Pilgrimage

I

A PROPER pilgrimage should be made with dried peas in the soles of one’s shoes, along dusty roads, and with a reverent spirit lurking at the elbow, to sober the new green of the trees and the wind in the grass. But the blue mist that is the color of adventure called us to the sea, and the reverence in our spirits sang to the waves of the Western Ocean, when we started on our pilgrimage to Stevenson’s high tomb.

You have read many tales of the sea, and probably they have been wild and stirring. No doubt you have sailed Two Years before the Mast with Mr. Dana, or worked in engine-rooms with Mr. McFee. Perhaps, too, — and I hope so for your sake, — you have followed the old shipmasters in and out of Salem Harbor, and from there on round the world.

I can give you no such story.

When asked to describe ourselves in government papers, my friend and I answered the first four questions by a discreet use of the word, ‘Medium.’ The last question, as everyone knows, is always ‘Occupation?' We had no occupation, and we earnestly hoped we should not have for many long months to come. Consequently, we scorned the word. But we must needs fill the gap somehow, and, in lieu of something better, wrote down, ‘Spinster.’

Now, however medium you may be, or however much of a spinster, you may still sigh for adventure other than upon the high seas of matrimony; but, of course, no matter how gay the glint in her eye, a spinster cannot hang from a yardarm, oil the engines, or stoke the fires; so that my story of necessity must deal with the upper decks of boats, which all true adventurers affect to despise. However, ‘adventures are to the adventurous,’ and, after all, upper decks are not to be looked down upon.

We began our pilgrimage from New York to New Zealand in a BritishIndia cargo boat. She was only 4000 tons, and her name was The Lake of Flowers. She had been a coast-tocoaster for forty years. Her past was a thing to dream about, for she had been a beauty in her time. A past it was of color and smells, chattering natives, spices, and the languid heat and sunshine of the Tropics. And now, like other belles of fashion, who, grown old, have nothing left but staid sobriety, she still held her place in the world of men by that which was put upon the face of her. Lord Inchcape, finding that there were many American missionaries in India desiring passage home, took the old lady, arrayed her in coats of many colors, and sent, her shivering round the world. A pretty pass for a lady of quality ! And oh! more shameful still, having carried to America a cargo of silks and spices, her last sweet touch with the East, she must relinquish it at New York, and have her hold crammed with knobby typewriters for the energetic stenographers of New Zealand, and Ford cars for the potentates of Australia.

But I must start my journey, or I shall never reach its end. Instead of waving tedious handkerchiefs and heaving heavy sighs to the last long line of skyscrapers down the harbor, as all good Americans should, my friend and I threw off our national symptoms and went on a tour of discovery round the boat. She found sheep on the main deck, all doomed to die, and looking as if they knew it, for we carried a native crew. And I found ducks on the poop. And between decks, and wherever there was a nook or cranny, coal was piled, tons of it, covered with tarpaulin.

II

A week to Panama. A week of getting used to things, learning how to dress in our cabin without, putting each other’s eyes out with our elbows, finding the cockroach that lived under the slats by the bathtub, watching the natives at their prayers and at their food. In the half-light of evening, when they spread their prayer mats on the hatches and prostrated themselves toward Mecca, you felt as if a story were being told and you were in the heart of it . When they ate, they squatted round a great wooden bowl, full of rice, in which they rolled pieces of curried mutton, scooping it all up with a cup-shaped hand and emptying it into their mouths.

A week to Panama, and in the roselight of a tropical morning, we found ourselves in the little bay that is the waiting-room of the Canal. We twisted in and out between the boats and sidled up to the coaling docks outside the town of Colon. A day’s hot rush for things forgotten. A hunt for jam and cakes and chocolate, and a ride through sweltering dusty streets. Then night and morning and the Canal; and, at last past the Peaks of Darien and out, in the midst of a blinding, stinging shower, into the blue Pacific overside the world.

Those were halcyon days, when we awoke to a flaming East, when we lay and dreamed of youth and the glory thereof. Halcyon days of laughter and gay winds, watching blue waves curl out in foam, and the albatross swoop and dare, and swoop again, tip-tilted to the water’s edge; long days of good books and invented games and sleepy long, long thoughts; days when we ‘tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky,’ and watched the orange deserts that he left behind the clouds, with their long lines of caravans and camels trailing off to some old forgotten city in the West. Evenings spent in a world of adventure; for, as night loosens the tongues of the dogs on land, so the dogs of the sea are led to tell their tales after the dark has come down. We were wrecked on coral beaches, we stole rubies in Madras, we made love to Burma girls, and we were eaten by cannibals in Malay; and on and on, until silence fell and someone suggested bed.

