Notebook Page 11

  Here gather American men of business, sailors, not able seamen, but captains, engineers and first mates, storekeepers and kanakas. Business of all sorts is done here. The place has a vaguely mysterious air and you can imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. In the daytime the light is dim and at night the electric light is cold and sinister.

  The Chinese quarter. Streets of frame houses, one, two, three storeys high, painted in various colours, but time and weather have made the colours dingy. They have a dilapidated look as though the leases were running out and it was worth no tenant’s while to make repairs. In the stores is every imaginable article of Western and Eastern commerce. The Chinese clerks sit impassive within the shops and stare idly at the passers-by. Sometimes, at night, you see a pair, yellow, lined, with slanting eyes, intent on a mysterious game which might be the Chinese equivalent of chess. They are surrounded by onlookers as intense as they, and they take an immense time between each move, calculating deeply.

  The Red Light District. You go down side-streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, and you come to a road, all ruts and holes; a little farther, and there is parking room for motors on either side; there are saloons gaily lit and a barber’s shop; there is a certain stir, an air of expectant agitation; you turn down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, and find yourself in the district. The street divides Iwelei into two parts, but each part is exactly like the other. Rows of little bungalows, painted green and very neat and tidy in appearance, even a trifle prim; and the road between them is broad and straight.

  Iwelei is laid out like a garden city, and in its respectable regularity, its order and trimness, gives an impression of sardonic horror; for never can the search for love have been so planned and systematised. The pretty bungalows are divided into two lodgings; each is inhabited by a woman, and each consists of two rooms and a kitchenette. One is a bedroom in which there is a chest-of-drawers, a large bed with a canopy and curtains, and a chair or two. It has an overcrowded look. The parlour contains a large table, a gramophone, sometimes a piano, and half a dozen chairs. On the walls are pennants from the San Francisco exhibition and sometimes cheap prints, the favourite of which is September Morn, and photographs of San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the kitchenette is disorder. Here beer and gin are kept for visitors.

  The women sit at their windows so that they may be clearly seen. Some are reading, some are sewing, and take no notice of the passer-by; others watch him approach and call out to him as he passes. They are of all ages and all nations. There are Japanese, Negro women, Germans, Americans, Spaniards. (It is strange and nostalgic as you pass to hear on a gramophone coplas or a seguidilla.) Most of them have no trace of youth or beauty, and you wonder how, looking as they do, they can earn a living. Their cheeks are heavily rouged and they are dressed in cheap finery. When you go in the blinds are drawn down and if someone knocks the answer is: Busy. You are at once invited to drink beer and the woman tells you how many glasses she has had that day. She asks you where you come from. The gramophone is turned on. The price is a dollar.

  The streets between are lit by a rare street lamp, but chiefly by the light that comes from the open windows of the bungalows. Men wander about, for the most part silently, looking at the women; now and then one makes up his mind and slinks up the three steps that lead into the parlour, is let in, and then the door and window are shut and the blind is pulled down. Most of the men are only there to look. They are of all nationalities. Sailors from the ships in port, sailors from the American gunboats, mostly drunk, Hawaiians, soldiers from the regiments, white and black, quartered on the island, Chinese, Japanese. They wander about in the night, and desire seems to throb in the air.

  For some time the local papers had been writing articles about the scandal of Iwelei, the missionaries had been clamorous, but the police refused to stir. Their argument was that with the great preponderance of men in Oahu prostitution was inevitable, and to localise it made it easy to control and rendered medical examination more reliable. The papers attacked the police and at last they were forced to act. A raid was made, and fourteen ponces were arrested; oddly enough on the charge sheet most of them claimed French nationality. It suggests that the profession is peculiarly attractive to the citizens of France. A few days later all the women were summoned and sentenced to be on their good behaviour for a year on pain of being sent to prison. Most of them went straight back to San Francisco. I went to Iwelei the night of the raid. Most of the houses were closed, and there was hardly anyone in the streets. Here and there little groups of three or four women discussed the news in undertones. The place was dark and silent. Iwelei had ceased to exist.

