RUPERT BOARDED THE SS Sterra bound for Honolulu. To the backdrop of a happy atmosphere on the boat provided by a crowd of young men with mandolins, he wrote in October 1913 the poem ‘Clouds’, imagining the clouds to be spirits of the dead, scudding across the moon and observing the living beneath them.
Down the blue night the unending columns press
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.
They say that the Dead die not, but remain
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
And men, coming and going on the earth.
The poem was to become a favourite of both his mother and Cathleen Nesbitt.
On the same journey he began ‘A Memory’, a cathartic poem about Noel Olivier, born out of a letter written to Cathleen relating the story of his relationship with Noel.
Somewhile before the dawn I rose, and stept
Softly along the dim way to your room,
And found you sleeping in the quiet gloom,
I knelt there; till your waking fingers crept
About my head, and held it. I had rest
Unhoped this side of Heaven, beneath your breast.
I knelt a long time, still; nor even wept.
It was great wrong you did me; and for gain
Of that poor moment’s kindliness, and ease,
And sleepy mother-comfort!
Child, you know
How easily love leaps out to dreams like these,
Who has seen them true. And love that’s wakened so
Takes all too long to lay asleep again.
To Cathleen he wrote, ‘I would like to make a litany of all the things that bind me to the memory of holiness – of peaks. It would mean – “The Chilterns” – “Hampton Court” – “Hullo, Rag-Time!” – “Raymond Buildings” and a few more names. And it would begin and end with Cathleen.’ He was also beginning to come to terms with his guilt over the Ka situation and being able to think of her without discomfort. Being able to regard it from a distance, he put his feelings into another poem.
Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and tree
Drift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes,
Some where an eukaleli thrills and cries
And stabs with pain the night’s brown savagery.
And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a woman’s hair, stretch out, and rise;
And new stars burn into the ancient skies,
Over the murmurous soft Hawaiian sea.
And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known,
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that loved – or did not love – and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.
He took a boat to Kanai before returning to Honolulu and catching the SS Ventura on 27 October. The Ventura put into Samoa on 2 November. He described the scene to Cathleen:
In the evening the wharf was covered with torches, lamps and a mass of Samoans, all with some ‘curios’ or other on little stalls … great bronze men, with gilded hair, and Godlike limbs lay about on the grass … The whole was lit up by these flaming lights against the tropical nights and the palms and the stars, so that it looked like a Rembrandt picture…
He wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘I lived in a Samoan house (the coolest in the world) with a man and his wife, nine children, ranging from a proud beauty of eighteen to a round object of one year, a dog, a cat, a proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and green parrot.’
He dispatched poems to Wilfred Gibson for possible inclusion in the new project. The name for the anthology of verse was for a while to be The New Shilling Garland, after Laurence Binyon’s The Shilling Garland, before the idea of naming it The Gallows Garland was mooted. By the time the plans were finalised, the title of New Numbers had been settled upon. The publication would contain the work of Brooke, Gibson, Abercrombie and Drinkwater. After a visit to Apia, Rupert took the SS Torfua to Fiji. There he entertained the fascinated locals with his prehensile toes, journeyed to the island of Kandarra, played Fijian cricket, took in Suva and sailed to the island of Taviuni. He wrote many letters home, factual to his mother, romantic to Cathleen, general to Eddie Marsh and others to the likes of Edmund Gosse, Dudley Ward and Denis Browne.
Denis! … it is mere heaven. One passes from Paradise to Paradise. The natives are incredibly beautiful, and very kindly. Life is one long picnic. I have been living in native villages and roaming from place to place … These people are nearer to Earth and the joy of things than we snivelling city-dwellers.
England, though, was still in his heart, as he informed Jacques Raverat: ‘Oh I shall return. The South Seas are Paradise. But I prefer England.’ To Violet Asquith he joked – from ‘somewhere in the mountains of Fiji’ – ‘It’s twenty years since they’ve eaten anybody in this part of Fiji, and four more since they’ve done what I particularly and reasonably detest – fastened the victim down, cut pieces off him one by one, and cooked and eaten them before his eyes…’
In mid-December he took the RMS Niagara from Fiji. From the Grand Hotel in Auckland he gave vent to his frustration to Cathleen:
Why precisely I’m here, I don’t know. I seem to have missed a boat somewhere; and I can’t get on to Tahiti till the beginning of January. Damn. And I hear that a man got to Tahiti two months ahead of me, and found – and carried off – some Gauguin paintings on glass. Damn! Damn! Damn!