We slept on deck, and my memory tells of soft hot nights, with the moon coming over the rim of the ocean, when we sat in our bunks and ate oranges sweet as honey, till the sea and the heavens were two black bowls touching edge to edge with a silver path across. The night wind died, and we began to wonder, like the Carpenter in Alice, whether the sea was boiling hot.

Besides ourselves there were three passengers. A man who owned performing dogs, and was going home to Australia because he had not seen his family or heard a laughing jackass for seven years. He used to make the dogs perform for us on the hatches; but as most of their tricks required balancing, and as the ship leaned to every wave, it was n’t a great success. Our second companion wrote scenarios for the movies, and when he was n’t sleeping, was forever trying to remember the name of a poem that sounded like a French pâtisserie. On the last day, he thought of it, and came into breakfast looking radiantly happy. We asked him what had happened and he murmured, ‘Lalla Rookh.’ The name with us will stick to him forever. Our third was an Early Victorian lady. I don’t mean that she could possibly have lived in the Victorian Era: oh, no; for she was young and pretty, and had black curls that stole about her face; but, unlike our modern maids, she wept and trembled and was afraid of mice. She had been to school, but had never learned anything there except how to enter a carriage; and as she had never had one and never expected to have, perhaps it did n’t really matter that they had omitted to teach her how to descend.

III

Were we ever bored? Of course we were. Six weeks to New Zealand, and mutton for every meal! We used to go out every morning to the sheep-pens on the after-deck. Not that we were n’t quite sure they were there, — a subtle something that was not the perfume of the East came floating down the corridors at night, so that we always knew we’d find them, — but we wished to count them and call them by name, and see if it were Jacob or Esau who had been led away to be sacrificed overnight. Finally, only Rachel was left, and daily we awaited the joy of her going. But Rachel developed a hacking cough and declined into galloping consumption, and lingered on. No one ever knew why she was not allowed to sink her sorrows in the sea; but she was there to the last, and we bade her goodbye between her shuddering paroxysms, and felt a gentle gratitude because by her timely illness she had saved us yet one more day of mutton.

The boat was so small, and we so few t hat we became a part of her, and were allowed to go anywhere. All the unimportant things turned to colossal occasions. How we hated the person who took the largest onion in the stew! How thrilled we were over a fight between the second cook and the messroom boy! What excitement there was the day a hen flew overboard! Ah, that hen! I spent long hours pondering her fate. Would she tip upside down, like a ship without a keel, and perish miserably with bony yellow legs ludicrously waving in the air? Would she, perhaps, like Jonah, find shore safe and sound at last, or would a wandering shark seize her by one stark cold toe and drag her down to death in the horrid depths? My imagination had run away too long ago to allow that she might end merely as a pathetic bunch of feathers wilted into the water from lack of food and drink.

One black midnight, in the middle of the Pacific, we picked up the solitary light of the Island of Pitcairn. What a wonder that; what a miracle for man! For three weeks not a speck on the horizon, and then, in the utter dark, at the appointed hour, a single infinitesimal gleam, and a blacker shadow against the blackness of the night. A hail and farewell it was. A greeting, and the leaving of one meagre bag of mail — and then, off into the night again.

We struck rough weather after we left Pitcairn. The sea rose up and raged. At night the wind tore the blankets from our cots, and we woke to find them slithering across the decks. We rescued them, and later woke again as our bunks raced each other into the scuppers, and our poor cold feet stuck out over the rail and caught an icy blast of wind and rain. We rolled and rolled and pitched and tossed. One kept saying to one’s self, —

It was like that. We listened to the wild whirl of the propeller leaping high out of the water, and to the dismal crash of dishes sliding from the pantry shelves — and this for days together. And then, one afternoon when there seemed no end to the wind and no warm place in all the world, land appeared on the starboard bow, and we saw the snow-capped mountains of New Zealand. Snow-capped mountains rising out of the sea, and afar off.

