the
natives going home from their work. They walked with long steps, slowly,
with care and dignity, and the soft patter of their naked feet was
strange to hear. Their dark hair, curling or straight, was often white
with lime, and then they had a look of extraordinary distinction. They
were tall and finely built. Then a gang of Solomon Islanders, indentured
labourers, passed by, singing; they were shorter and slighter than the
Samoans, coal black with great heads of fuzzy hair dyed red. Now and
then a white man drove past in his buggy or rode into the hotel yard. In
the lagoon two or three schooners reflected their grace in the tranquil
water.

"I don't know what there is to do in a place like this except to get
soused," said Lawson at last.

"Don't you like Samoa?" I asked casually, for something to say.

"It's pretty, isn't it?"

The word he chose seemed so inadequate to describe the unimaginable
beauty of the island, that I smiled, and smiling I turned to look at
him. I was startled by the expression in those fine sombre eyes of his,
an expression of intolerable anguish; they betrayed a tragic depth of
emotion of which I should never have thought him capable. But the
expression passed away and he smiled. His smile was simple and a little
naive. It changed his face so that I wavered in my first feeling of
aversion from him.

"I was all over the place when I first came out," he said.

He was silent for a moment.

"I went away for good about three years ago, but I came back." He
hesitated. "My wife wanted to come back. She was born here, you know."

"Oh, yes."

He was silent again, and then hazarded a remark about Robert Louis
Stevenson. He asked me if I had been up to Vailima. For some reason he
was making an effort to be agreeable to me. He began to talk of
Stevenson's books, and presently the conversation drifted to London.

"I suppose Covent Garden's still going strong," he said. "I think I miss
the opera as much as anything here. Have you seen _Tristan and Isolde_?"

He asked me the question as though the answer were really important to
him, and when I said, a little casually I daresay, that I had, he seemed
pleased. He began to speak of Wagner, not as a musician, but as the
plain man who received from him an emotional satisfaction that he could
not analyse.

"I suppose Bayreuth was the place to go really," he said. "I never had
the money, worse luck. But of course one might do worse than Covent
Gard