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There had been Ceylon. The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, with its scarlet and yellow Buddhas so garish and yet so oddly moving, as though there had passed into those pensive features something of the brooding faith of the hands that chiselled them; and the lake at Kandy after dusk, when the fireflies are thick about the trees; and the streets of Kandy on the night of the Perihera, when gilt-shod elephants lumber in the wake of guttering torches.

And afterwards there had been Siam. Bangkok with its innumerable bright-tiled temples and the sluggish waterways that no hand has mapped; those dark mysterious canals, their edges crowded with huddled shacks, their surface ruffled by the cool, slow-moving barges in which whole families are born, grow up, see love and life and die. Siam and the jungles of the north through which I trekked day after day, slithering through muddied paddy fields, climbing the narrow bullock tracks that cross the mountain. There had been Malaya, green and steaming when the light lies level on the rice fields; and Penang where I had lingered, held by the ease and friendliness of that friendly island, cancelling passage after passage till finally I had had no alternative but to cancel the visit I had planned to Borneo.

“I'll spend a month in Sydney,” I had thought. “Then I'll push on to the Pacific.” But I had been away six months before I left Singapore, and each place that I had been to had meant the forming of new contacts and relationships, the adapting of myself to new conditions. And as the
Marella
swung into Sydney Harbour and I saw lined up on Circular Quay a smiling-faced crowd of relatives and friends, that sudden sensation of nostalgia which is familiar to most travellers overcame me. England was at the other side of the world. I was lonely and among strangers. That very afternoon I was enquiring at the Messageries about the next sailing for Noumea. And as a month later the
Louqsor
rolled its way eastward through the New Hebrides, I lay back in my hammock chair upon the deck, a novel fallen forward upon my knees, dreaming not of the green island to which each day the flag on the map drew close, but of the London that was waiting a couple of months away.

And then I saw Tahiti.

But how at this late day is one to describe the haunting appeal of that island which so many pens, so many brushes have depicted? The South Seas are terribly
vieux jeu.
They have been so written about and painted. Long before you get to them you know precisely what you are to find. There have been Maugham and Loti and Stevenson and Brooke.
There is no need now to travel ten thousand miles to know how the grass runs down to the lagoon and the green and scarlet tent of the flamboyant shadows the road along the harbour; nor how the jagged peaks of the Diadem tower above the lazy township of Papeete; and beyond the reef, across ten miles of water, the miracle that is Moorea changes hour by hour its aureole of lights. And there has been Gauguin; so that when you drive out into the districts past Papara through that long sequence of haphazard gardens where the bougainvillea and the hibiscus drift lazily over the wooden bungalows, and you see laid out along their mats on the verandahs the dark-skinned brooding women of Taravao, their black hair falling down to their knees over the white and red of the
pareo
that is about their hips, you cry with a gasp of recognition, “But this is Gauguin. Before ever I came I knew all this.” Everything about the islands is
vieux jeu.
And yet all the same they get you.

For that is the miracle of Tahiti, as it is the miracle of love—for though you have had every symptom of love catalogued and described, love when it comes has the effect on you of something that has never happened in the world before—that the first sight of those jagged mountains should even now touch in Stevenson's phrase “a virginity of sense.”

Spell is the only word that can describe adequately that effect. Tahiti is beautiful, but no more beautiful than many islands—Penang, Sicily, Martinique—that touch the heart certainly, but far faintlier. There are no fine houses and no ample roadways. For the most part the sand is black, so that scarcely anywhere do you find those marvellous effects of colour, those minglings of greens and blues and purples that will hold you entranced for a whole morning in Antigua. There is no reason why, when you sit at dusk on the balcony of Moufat's restaurant, you should have that sensation which only and on occasions supreme beauty stirs in you of being in tune with the eternal. For it is upon a dingy square that you are looking down, nor would the
arriviste
care to be recognised in Bond Street in any of the dilapidated cars that are drawn round it. And it is the backs of houses—grubby
affairs of wood and corrugated iron—that are on your right, and to the left there are the meaner of the Chinese stores, dingy, ill-lit, with bales of crudely printed cloths, and imitation silk, and the tawdrier of Indian shawls. There is not a single object for your eye to rest on that possesses the least intrinsic artistic value. Yet there are those who would rather dine on the rickety balcony at Moufat's than see the Acropolis by moonlight.

