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Title: The Venture Book Author: Elinor Mordaunt * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 1600651h.html Language: English Date first posted: May 2016 Most recent update: May 2016 This eBook was produced by: Les Bowler Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg Australia Licence which may be viewed online.GO TO Project Gutenberg Australia HOME PAGE
THE CENTURY CO.
New
York
London
p. ivCopyright,
1926, by
The Century
Co.
PRINTED IN
U.S.A.
Two young Tahitian Girls |
Frontispiece |
A typical native woman of Martinique |
|
In the market, Fort de France |
|
Oranges in Martinique |
|
Bananas |
|
A view of the Rivière Madame, Fort De France, Martinique |
|
A ruined street in St. Pierre, Martinique (1925) |
|
A typical native woman of Fort De France, Martinique |
|
The U.S.S. Henderson in one of the locks of the Panama Canal |
|
The slide in the gaillard cut in the Panama Canal, showing the delay caused to south-bound ships |
|
The far-famed Diadem, Tahiti |
|
Sweeping the room, with many intervals of dreaming |
|
The pandanus tree |
|
One of the ladies in waiting at Maou-U’s Hospital House |
|
A fisherman’s house in Tahiti |
|
Holding the pearl upon his finger |
|
The lagoon |
|
The canoe |
|
The schooner Monterey sailing under the Panama flag |
|
The little house where I was entertained by Maou-U |
|
A Samoan dancing-girl |
|
A Samoan type |
|
Samoan native girls dancing the sitting “Siva-Siva” |
|
Male dancers of Vavau |
|
Samoan natives about to dance the sitting “Siva-Siva” |
|
Making kava |
|
Tongans dancing on the shore |
|
Preparing a feast in Tongatabu |
|
The council house at Mbau |
|
The sacred trees of Mbau |
|
Adi Litia Cakobau |
|
Some of the sennit work in Ratu Pope’s house |
|
Ratu Akuri Tudauni Mbau, the last chief of the Fishers for Human Beings, one hundred years of age |
|
Mbau council tree |
|
On the outrigger of a canoe |
|
Ratu Epeli Gavidi Ganilou, Roko Tui Ra |
|
Ratu Osea, a one-time cannibal of Viti Levu Bay |
|
Ratu Epeli’s boy seated in a kava bowl |
|
A chief’s house at Mbau, Fiji |
|
Little Nausori |
|
In the meke (the man is kneeling to dance) |
|
Boys seine fishing on the edge of the river |
|
The buli’s house at Wailotua |
|
Fijians |
|
The canoe of a Fijian chief |
|
A Samoan girl |
|
Fijian in meke dress |
|
Section of a rope-tree at Bega |
|
A typical river scene in the Fiji Islands |
|
Fijian boy spearing fish |
Fifty kilometers out from the port we drew up at the Hotel des
Bains for lunch, and there saw the first white faces which we had
chanced upon since starting: a couple of very slightly shaded
young French girls in delicate muslin frocks; an old man; the
French proprietor and his wife. Here, too, we discovered
what is of all things the most precious, the rarest and most to
be desired in life: a place where those who are sufficient to
themselves may find peace and escape from the perpetual colds,
the unutterable drab dreariness of an English winter; a place
where one might, indeed, taste the almost forgotten joy of living
within one’s income,—or, without any great
uneasiness, upon one’s overdraft,—living at ease in
mind and body.
p. 26For
Monsieur Dole’s Hotel des Bains is cheap, almost given
away, indeed, with the franc as it is: full board with wine,
thirteen to fifteen francs a day; the extravagance of a
sitting-room and wide stretch of veranda, the equivalent of one
and twopence a day in our money; board and lodging for a maid,
one and sixpence a day, for a chauffeur, one and ninepence a day;
garage accommodation for a car, twopence; with, actually, a
reduction on all this for any long stay.
Déjeuner for three of us, my companion and
myself in the large, clean, open dining-room—with the
forests dipping like green-velvet mantles to the edge of the
sea—and the chauffeur somewhere in the back regions, cost
fifteen francs; roughly, four shillings. A salad of tomato
and onions, eggs in butter, Jerusalem artichokes in white sauce,
fresh tongue served hot with salad, a dish of wild
raspberries,—of a finer grain, harder, and brighter than
ours,—a bottle of claret apiece, iced water, and
coffee—such coffee too, freshly roasted and ground and of
the country. Could any one wish for anything better?
The whole expense increased, as was explained to us when we went
round to the back of the hotel to order the car and saw nothing
of the chauffeur,—apart from a pair of feet clad in bright
blue socks p.
27hanging out over the door, while he took his siesta on
the floor,—by the fact, as one might have suspected, that
he had ordered an iced rum-punch.
Some day, I promise myself, I will come out to Guadeloupe
again and spend two or three months in this hotel, a perfectly
ideal place to work in. The beauty of the position and the
cheapness are not all there is to it, either; for five minutes
farther up the mountainside are the natural warm-water baths
after which the hotel is named: three great square pools overhung
with immense plumes of bamboo, mahogany trees hung with creepers
showing between them as though in a dark frame, the intense azure
patches of the sea far below them; pools of graduated depths, so
that one may sit or stand with the water to one’s
chin. There were, indeed, a few native women sitting there
with the odd effect of black heads and shining teeth set upon a
clear metal platter of shining green, so deep was the shade; in
water that is of an unchanging warmth, so near to the temperature
of the skin that as I dipped my hand in it I could scarcely feel
it—the same temperature at midnight, at dawn, and at
midday. Think of that, you at home in England, with the
kitchen stove, the hot-water supply, and the cook’s temper
forever at odds!
p. 28Yet,
even here, where one pictures oneself with old Andrew Marvell,
“Annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a
green shade,” sorrow has found its way,—albeit the
sort of sorrow which wears a feather in its cap,—for over
the door of one of the little dressing-rooms some swain has
written these words:
Le cœur est porcelaine qui se brise, mais
qui ne se raccommode pas.
Signé Duquor: Juillet,
1923.
From the hotel we drove on another fifteen miles to
Basse-Terre, down a succession of steep bends between groves of
cocoa-trees and high palms. Basse-Terre is a far better
town than Pointe-à-Pitre. In the upper part of it
are immense solid old gray-stone buildings, houses and barracks
and forts of the same period as the arch and the cocoanut avenue,
and right on the edge of the sea are modern wooden houses and
shops with brilliantly painted red-and-white and green-and-white
striped and checked and starred and spotted shutters, closed
during the heat of the day. In the center of its little
place is a real merry-go-round—prancing wooden horses with
flowing manes.
On the way back to the port we punctured a p. 29tire, and
while a new one was put on we waited in an old cottage with walls
close upon three feet in thickness, where we were regaled with
mandarin oranges from a high old tree just outside the door,
dragged down by the weight of the golden fruit. A cottage
of one large single room, very cool and full of soft umber
lights, belonging to an old negro and his wife who showed us
photographs of their daughter married to a Frenchman and living
in Paris with her husband. In the beautiful, soft,
round-syllabled French used by the negroes they told us about
their other children, widely scattered throughout the world, and
at parting presented me with two treasured beans of vanilla
wrapped in newspaper which looked as though it were stained with
blood from the sweet, perfumed juice which exuded from them.
We were obliged to stop again on our way back, to water our
engine at a little garage over which was posted the delicious
sign of Au Gracieux Sourire,—think of that for a
motor-garage, with its smells!—and reached our boat with no
more than a bare five minutes to spare before she sailed.
Not that I myself should have greatly minded had I missed her,
provided I could raise so much as a tooth-brush in the town, with
a memory of the Hotel des Bains still fresh in my mind.
Everywhere was color, the market-place a kaleidoscope of
color: gowns and turbans of scarlet and crimson, vermilion and
pink, crimson and orange, sky-blue, royal-blue, and peacock-blue,
green and yellow, the turbans tied with two smartly twisted ends
erect like ears, one on each side of the head and in violent
contrast to the color p. 32of the gowns; stalls heaped with
oranges and red and bright-green and vermilion peppers and purple
egg-fruit, a few mangoes, though it is not yet the season,
pumpkins cut open to show their luscious rose and crimson
centers, pomegranates with their thick red-and-yellow rinds slit,
displaying their ruby-like centers; eggs and fowls, and p. 33fish of every
color, and white and gray rabbits. The colors shifted,
mingled, and broke like waves as the people moved among the
stalls—people who are in themselves more beautiful than
anything else; women holding themselves like empresses,
deep-breasted and upright in their immensely full, starched print
gowns.
For the Martinique negroes and negresses are surely the most
splendid in all the world, their skins a clear and perfect black,
their teeth flawless, while the great muscles of the men move
like snakes beneath the skin. All alike are fresh and
untired, though many have walked as much as thirty miles this
morning, over the mountains, with their heavy baskets on their
heads. And the laughter and talk are like the sound of the
sea in a cave, so deep and soft and mellow.
Three of us, the Englishman, a French lady p. 34who is
another passenger on the boat,—a tall and magnificently
made woman with just enough of Tahitian to mellow the French
blood in her veins,—and I, took a motor and drove out over
the mountains to St. Pierre, the real capital of the island,
which was totally destroyed by an eruption of Mount Pelée
in 1902.
For some twenty-three miles the road mounts and mounts, and
never in my life have I seen anything like the splendor and
richness of the vegetation on each side of it: foliage, flowers,
fruit. For the greater part of the way it passes along an
immensely high and ever-rising ridge, with a deep ravine and
silver thread of river far below, to right and left, running down
to the great bay. Three miles from tip to tip of each horn
and four miles in depth, the bay lay beneath us like a small
platter of pure turquoise, the little islands and ships growing
ever more toy-like as we looked back between the arching bamboos
which edged the road, with ravine and hillside, deep in
tree-fern, below them. The road twists so sharply that upon
each short reach the next turn is completely lost to sight.
Here were little villages of very clean color-washed houses,
and churches which looked as though they were made of colored
cardboard, so p.
35crowded that a greater part of their congregations
debouched on to benches outside. Magnificently starched and
colored and flounced congregations they were, though every now
and then in front of some cottage we came across a group of
laughing children at play, colored and shining like black pearls,
naked as the day they were born—and not out of poverty,
either, for it is impossible to imagine anything of the sort in
this luxuriant land, but from sheer wanton delight in air and
sunshine. And at one spot, beneath a hibiscus tree with
brilliant hanging flowers shaped and colored like scarlet corals,
sat an old man clad in little more than a tightly curling white
beard.
About eighteen miles from St. Pierre the ground begins to
drop. There were high walls of shining canes on each side
of us, and presently we came across one house which had survived
the catastrophe of 1902; and again the road twisted, bringing us
within sight of the sea, and we dropped to the
burial-place—or, rather, the dead bones—of what had
once been a thriving town, with university and schools, a
cathedral and a convent, many shops and many private houses, the
most prosperous town in all the French West Indies.
To-day, when we visited it, we found forty or p. 36fifty
jerry-built wooden houses, a pathetic attempt at a market-place,
a handful of grown people and children; a new town devoid of
grandeur save for its surroundings. And yet, with all this,
a place in which one was conscious of a brooding spirit that
could have been nothing less than the spirit of death; a
dry-boned and sultry, brooding death which stood with folded
wings over the town where it had reaped so great a harvest.
There was one little café where we took our
déjeuner, a rickety wooden affair facing the
sea. The meals were served in an upper room which stretched
the whole width of the house; beneath it was a sort of open hall
with a tiled floor packed with barrels, bottles, and benches,
where chickens wandered about at their own free will. Back
of this were the kitchen and outhouses. In the whole place
there could be no possible space for any other rooms, and yet the
card which the bowing proprietor handed to me before I left reads
like this:
Voyageurs, Touristes!
N’oubliez pas en passant
à Saint-Pierre
de visiter le
SELECT-HOTEL
Rue Bouillé
(tout près du débarcardère)
Où vous trouverez:
Apéritifs divers, Casse-croute et Repas a toute
heure. Cuisine moderne.
Service irréprochable.—Prix
modérés.
Pension de Famille.
p. 37In the
upper room four more than brunette Frenchmen were playing
dominoes, splitting a bottle of wine among them. Two more,
whose mothers, even more obviously, had “drunk too much
coffee,” one with a wooden leg and both very smartly
dressed in large-check tweeds and flowing silk
ties,—twanging loudly upon their guitars, decorated with
bright-pink ribbons,—sang French love-songs. All this
did nothing whatever to diminish that indescribable feeling of
the immutability of everything on earth: a depression which
flattened the good rum-punch, the claret, the simple country
meal—brawn and tiny pasties the size of pennies, cold fish
with a piquant sauce heavy in garlic; rabbit and
purée of peas; wild raspberries and coffee.
Even the sight of the small black pig and pullet which slept in a
fond embrace upon the floor was powerless to lighten my
gloom.
An old negro gave me a wonderful and graphic description of
the eruption,—or, rather, what he saw of it from the other
side of the island, for no p. 38one now lives who was in it, or can
tell exactly how it came upon the town. In the whole town
there was but one man left alive: a man who had been imprisoned
for murder the night before, shut up in a deep underground
cell. Four days later his frenzied screams attracted
attention, and he was found to be raving mad, scorched and
blistered from head to foot.
The great eruption took place on the morning of May 8th.
But for days before that there had been a sound like the
continual roar of cannon inside the mountain, while a fine
powdering of ashes had fallen over the town, lying so thick in
the streets that the people moved about silently, like ghosts;
and all the singing and laughing in the cafés, all the
joking upon the quay, came to an end, beaten under by a weight of
foreboding. The people went about their business
white-faced and tight-lipped, refusing to leave the town which
they so greatly loved—“the darlingest little town in
the Antilles,” as Lafcadio Hearn called it, with all its
streets of seventeenth-century houses, its yellow walls and green
hanging balconies, its cathedral and universities, its many
shops,—for was it not rightly named the Paris of the West
Indies?—its theaters and cafés; La Place Bertil, the
pride of Martinique, with its many fountains, its p. 39gardens so
thronged in general by happy strolling citizens, overrun by
laughing children; for of all the islands in the world this
island of Martinique, with its mixture of French-negro blood,
shows most strikingly what the true mating of different races can
be like at its best, breeding women who are, indeed, unmatched in
the whole world.
One can see it as it lay during those days, edged with the
blazing sea, beneath a sunshine which is like the clear white
light of electricity, with all its palm-fringed streets and
gardens, its mountains and many streams, its wide and shining
river, its mouillage, or landing-stage, its many flights
of steps leading to the upper part of the town which must have
made it so like Italy. The lovely capital of an altogether
lovely island.