  Haula. A little hotel on the windward side of Oahu kept by a German Swiss and his Belgian wife. It is a wooden bungalow with a wide veranda and the doors are protected from mosquitos by wire netting. In the garden bananas, papaias and coconut trees. The Swiss is a little man with a square German head, a head too large for his body, bald, with a long, untidy moustache. His wife is matronly, stout and red-faced, with brown hair severely brushed back. She gives you the impression of being competent and business-like. They like to talk of their homes which they haven’t seen for seventeen years, he of Berne, she of the village near Namur where she was born. After dinner the hostess comes into the living-rooms and chats while she plays patience and presently the landlord, who is also the cook, comes in and sits down to gossip.

  From here you visit the sacred waterfall, passing through fields of sugar-cane, and then along a narrow brook upwards towards the mountains. A track runs along it, now on one side, now on the other, so that every now and then you have to ford the stream. Wherever there is a large stone with a flattish top, you see numbers of leaves that have been placed on it and are held down by a pebble. They are offerings to propitiate the deity of the place. The water falls through a narrow gorge into a deep round pool, and you are surrounded by tangled scrub, green and immensely luxuriant. Beyond, above, is a valley which, it is said, no one has ever explored.

  The Hawaiians. Their colour ranges from copper almost to black. They are tall and well-made, their nose is flattish, their eyes are large and their lips full and sensual. Their hair is dark and crisply curling. They incline to fat, and the women, graceful and slender in youth, with age become very stout. When they grow old both sexes become ugly, like monkeys; and it is strange after the beauty of their youth. Perhaps age is only beautiful when thought, activity, or violence of emotion has moulded the character. The Hawaiians, having lived a life purely animal, revert with age to the animal type.

  Kanakas at Waikiki. Tough Bill: a tall, dark fellow, with protruding lips, boastful like a child or a Negro. Holstein, known as Bananas, a descendant of a shipwrecked sailor in a Danish boat lost on one of the islands in the eighteenth century, odd on account of his dark red hair. Fat Miller: a stout, very dark man with a round face and the manner of a buffoon oddly at variance with a kind of innate dignity.

  The Hula-Hula. A small room with papered walls, decorated with Californian pennants and furnished with cheap wicker furniture. At one end sits an old man on the floor, with his legs tucked under him. He is thin and lined, with grey hair cut very short. He looks like a fisherman in some piece of realistic sculpture of the Hellenistic school. His dark face is impassive. He makes strange rhythmical sounds by beating a gourd with his hands and sings in a monotonous undertone. He seems never to stop to take breath. The dancers are two women, neither of them young, one fat, the other thin. They dance with little movement of the feet, but much of the body. Each dance is said to express in motion the words of the song the old man sings.

  The Departure. At the entrance to the wharf women assail the passers-by with offers of leis, garlands of flowers or of yellow tissue paper. They are hung round the neck of the departing. The people on board throw coloured streamers to those standing below, and the side of the ship is gay with the thin lines of paper, yellow, green, blue and vio
let. The band plays “Aloaha Oe”, and amid shouted farewells the ship, breaking the streamers, moves slowly away.