IV

The sun came up the next morning like the hymn, ‘Rise, crowned with light’; for we were going into Lyttleton Harbor, between cliffs drenched in the early gold of an early sun and covered with the yellow gorse of spring. New Zealand is a land of hills — soft, undulating, friendly hills, rolling and rolling forever, it seems, to the edge of the sea. Have you ever watched a sunrise in the hills, the light just touching the tops with crimson and leaving the hidden parts in darkness, like valleys of mystery or death; and then the glow creeping down and on, until the world is shining with new morning and fresh dew? That was what it was like going into Lyttleton Harbor — bare, black outlines crowned with red and gold, and suddenly a world transformed!

This is a hard part of the pilgrimage to tell about. Even pilgrims must rest from their journey sometimes; and resting, while delightful, can hardly interest a reader who, of common knowledge, delights in ‘alarums and excursions.’ We rested in a little valley between the hills of the North Island, where the sun fell hot and sweet upon the blue gums and rose-gardens, and they gave back his sweetness in their fragrance. We paddled up small English rivers, overhung with willow trees and lined along the banks with wattle. Small boys came out and helped us up the rapids for a penny; and on the way down, we stopped for tea and hot buttered scones in a little house set back from the bank of the river in an old-fashioned garden.

One day I moored my boat there, had tea, and was just getting in, to float away downstream, when something hard hit me on the side of the head. It hurt, and I looked down — to see quite a large stone on the bottom of the boat. At first I was angry, and then I remembered. True pilgrims always were stoned, were n’t they, in foreign lands? After that I was better pleased, and I picked up my paddle and went off without even waiting to discover the offender.

We stayed in our valley a month or so; and then, thinking that we had tarried long enough, set off again to find the ‘ little lazy isle ’ we were in search of. This time we sailed from Auckland, in a boat even smaller and older than before; and as the days went on, we found ourselves more and more like true pilgrims who have dangers encompass them round about; for cockroaches and little green lizards raced over our bunks, and rats played games at night on the cabin floor.

It is nearly a week to the first of the islands on the way to Samoa. The days came and went in an orderly procession, like the tropic clouds; and at the end of them, came a sight of silver beaches coral-ringed around green hills. We found white sunlight. No half-lights and shadows, nothing tempered or mellowed and golden, but white like something new-made, untarnished, just born. We found a heavy-scented heat, and sapphire-colored fishes in the water, and all the things we’d read or dreamed about.

Some day I am going back to be queen of one of those islands of love and laughter. I shall have a house on the side of a cliff, and watch the whitesailed schooners going by. There will be a great flamboyant tree by the door, and yellow trumpet-flowers hanging from the roof. If you will come to see me there, I will take you to walk between the palm trees, and show you long-haired pirates, in red bandannas and earrings, playing at dice with the natives as they sit cross-legged on the grass outside their huts, and the little black pigs run in and out with the little black children. One of the men will climb a tree for us, and drop down cocoanuts to drink. We shall have flowers to wear in our hair and wreaths to hang around our necks; and at night you will see the palm trees showing black against the moon, and hear the low singing of the natives in the distance.

V

‘Smells are surer than sights or sounds to make your heartstrings crack.’... You have read that, of course. We never really knew what it meant until we had smelt the copra they were loading on our boat, and wandered down the long street at Suva, which leads from the wharves to the Grand Hotel. Everyone who has been to Suva remembers that street, with the sea to the right and its long line of dirty crowded native shops to the left. I have walked there at midday, when the sun was hot and bright.; and I have walked there at midnight, with the tropical rain coming down in sheets; and there is always the same haunting smell: the sea and flowers, spice and dirt and native; too sweet, too hot, too close, and wholly fascinating.

We spent a day and a night at Suva. Cows had to be taken aboard for the islands farther on. All night we watched them being lifted from the scows into the hold. The whole world outside us was asleep, but the wharves and the boat formed a veritable turmoil of toil. Oil lamps, hung from the rigging, flung yellow rays here and there; and in the deeper shadows, the dark forms of natives were stretched out asleep. Voices shouted from the darkness of the sheds, and were answered by shouts from the boat and loud laughter. There was the sound of cattle stamping and bellowing from the scows; men rushed hither and thither, talking and calling to one another; and over it all, the winches shrieked and groaned, and the natives howled with fear and delight as each cow came swinging over the side. Its head was downward, perhaps because the rope had slipped, and an expression of ludicrous horror was on its silly cow-face as it found itself poised between earth and heaven and heard all about the very noise of hell.