On May 5th the sound of cannonading within the mountain
gathered to one continuous roar, while a suffocating wind blew
from it and a stream of boiling mud,—which some one speaks
of as “Mount Pelée bleeding black like a dying
octopus,”—bursting forth, rolled down the side of the
mountain, spreading out for many acres, moving at the rate of a
mile a minute along the bed of the Rivière Blanche,
carrying away a great sugar-factory in its course, dashing at
last into the sea, throwing up fantastic fountains of steam p. 40as though
boiling lead had been poured into it.
Upon this night a very few people began to slip away as though
ashamed of being seen leaving by daylight, jeered at by their
fellows, who, with their own nerves all on edge, terrified and
defiant, bitterly resented the very idea of any one being so
mean-spirited as to forsake the town.
The night of May 7th was stiflingly hot. Early in the
evening the Italian ship, Orsolino, steamed away; for the
captain, who knew Naples, realized what was brooding over the
fated town. At daylight next morning, however, the Quebec
boat, Roraima, came cheerfully to anchor, to be gutted,
charred, burnt to the water’s edge in less than two
hours. For at eight o’clock an explosion came like
the bursting of a mine, cutting short a message which was even
then being sent over the telegraph wires to Fort de France, and
of which the one word to reach it, prelude to Heaven only knows
what, was curiously and pathetically enough, Allez.
It was the last word of a doomed city. A city which was in
another moment devastated by a cyclone of red-hot dust and flame;
a hurricane of sulphur before which the men in the streets were
swept headlong, with clothes and flesh alike torn from them.
That was at eight o’clock, and, at that time, p. 41people upon
the far mountain summit declared that they saw a violet-gray
cloud, luminous and shot with fire, belch forth from the torn
crater like a charge from a cannon, striking the town and
spreading to the sea, with the flames eddying and twisting like
live things within it. In another moment the mountain
itself, the blazing city, hills, and bays, were blotted out by a
dense cloud of smoke and ashes which covered the entire island
and spread to many of the nearer ones.
In this disaster there was no fall of lava, and it was
altogether from the poisonous gases and the falling buildings,
the flames which swept the town like a scythe, that the people
died,—between twenty and thirty thousand of
them,—while so terrible were the fumes which hung over the
dead town for at least three days that those who ventured near it
were found later, dead among the dead, with blackened and
protruding tongues.
The wind is sweeping straight off the Atlantic and right
through the hotel, with its every door p. 45and window wide open. And, to
my mind, one of the joys in reaching the real tropics is to be
able to sit in a strong draft and feel the air racing through
one’s thin muslin garments. And what a wind it is,
too! One sits and thinks: “How cool! How
delicious! How can any one complain of the heat
here?” And yet with the least exertion, so little as
stooping to pick up one’s scattered papers, one is
dripping. I am so languid as to be thankful that I have no
luggage to bother about; concerned as to whether it will be
possible for me to gather energy to call for my bill, mount one
of the funny little zone carriages, with its orange-and-white
striped umbrella, and make my way back to the boat.
The Panama Canal does not run from east to west as one expects
it to, but due south from Limon Bay on the Atlantic side to the
widest part of Gatun Lake, where it twists sharply to the
east. It is not, indeed, a canal at all, but a bridge of
water eighty-seven feet in height.
It has six locks: three at the entrance to Gatun Lake, one at
Pedro Miguel, which lowers Pacific-bound ships to the level of
Lake Miraflores, and two between Miraflores and sea-level.
Each lock is double, so that ships going in opposite directions
may pass one another. All the machinery of the p. 46canal is run
by electricity, while the Gatun dam and spillways serve to keep
the water in the lake level, allowing for dry seasons and
evaporation. The dam itself is one and a half miles long at
its crest.
I believe that I am right in these details, but anything may
be, in truth, just the opposite of what I have said. My
mind has a way of suddenly spinning round on its own pivot over
facts, and the only fact of which I am always altogether certain
is the way in which anything new impresses itself upon me.
After all, any more definite, scientific, or practical knowledge
of the canal can so easily be come by at any public library.
To me it seems that the Panama Canal is something alive,
uncanny, and quite suddenly created: the outcome of a whim of
some demigod having nothing whatever to do with the pale,
set-looking men whom one sees—appearing so small,
inadequate, and fumbling, with an air of somehow being left
behind and very badly scared—about the margin of it.
More than anything else I have ever known, the silence of it all
impresses me: the perfectly noiseless, relentless motion of every
atom of machinery, with its air of stealing a march upon
humanity.
p. 47The
entrance to the canal is flat, desolate, terribly
depressing. The air is like the taste of flat soda-water
upon one’s lips. One’s limbs drag; one’s
lungs feel as though they had been ironed out with a hottish iron
and a damp handkerchief; one’s skin is moist and sticky to
the touch; and there is an odd smell in the air, the smell of a
close tailor’s shop.
To my mind there is nothing in the world so desolate as
mangrove swamps, and I wonder how many men they have, in truth,
driven to despair, madness, suicide: the gloom and damp mists and
the fever-specters of them; the grotesque and sinister figures of
the roots at low water. Here, now, on each side of us, are
mangroves and ragged acacias. Upon the low, half-hearted
hills of the landward horizon are gray wooden and concrete
houses, two or three twisted palm-trees; eternal hieroglyphics of
cranes, electric cables, and standards scrawled across the
sky.
It all looks like the very end, the last shunting station of
the hopes of man. Instead of this it is the beginning of
something so wonderful, so altogether and confidently
presumptuous that one goes through it in a state of panic.
Not on one’s own account, but because of what one feels
might happen to the world if things like this went on; p. 48the chance of
its slipping entirely out of gear.
At the top of the first lock of the three which will raise us
into Gatun Lake, is a large mail-steamer which looks as though
posed upon a wall, while small squat engines of blue and yellow,
shaped like tanks and worked by electricity, dumb and dreadfully
concentrated, run up the slope to this height and disappear over
what might very well be the end of the world. As the
mail-steamer drops from sight, six of these beetle-like creatures
take us in tow. Two run on in front with ropes from each
side of the bow; two, with more ropes amidships, keep us off from
the walls which rise high above us; and two more hold us
back. Despite all precautions there are accidents.
One little engine still lies derelict, having been plunged into
the water by a ship which rushed away too impetuously under her
own steam as she left this lock, making for the Atlantic;
breaking through the chain fenders which in general allow no ship
that is not moving at its staid and proper pace, to
“bullock” through them.
We pass into the lock through an immense gateway from which
steel gates have rolled silently back into the sides of the
canal; the gates close, and an amazing process begins.
In reality, of course, the water rushing in from p. 49culverts
rises, taking us with it. But that is not in the least what
it seems like. Rather, the walls of the lock, the top of
which has been on a level with the crow’s-nest, appear to
sink very slowly down and down, drawn under the water by some
force which leaves us high on a level with the top of it,
paralyzed with wonder. The whole effect is so keen and
piercing that one is perfectly prepared to see the causeway, the
little engines, the slack-looking men who seem so entirely,
blindly indifferent, ultimately disappear beneath the waters;
while we and our ship, all the impedimenta and furniture and
stores and machinery and funnels and fuel, all the people, crew
and passengers, with all their petty strivings, engrossments,
generosities, and jealousies, their families and boxes and
chairs—the whole caboodle are shot up heavenward, amazing
Peter; along with that god upon earth who sits at the top of the
center lock,—before him a flat working model of every wall
and gate, every scrap of machinery,—and, himself alone,
throws out the switches, controlling every operation, every
movement of the waters, and of the ships upon the face of the
waters.
It seems as though a lifetime had passed in this amazing
process, while the barometer in the captain’s cabin sinks
beneath one’s eyes, with a p. 50heavier weight of air. And yet,
from the moment the great steel gates close behind us, to the
moment the second pair above opens to admit us, is no more than
thirty minutes in all. Not the least surprising part of the
whole affair is the fact that no one appears to be doing anything
whatever, apart from the pilot, who walks up and down the topmost
bridge, barking out an occasional order.
If I were down upon the lower deck, which I now regard as a
sort of dog-shelf, I could see next to nothing, the whole advance
being hidden by the fo’c’sle. But from my proud
position upon the bridge I see the whole play opening before me;
while as we are raised to the highest level of the last Atlantic
lock, Gatun Lake (made from the deepening and widening of the old
bed of the Chagres River; eighty-seven feet above sea-level,
twenty miles long, and covering an area of one hundred and sixty
square miles) is unfolded like a picture laid flat upon a table,
while the clean, fresh air blowing across it fills one’s
lungs so that one feels almost like a real person again.
Close to the entrance into the lake is a large village,
housing some of the three thousand white men and five thousand
colored people employed by the Canal Zone Company. We see a
series of p.
51tennis-courts at one side, and at the other golf-links
with men in white clothes wandering rather limply across
them. The whole village seems less significant than a
bee’s nest hung upon the bough of a tree at the entrance to
an unexplored forest; for I cannot get over the idea that, as a
whole, humanity has had nothing whatever to do with all this.
It is a misty day, and I think that the shoreless lake seems
all the lovelier for this, as we rise to it and see it dotted
with innumerable islands, which are in reality the tops of
one-time hills; every island a tight bouquet of intensely green
palms, hung with vivid green creepers.
Toward the end of the afternoon the sun comes out, not
brilliantly, but in a flattened golden sheen, while the air is so
damp that it seems as though everything were covered with a
fine-meshed gray gauze, cut by the close-pressed wedges of wild
duck, which are forever crossing and recrossing it with the sun
upon their backs.
At the end of the lake the little islands thicken and gather
to mountains upon each side of us; until we slide in between the
high cliffs which men are still cutting away—standing as
casually as any suburban householder hosing his garden of an
evening after business hours—with a pressure p. 52of water so
intense that the walls of the cliffs fall, flatly and almost
silently, unbroken like slices of cut cake.
In between these cliffs we pass to the Gaillard Cut, six miles
in length, among mountains which tower peak upon peak, almost
perpendicularly upon each side of us. Of all the wonders of
the canal, in the main constructive, this vast and utilitarian
work of destruction which formed the Gaillard Cut—the one
“man-made” cañon in the world—is the
greatest. For here is no quiet canal, wending its way
through flat meadows, but that bridge of water still continued at
the same height as Gatun Lake, cutting in among the mountains of
the Great Divide. Of all the heartbreaking difficulties
which the Americans encountered in their task, there can have
been none like those encountered here. The land-slips or
slides which in a few moments destroyed the work of months or
even years, and others even more devastating which continued with
dreadful certainty at the rate of two or two and a half feet a
day, for months upon months on end, must have dragged the very
heart out of the idealists who had evolved from their dreams this
wonder of the world, breaking into the will of the desert with
that strength which is indeed the child of dreams, overthrowing
mountains and gorges, rivers and jungles; p. 53vanquishing,
even, that dreaded Cucaracha Slide which, having turned the
French aside from their path, broke out afresh with savage
vehemence the moment that the Americans laid their hands upon its
territory, shooting across the entire canal prism.
Here, now, as though in radiant triumph, the
scenery—like a woman of the Sabines scarred and torn, and
mantled only in her own hair—is wild and wonderful beyond
all words. For where the garments of forest trees and
creepers are slashed away from them, the scarred cliffs show pink
and purple, lovely in the last level rays of the evening sun;
streaked with great masses of greenery, toppling trees and
trailing creepers which the fall of soil has dragged away with
it. In one place a huge perpendicular cliff of absolutely
clear vermilion, topped with green, rises against the clear
greenish sky in front of us.
By the time we reach the single lock of Pedro Miguel the whole
scene is aflame with the setting sun, like the brief but gaudy
transit of some Oriental magnate, crossing the street with all
the panoply of one who sets out to war.
As we enter the first of the two remaining locks a train
running between Colon and Panama comes p. 54out from among the mountains and
stops at a little station upon our right.
All through the day, so long that it has seemed altogether
unconnected with time,—for I have not even gone down to the
meals which in general punctuate it,—the whole scene has
been like the gigantic setting for some Titanic drama. Now
the play itself comes upon us, pathetic because it is so small,
infinitely touching as is every aspect of man in the desert;
ridiculously inadequate for the setting—and yet, within it,
holding the material for a hundred little plays in little
theaters.
Across from the station, on the opposite side of the lock,
there is a group of dilapidated cars and mule-carts, and the
American soldiers who tumble out of the train on their way back
from some race meeting or other (for it is a fête-day in
the real world) make a dash to reach them before the gates open
to let us through. We are sinking quickly now, going down
and down instead of up and up as we did at the entrance from the
Atlantic, and the men running across the narrow wall above us
look like nothing more than a host of neutral-tinted ants, with
their twinkling legs. Those who are alone get over p. 55in time; but
there are many more with women and children who find themselves
cut off and, standing along the sides of the lock, wait for us to
go through.
The sun has almost set by now and sky and water and steep
wooded hillside, the color of spilt wine and purple fuchsias, are
reflected upon the hard white wedge-like faces of the men, very
lean and standing very upright, as though nerving themselves
against being overborne by the heavy brooding silence of the
place, the sullen forests, the hot suggestive twilight: as though
they were saying to themselves, setting their jaws over it,
anxious and unsmiling, “It looks as though it might get us,
but—gee-whiz!—we won’t have it!”
The yellow-faced babies which so many of them hold in their arms,
the children who cling to them, the half-caste wives who lean
against them—full-breasted and voluptuous, as curved as
their husbands are angled, waving a languid and indifferent hand
to us, with passionate dark eyes raised to their
husbands—have got them far more certainly than any
wild.
Night has closed in before we pass the second of the
Miraflores locks and drop to sea-level: a perfectly clear
greenish-indigo night with a full p. 56moon overhead. As I look back
over the length of the ship, the sight is extraordinarily
fairylike, fantastic, and unreal.
Backed with high-peaked mountains, the causeways to the locks,
shortened and broadened by perspective, show like the top of an
immense Christmas cake, the tall white concrete pillars with
their lights, clusters of five hundred wax bulbs under concrete
shades, like candles set above them. The little engines
with their bright crimson lamps add a still more fantastic note
of decoration to the scene. It is an appropriate finish to
the transit through an isthmus in itself fantastic beyond all
words, worked to their own ends by men who, as it seems, could
scarcely have realized the magnitude of their own powers.