You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person. And I had fallen in love with Tahiti before ever I had set foot in it.

As the ship swung slowly through the gap in the reef I could see the children bathing in the harbour. There was a canoe drifting lazily in the lagoon. The quay was crowded with half the population of Papeete. They were laughing and chattering and they waved their hands. As the ship was moored against the wharf and the gangway was let down, a score or so of girls in bright print dresses, with wreaths of flowers about their necks, some quarter white, some full Tahitian, scrambled up the narrow stairway to welcome their old friends among the crew. The deck that had been for a fortnight the bleak barrack of an asylum became suddenly a summered garden. The spirit of Polynesia was about it, the spirit of unreflecting happiness that makes the girls wear flowers behind their ears, and the young people smile at you as you pass them by, and the children run into the roadway to shake your hand.

It was in a tranced state that I walked past the little group of trading schooners to where the tables at the Mariposa Café were filling up. It was five o'clock, the hour at which the offices and the stores are closed. The water-front was crowded with people returning from their work. It was a variegated crowd. There were the Frenchmen, smart and dapper in their sun helmets and white suits. The Tahitian boys with narrow-brimmed straw hats. The island girls barefooted, in long print dresses that reached half-way down their calves, their black hair flung loose about their shoulders or gathered high with a comb upon their heads. They wore
most of them behind their ear the white flower of the
tiare.
They walked with strong, swinging, upright stride, while beside them and among them, dainty in frocks that had been copied from Californian fashion plates, were the
blondes
and
demi-blondes,
some of them pushing bicycles, others loitering in the shadow of a parasol.

A variegated crowd, a mingling of every nationality and race. Yet they gave the impression of belonging to one family. For that is another of Tahiti's miracles: that it cancels all differences of race and caste. In the old days, when it was the custom among the Polynesians to exchange their babies, there grew up a saying that they were all brothers and sisters on the islands, since no one knew for a surety who was the child of whom. And now, though the custom is dying or has died, its influence persists in the feeling of kinship that binds together this variously blended, variously conditioned race.

On the verandah of the Mariposa Café, at the next table to mine, there were seated some half-dozen girls who were chattering merrily and noisily together. When I ordered a cocktail they burst into a roar of laughter.

“Cocktail,” cried one of them. “So that's your middle name? Mine's rum.”

For a moment I was puzzled, wondering into what old menagerie I had landed. But before we had exchanged five phrases I had realised that their greeting implied no more than friendliness: that introductions were an unnecessary inconvenience on the island.

“When we like the look of anyone,” they said, “we speak. What's your phrase, Tania?”

“A feeling is a feeling.”

And they all burst into a roar of laughter.

They were always laughing, for no reason in particular, out of sheer lightheartedness. And I brought my chair over to their table. And we chattered away in a rapid mixture of French, English and Tahitian in which French, being the only language which we could all speak with any fluency, predominated.

“And you're sailing on the
Louqsor?
” they asked.

I supposed I was.

Ah, but I wasn't to, they protested. We could have such fun together. They would take me out into the districts and we would eat
feis,
which is the wild banana, because no one who had eaten
feis
could leave Tahiti. And as I sat at ease and happy among those happy people, while the sun sank, a mist of gold-shot lilac, behind the crested outline of Moorea, I felt that my life would be half-lived were I to sail five days later.