He described New Zealand as ‘a sort of Fabian England, very upper middle class and gentle and happy (after Canada), no poor and the government owning hotels and running charabancs. All the women smile and dress very badly, and nobody drinks.’ He stayed for a while with one of the early New Zealand families, the Studholmes, at Ruanni in the middle of the North Island, as well as seeing Warapei and Wellington where, at the Wellington Club, he read several of his Westminster Gazette articles and a complimentary write-up of Cathleen’s performance in the play Quality Street. He saw a specialist in Wellington about some poisoning in his foot, before sailing a week or two behind schedule to Tahiti. On board was the statuesque contralto Clara Butt and her family. They got on so well that they dined together on arriving at Tahiti in early February.
Rupert described his new surroundings to his mother.
I have found a fine place here, about 30 miles from Papeete, the chief town in Tahiti. It is a native village, with one fairly large European house in it, possessed by the chief, and inhabited by a 3/4 white man … it is the coolest place I’ve struck in the South Seas (Papeete was very hot), with a large veranda, the sea just in front, and the hills behind … there’s a little wooden pier out into the sea (which is 30 yards away in front of the house). With a dive into deep water … PS. They call me Pupure here – it means ‘fair’ in Tahitian – because I have fair hair!
Brooke immediately fell in love with the island, deciding to stay for at least a month, fishing, swimming, canoeing, exploring and eating ‘the most wonderful food in the world, strange fishes and vegetables, perfectly cooked’.
When the original settlers, the Polynesians, first came here in the seventh or eighth century the vegetation was limited to seeds and spores, forcing them to bring taro, yams, coconuts, bananas and breadfruit; missionaries later introduced corn, citrus fruits, tamerinds, pineapples, guavas, figs and other vegetables. The first European to set foot on Tahiti, the most famous of French Polynesia’s 130 islands, was Captain Wallis of the HMS Dolphin in 1767; Captain Cook arrived there two years later, and HMS Bounty under Captain Bligh in 1788.
One hundred and twenty-five years on, no mutiny was necessary for Brooke to enjoy the Tahitian way of life for as long as he pleased. Within a day or two of arriving he met a local girl, Taatamata, who symbolically gave him a flower. Wearing a flower over the right ear meant you were looking for a sweetheart; over the left ear, that you had found a sweetheart; and behind both ears, that you had found one sweetheart and were looking for another. To Cathleen he wrote:
A white flower over each ear, my dear, is dreadfully the most fashionable way of adorning yourself in Tahiti. Tonight we will put scarlet flowers in our hair and sing strange slumberous South Seas songs to the concertina and drink red wine and dance obscure native dances and bathe in a soft lagoon by moonlight and eat great squelchy tropical fruits – custard apples, papia, pomegranate, mango, guava, and the rest…
From Eddie Marsh he heard news of Wilfred Gibson’s impending marriage, and Marsh’s delight at receiving Brooke’s poem ‘Heaven’.
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream or Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto Mud! – Death eddies near –
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somehow, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almight Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
Marsh confessed to Rupert, ‘I do long to see you. Every now and then it comes over me, how much more I should be enjoying everything if you were here.’ He also mentioned the impending publication of the first edition of the Brooke/Abercrombie/Gibson/Drinkwater co-operative publication New Numbers. The volume published in February 1914 contained three of Rupert’s sonnets, ‘A Memory’, ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’ and ‘One Day’ written in the Pacific.
Today I have been happy. All the day
I held the memory of you, and wove
Its laughter with the dancing light o’ the spray,
And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love,
And sent you following the white waves of sea,
And crowned your head with fancies, nothing worth,
Stray buds from that old dust of misery,
Being glad with a new foolish quiet mirth.
