When Kelly played American or English airs and the Tahitians sang their native words, he gave the I. W. W. version in English.  Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite.  Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the “Himene Tatou Arearea” in repetition.  It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe’s mission in the Chicago slums, was: 

    Hallelujah!  Thine the glory!  Hallelujah!  Amen! 
    Hallelujah!  Thine the glory! revive us again!

Kelly’s version was: 

    Hallelujah!  I’m a bum!  Hallelujah!  Bum again! 
    Hallelujah!  Give us a hand-out!  To save us from sin.

He had the stanzas, burlesquing the sacred lines, one of which the natives especially liked: 

    Oh, why don’t you work, as other men do? 
    How the hell can we work when there ’s no work to do?

None of us had ever heard Kelly’s songs, nor had any one but I ever heard of his industrial organization, and I only vaguely, having lived so many years out of America or Europe.  But they all cheered enthusiastically except Llewellyn.  He was an Anglican by faith or paternal inheritance, and though he knew nothing of the real hymns, they being for Dissenters, whom he contemned, he was religious at soul and objected to making light of religion.  He called for the “Himene Tatou Arearea.”  He took his pencil and scribbled the translation I have given.

“This is the rough of it,” he said.  “To write poetry here is difficult.  When I was at Heidelberg and Paris I often spent nights writing sonnets.  That merely tells the sense of the himene, but cannot convey the joy or sorrow of it.  Well, let’s sink dull care fifty fathoms deep!  Look at those band-boys!  So long as they have plenty of rum or beer or wine and their instruments, they care little for food.  Watch them.  Now they are dry and inactive.  Wait till the alcohol wets them, They will touch the sky.”

Llewellyn’s deep-set eyes under the beetling brows were lighting with new fires.

His idea of inactivity and drought was sublimated, for the musicians were never still a moment.  They played mostly syncopated airs of the United States, popular at the time.  All primitive people, or those less advanced in civilization or education, prefer the rag-time variants of the American negro or his imitators, to so-called good or classical music.  It is like simple language, easily understood, and makes a direct appeal to their ears and their passions.  It is the slang or argot of music, hot off the griddle for the average man’s taste, without complexities or stir to musing and melancholy.

The musicians had drunk much wine and rum, and now wanted only beer.  That was the order of their carouse.  Beer was expensive at two francs a bottle, and so a conscientious native had been delegated to give it out slowly.  He had the barrel containing the quartbottles between his legs while he sat at the table, and each was doled out only after earnest supplications and much music.