Take it all in all, the whole effect of the Canal Zone is
theatrical. The islands are not islands at all, but the
tops of mountains pushing up through the water; the mountains
themselves are cut to pattern, placed just so; the green of the
vegetation is more than a trifle overdone, as are the exaggerated
madder and vermilion of the cliffs. The machinery of the
gigantic transformation scene left lying about, with the pathetic
remains of the heroic failure of Lesseps, suggests the idea that
it has all been brought there by p. 57trolleys, small enough because of the
primal flatness; that the valleys which open between the
mountains are mere wings leading to the green-room, with nothing
whatever at the back of them. We have the feeling that it
all must come to an end when the last of the lights go out, and
the electrician, forsaking his engines, goes home to supper and
bed, leaving the night watchman seated on a little camp-stool in
the center of this vast stage, his elbows on his knees, his chin
cupped in his hands, staring out in front of him and wondering
what on earth has been the good of it all, thinking over those
days when he himself took a part in the great play, wore the
crown of a king, or saw himself as one with God, outdoing God,
for the amusement or convenience of a gaping world.
We stop at Balboa for water and some necessary repairs to the
engine; but I am too tired to go on shore, while it is far too
late to drive out to Old Panama. Besides, I spent so much
money at Guadeloupe and Martinique and Colon that I am beginning
to get a little scared at to what will happen when I get to
Tahiti, unless my agents have meanwhile sold something for me,
either in America or England. Not that I should bother
over-much about ways and means, for one p. 58can always
get where one means to go, unless I were dead beat by a heat so
enervating that I have been obliged to tie a towel round my neck
while I stooped over my work. It is best to leave all
one’s money worries upon the knees of the gods—the
only knees I have ever altogether trusted.
The moonlit quay at Balboa is deserted, apart from a few
policemen negligently swinging their “love sticks” in
one hand, with the other hand stuck in a trouser-pocket, who
wander on and off the ship in pursuit of their express duty of
seeing that the prohibition regulations are fully carried
out.
I am terribly troubled as to how I am to register and post a
packet of manuscripts; still more troubled when, having entrusted
it to one of these gentlemen, I hear from the captain how many
brandies he has consumed. My one comfort is that a
“dry” American is probably as well seasoned to liquor
as any other man on earth.
The highest peak of all, Aorai—and it is these vowels
that make the Tahitian language so lovely—has her head in
the lead-gray and silver of cumulus clouds, but the Diadem, the
pride of Tahiti, with her seven piercing peaks of deep indigo, is
flung across with no more than the p. 61lightest scarf of that mist which
lies thick among the innumerable ravines. The foot-hills
and lower slopes are of that same vivid and indescribable green,
with—and here is an extravagance of beauty—a broken
rainbow arched above the town. The white wooden buildings
and toy churches are embowered and almost lost in trees deeply
green as the velvet of a huntsman’s coat, splashed in
places with the clear fervent scarlet of the flamboyant, not yet
in its full glory.
There is no ugly quay to mar Papeete, the one town and port of
the island; no chimneys, cranes, and blackened buildings, the
cloven hoof of most seabound towns. The small wooden
landing-stage, this afternoon, resembles the tulip-beds at
Hampton Court, with a breeze-blown parterre of girls in the
lightest of muslin and thin silk gowns,—straw-colored and
daffodil yellow and white and pink and rose, mauve and fuchsia,
gray and blue of every shade,—the most of them flounced to
the waist. Girls with broad-brimmed hats or with flowing
wavy hair falling far below their waists, wreathed with flowers;
and mingled with these, young men and old men in white suits or
shirts and paréus. For the whole island takes
holiday at the incoming of the French boats.
p. 62Right
opposite to Papeete, seemingly so near that its reflection almost
touches us (though it may be in truth twelve or fifteen miles
away) lies the island of Moorea, all its many peaks pure
amethyst, filmed over with gold in the light of the setting sun;
the shadows a deeper purple cut with gold, the water in the
little lagoon deep olive. Though mountain and water are
alike black—the mountain black velvet, the sea a shimmering
satin, before I can get away from the ship. For the young
French officers insist upon my drinking to what they call our
“friendhood,” in a glass of sweet champagne; while
the murmur of voices from the landing-stage beneath us, slurred
syllables, soft vowels, lap like small waves on a sandy
shore.
It is Saturday night and mercifully the customs officer has
started celebrating it in good time, being so altogether
“market ripe” that seeing two boxes for every one of
mine he shakes his head in despair and allows me to go my way
without so much as a tentative offer of keys, along the shore to
“Johnny’s.” Johnny’s is the only
place in which any one with any sort of soul can stay in Papeete,
though there is a pretentious hotel in the heart of the town
where you can put your body when you have nothing better p. 63to do with
it, and eat your meals. At Johnny’s nothing is
supplied beyond the rooms and the petit déjeuner;
actually supplied that is, for how infinitely more there is to
it!
First Johnny himself, or Paree, as he prefers to be called,
the son of the fattest woman and most famous cook in the Pacific,
the friend of innumerable wanderers, the last refuge of
innumerable derelicts. Johnny himself is round and fat and
cherubic, with the forehead of a dean. One can see him
wearing a round black shovel hat and a bishop’s apron or
wreathed like Bacchus in vine-leaves, his smiling mouth smeared
with grape-juice. As it is, he is attired in a dark silk
paréu and white singlet. He is kind and
smiling, and beyond belief glad to see one; so altogether and
artlessly charming that it is little wonder to me that in
speaking of Tahiti every one I have ever met who came from here
has spoken of Johnny first. And this is not all there is to
it, either, for his house is immediately opposite the sea, and
from my latticed veranda—which forms in reality a second
room—I look down upon it, through a tapestry of solid green
and scarlet, to where the lanterns of the fishermen flicker like
fireflies along the reef.
I have just come back from eating my dinner p. 64at an
unorthodox little restaurant facing the quay. It is kept by
a Frenchman and an Irishman, who, dripping with heat in their
singlets and white trousers, serve the most delicious food
imaginable, helped by one small bronze boy beautiful as a
statue.
The tables are on a veranda debouching on the road; and here
were officers of all grades from the boats; young Frenchmen and
other young men of every gradation of shade with their Tahitian
friends, dark beauties with flower-bound hair and pale
flower-like silk dresses; four black cats with brilliant green
eyes, all precisely alike, which sprang up on every side of one
like the creatures of a dream. Laughter and light, the
twang of a guitar; salad and grilled chicken and omelette and
good red wine with friendliness.
I was happy there and I am happy now, back at Johnny’s,
wandering about my room,—grandiloquently designated
“the countess’s room,”—which is
fantastically hung with scarlet and white
paréus. I revel in that sense of space which
makes the end of a voyage almost as good as the beginning.
It is one of the many delightful reactions of life, such as the
unsung joy of falling p. 65out of love, with its delightful
sense of altogether fresh possibilities.
There seems to be nothing more than a bottom sheet on my
bed,—of course no blankets,—and trying to attract the
attention of a maid of some sort I am reassured by a distinctly
masculine, friendly American voice on the other side of the thin
wooden partition, informing me that I shall find a top sheet
folded across the foot. An informal little introduction
which seems to warrant my protesting against the rattle of a
typewriter close against my head, spoiling the beat of the surf
in my ears; apart from which there is no sound save the murmur of
voices as barefooted people pad softly by in the dusty road, the
whisper of lovers along the strip of green between it and the
sea.
I was up at five o’clock this morning, to visit the
market. But there was nothing whatever interesting in it,
though I enjoyed meandering back to Johnny’s along the
waterfront, where the families aboard the tiny ketches and
schooners and cutters anchored there were making their morning
toilet in a bland, leisurely way, regardless of the long hiatus
which occurred between p. 66discarding their night wear, hanging
it out among the rigging to air, and getting into their best
Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
There were rolls and butter and coffee, and paw-paw and
bananas and melon on the veranda at Johnny’s when I got
back. All of Johnny’s boarders were there: two
American men, the Englishman who came over on the same boat with
me, a Russian, and an American married couple in their
dressing-gowns, talking and laughing, wandering off to the
bath-room,—a large, cool stone tank, walled round and
roofed over, with an immense shower,—and reappearing,
picking up the conversation where they had dropped it, with their
hair still dripping. These Americans had evidently been in
Tahiti long enough to have all their country’s irritable
restlessness buffed off them.
I have an idea that my veranda will be a very good place to
write in; at least so I tell myself, though at the back of my
mind I know better. I know that it is, indeed, a place in
which to dream, leaning back in a long chair or opening one of
the small lattice shutters and lolling over the rail, exchanging
pleasantries with passers-by whom one has never seen
before. In my room at the back of the veranda the serving
maid is sweeping the p. 67floor. She wears a bright
pink-silk dress flounced to the waist, with purple violets
embroidered upon the low and sleeveless bodice; her wavy hair,
flowing to her waist, is wreathed with flowers, and she is
smoking a cigarette.
Another maid comes into the room to talk to her. This
girl, who is dressed in pale lemon-colored muslin, has a guitar
in her hand and the two of them chat together,—chat, chat,
chat,—discussing p. 68the tune which she picks out upon it,
and love and lovers. What a place, what a place for me to
find myself in! I who am in general ravaged by
activity. A place where time melts like the mist upon the
mountains, and is no more to be caught or woven to any useful
end.
p. 71In some
places the mountains rose sheer on one side of us, cut by deep
ravines filled with an amazing vegetation, not in the least like
ordinary trees and shrubs. There were green and pale-yellow
striped leaves shaped like the spear-heads of gods; glossy green
leaves like immense fans; the fronds of ferns brown and hairy as
Pan’s hock; the long pale leaves of wild bananas; the tall
straight stems of what is called here the mapau tree, with
immense flanged roots like folds of stiff silk upright above the
ground, and fluted trunks like Ionian columns. In the sea
at the other side of us, which was perfectly smooth, clear, and
shining, fishermen waded up to their waists, dragging their nets
through the water, so clearly reflected that each man seemed like
the upper half of two men welded together.
At one spot the side of the mountain was hollowed out by an
immense cave, hundreds of feet high, almost completely dark, with
the unimaginably long roots of trees hanging down within it, and
a continual drip of water into the dark and ominous pool which
paved it.
More and more I feel that this island is not a place in which
to paint. There are too many strong primal colors; it is at
once too artless and too passionate. The vegetation is too
like the p.
72packed hothouse of a millionaire. The background
of sky and mountain is purposely set for the life drama of an
artless, material, and yet primitive people.
Among the rocks in the ravines are many skeletons, for the
people once hid the bodies of their departed chiefs there so that
their enemies might not get at them. Thus any wanderer
up-country in Tahiti may be confronted by death grinning out upon
him suddenly amid bowers of ferns, the spurt and spray and
whisper of those innumerable waterfalls which flow with an
outward curve like flying-buttresses from the top of high,
in-curving cliffs; finishing touch to those dark figures of dread
and melancholy which step hand in hand with love and beauty
through the slow and silent dance of tropic days.
I am scribbling as best I can upon my knee while we rattle
along. The air is full of scents: the smell of guavas, like
warm flannel, of mangoes, daturas; of dust and a depth of damp
vegetation untouched by the sun; of plants like animals; of sweet
ginger-flower and wild gardenia, or tiare, the national
bower of Tahiti, of lantana, with the stuffy odor of nettle beds
at home in England; of seaweed and stagnant salt-water
pools. And the sibilant p. 73secret hush-hush-hush of
palms, the pat of small waves on the shore are forever in the
ears.
Two tall bronze colored boys, on the edge of manhood, run out
of the sea, and, vaulting upon a white horse and a chestnut
horse, dash up the narrow steep slope of sand and across the road
in front of us. Fine spray, gold with sunshine, showers out
of their hair as they go, and silver drops stream down their wet
bodies.
Something stirs against a garden hedge as we pass it—a
hedge behind which grow balsams and zinnias of every shade,
jasmines, crimson and yellow crotons, crimson and yellow
cannas—and we see a youth leading a white heifer, white as
a transparent silk stocking on a woman’s leg, against the
flaming hibiscus bushes. The boy, wide-eyed with terror
lest we dash into him and his charge, presses back into the
shrubbery, out of our way.
Girls run out of the cottage gardens and throw flowers into
our car; others leap upon the steps and hang garlands—which
they must have had in readiness for any chance
passer-by—around our necks. They have not the
slightest air of expecting anything in return, these laughing
girls with flowing hair and white teeth.
The island is roughly divided in two by a wide p. 74causeway and
banks of trees, close upon forty miles out from Papeete.
Just before crossing the causeway we stop at the house of a
Tahitian friend of my friend, who comes out to be introduced to
me. He promises to have luncheon ready for us when we
return, for we are going on still farther.
We cross the causeway between an inland lagoon and the
sea—water clear as glass without so much as a ripple to
break the reflection of unnumbered islets; bays curving so
sharply that they look like islands—and enter a series of
deep woods, broken by clusters of houses with their gardens, and
pass along a road so narrow that the masses of hibiscus growing
upon each side of us are pressed back like wall hangings of
brilliant patchwork.
We come to a space which is a little more open. On one
side of us is the sea, on the other, a hundred yards back from
the road, are immensely tall cliffs with waterfalls streaming
down them at the distance of every quarter of a mile or less,
silver threads and silver ribbons, and widths of silver tissue
hung with mist.
When we get back to Maou-u’s he protests that had we
only let him know earlier he would have had a better meal ready
for us, more for us to p. 75eat. At this my companion turns
to me, laughing. “Only wait and see,” he
says.
Maou-u has a little guest-house across the road, and on the
veranda of this our luncheon is served to us. We are waited
upon by one of the girls who live with the family, not at all a
servant, but more like a lady in waiting. She is a tall,
deep-breasted creature with great dark eyes swimming with
passion, love, and melancholy; the offspring of some American
captain’s stray fancy for a girl of the race to which
Marcaline, despite her assertion to the contrary, so plainly
belongs.
More to eat! How would it be possible? Marcaline
brings us an immense dish piled with fresh oysters, five dozen of
them; a savory omelette; fried chicken and some sweet, succulent
beanlike vegetable; fried plantains, black coffee. To all
of which we do such justice—think of it, five dozen oysters
between two of us!—that it seems impossible that we should
ever again be able to rise from the low chairs into which we have
sunk. We lie back without a word, perfectly content to
watch our cigarette smoke rising up against the dark green of the
trees, just sufficiently awake to realize our entire contentment,
no more.
p. 76When we
do at last take our departure Maou-u’s wife and three
children, Marcaline and another girl, with Maou-u
himself—stout and smiling, utterly refusing to accept
anything in return for his hospitality, delighting me with an
invitation to come out and stay at his guest-house—and two
shy smiling youths, gather to see us into our motor, already
piled with ripe cocoanuts, a basket of guavas, a bunch of fresh
plantains. The girls hang round our necks garlands of white
and yellow ginger-flowers, the heavily perfumed cups of the
pandanus fruit, gardenias, and pink and crimson roses.
Every word they say, every glance of their dark eyes, is full of
kindliness toward me, more than kindliness for the handsome young
Frenchman, a boy altogether so delightful that there is nothing
that I should like better than to own him as my son.