So lightly I played with those dark memories,
Just as a child, beneath the summer skies,
Plays hour by hour with a strange shining stone,
For which (he knows not) towns were fire of old,
And love has been betrayed, and murder done,
And great kings turned to a little bitter mould.
During his time in the South Seas, the quality and depth of Rupert’s poetry reached a new maturity, while at home his reputation was growing. Wilfred Gibson was a little peeved that he had not been offered ‘Heaven’ for New Numbers, and the English Association wanted to include ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ in an anthology of modern poetry for use in secondary schools. The editor of a new series of Body and Modern Development of Modern Thought was keen for Brooke to contribute, having been impressed by his review of Poems of John Donne. Eddie Marsh suggested he might manage 40,000 words on somebody like the Stockholm playwright Johan August Strindberg, a subject close to Brooke’s heart. There was a splendid review of New Numbers in The Times, which quoted his ‘Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)’.
Not with vain tears, when we’re beyond the sun,
We’ll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there
Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.
New Numbers was being printed by the Crypt House Press at Gloucester and stamped and dispatched by the local postmaster Mr Griffiths with the help of Dymock postmen Charlie Westen and Jack Brooke. The first edition was oversubscribed, to the extent that the project was deemed to be a veritable success, Eddie Marsh writing to Rupert, ‘N. N. is out. It’s very good, the shape, print and appearance quite excellent.’
As Brooke’s reputation was spreading, via Eddie he had had a direct entree to the right social, literary and political circles; so why did he tread water in Tahiti rather than race home to embrace success and capitalise on it? The answer was Taatamata, and a laissez-faire way of life that appealed to his neo-paganism. From Papeete Rupert was to declare to Marsh: ‘All I want in life is a cottage and the leisure to write supreme poems and plays.’
Five of Rupert’s South Seas poems would appear in the third volume of New Numbers in July 1914, one of them, ‘Tiare Tahiti’, making reference to Taatamata, whom he called Mamua. Although he affords her only the odd allusion in his letters home, they enjoyed a full physical relationship and she nursed him back to health when he was feverish with coral poisoning. On the face of it, it was a dalliance that suited them both, and he waxed lyrical about her:
I have been nursed and waited on by a girl with wonderful eyes, the walk of a Goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her – only I fear I’m too fond of her.
The idyllic life could not continue: he had run out of money and the call of England was too great. Homesickness tore him from the arms of Taatamata, and from the Pacific he wrote:
Call me home, I pray you, Cathleen. I have been away long enough. I am older than I was. I have left bits of me about – some of my hair in Canada, and one skin in Honolulu, and another in Fiji, and a bit of a third in Tahiti, and half a tooth in Samoa, and bits of my heart all over the place.
The Tahiti, with Brooke aboard, left in early April. He described his sadness at leaving in a letter to Cathleen, understandably omitting his prolonged and personal farewell to Mamua:
I was sad at heart to leave Tahiti but I resigned myself to the vessel, and watched the green shores and rocky peaks fade with hardly a pang. I’ve told so many of those that loved me, so often. Oh yes, I’ll come back … next year perhaps: or the year after … I suddenly realised that I’d left behind those lovely places and lovely people perhaps for ever. I reflected that there was surely nothing else like them in this world, and very probably nothing in the next…
His final South Seas poem was ‘Hauntings’.
In the grey tumult of these after-years
Oft silence falls; the incessant wranglers part;
And less-than-echoes of remembered tears
Hush all the loud confusion of the heart;
And a shade, through the toss’d ranks of mirth and crying
Hungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood –
Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,
So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,
Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible,
And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell.
Still in the Pacific on board the Tahiti, he wrote to Frances Cornford, addressing the contents to her six-month-old daughter Helena: ‘[L]ately, I have been having English thoughts – thoughts certainly of England – and even, faintly, yes, English thoughts – grey, quiet, misty, rather mad, slightly moral, shy and lovely thoughts.’
On the way back home, Brooke went back to the United States travelling through Arizona to San Francisco, where he already started to yearn for Tahiti – ‘How I hate civilisation and houses and towns and collars’ – and miss Mamua – ‘waiting there to welcome me with wide arms … under the constellation the Southern Cross’.