Beatrice Grimshaw - In the Strange South Seas

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In desire of many marvels over sea,

When the new made tropic city sweats and roars,

I have sailed with young Ulysses from the quay,

Till the anchor rattled down on stranger shores.

Kipling.

M OST men have their loves, happy or hopeless, among the countries of the earth. There are words in the atlas that ring like trumpet calls to the ear of many a stay-at-home in grey northern citiesnames of mountains, rivers, islands, that tramp across the map to the sound of swinging music played by their own gay syllables, that summon, and lure, and sadden the man who listens to their fifing, as the music of marching regiments grips at the heart of the girl who loves a soldier.

They call, they call, they callthrough the long March mornings, when the road that leads to everywhere is growing white and drythrough restless summer nights, when one sits awake at the window to see the stars turn grey with the dawnin the warm midday, when one hurries across the city bridge to a crowded eating-house, and the glittering masts far away down the river must never be looked at as one passes. Of a misty autumn evening, when steamers creeping up to seaport towns send long cries across the water, one here, and another there, will stir uneasily in his chair by the fire, and shut his ears against the insistent call.... Why should he listen, he who may never answer?

(Yokohama, the Golden Gate, Cape Horn, the Rio Grande, Agra, Delhi, Benares, Bombay, the Amazon, the Andes, the South Sea Islands, Victoria Nyanza, the Pyramids, the Nile, Lhassa, Damascus, Singapore, the tundras, the prairies, trade-winds, tropics, and the Linecant you hear us calling?)

L ove is not stronger than that calllet sweetheartless girls left alone, and the man of cities who has loved the woman of the wandering foot, give bitter witness. Death is not strongerthose who follow the call must defy him over and over again. Pride of country, love of home, delight in well-known faces and kindly hearts that understand, the ease of the old and well-tried ways, the prick of ordinary ambitions hungering for the showy prizes that every one may seethese are but as dead leaves blown before the wind, when the far-off countries cry across the seas. Not one in a hundred may answer the call; yet never think, you who suppose that love and avarice and the lust of battle sum up all the great passions of the world, that scores out of every hundred Englishmen have not heard it, all the same. In the heart of every man, a poet has died young; and in the heart of almost every Briton, a wanderer once has lived. If this were not so, the greatest empire of the world had never been.

So, to The Man Who Could Not Go, I address this bookto the elderly, white-waistcoated city magnate, grave autocrat of his clerkly kingdom (never lie to me, sirwhat was your favourite reading in the sixties, and why were you a very fair pistol shot, right up to the time when you were made junior manager?)to the serious family solicitor, enjoying his fathers good old practice and house, and counting among the furnishings of the latter, a shelf of Marryats, Mayne Reids, and Michael Scotts, wonderfully free of dustto the comfortable clergyman, immersed in parish cares, who has the oddest fancy at times for standing on dock-heads, and sniffing up odours of rope and tarto all of you, the army of the brave, unwilling, more or less resigned Left Behinds, who have forgotten years ago, or who will never, forget while spiring masts stand thick against blue skies, and keen salt winds wake madness in the brainto all I say: Greeting! and may the tale of anothers happier chance send, from the fluttering pages of a book, a breath of the far-off lands and the calling sea.

CONTENTS

Fate and Her ParcelsHow It All came trueThe First South Sea IslandColeridge and the TropicsThe Spell of the Island ScentsWhat happens to TravellersDays in DreamlandA Torchlight MarketThe Enchanted Fei.

L IKE an idle messenger-boy, Fate takes a long while about her rounds, but she will get through with them and deliver all her parcels, if you give her time enough.

She has so much business that she confuses orders very often, and you are never sure of getting what you sent for. Still, you will certainly get something, if you wait, and it may even be the thing you demanded.

The morning she called at my door, with a very full basket, she had already been to my neighbours, and given them, in a big assortment of goodsa failure on the Stock Exchange, a hunting accident, and a broken engagement. What they had ordered was a seat in Parliament, and a winter at Monte Carlo, with anything good that might come in in the way of new-laid motor-cars. But Fate was, as usual, in a hurry, and she never changes any goods, once delivered. So they had to take them in.

I had given up expecting her when her knock came to my door, because my order had been sent in some years ago, and so far had remained unacknowledged. But she fairly emptied her basket into my hands, once she was admitted.

Goods all right, and none the worse for keeping; couldnt find time to see to you before, Ive been so busy attending to an order from Japan for a new army and a gross of assorted victories, she panted. Had to serve the Czar of Russia with a lot of old defeats Ive had lying by since the Crimea, instead of the new empire he sent for; and cant get time to fill more than half the German Emperors order for fireworks. You private people are lucky to get anything at all. Count the goods, pleaseone journey round the world, two-and-a-half years of mixed adventures, a hundred South Sea Islands, threescore new friends, first quality, one large package luck. Thats all, I thinksign the book, and let me go; Ive got seven attacks of appendicitis, a foreclosed mortgage, two lawsuits, and a divorce, to deliver in this square before lunch.

So, like the fairy tales, it all came true, and one bright winter afternoon a Cunard liner bore me away from the streets and shops and drab-coloured, huddled houses of Liverpool, down the muddy Merseyoff round the world.

There were thousands of people on the quay, come to see the famous boat away, for it was Saturday afternoon, and the town took holiday. They had a few hours of freedom before themthen, the airless office room, the stuffy shop, the ledger and the copying-press, and the clattering typewriter, the grim window giving on the dark wet street, for six long days again. Next year, and the year after,-just the office, the frowsy lodging, the tram car, the pen in the strong young fingers, the desk to stoop the broad young shoulders, the life foreseen, eventless, grey for ever and for ever. And I was going round the world.

It is three weeks later, and the big A and A steamer is ploughing along in the midst of a marvellous dazzle of diamond-spangled, pale-blue tropic sea and scorching, pale-blue tropic sky. The passengers, in cool white suits and dresses, are clustered together on the promenade deck, looking eagerly over the port railing, while the captain, telescope in hand, points out something lying only a mile away, and says: Thats Tiki-Hau, so now youve seen a South Sea Island.