To be kind, to be happy, to love and be loved; to find oneself
surrounded by beauty and perfume and sunshine and sea-air, blest
with an infinity of leisure. Is it to be wondered that many
men forget that there is anything else left in life to be
desired?
The Kantara is sailing early to-morrow morning, and a
couple of officers come to make their adieux over a last
glass—though that “one last p. 77glass”
is a merely formal way of putting it—of Johnny’s iced
rum-punch glowing with golden fruits. Surely it is one of
the most enticing drinks imaginable!
It is after nine o’clock, for they have been extra busy
with the cargo, and we are out on the narrow slip of crab-ridden
grass opposite the house, between the sea and the road, while the
whole entertainment is of the sort impossible for any
England-bound English man or woman to imagine. The
housemaid and parlor-maid—I use the only words I can find
to describe the nymphs who bring out the punch—have changed
into even brighter silks than they have worn during the day,
combed out their long hair, and placed hibiscus blooms behind
their ears—and it is the left ear for the girl who wants a
lover and the right ear for the girl who is contented, or vice
versa; I can never quite remember which. Not that it
matters, for they themselves make certain of not being left in
the lurch, wearing a bloom behind each ear.
The girls have their guitar with them, and sitting down upon
the grass at our feet, or upon the benches at our side, sing to
us—love-songs and that strange haunting Tahitian song of
which the only words seem to be, “How happy I am! oh, p. 78how happy I
am!” set to the tune of an old French Baptist hymn.
Apart from the singing and playing, low notes and low crooning
voices, the night is almost silent. What sounds there are,
beyond the shrilling of the cicadas—striking upon the ear
as though a myriad wires vibrated between the ground beneath
one’s feet and the star-strewn sky—is dulled by love
and languor. Young men and girls in muslins with flounced
skirts pad softly by, whispering to one another. Large,
majestic women with straight white cotton dresses to their feet
sail past with a flotilla of small children about them; and there
seem to be more children in Tahiti than I have ever seen before,
for whatever the admixture of blood may do in other directions,
it very certainly does not lead to sterility.
“Love and languor.” The words swim gently
through my mind as the keynote to Tahiti, or rather to the full
understanding of it, for I do not believe that it is of the very
faintest use to expect any full-blooded, warm-hearted people to
be moral with so much time on their hands and in a climate like
this, among girls so gentle and smiling, so much more kind than
immoral. As to working hard or continuously, it is out of
the question. Never in all my life have I taken so p. 79long to dress
and undress; never have I wandered about my room with such
vagueness, such long pauses in everything I happen to be doing,
though goodness knows it would be impossible, with decency, to
wear fewer clothes than those which I put on and take off
me. The fact is that one never can keep to one thing at a
time. One’s brain is so full of all sorts of odd
quotations, odd ideas, impulses to do something altogether
different. One is, indeed, in a continuous sort of pleasant
swoon. I am convinced that if I lived here I should get
into the habit of reading nothing whatever beyond
anthologies.
Merely looking out of my window, or leaning over my balcony
rail, takes much time. To begin with, I am absorbedly
interested in what the people in the next house are doing, waving
hands to the domestics who sweep a little, smoke a little more,
and make love a great deal—all precisely as they do here,
and yet, as ever, the house next door is more interesting than
one’s own. Then in the front there are the land-crabs
to beguile me, so like stout city gentlemen bolting down into the
Underground on their way home at night, running in and out of
their holes, forever in a prodigious hurry. There are the
amazing ways of the sun and moon and the clouds; the rain which
comes p. 80down
in sudden terrific sluices as though the sky had opened overhead;
and, above all, the ways of the wind which, rising suddenly in a
terrible passion, sweeps through the house, carrying everything
with it, setting every door and window banging.
Really, when I come to think of it, the only thing I ever do
with decision here is getting up in the morning,—the
antithesis of my way at home,—for the mornings are heavenly
and I do not sleep very well; the mosquito curtains remind me of
the refrain which a Spanish lover sang to his mistress:
“Neither with thee nor without thee have I any
peace,” for with them it is too stuffy for words, while
without them it is impossible to rest at all. I scalded one
arm rather badly on the boat, and the new skin, young, tender,
and childlike, is so tempting that the mosquitos literally jostle
one another gourmandizing upon it.
To-night two large wreaths of roses and gardenias hang one
upon each post at the end of my bed. By whom they were sent
I know not, though I suspect the housemaid, for there is no
mosquito curtain here. Yesterday I pointed out to her that
it should be taken down and washed. She took it down this
morning, declaring that it would dry in less than no time, would
be up again long p.
81before I was ready for bed. But, of course, it is
not there. No one can find it; no one knows where it is,
and I find myself obliged to fit up, with the help of three
giggling maids and the sacrifice of the tapes out of two
petticoats, the curtain belonging to my own camp equipment, so
small that it lies like a veil against my face.
And this is so like these people. They could take
infinite trouble over those wreaths and feel themselves utterly
unable to grapple with that curtain—even if they knew where
it was, which they don’t.
Three days later the curtain is found, I myself spying it on a
line at the far end of the back garden and going out to fetch
it. It has stormed with rain for close upon twenty-four
hours; but for one hour the sun has shone and the curtain is
almost dry. Taking it off the line and wandering round the
back veranda, seeking some safe place to finish it off
in,—for the sky is as black as ink,—I come upon two
of the maids ironing their own innumerable, brilliantly colored
pongée silk dresses.
A large ironing-sheet and blanket are spread upon the floor,
where they sit in their chemises with their legs stretched very
far apart, ironing between them. There is a great deal of
giggling p.
82when I come upon them with the curtain, of which they
deny any knowledge whatever. But in this island the girls
are always giggling, the older women gazing out to sea, deeply
melancholy.
There is one elderly looking woman, though goodness knows she
may not be more than five and twenty. She appears to live
on the veranda of the house next door, and she greatly intrigues
me. For whatever time in the morning I happen to look
out,—and it has been as early as four,—I see the
outline of her face and figure by moonlight or in the gray dawn,
with her chin propped in her hand, gazing out to sea in the
precise attitude of the Minotaur in Watts’s haunting
picture. Now, while I write, there is a man upon the bench
across the road, gazing, gazing with precisely the same air of
desperate resignation, far and away beyond despair. I
wonder what it is that, without hope, they long for. It may
be some sort of subconscious yearning for the land from which
their race once came; or it may be that they are forever trying
to follow with their eyes those sailing-ships which come and go
above the horizon, bearing away, away their loved ones.
To-day I walked very slowly past the shop, for I must say that
pearl draws me, so that I find my footsteps continually turning
in that direction. Seeing me as he stood peering out of his
dark shop, the proprietor beckoned me in, looking very sleek and
sly; and when I got up to the counter he was p. 91behind it,
holding the pearl upon his finger, as though it were set in a
ring.
I took it from him and he made a pretense of hunting for the
little piece of black material upon which to show it off,
apparently distracted when he could not find it. As it
happened, I had in my bag a powder-puff with a black satin
cover. I laid the pearl upon this and walked to the door so
as to catch the light, returning at once in a great rage.
“It’s not the same pearl,” I said.
His eyes met mine blankly for a moment; then he smiled very
sweetly, and, curiously enough, with the greatest satisfaction,
really liking me for having found him out. Unlocking a
drawer, he took out what I called my pearl, twisted in a tiny
screw of newspaper. It seemed to me, however, that I had
found some basis for refusing to buy it, bolstering up my
strength of mind, and with great dignity I walked out of the
shop, declaring that I should never come near it again. Yet
I know in my own heart that this particular Chinaman and I shall
go on playing the same game for so long as I remain in
Papeete.
There are dozens and dozens of Chinese shops here, the most
intriguing of all being those of the Chinese druggists.
p.
92To-night I have dined in the largest and most important
of the Chinese restaurants. The whole of the ground-floor
is a store, while above this is one large room, one smaller
room,—which pretends to be set apart for white
people,—and a few little semi-private rooms like
bathing-boxes, with muslin curtains across the empty doorways,
and a veranda set with tables.
It is Saturday and the whole place was crowded with people,
many of whom had evidently come in from the country, for they all
were crowned with fresh flowers. A few children lay on the
floor at their parents’ feet, sleeping. There were
men of every color there. No collars were worn even by the
white men, while one—an Englishman, I found out
later—was in nothing more than a bathing-dress and a very
great deal of tattoo. The noise was terrific: if shouting
failed to bring a Chinaman, or one of his Tahitian waitresses,
the people took up their chairs and banged them on the floor,
while all the time an agonizing admixture of many different tunes
was strummed upon innumerable guitars, and concertinas mingled
with the sounds of a gramophone braying out jazz music—or
so-called music.
The Tahitian waitresses, with their flowing hair, moved
superbly, and altogether aloof, p. 93bearing their heavy trays in front of
them. All the ladies of the town were there. There
was one, very ugly and badly dressed, but with such an air, such
a beckoning assurance that every man in the place turned to look
at her as she walked down the room with her breasts thrust out,
her shoulders squeezed up high and tight, swinging her hips in
the way in which they all do.
I had a chop-suey of shredded chicken with shrimps, and
shredded vegetables and red pepper—an immense heaped plate
of it served with a bowl of rice and a doll’s saucer of
piquant sauce, and China tea to follow.
Coming back along the waterside I found a great number of
little schooners and ketches anchored there, pulling at their
ropes with a soft whimper, for the tide was going out,
endeavoring to draw them with it.
In the stern of one boat some one was playing a guitar and men
and women were singing. This serenade was broken into by
the most appalling, long-drawn shrieks as I passed the bows,
growing louder and louder, more and more piercing, until they
ended in one long, horrid gurgle. A sound which made it
plain to the meanest imagination that a little pig—and all
boats carry them, running about the deck—was being killed
for the Sunday p.
94dinner, while, likely enough, one of the swains chanting
such melodious love-songs was himself doing the job, without so
much as turning a hair over it.
The three children climb up into the trees, a height full
forty feet above the water, and dive, dropping in a sitting
position, crossing their legs as they touch it. Armani,
aged nine; Spole, aged seven; and Charlie, only four but tall as
a child of six. Both the little girls have long, flowing
straight hair, and it is delightful to see them
swimming—racing beneath the water, like small fishes, their
hair streaming out beside them like fine, elongated,
semi-transparent fins. They are totally without fear,
though the water is at least ten feet deep. All three
children are swift and supple, finely made and fair as golden
shadows, for their mother has Alsatian blood and is a beautiful
woman with blue-gray eyes.
Maou-u joins his children in the deep water, but we four women
go on farther to a place where there is a beach of round
pebbles. Maou-u’s wife does not bathe, as there is
another baby on its way, but the rest of us go into the water in
our petticoats. Following the directions of the others, I
have brought a cake of soap, a clean dress, and a princess
petticoat with me. I bathe in the petticoat I have on; then
when I come out of the water p. 98I put on my fresh things and wash
those that I have been wearing, as do the other women. And
this, it seems, is the rule of the day, to change your clothes
twice and bathe twice,—then at night to bathe your feet the
last thing before getting into bed.
The three children come running up, and, seeing that I have
not yet finished dressing, immediately turn their backs, sitting
like three small gold-tinted statues motionless upon the stones
at the edge of the water until I am once more presentable.
It is only five in the morning, but I could sleep no longer
and am sitting on my veranda, waiting for the sunrise, which
begins with a silver-gilt diffusion of light over the entire
scene. The fish are once more leaping high in the inner and
outer lagoons, as I could hear them doing up to twelve
o’clock last night. I see Marcaline’s figure
out upon the causeway and she calls to me, her hands rounded to
her mouth, telling me that the sun is about to rise. From
the exultation and joy in her voice one might think that such a
thing had never happened before. By the time I join her,
the outer and inner lagoons are like sheets of gold with crimson
roses reflected upon them; the mountains at the back glow with
purple and gilt, while p. 99in a cleft of the mountains to the
right of us the sun comes up, as it seems, with a rush.
Already the children are bathing in the inner lagoon, laughing
and shouting, splashing golden drops around them; they bring a
small fish to show to me, flat and broad and of the color of
brilliant blue enamel shot with violet. For a few minutes
they play about around me, then run back into the water, catching
fish in their hands and throwing them up to their two pet
frigate-birds, which swoop and swirl above them, mount so high
that they are lost to sight, then swoop down again.
I am wearing nothing more than my nightgown and the thinnest
of kimonos, but I paddle down to the edge of the water and join
the children, watching them with delight as they gaze upward,
throwing the fish as high as they can, calling out the names of
their birds in long-drawn syllables: “Chacco-o!
Chacco-o! Chacco-o! T-i-t-i! T-i-t-i!
T-i-t-i,” perfectly sure as to which is which, while they
are so far overhead that I myself am unable to see them.
The children have in general lovely manners: never once since
that first afternoon, when Charlie came and sat upon my floor and
gazed at me, have they come near me or into the garden when I
might be dressing or resting. Directly I begin to p. 100eat, they
move away, however absorbed they may be in their games upon my
veranda, and if, when we are out walking, I stop to speak to any
one, they walk out of ear-shot at once. All alike, however,
detest the artist, whom Marcaline and the other native girls call
“Mam’selle.” Spole has two French words,
“savez” and “no savez,”
though there is little enough that she does not know,—the
native names and habits of all the birds and fish, flowers, and
trees, being perfectly familiar to her,—while her English
consists of “good” and “no good,” into
which she throws a wealth of meaning. Thus when she speaks
of the artist she wrinkles up her minute nose until it is nothing
more than a series of creases upon her small thin face, turns
down her thumb, and with the greatest disgust ejaculates,
“No good!”
He is, indeed, exasperating. This morning he had his
“little breakfast” on my veranda with
me,—coffee, fresh cocoanut cream, bananas, and oranges
still gleaming with dew,—and all the while he grumbled and
peeved, declaring that he had lost a silver spoon which he had
brought with him; that he had been unable to sleep because of the
snoring of his host, the coughing and fidgeting of children; that
the cocks and hens awoke him at dawn; that he would be sure to
get elephantiasis, p.
101sleeping among natives. All this in face of
Maou-u’s wonderful hospitality disgusted me so, spoiled my
early morning blaze of joy to such an extent that I am glad now
to be out in the canoe with the children and Maou-u’s best
boy to paddle us. For the winds get up so suddenly here
that it is not safe to venture far without some one with a strong
arm, and we have set our hearts upon getting out to the reef.
The canoe is so narrow that only the smallest child can really
sit in it: others must perch upon a little board laid across it,
or overstride it like a horse. The children hop in as light
as birds, but for me, a trifle lame as I am, it is more
difficult. Spole, for all her seven years no bigger than
Charlie at four, is as careful of me as though I were a child,
supporting me with her minute, wiry person, absorbedly
anxious.
