A Writer's Notebook (39 page)

Apia. It lies along the beach amid coconut trees, a straggling little town of frame buildings with red roofs of corrugated iron. The Catholic cathedral, all white, stands out not without impressiveness; and beside it the Protestant chapels look like meeting-houses. It is hardly a harbour that you sail into, it is an open roadstead protected by the reef. There is little shipping, a few cutters, a number of whale-boats, a motor-boat or two, and some native canoes.

The Central Hotel. A frame building of three storeys, with verandas all round it, a paddock on one side in which feeds a grey pony, and behind, a couple of yards in one of which is a bungalow for the Chinese servants and in the other stalls for horses and spaces for the traps and buggies of men coming from other parts of the island. The principal room in the hotel is a bar divided into two parts; there is a long, low dining-room and a small hall with a round table and wicker-work chairs. On the first floor there is a larger veranda, overlooking the street, with big chairs in it. The bedrooms are on each side of
a central passage at the end of which are two little chambers in which are showers.

The owner of the hotel. He is a dentist by profession, and comes from Newcastle. He is a little man, not fat, but not lean either, with black hair, thin on the top and turning grey, and a small untidy moustache, a very red face, partly due to sunshine, partly to alcohol, and a small red nose. He wears white ducks and a black tie. He is an excitable little man, more often than not tipsy, and he loves to tell you the scandal of the island. He is fifty, but talks grandly of going to the front next February, and you are pretty sure that in February he will talk of going in March. He spends his time chatting with the guests and behind his own bar, where he can always be persuaded to take a drink with a customer. He has owned hotels in Sydney and is invariably ready to buy or sell anything from a hotel to a horse, from a motor-car to a camp bedstead. He is bellicose in his conversation and fond of telling you how he hit this person or the other on the nose. He never fails to come out of his contests victorious. He is a figurehead in the hotel, which is run by his wife, a tall gaunt woman of five and forty, with an imposing presence and a determined air, a large-featured woman with a firm mouth. He is terrified of her, and rumours run about the hotel of domestic quarrels in which she has used her fist and her foot as well as her tongue to keep him in subjection. She has been known after a night of drunkenness to keep him for a day in his own little bit of veranda, and on these occasions, afraid to leave his prison, he talks rather pathetically to people on the street below.

Banana leaves. They have a kind of battered beauty like a lovely woman in rags.

The frivolous elegance of palm trees

The coconut trees came down to the water's edge, not in rows, but spaced out with a certain ordered formality. They had something of the air of a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, who stood with a simpering grace in affected attitudes.

The administrator. He is in Apia because his wife is awaiting her confinement. She is a big untidy woman, in flowing draperies, who suggests Notting Hill Gate or West Kensington. She has languid movements and a drawling voice. She is not handsome, nor even pretty, but she has a pleasant, ingenuous face. He is a tall man, and his small thin face is tanned by years of exposure to the tropical sun. A small moustache barely conceals the weakness of his mouth. He has a foolish laugh, and when he laughs he displays long yellow teeth. He began life as a medical student and prides himself on his medical knowledge. He likes silly jokes, practical chiefly, and is fond of chaffing people. He has the utmost contempt for the whites of Apia. One can guess that he runs his island competently, but with an exaggerated insistence on insignificant details. He measures everything by the standards of the public schoolboy. He regards the natives as wilful children, unreasonable and only just human, who must be treated without any nonsense, but not unkindly. He boasts that he keeps his island like a new pin. There is something old-maidish about him. He looks forward to the time when he can retire and live in the dull London street which you feel he regards as his only real home. He is incredibly conceited.

When you come out of the Central and turn to the left, you pass stores, mostly kept by half-castes; then you come to the large buildings of the German Firm: this is the name by which are known the offices and headquarters of the great German company which had something close to a monopoly of the South Pacific commerce; then you come to pleasant little
friendly bungalows inhabited by residents, and farther still, straggling, a native village. When you turn to the right from the hotel, you pass more stores, Government buildings, the English club, and then you come to another native village. In the back part of Apia are stores and small frame houses in which live Chinese and half-castes, and farther back still, clusters of native huts. Coconut trees grow everywhere, mangoes, and here and there trees rich with clustered flowers.

L. He was an estate agent in London and came to Samoa originally for his health. He is a little, thin man, with a long face and a narrow, weak chin, a prominent nose, large and bony, and good, dark brown eyes. He is married to a half-caste and has a small son, but she lives with her parents and he at the hotel. He has rather a cunning, shifty look and does not impress you as honest or scrupulous; but he is anxious to be thought a good sport and is full of a surface jollity. He is quite intelligent. He drinks a great deal and is dead drunk three or four days a week, often by mid-afternoon. Then he is quarrelsome and wants to fight people. He is sullen and vindictive. He lies about stupefied, and when obliged to walk waddles on bent knees.

Gardner is a German American who has changed his name from Kärtner, a fat, bald-headed, big man, always in very clean white ducks; he has a round, clean-shaven face and he looks at you benignly through gold-rimmed spectacles. The
faux bon homme
. He is here to open a business for a San Francisco firm of jobbers in the goods sold on the island, calicos, machinery, everything that is saleable, which they exchange for copra. He drinks heavily, and though fifty is always willing to stay up all night with the ‘boys', but he never gets drunk. He is jolly and affable, but very shrewd; nothing interferes with his business, and his good fellowship is part of his stock
in trade. He plays cards with the young men and gradually takes all their money from them.