  Kilauea. The volcano is on Hawaii, the largest island of the group. You land at Hilo and drive up, first through fields of rice and sugar-cane and then, climbing all the time, through a forest of great tree-ferns. They are weird and strange like the imaginations of some draughtsman of the horrible. All manner of climbing plants wind around the trees in an impenetrable tangle. Gradually the vegetation stops and you come to the lava field, grey, dead, silent; here no plants grow and no birds sing; you see the smoke rising, here and there thickly, in other places ascending thin and straight like the smoke from a cottage chimney. You get out and walk. The lava crunches under your feet. Now and then you step over narrow fissures from which the sulphurous smoke rises, making you cough. You come to the jagged edge of the crater. Nothing has prepared you for the sight. It is stupendous and alarming. You look down upon a vast sea of lava. It is black and heavy. It is in perpetual movement. The lava is only a thin crust and it is broken at irregular intervals by gashes of red fire, and here and there again are geysers of flame rising into the air, thirty, or forty, or fifty feet. They spurt up, white hot, like artificial fountains. The two most impressive things are the roar: it is like the roar of surf on a gloomy day, as unceasing, or like the roar of a cataract, as formidable; and secondly the movement: the lava moves on, on, all the time, with a stealthy movement in which you may almost see the purpose of a living thing. There is something strangely determined about its quiet progress, it has a malign tenacity; and yet it transcends anything living, it has the inevitableness of fate and the ruthlessness of time. The lava is like some huge formless creature born of primeval slime crawling slowly in pursuit of some loathsome prey. The lava moves forward steadily towards a fiery gap and then seems to fall into a bottomless cavern of flame. You see vast holes of fire, great caves of flame. A man standing near said: “Gosh, it’s like hell,” but a priest beside him turned and said: “No, it is like the face of God.”

  The Pacific. On some days it offers all your fancy pictured. The sea is calm and under the blue sky brilliantly blue. On the horizon are fleecy clouds, and at sunset they take strange shapes so that it is almost impossible not to believe you see a range of mountains. The nights then are lovely, the stars very bright, and later, when the moon rises, it is dazzling in its brilliancy. But more often than you would have expected the sea is rough, capped with white crests, and sometimes it is as grey as the Atlantic. There is a heavy swell. The most wonderful thing about the Pacific is its solitariness. You pass day after day without seeing a ship. Now and then a few seagulls suggest that land is not far distant, one of those islands lost in a wilderness of waters; but not a tramp, not a sailing vessel, not a fishing-boat. It is an empty desert, and presently the emptiness fills you with a vague foreboding. There is something frightening about the vast, silent emptiness.

  Passengers. Gray: A tall Jew, powerfully built and very strong, but ungraceful and clumsy of gesture; he has a sallow face, long and thin, a big nose and dark eyes. His voice is loud and strident. He is aggressive and a bully and he always wants to have his own way. He is irascible, sensitive and perpetually on the look-out for slights. He keeps vaguely threatening to give someone a hit on the nose. He’s fond of poker. He’s not above having a look at the cards of the person sitting next to him if he gets the chance. He constantly abuses his cards and curses his luck, but almost every time he plays, he rises a winner. When he loses, he loses his temper too and insults the table, then goes away and won’t speak to anyone for the rest of the evening. He’s very sharp in money matters and will cheat a friend out of sixpence if he can. But a sentimental tune on the gramophone, the obvious beauties of the moon over the Pacific, wonderfully affect him and his voice trembles as he says: “Hell, isn’t that swell.”

  Elfenbein. He is travelling to Sydney for his firm. He is much younger than Gray, short, sturdy, with a big head covered with crisp dark hair receding very far over the temples; he is clean-shaven, and he has prominent brown eyes. He comes from Brooklyn. He is as noisy, vulgar and loud-voiced as Gray, but he is kindly, and notwithstanding a roughness of speech which is a sort of defensive armour, sensitive and emotional. He is self-conscious of his race and when the conversation touches it looks away, silent and embarrassed. He has tremendous vitality. He bellows unceasingly. He is sharp on money and will not be “done”. At Pago-Pago he took some old shirts on shore and traded them with the natives for toy canoes, bananas and pine-apples.

  Marks is the opal king of Australia, a little man of nearly forty, with hair going grey and a much lined small face. He is a natural buffoon and loves to make himself ridiculous. He goes in for all the ship’s sports with gusto. At the dress-parade he got himself up like a Hula girl and played the part with immense animation.

  Melville. A tall man, with a saturnine countenance, long, dark, curling hair, turning grey, and strongly marked features. He is going to Australia to produce American farces and musical comedies. He has travelled all over the world and talks enthusiastically of Ceylon and Tahiti. He is very affable when spoken to, but naturally silent. He sits reading French novels all day long.