I sit cross-legged over the narrow canoe, scribbling upon my
knee, wearing nothing more than a cotton dress and petticoat,
with a bath towel hung over my shoulders to keep off the
sun. If I held up a parasol we should certainly go over,
and I am, indeed, growing so used to this bath-towel arrangement
that when I leave it off I shall feel as naked as one does when,
in London, one makes one’s first appearance without a
fur. For p.
102coolness nothing could be better, as I dip it
constantly into the sea, wring it out very slightly, and sit with
the drops from it trickling down my spine.
The water is as clear as glass. In some places it is so
shallow that the children jump in and out of the canoe and push
it in front of them. As we near the reef they sit perfectly
still, for here the sea is full of currents, dangerous, and
deep. Below us are gardens of coral and trees of coral, of
every shade of pink and pale mushroom; great flat tables of coral
and fairy fine forests of seaweed, green and rose at the bottom
of it, shot through and through with small brilliant blue
fish.
The frigate-birds, which have followed us out, whirl and plane
overhead with a sound like weeping; a sound so penetrating that
it pierces the roar of the waves, which arch their great necks
above us at the farther side of the reef, dropping in a mass of
foam upon it, racing toward us in deep, greedy ripples which rock
the canoe violently from side to side.
It is seven o’clock by now, and so hot that we put back
toward the shore. After landing the boy, who is anxious to
be back at his work, the children take me in at the mouth of the
river and on up it. The trees on each side are immense,
dark, sullen, and threatening, as is so much p. 103tropical
vegetation. Here are tall and slender mapau trees, with
their extraordinary flange-like roots, and trees of a heavier
build with large, round, brilliantly green leaves, thick as
metal, which the children call hotu. From all alike
hang long beards of lichen and a brilliant green parasite like
bunches of long satin ribbons; while some of the trees are so
thick with the ferns that it is impossible to tell which is fern
and which is tree.
The frigate-birds, overcome by boredom as we turn in among the
trees, where they can no longer display their swooping, leave us
and go back to the shore, where, too lazy to catch fish for
themselves, they will, supposing no one goes out in the canoes,
sit mewing and complaining throughout the entire day. In
their place, however, clouds of shining white birds the size of
pigeons, only more lightly built and with fine curved wings,
hover round us with a loud fretful cry.
“E-t-a-t-ae,” the children call to them, and I
write it as they say it, every letter separate and distinct.
There is another bird, half as large again as a thrush, pale
greenish brown, and very slender, with a long curved bill like
that of a humming-bird, the smooth aristocratic air of a person
whose clothes are very beautifully made by the best tailor.
This the children seem to call “a-u-u,” with
the ap.
104wide as in the Italian; but then again, or so it seems
to me,—though I cannot be sure that it is the same
bird,—they call to it as “Au-ta-a,”
“Au-ta-a.”
In parts of the river there are deep pools, black, without a
ripple; in others the water eddies over such shallows that the
canoe can scarcely pass, and the children jump in and out of it,
pushing it, chasing the fish. There are cries of
“Pou-e-e!pou-e-e!” and they tumble out
in such haste after an eel, which they fail to catch, that both
paddles go with them, are recaptured with difficulty, much
laughing and shouting.
I should like to draw the mapau trees with their sinister and
fleshly roots; but the mosquitos settle upon my hands so thickly
that it is impossible; while both my hands and ankles are already
so swollen out of shape that we are driven into the open.
Coming out of the mouth of the river, caught by the wind, the
canoe swings atop of the water so airily that it seems that it
might take wing and sweep upward to join the frigate-birds which
have come out to meet us, bitterly complaining. I, who
cannot swim at all, find it difficult to take it as gaily as the
children, who are like fish in the water.
p.
105Mam’selle grows to be a more and more unmitigated
nuisance; throughout the whole of dinner this evening he has
grumbled. When Marcaline says, at the end, in her pretty
way: “I hope the dinner was good?”—the dinner,
mind you, for which Maou-u would never accept so much as a
penny—he snaps out, “The coffee is cold.”
To escape from him and the mosquitos I go out in the canoe
with the children. Armani, who is all moods, is in a fit of
the blues, and the other two, who love teasing—as all these
people do—torment her so that she at last retreats to the
extreme stern; sits there with her back turned to us, her fingers
in her ears.
We go a long way up the coast by innumerable bays, past
innumerable islets. The hills are black, the water shining
like mother-of-pearl in the moonlight. And all the time we
are out, when they are not baiting Armani, the two younger
children sing to me in their soft treble voices.
When we get back to the causeway Maou-u calls for me to come
up to the house and hear his gramophone, playing songs and airs
from the grand operas, which he passionately loves. The
whole party is sitting under the palm-leaf lean-to, which takes
the place of dining- and sitting-room. p. 106Marcaline
has a new pale-pink flounced muslin dress and patent-leather
shoes, which she very soon kicks off. She appears to have
quite forgotten the irritation aroused by Mam’selle and
must be dreaming of love, aching with love, from the look of her,
the expression in her face, as she sits with her chin upon her
clasped hands, gazing out to sea.
Maou-u takes Spole on his knee and presses his cheek to
hers. Of the three children, both he and his wife have
always seemed fondest of this small pale and spiritual creature;
now to my surprise I hear her speak of “My real
papa,” and find that Maou-u is, indeed, no more than the
“papa who gives me bread.” For these people
have strange ways with children. They look upon it as a
sort of grossness to be overfond of their own, differentiating
between them and others. They are, indeed, equally fond of
all children, treating them with a passionate tenderness.
If a woman is expecting a child and a friend begs that she may
have it when it is born, she will not be refused and another
child is taken in its place; so there may be in one family many
children of different parentage, though it is impossible to tell
the difference between them.
Mam’selle has been upsetting Maou-u’s wife so, p. 107and she in
a state of health where she must not be upset, that Maou-u came
to me this morning and asked whether his bed could be put on my
veranda. It is an intolerable nuisance, but how was it
possible to say no when Maou-u’s own hospitality is
unbounded? Fortunately, when I get back to my house this
evening, though it is no more than nine o’clock, he is fast
asleep under a mosquito curtain which I had in my pack and lent
to him. There is no other place for his bed save directly
against the openwork bamboo wall, at the other side of which
stands my washing-stand, and I am rather afraid that he may awake
while I am performing my ablutions. Fortunately, however,
despite his assertions of insomnia, he sleeps on, even snores;
and after all, come to think of it, it doesn’t greatly
matter one way or another, seeing that he is a landscape and not
a figure painter. But—Heavens!—what a setting
for a romance! Never, never, or so it seems, were
Browning’s wonderful words: “Never the time and the
place and the loved one altogether,” more apt.
The end has come. At his “little breakfast”
this morning, the artist was in an altogether intolerable humor,
and the veranda was a disgusting sight with his unmade bed and
all his untidy p.
108belongings. I was the offender this time—I
under whose mosquito curtain he snored, and snored. I had
disturbed him with my fidgeting. My temper broke and I
turned upon him, bidding him, “For God’s sake, shut
up!” and informing him that, as I had come there for rest
and quiet and not to be bothered by anybody, I should be glad if
he would stop complaining.
Upon this he turned on me like a cat, hissing and screaming,
stuttering with rage. “You damned civilized women
oughtn’t to be allowed in the place, spoiling
everything!” he cried, at which I laughed, for it was
really too funny in the face of all his fussing, his silver
spoon, his nerves. As to my civilization, what was there to
be said for it, considering my costume, a rough-dried dress, my
bath-towel over my shoulders, my hair in a plait?
“That’s good! that’s very good!” I
said. “‘Civilized’ from a man whom every
native girl in the island knows as
‘Mam’selle.’” An answer which did
nothing whatever to turn away his wrath, for he rushed off down
the garden and across the road to Maou-u’s house, where I
heard him shrieking curses, declaring that he would no longer
take his meals with “that damned woman.”
Of course, this was the end of it, for Maou-u was furious,
declaring that he would not have the p. 109creature in his house, though he
himself was too much of a gentleman to send him off in the heat
of the day. Thus, all this morning, while the children and
I have been paddling around the shallows, in the canoe, we have
seen him sulking under the trees where he was ultimately given
his déjeuner,—“with the dogs,” as
Maou-u put it, adding, “A cannibal have better
manners,”—lying down there to rest until the
motor-lorry which takes bananas, sugar-cane, vegetables, and
passengers to Papeete each day came past.
Now he is safely off the premises and we all go down to bathe
together with a new sense of peace in our hearts. It is,
indeed, almost worth having had him here to realize the relief of
his going: the old game of the swings and the roundabouts.
It is after eight and we are all sitting upon the edge of the
causeway, with dangling feet, while Maou-u plays very softly upon
his concertina. The after-sunset sky is the color of honey;
the moon is honey-like; so is the sweetness of the air.
Four more days remain to me out here—four entire days and
four nights bland with sweetness and pure air: hours like honey
distilled drop by drop.
Heaven be thanked that I am old enough to p. 110realize
what happiness is, a gift denied to youth; to savor the rareness
of it, to miss nothing, to blur nothing. I am happy now;
and throughout four more days and nights I intend to be happy,
for no letter can reach me, and whatever may come later I shall
have had this: a joy free from rivalry and striving, the fever of
love, the strain of triumph; hours like the song of a bird in my
heart.
I found him asleep this afternoon with the sun from one of the
windows blazing full upon his face. Getting a bit of
curtain out of my pack, I hung one end to a hook in the wall and
was near to bringing catastrophe upon us all—putting the
entire magnetism of the ship out of gear—by driving in an
iron nail to hold up the other. Thank Heaven, the captain
opened one eye, just then, saw what I was doing, and let out a
bellow such as I should never have thought him capable of.
About four o’clock this morning the captain came out of
the wheel-house and advised me to shift myself, as the wind was
about to change and I was likely to get a bucket of soot over me
from the chimney of the donkey-engine. Stubborn and sleepy,
however, I did no more than grunt, refusing to move, and in
another hour was well paid out for my folly by feeling something
like a thick p.
134blanket over my face. Stumbling to my feet,
rubbing my sleepy eyes, I found that I was deluged in soot.
Having moved my mattress and blankets to the leeward, though
too late to be of much use, I crept through the
wheel-house—for not for anything in the world would I have
had the captain see me—and stumbled blindly down to the
saloon, where the second mate was having coffee.
The expression upon his face as he saw me, his slow,
“Gee-whiz but you have got it this time!” was
enough. Going into the captain’s cabin, looking in
the glass as best I could,—for I was more than half
blinded,—I discovered that I was as black as though I had
been cleaning a chimney with my head and hands.
The Chinese boy got me some hot water, while the mate held a
mug of coffee to my lips and broke off some bread for me, for I
could not touch anything. It took seven buckets of hot
water and a whole pot of Selfridge’s best massage
cream—and I would have given anything to have had the
lovely young lady who served me with it see to what uses it was
being put—to get me even moderately clean. I greased
and scrubbed every inch of my body, and each fresh bucket of
water was thick with scales of black.
p. 135Now,
since breakfast, I have been busy washing my kimono, nightgown,
and pillow-covers, with an accumulation of dresses and
petticoats, for we are well off for soft water after the
rain.
I sit upon a box on the poop-deck with a bucket between my
knees and wash in true sailor fashion—for soldiers squat at
their washing, rubbing it on a board on the ground or deck, while
sailors sit and rub it between their hands. The first mate
carries water for me and hangs out my clothes on a rope along the
fo’c’sle head, and the captain wrings out my heavier
gear, for my hands are so feeble with too much writing that I am
a hopelessly bad wringer.
We are now in latitude forty-two south, longitude one hundred
and fifty-nine, fifty-three west, and every afternoon for three
or four days the same thing has happened. It grows suddenly
and terribly hot, as though some inner oven of hell were opened
upon us, and a dense gray cloud shoots up in the east, lying like
a hand close pressed down above the horizon, which shows a vivid
green line. At the same moment it seems as though another,
and this time unseen, hand throws up a roll of carpet, the color
of old lead, over the eastern edge of the world, with so much
impetus that it rolls out and out, on and on for p. 136miles,
though it is no more than a bare half mile in width. The
sea on each side of us remains the same pinkish mauve, for it is
by now almost immediately before sunset. Then, in another
moment, with a slap as though some one above us has overturned an
enormous bucket, the rain begins to fall, pouring down upon us in
one solid sluice. The wind swings round with a wrench that
shakes us from stem to stern, and all the sails have to be
re-shifted.
There is a Frenchman on board, a sort of semi-passenger, on
his way back to New Caledonia. He used to be mate of this
ship before she was sold to the present owners, of whom the
captain is one. We all dislike him intensely, for he has a
way of behaving as though the schooner belonged to him, coming in
and out of the wheel-house and glancing at the charts and sailing
directions. There is also one Englishman, who is supposed
to help with the engine, and of whom I am not particularly proud;
and a Russian among the otherwise entirely native crew.
Everybody is quarreling; each in turn comes to me with some
complaint or other, and when I look at the log I cannot wonder;
for the boat has been over three months out, was two months later
than she should have been in reaching Tahiti. Throughout
the entire p.
137voyage one thing after another has gone wrong.
She had, indeed, to put back to San Francisco, ten days after she
left, for some repairs or other.
There are continual rains now and it is very difficult to
work. At this moment the first mate and I are cheek by jowl
on two upturned soapboxes at the chart-table in the wheel-house,
I typing and he working out his calculations. The captain,
who seems to have been in less pain the last couple of days, is
propped up on the little settee, deep in my copy of “Moby
Dick,” with his feet upon another soap-box. (For we
each have a soap-box of our own, about which we are very
fussy.) An immense and gravely absorbed Loyalty Island boy
stands at the wheel, dressed in his red
paréu. All this in a place smaller than the
smallest bath-room.
I begin to think that the officers would be better if they had
a little more variety in the way of food, and have started making
them blanc-manges, treacle tarts, etc., as a sort of treat,
though it is too grilling in the galley to attempt to remain
there long at a time.
It is not that the island is not beautiful, for it is indeed
very beautiful. The road up to Vailima is perfectly lovely,
with its green spillways to the sea, the tree-clad heights of
Vaea, the sharp dipping valleys of the Vai-Singano, the
swift-running water-courses and waterfalls, the deep pool shaded
with orange-trees where Stevenson used to bathe; though even here
what attracted me more than anything else, the only thing which
has, so far, really touched me in the whole island, p. 140were the
groups of native houses that I passed on my way up to
Vailima. And these are like nothing which I have ever seen
before, in their fitness and charm, in the cleanliness and
delicacy of their surroundings, with their little lawns smooth as
pigeons’ breasts, shorn by hand with long knives, their
flower-beds thick with roses, cannas, balsams, and zinnias of
many colors.
