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_ I have said already that but for the hazard of a journey to
Tahiti I should doubtless never have written this book. It is
thither that after many wanderings Charles Strickland came,
and it is there that he painted the pictures on which his fame
most securely rests. I suppose no artist achieves completely
the realisation of the dream that obsesses him, and Strickland,
harassed incessantly by his struggle with technique,
managed, perhaps, less than others to express the vision
that he saw with his mind's eye; but in Tahiti the
circumstances were favourable to him; he found in his
surroundings the accidents necessary for his inspiration to
become effective, and his later pictures give at least a
suggestion of what he sought. They offer the imagination
something new and strange. It is as though in this far
country his spirit, that had wandered disembodied, seeking a
tenement, at last was able to clothe itself in flesh. To use
the hackneyed phrase, here he found himself.
It would seem that my visit to this remote island should
immediately revive my interest in Strickland, but the work I
was engaged in occupied my attention to the exclusion of
something that was irrelevant, and it was not till I had been
there some days that I even remembered his connection with it.
After all, I had not seen him for fifteen years, and it was
nine since he died. But I think my arrival at Tahiti would
have driven out of my head matters of much more immediate
importance to me, and even after a week I found it not easy to
order myself soberly. I remember that on my first morning I
awoke early, and when I came on to the terrace of the hotel no
one was stirring. I wandered round to the kitchen, but it was
locked, and on a bench outside it a native boy was sleeping.
There seemed no chance of breakfast for some time, so I
sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already
busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn,
and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away
the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy
Grail, guarded its mystery.
I did not altogether believe my eyes. The days that had
passed since I left Wellington seemed extraordinary and
unusual. Wellington is trim and neat and English; it reminds
you of a seaport town on the South Coast. And for three days
afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds chased one another
across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm
and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its
spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it
has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe
is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it
vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly
suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the
approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view
in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously,
like the unsubstantial fabric of a magic wand. With its
jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you
may imagine that there Polynesian knights guard with strange
rites mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the
island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in
distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as
you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself
together in a stony, inaccessible grimness. It would not
surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in
the reef, it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met
your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.
Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker
green, in which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in
their sombre depths, down which murmur and plash cool streams,
and you feel that in those umbrageous places life from
immemorial times has been led according to immemorial ways.
Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression
is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to
the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you
may see in the jester's eyes when a merry company is laughing
at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in
the communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone.
For Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a
lovely woman graciously prodigal of her charm and beauty;
and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the
harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to the quay are trim
and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane,
and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt
their colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an
unashamed violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd
that throngs the wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay
and debonair; it is a noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd.
It is a sea of brown faces. You have an impression of
coloured movement against the flaming blue of the sky.
Everything is done with a great deal of bustle, the unloading
of the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone
seems to smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you. _
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