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But I think there’s more than luck or German wisdom at the bottom of the happy condition of Samoa. Something in the very magic of the place seems to subdue or soften the evil in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white men and brown are on record. But as a rule the greedy or the boorish, once they settle there, appear to mellow and grow quiet. Between this sea and sky even a trader becomes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian almost lovable, and the very missionaries are betrayed by beauty, and contentment takes them unaware.

Samoa has been well governed. The people have been forbidden a few perils of civilisation, and for the rest are left pretty well to themselves. Go up from Apia across the mountains, or round the coast, or take a boat over to the other big island, Savaii, and you find them living their old life, fishing and bathing and singing, and never a sign of a white man. They are guaranteed possession of their land. They’ll sometimes complain faintly of ‘taxation’–a small head-tax the Government exacts, which compels the individual to some four or five days’ work a year. The English inhabitants themselves have had no grumble against the Germans except that they incline to be ‘too kind to the natives’–an admirable testimonial. And traders in the Pacific say they always get far better treatment from the customs and harbour authorities at Apia than at the British Suva, in Fiji.

And yet the Samoans do not like the Germans. When I was there, nearly a year ago, I was often asked, “When will Peritania (Britain) fight Germany, and send her away from Samoa?” They have no complaint against the Germans. They have merely a sentimental and highly flattering preference for the English. On a recent visit of an English gunboat to Apia, the officers were entertained at a Samoan dinner party, with music and dances, by an eminent and very charming young princess. The princess is a famous beauty, with the keen intelligence Samoans have if they care, a wonderful dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice and a perfect knowledge of English. The party was a great success. The princess led her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before anyone could stop her, she leapt on to the pole and raced up the sixty feet of it. That also is among the accomplishments of a Samoan princess. She seized the German flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and danced on it. So the tale is; and it is probably true. In the villages where I stayed it was amusing how swiftly and completely the children forgot the few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while one or two common phrases, ‘Morgen,’ ‘gut,’ etc., were retained as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the very ridiculous German-ness of them….

I wish I were there again. It is a country, and a life, that bind the heart. There is a poem:

“I know an island,
Lovely and lost, and half the world away;
And there, ‘twixt lowland and highland,
Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer,
And there my friends go, all the radiant day,
Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer,”

–and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow’s own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and such grey things:

“Evil, and gloom, and cold o’ nights in my land;
But,–I know an island
Where Beauty and Courtesy, as flowers, blow.”

So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. But the whole poem is a bad one. Still, the man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a different way of life. In the South Seas, if you live the South Sea life, the intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow more sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and leaves. Hour after hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous water, or diving under in a vain attempt to catch the radiant butterfly- coloured fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows of their gorgeous coral palaces. Or go up, one of a singing flower-garlanded crowd, to a shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool from the mountains. The blossom-hung darkness is streaked with the bodies that fling themselves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around the water, and the haunted forest-silence is broken by laughter. It is part of the charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish as to ‘think,’ their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their sense of humour and their intuitions of other people’s feelings are very keen and living. They have built up, in the long centuries of their civilisation, a delicate and noble complexity of behaviour and of personal relationships. A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies. But even he soon learns to be his body (and so his true mind), instead of using it as a stupid convenience for his personality, a moment’s umbrella against this world. He is perpetually and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food, of every tint and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death. And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance–all this will seem to him, inexplicably and almost unbearably, a scene his heart has known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for.

And now Samoa is ours. A New Zealand Expeditionary Force took it. Well, I know a princess who will have had the day of her life. Did they see Stevenson’s tomb gleaming high up on the hill, as they made for that passage in the reef? Did Vasa, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and that infinitely adorable lady Fafaia, wander down to the beach to watch them land? They must have landed from boats; and at noon, I see. How hot they got! I know that Apia noon. Didn’t they rush to the Tivoli bar–but I forget, New Zealanders are teetotalers. So, perhaps, the Samoans gave them the coolest of all drinks, kava; and they scored. And what dances in their honour, that night!–but, again, I’m afraid the houla-houla would shock a New Zealander. I suppose they left a garrison, and went away. I can very vividly see them steaming out in the evening; and the crowd on shore would be singing them that sweetest and best-known of South Sea songs, which begins ‘Good-bye, my Flenni’ (‘Friend,’ you’d pronounce it), and goes on in Samoan, a very beautiful tongue. I hope they’ll rule Samoa well.