How I was to avoid sailing, however, I did not see. I have rarely been more penniless than I was at that moment. All my life has been passed upon a shoe string. The moment that money comes to me I spend it. Overdrafts and account-rendered bills are the framework of my existence. I live, have lived, and expect to die in debt. But this time I had not only been improvident, I had been unfortunate. Just as the
Marella
was leaving Singapore I received a telegram from London with the news that the chief commercial concern on which my livelihood depended had gone into liquidation and the residue of emoluments long overdue was being farmed parsimoniously by the public receiver. Had I received the news a day earlier I should have returned to England. As it was, my passage to Australia was booked. It looked the devil. Indeed, had it not been for the rescuing generosity of my American publishers I should have spent two of the most uncomfortable months of my existence. Even as it was, I arrived in Tahiti with a capital consisting of the unexpired portion of a ticket to Marseilles and eleven pounds in cash. I could see no alternative to continuing my journey. English short stories are an uncommercial commodity in a French island that has no printing press. The beachcomber market has been spoilt. And though I sent a cable of enquiry to the friend who manages my business, I had no reason for believing that anything but a substantial overdraft was awaiting me in London. Nor was anything unlikelier than that I should get an answer to my telegram in time.

Just occasionally, however, things turn out in real life as
they do in stories. Hilaire Belloc has written somewhere of that dream of all of us, “the return of lost loves and great wads of unexpected wealth.” And I do not think that any single moment will ever bring me, as it had never brought me, as keen a thrill as that with which I read on a green telegraph form, a few hours before the sailing of the ship, above the signature “Peters,” the news that one of the big American magazines had bought, and princelily, the serial rights of my last novel. I could not believe that it had really happened; that for half a year I was to be free from all need to worry about money; that I could stay in Tahiti as long as I might choose, that I could do the conventionally romantic thing and watch from the quay my ship sail on without me.

That evening I walked slowly and alone along the waterfront. The air was heavy with the scent of jasmine. A car drove by; a rackety old Ford packed full on every seat, so that the half-dozen or so men and women in it were sitting anyhow on each other's laps, their arms flung about each other's shoulders. In their hair was the starred white of the
tiare.
One of them was strumming on a banjo; their voices were raised, their rich soft voices, in a Hawaiian tune. Here, indeed, seemed the Eden of heart's longing. Here was happiness as I had never seen it and friendliness as I had never seen it. Here was a fellowship that was uncalculating and love that was unpossessive, that was a giving, not a bargaining. I wondered how I should ever find the heart to leave.

Which is how most of us feel on our first evening in Tahiti, and yet, one by one, we wave farewell to the green island in the sure knowledge that in all human probability we have said good-bye to it for ever.

§

The conditions of the old South Sea sagas have been reversed. They told, those old stories, of men happening by chance on Eden, and suddenly abandoning their plans, and their ambitions, deciding that “slumber is more meet than toil,” and letting their ship sail without them.

To come as most men deemed to little good,

But came to Oxford and their friends no more,

And that is over. You cannot at this late day happen unexpectedly upon a South Sea Island. The hydrographers have seen to that. Instead, the islands attract from a distance of ten thousand miles those whom modern life has disenchanted. It is with the half-confessed intention of never coming back that they set out. After they have been there ten days they assure you that no power on earth will induce them to go away, and yet within a very few weeks you will run across them in a shipping office.

Not, I think, for any of the obvious reasons.

I know all that can be urged against the tripperishness of Tahiti. It has a tourist agency, a cinema, six hotels and three ice-cream parlours, with the night-club idea of a good time so thoroughly introduced that all that the average Tahitian wants is to wear a print dress copied from a Californian fashion-plate, be stood cocktails all the afternoon, taken to a cinema in the evening, and driven afterwards along the beach in a closed Buick. The whole island lives for the monthly arrival of the mail boat from San Francisco. During the twenty hours that the liner is moored against the quay every truck and car that comes in from the districts is packed. From dawn to closing time the tables of the Mariposa Café are crowded. There is not a seat vacant in the cinema, and afterwards there is dancing and singing and much drinking, so that the superior-minded tourist will raise his eyebrows scornfully. “I don't want to see this,” he says. “I want to see the real island life.”