  The engineer told me about Ah Fons. He started life in Hawaii as a coolie, became a cook, bought land, imported Chinese labour, and in the end became rich. He married a Portuguese half-caste and had a large family. They were brought up as Americans and he felt himself a stranger among them. He had a deep contempt for Western civilisation. He thought of the wife of his youth in China and the life of the seaport in which he lived then. One day he called his family together and told them he was going to leave them. He disappeared into mystery.

  There is the making of a story here, but I never wrote it because I discovered that Jack London had already done so.

  Pago-Pago. The ship makes her way along a beach rising quickly to hills covered to the top with luxuriant vegetation; the coconuts grow thickly along it and among them you see the grass houses of the Samoans, and here and there, gleaming white, a little church. Presently you come to the entrance of the harbour. The ship steams slowly in and docks. It is a great landlocked harbour big enough to hold a fleet of battleships, and all round it rise, high and steep, the green hills. Near the entrance, getting such breeze as comes from the sea, stands the Governor’s house in a garden. Near the quay are two or three trim bungalows and a tennis court, then the quay with its warehouses. To receive the ship come a little crowd of natives, a number of U.S. sailors, and some officials. Ships come from the States once in three weeks and their arrival is an event. To barter with the travellers on their way to Sydney the natives bring pines and huge bunches of bananas, tapa cloths, necklaces, some made from the backs of beetles, others of brown seeds, kava bowls and models of war canoes.

  There is not a breath of air in Pago-Pago. It is terribly hot and very rainy. From out of a blue sky you will see heavy grey clouds come floating over the mouth of the harbour, and then the rain falls in torrents.

  The natives. They are brown, copper-coloured is the usual epithet, and mostly they have dark hair, often curling, but often straight. Many dye it white with lime, and then, with their regular features, they have an appearance of extraordinary distinction. They often dye it, men, women and children, various shades of red, and then in the young it has an agreeably frivolous air. Their eyes are rather far apart and they are not set deeply in the head, which gives them a little the look of archaic bas-reliefs. They are tall and finely-built, and often you see types that remind you of the Ægina marbles. They walk with long steps, with ease and dignity, slowly; and when they meet you on the road they call out a greeting, and their faces light up with smiles. They are quick laughers. Most of the children and boys have yaws, disfiguring sores, like torpid ulcers. You see many cases of elephantiasis, men going along with a huge heavy arm or a grossly mis-shapen leg into which the foot has sunken away. The women wear lava-lavas and over this a loose gown shaped something
like a chemise.

  The men are tattooed with an elaborate pattern from the waist to the knees and round the wrists; the women on the arms and thighs with little crosses rather far apart. Men often wear a flower of the hibiscus attached to the ear; the scarlet looks like a red flame against their brown faces. Women put the white sweet-smelling tiare in their hair, and its fragrance scents the air as they walk.

  The missionary. He was a tall thin man, with long limbs loosely jointed, hollow cheeks and high cheek-bones; his fine, large dark eyes were deep in their sockets, and he had full sensual lips; he wore his hair rather long. He had a cadaverous look, and a look of suppressed fire. His hands were large, rather finely shaped, with long fingers, and his naturally pale skin was deeply burned by the Pacific sun.

  Mrs. W., his wife, was a little woman with her hair very elaborately done, with prominent blue eyes behind gold-rimmed pince-nez; her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness. She had the quick movements of a bird. The most noticeable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating the nerves like the clamour of a pneumatic drill. She was dressed in black, and wore round her neck a thin gold chain from which hung a small cross. She was a New Englander.

  Mrs. W. told me that her husband was a medical missionary, and as his district (the Gilberts) consisted of widely separated islands, he frequently had to go long distances by canoe. The sea was often rough and his journeys were not without danger. During his absence she remained at their headquarters and managed the mission. She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement, unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond description. She said that when first they went to the Gilberts it was impossible to find a single ‘good’ girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about the dancing.