The Samoan native house carries all the enchantment of the
dream houses of my childhood days; the Perfect House in the
Perfect Wood which not even Barrie himself has been able
altogether to reconstruct for me; the house of happiness and joy
and plenty and beauty, full of song and laughter, familiar to
fairies and a veritable part of the woodland itself.
The Samoan house has the smoothness and glint of the wing of a
golden-tinted butterfly. It is very large, comprising one
room only, and round or oval in shape. The immensely high
roof of dried and plaited sugar-cane—arched over with
slender semi-circular laths of wood, p. 141crossed by heavier beams, for all
the world like the inside of an overturned boat—is upheld
by two upright posts in the oval houses and one in the round; the
whole being fastened together with elaborate plaitings of black
and red-brown and biscuit-colored twine worked into an infinitude
of geometrical patterns. There is not a single nail in the
building. All the wood in these houses is of delicate
shades of biscuit and cinnamon. The sides have open
cinnamon-colored blinds of plaited sugar-cane, ready to let down
if the sun is too hot or the rain beats in too fiercely from one
side or the other. The carpet, raised a couple of feet
above the level of the ground outside, is formed of the finest
transparent black pebbles smoothly raked.
For furniture there are a table, a few cedar-wood boxes, piles
of finely woven and patterned mats, and a number of white-covered
pillows. By the fineness and number of his mats is a
man’s wealth known. Some are so rare, so fine, that
you can crunch them up in your hand like a piece of silk.
To-day I have been sitting in the house of a chief,—or,
rather, lying lazing upon a pile of mats fully four feet by six
in size, fringed round with brilliantly colored
wools,—looking out upon p. 142a pleasant green lawn with other
houses dotted round it, and flower-beds and borders, like silken
patches and gay ribbons, running down to a lake-like inlet from
the sea. I drank fresh cocoanut milk and smoked a cigarette
of pungent home-grown tobacco, like a thin black ribbon, wrapped
in a strip of dried and shredded banana leaf. While I
talked to my host and played with the baby, the little wife, who
had no English, sat by, nodding and smiling; and the retainers,
men and women from the other little houses in the
village,—who do all the work of the chief’s house,
the sweeping and drawing of water,—gathered upon the outer
fringe of the pebbled floor, smiling too, full of interest and a
fine courtesy. And the air flowed coolly through the open
house and around us.
Talofa Ali—love to you, O Chief! Will you
ever, you people of Samoa, by your dignity and repose, by the
cleanliness and order of your dwellings, shame the strangers in
your land out of that queer apathy which seems to hang around
them, so that it is impossible to walk along the foreshore of
Apia without being reminded of Kipling’s lines:
All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
All along of doing things, rather more or less.
p. 143It is
devastatingly hot, so hot that one cannot move without everything
that one wears being wet through in a moment; while a sort of
misty heat hangs over the whole scene, punctuated by clouds of
mosquitos. I take a motor and drive a couple of miles out
of town and, sending it away, move a few yards into the bush and
sit on a log, to watch the building of a great house which is
being put up for one of the chiefs. A round house with one
immense center pole.
This pole is formed of the trunk of a perfectly straight and
very tall tree, stripped of its bark and quite smooth. Over
seventy men haul at the ropes, which are fastened to the top of
it, as to a May-pole. Logs are pushed in under the lower
part of it to give it a start, and slowly, very slowly it is
raised. The butt of it is fitted into a hole already
prepared, into which more men, running forward, roll
stones. While one swarms to the top and hangs by his knees,
fixing the smaller cross-beams, others mount half-way.
Still others, sticking temporary posts into the ground, mount
them and cling to them with their knees, stretching out their
hands to uphold the smaller cross-beams while these are being
fastened.
The workers wear nothing but their lava-lavas, strips of white
material worn round their waists p. 144like petticoats or kilts, shorter
than the Tahitian paréu, and always, it seems,
perfectly clean. In work like this, when the men pull their
lava-lavas up and fasten them between their legs, one realizes
the perfectly symmetrical patterning of the tattoo spread like
fine black lace over the upper part of their legs and thighs and
enwrapping their bodies, with a curved line below the breast like
a woman’s stays.
The old chief for whom the house is being built sits beside
me, upon the trunk of a fallen tree, with other white-haired men,
gentle and courteous, who talk to me of houses they have seen
built, in the past. In a sort of chant they describe
them,—the length and height of them, the manifold patterns
enwoven around the pillars and beams,—those wonder-houses
of former days.
We are four days out from Apia, having left in a deluge of
rain which seems to have extinguished the sun completely, for the
sky is a still leaden black, split by incessant lightning.
It is very hot; but at the same time there is a chilly
dampness in the air. All the port-holes have to be closed,
and down below one could cut p. 145the air with a knife. The
fumes from the donkey-engine make it almost unendurable.
Up on deck the masts stand bare; the starboard engine is
throbbing very faintly, and we scarcely move. The port
engine is altogether out of gear, as it has been almost every day
since the schooner left San Francisco. The deck is flooded;
every now and then a heavy shoot of water slides off from the one
scrap of awning which we put up with such joy in Apia. As
it is impossible to stay out on the open deck, my only refuge is
in the wheel-house. And here, at night, it is impossible to
have any light apart from that above the binnacle, where the
steersman stands naked to his waist; immovable as a bronze
statue, save for the motion of the hands which grasp the spokes
of the wheel, the sidelong glances of his eyes showing the
whites; so immovable that one jumps when he raises his hand to
strike the bell above his head.
The last meal of the day is at five o’clock, and it is
dark by six. After this there is nothing to be done save to
sit on the minute settee, with one’s feet on a soap-box to
keep them out of the wet, until one has gathered sufficient
courage or is sufficiently drugged with fatigue to go below and
sleep. For now that the deck is impossible I am p. 146using the
captain’s cabin, my conscience lulled by the fact that
though he stayed in a hotel at Apia, he was still obliged to sit
up in a chair all night.
It is a nice cabin with a good bunk; but there are a great
many, too many, cockroaches and copra-bugs. Seven
cockroaches and innumerable bugs fell out of my hairbrush only
this morning. They do not bite, but they are disgustingly
soft and squashy, and have a passion for perambulating all over
one’s person. With the heat, the prevailing damp, the
smells, and the insect life, it is for the time being anything
but pleasant on board.
The schooner rolled so last night that the heavy electric fan
which the second mate fixed for me in Apia rolled off the table
with a tremendous crash, awakening me to the conviction that we
must at last have struck a rock. Not that I was in a mood
greatly to care, one way or another. Fortunately it stopped
raining between three and four, and—feeling as though a
thick blanket of fugginess had been laid across my face, my heart
stifled in its beat—I wrapped myself in a blanket and went
up on deck, where I slept in snatches, curled up in my
deck-chair, with the water rushing to and fro under it at each
roll of the ship.
It is raining again now, and I rather wonder p. 147why I ever
came to sea. But I have felt like that before, in short
spasms, and I know the feeling will soon pass. It is not,
and never will be, in the least like the constant nostalgia
induced in me by shores.
p. 153At
first the two of them merely posture; then the dance becomes
faster and faster, though they scarcely move their feet, and
frankly sensual in every gesture. They roll their eyes at
each other, pouting their lips, and every now and then the man
breaks into loud shouts, showing all his teeth in a mirthless and
horrible grin. The teacher—Wesleyan
trained—stands by, smiling smugly, though he must know what
it all means.
The missionaries here are as thick upon the ground as they
were in Samoa, and I wonder that the country can support
them. The competition for pupils is great, and the boys and
girls are kept at school so long that they are never much use for
anything else afterward. Here are men from the London
Mission, Seventh-day Adventists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Mormons,
Roman Catholics, and almost everything else you can think of,
though the natives have and try to hold to a Free Tongan
Church. All the finest houses and plantations belong to
missionaries.
In the afternoon I hire a sulky and take the captain for a
drive. It is a great cavalcade. The mare I drive is
almost incredibly thin; the reins are too short to be managed in
any other way than separately, at the extreme length of my arms;
p. 154while a
four-months-old colt follows behind, and a man in a purple
lava-lava rides on in front to show us the way to where an
underground river comes out into a deep lake in a cave, half-way
down a steep cliff some three miles from the port.
As we pass through the villages, cutting across wide green
lawns, girls and children come running out, juggling with
oranges, keeping five or six in the air at once. Then,
throwing wreaths over our heads they run away, laughing.
We pass through deep bush in which every tree is hung with
parasites and lichen, broken by open patches of cocoanuts far
more healthy-looking than the ones I saw in Samoa. There is
no sign of vanilla or cocoa, and the greater part of the land is
waste. The pool of the underground river is an uncanny
place; the air above it dank and chilly. It is reached by a
small opening in the face of the cliff, through which men and
women slip and swim about like fish in the ice-cold water beneath
an absolutely black arched roof.
The mosquitos are almost unbearable upon the schooner, lying
up close against the shore as it does, and after dinner to-night
I walked away from the little town, up a steep slope, and among
the trees, through a series of native villages. p. 155Dipping
again, I came at last to a cemetery on the edge of a wide lagoon,
where the graves were covered with very finely powdered white
coral and decorated, here and there, with glass bottles intended
for ornaments. Here I sat down to watch the moon rise over
the water. Two natives came up in their canoes and, getting
out, waded toward me, pulling it after them. Squatting on
their hunkers, quite close to me, they regarded me
without—or so it seemed—so much as a wink, for the
best part of half an hour. My flesh literally crept, for I
have no great belief in cannibalism being altogether obsolete,
but at last they got into their canoes and paddled away, and I
returned to the ship, where the mosquitos were still making night
horrible.
The captain is the most untidy man I have ever seen. I
ironed his one shore-going suit before we reached Vavau.
When we left he changed into his usual kit, shirt and trousers,
flinging his suit over the edge of the bath (which has to be used
for storing fresh water, so that one washes in a tin pail,
usually with a scrubbing brush), where I found it this morning,
sopping wet. His watch and all his money, fallen from his
pocket, lay at the bottom of the water.
p. 156Now
he has been using my typewriter and left it balanced on the very
edge of the chart-table. When I take it up, very sweetly,
with a Fairchild-Family smile, and, putting it in its case,
remark, “That’s where it lives,” his only reply
is that he reckons it’s like the rest of us, and must
“get used to locations.”
There is virtually no wind, and we are rolling horribly, with
a heavy swell, among deep-troughed waves.
On Tongatabu, which a casual tourist might pass by as yet
another island with the eternal sameness of all tropical islands,
the whole spirit, light and joyous and forever youthful, is the
spirit of play. So that in talking over my wanderings, as I
shall do, as we all do,—though no one really cares to
listen and we know it, fully realizing that there is nothing more
than a personal stimulus and delight in saying, In this place it
was like this or that, the people so-and-so or
so-and-so,—Tongatabu will remain forever the playground,
the people of Tongatabu the playboys, of the Pacific isles.
For here there is no need for any one to work. It is,
indeed, an earthly paradise, where all alike have a few cocoanut
trees and a few fowls and many pigs; where each boy upon reaching
the age of eighteen is given half an acre of land in his own
village and three acres of bush land; where if any one needs
kerosene or a new lava-lava or a p. 178little money to pay the
infinitesimal taxes, no more exertion is required than that
necessary to gather a few nuts, dry and sell a little copra.
For the rest, the people dance and sing, strumming softly upon
their guitars, feast, and play at football, tennis, and cricket
upon the smooth green and park-like glade in the center of every
little hamlet, for, however small the gathering of huts, there is
a cricket-pitch of concrete where the people play with English
cricket bats and balls, and a roughly marked-out tennis-court
with a fishing-net hung across it. If in the evening you
drive through a village where the people are laughing and singing
and calling to one another in soft-syllabled words, it is as
though a garden fête were in progress. As for
feasting . . . ! The queen, who has been away in the
country, only nine miles distant, for two or three weeks, came
back to her capital yesterday, for no more than a couple of days,
and there was feasting throughout the length and breadth of it,
with ceremonial lengths of tapa and festive mats laid out under
the trees and a tremendous cooking of pigs and yam and
breadfruit.
I myself—the papalagi, or stranger of the
hour—am to-day being fêted. The occasion will
forever live in my memory, like a clear picture painted p. 179upon
metal—or, rather, an enamel run out upon metal in brilliant
greens and purples and blues with gold and silver dust—a
picture which nothing can destroy. In looking back upon my
life I shall be able to say, whatever happened before this,
whatever happens after, I shall have had at least this one
brilliant and unspoiled day.
A planter, half Swiss and half Tongan, arranged the feast, at
which the captain of the Monterey was the only other
European guest, and to which we drove some twelve miles in a
motor; going past the Queen’s Garden and the Resting Place
of Kings, a raised platform of stone beneath a vast banyan
tree.
Passing Mua, the queen’s country retreat, I saw that she
was there again, sitting on the ground in front of the house,
which is altogether a native one, among her women. Begging
the others to wait for me, I got out of the motor and crossed the
glade to speak to her.
She signed for me to sit down by her, and we talked together,
for she has been at school in New Zealand and speaks perfectly
good English. She and all the other women, who sat in a
semicircle at a little distance from her, were dressed in the
same way, in a thin black muslin dress over white chemise and
petticoat, while none of them wore p. 180shoes or stockings. But for
all that she stood out above all of them in her dignity and
serenity; an immense young woman, no more than twenty-four years
of age, six foot four in height and already too fat, though
magnificently made.
There has of late been trouble among the Tongan Islanders in
regard to their own Free Church. The prince consort, who is
a good many years older than the queen, has great power over her,
or so it is said. He holds as strong a hand as any man can
well do, being not only prince consort, but Minister of Education
and Minister of Customs, and he dominates the young queen, Salote
Tubou, to such an extent that she is becoming very
unpopular. The last straw is that he has persuaded or is
persuading her to force the people to give back their church to
the Wesleyans, to whom he belongs. I saw him yesterday and
he promised me that nothing would be done without the full
consent of all the people; and yet, immediately afterward, that
very afternoon, there was an unexpected and unannounced meeting
of the council, with scarcely any one there, and the measure for
the transference passed.
To-day the queen’s women, a vast kava bowl in front of
them, were making kava, wringing out the roots in their
hands. They brought the queen p. 181the polished half of a cocoanut
shell from which she drank, afterward throwing the shell far away
from her, as is the custom. They then brought me a shell of
kava, but I was out of temper and would not drink, telling the
queen very plainly what I thought of her; expressing it as my
opinion that if she persisted in her course in regard to the
people’s religion she would end by losing her
kingdom. With the placidity of all very fat p. 182people,
however, she kept perfectly calm under my onslaught, reiterating
the words, “You must ask my husband about that . . .
