CHAPTER VIII
TAMATE AND ANOTHER
AFTER this Mr. Chalmers went to England. While he was there he met the lady who afterwards became his wife. With this second Tamate Vaine he made a home at Motu-motu, the village of islands, a place still farther west and nearer the country of the wildest tribes of New Guinea.
Mrs. Chalmers entered into her husband’s work with great spirit. She soon loved the wild villagers, and the chiefs from the country round her home. And the little dark-skinned children were a joy to her. But the climate told on her health, and her husband sailed with her to Sydney that the voyage and rest might strengthen her.
At this time there was another great Scotchman on an island in the Pacific. He, too, was trying to help those amongst whom he lived, though not in the same ways that Tamate helped. His name was Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote delightful stories and poems, “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”; “Leerie” and “The Land of Counterpane,” and very many more.
When he was a full-grown man he enjoyed romping just as much as Mr. Chalmers had enjoyed being a bear in Cheshunt College. These two men were like each other in many ways, and when they met on board the steamer from Sydney to the islands, they became friends at once.
There was a little smoking-room on board ship, and night after night the dim air was full of pictures, pictures of shipwrecks and strange weird places, of wild men in battle, and little children. They were the pictures that rose as one story followed another.
Too soon the steamer reached Samoa, where Mr. Stevenson’s home was. The friends had not to part at once. Tamate stayed some days in the island, but he was so busy seeing people and speaking that there was not much time for story-telling. Twenty-four years before this, after the ship-wreck at Savage Island, he had landed at Samoa with nothing except the clothes he wore. He had made friends there as he always did, and now many of them, as well as others who had only heard of him before, wished to see him.
A great open-air meeting was held. Hundreds and hundreds of native men and women gathered to listen to him and to their own King Malietoa.
The white people who lived there wished to hear him too. They asked him to lecture to them. This he did, and Robert Louis Stevenson was in the chair at the meeting.
When Tamate sailed away from Samoa he hoped soon to see his new friend, but they could never meet again. The letters they wrote to each other were full of love and honour. In one of them Mr. Stevenson said:
“O Tamate, if I had met you when I was a boy, how different my life would have been!”
It was not only the wild men of New Guinea who loved Mr. Chalmers. Wherever he went he drew out all that was finest in men and women, and made them better and gladder because he was there.
When he and his wife reached Motu-motu the sea was very rough and they could scarcely land. But they were so eager to be amongst their friends there again, that they would not wait for calm. The little landing-boat lay alongside, but far down below the deck, and she danced on the waves like a cork. It was too wild to think of a ladder, so Mrs. Chalmers called out:
“Stand ready to catch hold of me, boys, and when she rises again, I’ll spring.”
Her husband said:
“That’s the only way; but I fear you won’t do it in time.”
But before he had finished speaking Tamate Vaine found herself safely in the boat, not very sure how she had got there, but glad to be one step nearer home.
What a greeting met them. Every one was at the water’s edge to welcome them home. The houseboys came as far out as they could on a bank of sand and ran alongside as the boat came in, and the dogs plashed into the water in their delight.