We left Fiji and continued our pilgrimage. Our fellow passengers came and went, as we stopped at different places to deliver or take in cargo; and the scene, like the passengers, changed from one silver-beached island to the next. Here, we had lunch on the beach and afterward lay on the grass and listened to the waves break over the reef; there, we went exploring, climbed hills, or bargained for shells and coral along the wharves. Sometimes the natives gave us great armfuls of fruit; and sometimes, as we wandered down the sweet-smelling aimless lanes of the villages, we saw them dancing, or heard them singing in the darkness. After a week of lotus-eating, we found our island lying green and quiet inside its coral reef, and we saw the mountain rising above where the Master of all Adventurers had said that he should lie, with the stars at his head and the sea at his feet and the deep tropical forest all about him.

VI

We pulled into Samoa Harbor in the afternoon, and watched the crew unload the cargo of big timber piles, with a sea running and the piles crashing into gangways and hatches, and the natives capering about, yelling with laughter.

In the harbor at Apia there is a wreck blown up on the beach from the storm in 1889, when the Germans were in possession. There were American, English, and German boats in the harbor at the time. They saw the blow coming, but for some reason or other the Calliope, a British man-of-war, was the only boat able to get to sea in time. If you ever go to Samoa, you will be sure to hear how the Americans and Germans stood at attention and cheered as the Calliope steamed past; and a short while after were blown on to the reefs themselves, and sank in sixty fathoms of water, or were dashed to pieces on the merciless coral, and hurled away by the hurricane. A battered part of one boat remains lying on the top of the reef, bare to the bones, as a sort of sinister warning.

When the sea went down and the cargo was unloaded, the Samoans came out and got us in rowboats and took us ashore. As soon as we stepped on dry land, we started for Vailima. When the Germans owned the island, the governors used to live in Stevenson’s house; and as we entered the front door, a great picture of Bismarck greeted us. But it did n’t seem to matter. The gentle gay spirit that first loved the place seems to be left behind in the light airy atmosphere of the rooms, and the idea of the Man of Iron sitting there still, stern, and silent, looking on the beauty and wealth his country had lost, would surely have appealed to a teller of stories.

The house is set on the side of a hill looking out to sea and surrounded by large verandahs. It is easy to imagine Stevenson sitting on the upper one, in a lounge chair with the cushions piled behind him, just as Saint Gaudens made him, devising glorious sport for David Balfour.

But his grave was what we had come to see. We delayed a little, because we were half afraid. We had come over ten thousand miles of sea, and then three thousand more, and it might be disappointing. Now that we were here, we doubted. The time was to be so short, like waiting years for one short minute. And then the thing of beauty we had come to see might, by the stupidity of others, turn out to be cheap and tawdry. I wonder now why I did not realize that he must have made other people see beauty as he saw it, so that they could not make a mistake about what he would have wanted.

You start deep down in the valley, below the lawns of the house; you go over a brown and crystal flood of water; and then you toil up and up and up a tiny slippery track, part scrambling for foothold after the rain, and wholly panting for breath in the humid misty heat. Up and up and up, until you can look over the tops of the trees, until your heart is bursting, and your face a living fire. It is as if he had planned that only the faithful should see him in the sweetness of his rest.

VII

Finally, you are there. It is quite simple. There is a little opening in the trees and you see a great gray stone on the rounded slope that is the very top of the mountain. A place is cleared around it just a little, and the grass underfoot is thick and soft. On every side stand tall hibiscus bushes, with big bright flowers hanging down. The blossoms drop now and then, and the petals are blown across the stone or sift softly in between the grass-stems, making a carpet of crimson and green along the edge of the clearing. Two long vistas run out like giant paths: one shows the sea and all the ships that pass, and the other lets you see down into the heart of the rounded valleys below. On all sides there is the thick, sweetsmelling forest. It is better than one ever imagined — unspoiled by anything, peaceful and wild and lovely. Cut on the stone are the words he wanted: —

His wife is buried beside him, and the words he wrote for her are on t he front of the stone: —

That is all. Our pilgrimage was over. We laid some wild flowers on the stone, and we sat for a little while beside it, looking out to sea. We did not say anything. But in our hearts we had a feeling of glory, as those should who visit a holy place.