You must tell my husband about that . . . I leave all that
to my husband,” until, out of all patience with her, I got
up and flung back to the motor, without so much as the semblance
of an obeisance or good-by.
The fête to-day, which takes the form of a picnic, is
held at the base of a steep cliff toward which, some twelve miles
out from Nukualofa, we turn, through by-roads so thick with
greasy mud that again and again we stick and, rounding our hands
to our mouths, shout for natives to come and haul us out with the
ropes which we carry. At the end of the motor drive there
is a walk through grass of a height above my shoulders for close
upon half a mile, a scramble down the steep sides of a cliff,
thick with undergrowth, and we come upon the scene set for our
little play: a curve of cream-tinted sand round a small bay; a
strip of purple-blue lagoon, and pale-jade and lapis-lazuli
breakers with white crests upon the reef.
I have wandered along the shore and paddled through the water
into another bay, silent and p. 183fresh and clean as at
creation. I bathed in a deep pool in the coral under the
hanging cliffs, then, getting back into my clothes, with my skirt
pulled up to my knees, my shoes and stockings hung over my arm,
waded out to the reef, where I am sitting. I came past
brilliant pools of madder and purple and vivid-green rocks; pools
as clear as jewels, with pink branching corals and feathery
brilliant green seaweeds, and jeweled fish and sea-anemones, and
jellyfish, like delicate lengths of silk puffed out with water,
thick within them.
Now, upon the reef, the roar of the waves is tremendous as
they raise their green throats high as temple arches above me,
threaten terribly, then drop in a smother of white foam, with a
sound like laughter. The people on the shore call and
beckon to me. The table-cloths of palm-leaves—woven
with fingers which move as swiftly as small dark fish sporting in
a pool—are already laid. Some of the guests are
seated about this cloth, others are bent over holes in the ground
filled with hot stones, taking out of them the cooked food.
The hair of some of the men measures two feet across the top, is
smooth and massive as a clipped yew hedge, and singed into shape,
so that no single hair stands a fraction higher than p. 184another, by
women with red-hot stones. The girls’ hair falls
loosely and is decked with flowers and maidenhair fern.
For the feast there are two almost full-grown pigs and four
fowls, with a pile of breadfruit as big as a road-mender’s
heap of stones by the roadside: all of which we finish
completely, washing it down with kava drunk from halved and
polished cocoanut shells. The pigs and fowls are all
deliciously stuffed with herbs and lemon and mashed sweet
potatoes. The leader of the feast has a large knife with
which he cuts the thick skin about the throat of each pig, then
tears it, and we eat it with our teeth and fingers—for
there are no other knives and no forks—holding our salt in
the hollow of our hands.
After the feast is over we lie in the shade and rest a
little. Then, though the sun is still high in the heavens,
two girls and two men draw apart in opposite directions to make
themselves ready for the dance. An older woman attends upon
the girls, oiling them all over, dressing them in grass mats as
fine and soft as silk, appliquéd with patterns of black
velvet, and hanging them with ferns and green creepers. The
men, taking off their lava-lavas, oil themselves, don a very
short pair of cotton shorts, and wreathe themselves with p. 185garlands of
brilliant green weed from off the rocks.
The sun is still high in the heavens, but now the two couples,
coming forward and meeting each other, begin to dance upon the
hard white sand at the edge of the water, with the opal of the
lagoon, the wall of foam upon the reef, the solid blue of the
afternoon sky, as a drop sheet behind them, and to the right a
dark arched cave of every shade of purple and deep madder.
Every movement of these dancers—their advancing,
retreating, beckoning—is infinitely luring, full of the
suggestions of passion and love. They are so altogether
Egyptian that they seem to have stepped out of an Egyptian
frieze.
There are two guitars to which the players sing in deep,
monotonous tones; while we others, sitting along the sand upon
our heels, swing our bodies to and fro, at first slowly then more
and more quickly, clapping our hollowed palms, following the
quickened movement of the dancers; breaking off a little as they
pause, posing, as motionless as statues, then beginning again;
faster and still faster, swung not so much by our volition as by
the allurement, the excitement of their movements.
As I squat here upon the sand, clapping my p. 186hollowed
palms together, swinging my body to and fro, quite
suddenly—as though the slides were unexpectedly changed in
a magic-lantern—my mind goes back to the last dinner I was
at in London: a large literary dinner overborne by the eternal
complacent sameness which overwhelms all people of one craft
gathered together in a mass. I wonder what on earth the
other guests would think of me if they could see me now, without
shoes or stockings, my wet hair dripping down my back. Or
if they could have seen me eating pork and p. 187chicken
with my fingers. But it only shows how quickly one can drop
into anything on earth, may ultimately drop into anything above
or below it, while manners are, like morals, the merest matter of
latitude and longitude.
I have come out for a drive with the elder of the two Smith
boys, a lad of fourteen, who knows everything there is to be
known about the customs and superstitions of the people here, the
birds and flowers. We have driven for some twelve
miles,—in a buggy with an ancient white horse, and harness
rather inadequately tied up with string, which the half-caste
Swiss planter has lent me,—past the one spring of natural
water in the whole island, to this spot where I am now
writing. And picture it if you can: a group of brilliant,
glossy-leafed trees with immense blackened trunks; and beneath
their shade a number of elderly men sitting round a kava bowl,
drinking and smoking with an air of the deepest serenity.
Away from this shaded spot runs a clear, wide open glade
covered with short smooth grass, with an immense spread of tapa,
two hundred fathoms in length, laid out upon it.
Tapa-cloth is made of a certain bark, wetted and pulped and
beaten into flat sheets, then glued p. 188together so skilfully that there is
no join to be seen. It is white and soft as silk—so
soft that one can crumple it up in one’s hand without
creasing it. Upon a sheet of white tapa the women of these
islands make patterns, nearly all geometrical and perfectly
symmetrical, in black or brown, using in place of paint-brushes
small three-cornered pieces of slate or stone.
This length of tapa laid out in the glade was already nearly
finished, though at the farther end there were at least fifty
women at work upon it. Along each edge there was a fine
pattern of red-brown, with diagonal stripes and diamonds.
Against this there were p. 189half-diamonds of solid black, two
broad black stripes, a line of checks, a broad band of groups of
four wings like aeroplanes, another stripe, a zigzag of black and
white, and a strange cubist-looking design of elongated
diamonds. The same pattern was repeated from the other side
until the two of them met. No rough sketch is drawn in with
charcoal, and yet there is not one single mistake in the entire
length and breadth of the strip. Only imagine the accuracy
implied in such work!
We sit for a while among the men, talking to them, the Smith
boy translating all that they say. Here the shadows are
like gray velvet, the patches of light which fall between the
leaves of the trees a brilliant golden green; the air is like a
caress, the touch of a cool petal of a sweet-scented flower
against one’s face. The first time I drank kava I
hated it, thought that it tasted like nothing so much on earth as
stale soap-suds; but now there is no drink to be found in
tropical countries that I should prefer, and I drink with
gratitude what the men offer to me, throwing my cup as far as
possible after I have drunk. We get up and, walking along
the length of tapa, join the women at the end of it. There
is less than a yard to be done now and as they ask me to add
something to it, I put my initials and a prancing horse in p. 190one corner
of it, witness throughout centuries to come—as this tapa is
virtually indestructible—to the ineptness of a European
working with tools to which she is unaccustomed; for there is
nothing, apart from the point of a triangular piece of wood, to
serve me as a brush.
The boy and I have come on through an avenue of ironbarks to
the shore, and are now sitting at the top of the terraces, half
cliffs, of white coral, serrated into a thousand spikes and
hollows, with rounded pools and semi-terraces. Here we
watch the great plumes and towers of water which come up through
the blow-holes; for the Pacific breakers rush in with all their
force, under these terraces, and up through the holes, scattering
in lofty columns of foam and spray far, far overhead, against the
brilliance of the unclouded midday sky; driven by the wind back
inland over the cocoanut groves, mingling with the spray-like
foliage of the ironbarks.
There is an out-of-the-way good hotel where I am staying until
I can find out some means of getting up-country; for I find the
town itself a very dreary place where people play at being in
London—a little on the outskirts, perhaps, but still very
select, elaborately dressing for dinner each night. Indeed,
in Suva two things strike me more than anything else: the
splendid appearance of the native Fijians, with their immense and
symmetrical heads of hair,—who walk like princes and are so
superior to the imported East Indian, with his poor physique and
curiously furtive air,—and the dress of the European women,
delicately fresh and forever new, or so it seems.
I went down to the port office this morning, to meet the
captain and get my formal discharge p. 193from the Monterey, though it
breaks my heart to think that I must leave. But the
schooner is not staying here long enough to give me time to see
the islands.
For some whim, I dressed all in my best, in a delicate
pale-gray embroidered muslin, large black hat, and, as an
exaggeration of affectation, long white suede gloves, and nothing
has ever amused me more than the faces of the officials waiting
ready to make out the papers of the ex-stewardess of the little
schooner—small, bedraggled, rakish as a rough-haired
fighting terrier, one ear cocked, the other torn down—which
lies against the wharf, discharging cargo with a good deal of
language upon every side.
The certificate of discharge, with an American twenty-five
cent piece, as there must be some pretense of wages, lie before
me on the table, back in my room where I sit writing, after a
luncheon at which the captain and I drank each other’s
health with many pretty compliments, with many true regrets at
parting. Really, it is altogether ridiculous to think that
I am going to leave a boat to which I am far more mated than most
men to their wives.
p. 194Here
is the discharge:
CERTIFICATE OF DISCHARGE |
|||
Name of Ship |
Official Number |
Port of Registry |
Registered |
Monterey |
|
Panama |
1143 |
Horse-power of Engine (if any) |
Description of
Voyage |
||
600 |
Stewardess Foreign |
||
Name of Seaman |
Age |
Place of Birth |
Capacity, if Mate or
Engineer |
E. M. Mordaunt |
|
England |
Stewardess |
Date of Engagement |
Place of Engagement |
Date of Discharge |
Place of Discharge |
|
Tahiti |
3/5/24 |
Suva, Fiji |
The mother was so ill on the voyage that, when they reached
Levuka, they decided to stay there for a few days, anchoring the
schooner and going off in a boat to the shore. They were
quickly driven back by the sight of the trussed-up limbs p. 197of a man,
openly carried through the little town to a place where the fires
were already lighted for a feast, and by the sound of firing,
though of this they were told, quite casually, that it was
nothing more than the hillmen fighting the lowlanders.
Anyhow, they did not attempt to go on shore again, for all their
sickness and fatigue, until Wainimala itself was reached.
There they seemed to have settled down quite placidly, despite
the fact that when the whole family went to take lunch with the
Burns family, their nearest neighbors—the first and last
occasion, for a very few weeks later the Burnses were all
murdered—the little new-comers, running out to the native
lines to play with the Burns children, were struck by the sight
of a row of poles with the immense fuzzy heads of some half-dozen
of the highlanders stuck upon them. The highlanders
themselves had already been cooked and eaten.
They spoke of it quite placidly, these sweet white-haired old
ladies, sitting, with white folded hands, in the lounge of the
hotel. When I asked if their mother was frightened, if
there had been any talk of her leaving her husband and taking her
children away with her from such a place, they seemed surprised,
though this affair of the Burns family—and they themselves
had seen p.
198fragments of their playfellows floating down the river
past their house—had by no means been the end. Out in
a canoe with their father and brother, a very little while later,
they met a man in a canoe, fleeing from the scene of the murder
of Mr. Mackintosh and Mr. Spiers. They themselves had
already passed Mrs. Spiers’s house, and, returning as
quickly as they could, they took the unfortunate wife back with
them to their own house, after which the father and his young
son, both fully armed, went up the river again, to the place
where the murder had been committed. There they saw the
trunks of the two murdered men—with the heads, arms, and
legs cut off them, already prepared for the feast—propped
against a tree.
They told me too, these gentle ladies, of how their
mother,—and in what we consider the most mushy period of
Victoria’s reign,—when her husband was away from home
on business, one day heard a great palaver going on upon the
river brink, among a group of gesticulating natives. She
went down alone, and apparently without the slightest qualm, to
find her friendly lowlanders dragging a highlander, riddled with
bullets but still alive, along the ground; disputing how they
could best get him to the other side of the river, p. 199where their
store of wood was stacked, so as to finish killing him and cook
him.
Queer—to think that there are now at home in England, at
Oxford, at Balliol, even, grandsons of these old cannibals,
finishing their education. Though, after all, there are far
worse things in life than murder or cannibalism. The moral
standards of almost any European man would have brought a blush
to the cheek of these warriors, with whom incontinence in the
young man before marriage was regarded, not as something manly,
but as the sign of a feeble, weak-minded person, a sin certain to
be followed by the loss of health if not by the loss of life
itself.
These old ladies in the hotel told me of the murder of the
missionary Mr. Baker. Some of the natives themselves
implicated in the murder recounted to them—with shame over
having been so uneducated and provincial—the fact that, not
realizing that his boots were detachable, they had boiled, and
boiled, and reboiled his feet in despair of ever getting them
tender.
I am writing now from the tiny island of Mbau, the native
metropolis of Fiji; for Suva is altogether European, the Putney
of the Pacific. This is by far the most romance-haunted
spot—the spot p. 200which almost speaks, and groans in
speaking, of what is past—in all the islands. It is
the center of all that was dreadful in the wild days of the old
Fiji; the home of kings and chiefs, the shrine of
cannibalism. Mbau the beautiful, Mbau the terrible.
Ratu Pope, the premier chief of Fiji, invited me to stay
here. The invitation was received through the introduction
of a young Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with whom I
have made friends, and who is, for the time being, teaching in
the principal boarding-school for the sons of chiefs. In
Fiji, all the chiefs send their sons to boarding-school as we do
in England, receiving them home but once a year.
Ratu Pope Seniloli, Na Gone Turanga ni Vunivalu (“Child
of the Root of War”), himself came down to the
water’s edge to meet us, as we disembarked from the canoe
which he had sent across to the main coast for
us,—navigated by a host of small boys, who perched like
birds along the wide-spreading wing-like bows of the
outrigger. Though he is in some disfavor with the English,
he is as fine an aristocrat as Fiji can show. For Fiji is a
land where at a single glance, though all dress alike, one can
discriminate between the noble and the commoner; where the p. 201aristocracy
is so fiercely maintained that any young noble might as well cut
his own throat as marry the daughter of a commoner.
We have come to the guest-house, which Ratu Pope has prepared
for us, past the council house which now stands in the place of
one of the old temples, upon the same terrace formed of great
blocks of stone—many of them as much as ten feet in height
and more than half that width across—which were brought to
Mbau by canoe in the days of its grandeur. There, also, are
the great and sacred gate-posts stolen from Kadavu and brought to
Mbau, stolen again by the men of Rewa and brought back, stolen
and brought back again, and yet again, with God only knows what
bloodshed; gate-posts between which p. 202unnumbered British sailors, lured to
the island and sacrificed upon the terraces, were dragged.
I saw the site of the Temple of the Human Being Fishermen, with
its two gigantic, hoary banyan trees, still so sacred that no
single twig can be cut from them without a great feasting and
offering up of roast pigs. It has terraces like those of
the other temple, less than sixty years ago soaked with
blood.
If only I could put it all into words which could adequately
picture it, give my whole impression of it, this minute kingdom
of Mbau, with its immemorial customs; the atmosphere of something
p.
203powerful, great, and dreadful which still hangs round
it, so that the sighing of the wind among the trees, the whisper
of the waves along the shore, are like the sighing and the
whispering of those who once knew themselves about to perish upon
it. It is a place where ghosts walk, and sigh and whisper
throughout the entire night; a place inhabited by hundreds whom,
without seeing, one can feel about one.
At home in England, men stand at attention before their
superiors; but here, as we walk along the narrow strip of coast
and through the village edging the sea, men and women alike squat
upon their haunches, for it is forbidden to stand upright before
a chief. At lunch the man and two girls who wait upon us,
in general magnificently erect,—one of the girls, Maopa Tui
Rewa, the daughter of a chief, and lady-in-waiting to Ratu
Pope’s wife, I have already seen crossing a glade with the
swiftness and swing of a panther,—move crouching, bent
almost double, round the table, kneel to serve their chief, and
in asking him any question, kneel behind his chair,
whispering—not because the thing is secret, but because one
must not raise one’s voice in the presence of the Great
One. Even the boy who takes away my wet shoes, to dry and
clean, brings them back to me p. 204crouching, and kneels as he hands
them to me.
I have a house to myself, with a sitting-room and large
bedroom in which is a wooden bed spread with finely woven mats
fringed with scarlet and bright green and black wool. The
bedroom has two doors and two windows, one window and one door
opening on to a yard-wide strip of grass, with the low sea-wall
beneath it, the other giving into a large sitting-room in which
we all take our meals: that is, the chief and his little son of
twelve, Ratu George Kadavulevu, or Prince Kadavu, myself, and my
companion; for the women of the family do not in general dine
with the men. In addition to this is another building where
my traveling companion and George sleep, and a separate
kitchen. There is, indeed, nothing it is possible to think
of that has not been done for our comfort and entertainment,
nothing which we could possibly fancy to eat which is not offered
to us; as is only natural in this part of a country where there
are special invocations made over a child immediately after birth
to save it from that worst of all vices, stinginess.
Each night during those faint and mysterious hours when the
strength of man is at its lowest, the chief gets up and walks
round his island, then goes back to bed until five or six
o’clock. And p. 205the island is like this: It is half
a mile in circumference, within the middle of it a flat-topped
hill like a haystack with the graves of chiefs upon it.
Upon three sides there is nothing more than a narrow strip of
land between the hill and the sea; on the fourth is a stretch of
smooth open green in front of the old temples, and a few sacred
trees, and, at the farther side of it, the village, which runs
along the edge of the sea, stretching from the green to the
inclosure of the house of the chief, who is not only Lord of
Mbau, but Lord of all the Isles. Although the island is so
small, there are twelve wells upon it, with fresh water in them
as close as six feet from the edge of the sea.
The widowed sister of Ratu Pope lives in the village.
Almost the first thing he asked us upon our arrival was that we
should go and call upon her, and this evening I have been
spending an hour and more sitting in her house, talking to
her. She is a woman whom one must recognize at a single
glance as the sister and child of a chief, with her pride of
bearing, her fine skin, her almost Greek features, her hair more
wavy than fuzzy, lying in the smooth waves of the modern shingle,
her fine, slender, quiet hands, her grave and sincere gaze.
p. 206In
every way Ratu Pope thinks of and for his sister, Adi—the
Princess—Cakobau, with the greatest devotion and
tenderness. But he cannot speak to his own sister, for that
is forbidden to any man of high rank in Fiji; nor can he enter
her house, for that also is against the etiquette of a country
which is ruled by etiquette. And yet, if this sister of his
had had a son and Ratu Pope a daughter, these would inevitably,
in the old days, have been husband and wife without the necessity
of any ceremony; though if Ratu had a son, it would be an
abomination for him to mate with his cousin, the daughter of his
father’s sister.
Ratu Pope’s own house consists of one immense
sitting-room and a small bedroom. All the pillars and beams
in the large room are decorated with geometric patterns, formed
by the black and russet-brown and pale biscuit-colored twine
which holds them together, for no nails are used. There are
many beams and many pillars, for the roof is high, so that,
sitting at one end of the house, one p. 207looks down an elaborate vista, with
not two patterns alike. The entire floor is covered with
one immense mat of white woven pandanus leaf, patterned in
black.
Seated at the doorway of my house with Adi Torika, Ratu
Pope’s wife, and the girl, Tui Rewa, p. 208I have been
telling them of the sciatica or arthritis or whatever it is
torturing my left leg, which has been twice broken. They,
in their turn, immensely concerned, have tendered me a great deal
of advice as to the use of certain leaves, the coöperation
of the fairies, gravely doubtful as to whether dwarfs—whom
they picture as we have always pictured them: squat, malevolent
creatures with bald heads and long gray beards—may not have
something to do with it.
“Or an enemy,” suggests Tui Rewa, gazing at me
with her great shining dark eyes, so full of life and
intelligence. “If you can find your enemy, Marama,
and cut a little piece off his dress, or the mat he has been
sitting upon, then roll it up with earth and grass and seaweed,
so as to make a little figure of him, and get the magic man to
say magic words over it, then take your enemy’s
water-bottle and put the image in it and bury it in the ground,
it is certain that your enemy will die, Marama, and the pain in
your leg be better.”
Adi Torika has a sad face; as Tui Rewa chatters on, she sits
with her hands folded in her lap, gazing out at sea through the
open door.
“Adi Torika,” I say to her, “what will you
do when your son goes back to school? You will be very
lonely without him. You, Adi Torika, and p. 209Ratu Pope,
ought to have more children so that the world may know how fine a
thing the children of chiefs can be; what is one son to people
like you?”
The moment the words were out of my stupid mouth, I could have
bitten off my tongue; for the tears came into her eyes and she
turned her head aside.
“Is she angry?” I questioned Tui Rewa.
But Rewa shook her head, and Adi herself, flashing me a
reassuring smile, turned to Rewa and laying her hand upon her
knee, spoke to her in her own language.
“The Princess Torika wants me to tell you,” said
Rewa, “that she can have no more children, for she and her
husband, Ratu Pope, broke all the laws of etiquette and propriety
by not going to stay a month with her father and mother after
Ratu George Seniloli was born. And that is why she is
always sad. Seeing that they refused this homage to her
parents, it is forbidden to them to have more children, and day
and night she dreams of them and longs for them.”
Of all the people in the island of Mbau, the one I have most
longed to meet is the Chief of the Tribe of Human
Fishermen,—or, p. 210rather, “Fishermen for Human
Beings,”—but that has been hard to come by, for very,
very early each morning he goes out fishing alone in his canoe,
remains out for hours on end; then, when he comes back and I go
to his house, I am told that he is eating or sleeping, and he
sleeps much, for he is a hundred years old.
In the “Small Morning”—the hours between
four and six—I saw him push off from the shore. An
intrepid figure, in that pale and brilliant moonlight seen
immediately before sunrise and at that time alone, lean and
upright, with a thatch of white hair; standing erect in the teeth
of a wild gale, paddling his canoe toward the mainland.
Soon after nine o’clock he came back to sleep, but now
it is “The Afternoon is Near”—the three hours
between twelve and three o’clock,—and, answering the
summons of his overlord, he has come to talk to me, sitting on
the floor before me. An old man with an eagle-keen face,
large hooked nose, the sort of profile which might belong to any
old and distinguished general at home in England.
This Chief of the Fishers for Human Beings has eaten human
flesh, remembers the wild and bloody rites at the temple of his
tribe, when the brains of the captured were dashed out against
the great stones which still support the terraces. Hep. 211assures
me—this handsome, alert centenarian, so keenly smiling,
bright-eyed, and courteous—that he did not like the taste
of the flesh of white people, even when most delicately cooked,
with mboro ndina, or the true spinach, which is used only
with human flesh, any more than he liked the flesh of p. 212the people
of the Carpenter Tribe, both alike being tough and tasteless.
He tells me, also, so vividly that I seem to see it, of the
strangling of the widows after the death of the father of the old
King Cakobau; how he saw them being led by other women along the
green margin of the island between the hill and the sea, oiled
and garlanded and wrapped in their finest tapa; peeping out at
them from a hiding-place he had contrived for himself, so as to
escape having his finger cut with an ax, as was done with all the
male members of the tribes at the death of the king.
With Ratu Pope translating, he tells me, and his still strong
voice singsongs out the tale like a saga, in soft rounded
syllables—and in Fijian every syllable ends in a
vowel—which run stream-like, gently, then with the sound of
a rushing river: of the revolt of the people of Kaba; of the
carrying off of the women of Mbau; of the coming of the first
Tongans, with the first missionary, who offered to help them if
they would become Christians; for this was in the reign of King
Cakobau, during the latter part of the reign of King George of
Tonga. Tells of their return with ten great canoes and of
the review of the p.
213united troops upon the reef, the island being too small
for the vast number of men gathered together to spread out upon
it. Tells of how the men of the Lasekau Tribe had been sent
on to the reef before them, toiling slave-like by hundreds across
it, to cut away all the sharp points of coral, throw aside all
the poisonous fish stranded there, lest the warriors should have
their feet injured, and so be unable, not so much to march as to
pursue. Tells of the favorable augury of the Ghost of the
Sacred Trees of the Fishers of Human Beings, which had been given
to them before they went; of their great victories and the
pursuit of p.
214their enemy with their war-cry of “W-we . .
. W-we . . . Uway—Uway-y-y-y.”
It is our last night in Mbau, and I wander backward and
forward through the village, overcome by a feeling of utter
misery, weighed down by the inevitability of that fate which
forces me forever to leave the thing that I most love. The
preparations for a great feast are going on in the kitchen of the
chief’s house, overlooked by Adi Torika and her maidens,
who are cooking and stuffing chickens. Just outside the
kitchen there is a hole in the ground where among hot stones,
covered with many layers of leaves, fish and breadfruit and
pigeons are roasting. There are altogether in the kitchen
three women and a youth. When they are tired or when there
is any interval in their labor, they spread mats and lie down
upon the floor to rest, for no one drives any one to work in this
country, and there is no pretense of being busy when one is not
busy.
I have come to my room, for the feast is over, and all the
ceremonies and good-bys past. This night, in our special
honor, one of the most stringent rules of etiquette has been
relaxed, and Adi Cakobau the princess and her sister-in-law, Ratu
p.
215Pope’s wife, dined with us, sitting in a circle
upon the floor; with the old Chief of the Fishermen for Human
Beings and the buli, or lesser ruler, of the village a little
distance away. At the end of the feast, which began with
oysters, we drank healths: drank the king’s health sitting,
as a mark of the highest possible respect, drank the health of
all we loved.
There were two lamps on the floor, but the room was large and
full of shadows; the sound of wind and sea seemed almost
deafening.
“And now,” said Ratu Pope, “we will drink
the health of Marama, the lady, Dauvolavola, the one who is
always writing; drink to the health of Vavalagi, the foreigner;
drink to the health of The One Who is Always Sleeping.”
This with a sly glance at my companion, who has passed the
entire afternoon in slumber, to which he responds, jumping to his
feet with his glass in his hand:
“And to the health of Dauboge, the one who is always
walking about at night, the one who is always up to some mischief
or other.”
“And still there are more healths to be drunk,”
said Ratu Pope, when the laughter which followed this sally had
died away. “We will drink to the health of the son of
the Marama, and to the health p. 216of the captain of the ship who
brought her here. We will, indeed, drink to the health of
every one we know, of all whom we can think of without
knowing.”
When the feast was over there were good-bys to be said, for we
were leaving at dawn next morning, and, going out into the fresh
air which cleared our heads a little, we made the round of the
village, sitting for a long time in Adi Cakobau’s house,
overcome by sadness; hung round—at once depressed and
gladdened—by all the kindness and courtesy of our hostess
and her guests, men in white sulus (akin to the lava-lava of the
Samoans) and girls in white gowns, who sat round and sang to
us.
There were so many mats on the floor that it was soft to lie
upon, being high above the ground, and we lay on our sides with
white pillows under our heads, smoking. Tui Rewa had
brought us fire for our cigarettes, a smoldering stick of wood
cut at one end to the shape of a halved triangle, of which the
lower half can be laid on the ground, and the upper point lighted
without fear of its setting fire to anything. Our
cigarettes were of native tobacco rolled round in a thin pandanus
leaf.
p. 217There
was one lantern on the ground at the back of us; for the rest,
the great house was in darkness, the figures of the singers,
shadowy. The sound of their songs, far away and melancholy,
mingled with the wind, which to-night is sweeping in like a
cannonade of great guns from the sea, with tearing sheets of
rain. Adi Cakobau was wearing a blouse like a man’s
tennis-shirt, open at the neck, and a dark skirt. From
where I was lying, I could see her fine face and head edged with
the light, dark against the golden-brown walls of her house.
The men and girls sang hymns, “Abide with Me” and
“Lead, Kindly Light,” then with a splendid sort of
gusto, rolling it out, “Onward, Christian
Soldiers.” I and my companion gave one of the girls
some money, so that kava might be drunk, and matches bought at
one of the ridiculous little stores of the metropolis; and when
the kava had been brewed the whole company gathered close around
it, drinking it, drinking to our health.
I came back to my house soon after eleven and went to bed and
to sleep. But a little after two I was awakened by the
silence, for the storm had suddenly dropped. Then came a
great splashing p.
218against the sea-wall immediately beneath my window;
and, when I got up and went outside, I found the moon clear and
full in a sea of light, mid islands of umber clouds.
The great bull of the island, two heifers, a cow and a tiny
calf were walking round this small jutting point of sea-wall to
the next strip of sloping shore. The water was high and the
cow and the calf walked together in front of the heifers, with
the bull leading. At one spot, however, close to my house,
the water was so deep, the waves so high, that the calf refused
to go farther and stood pressing against the wall.
Whereupon the cow mooed to the bull, attracting his attention, so
that he returned, and pushing the cow aside, placing his own
solid body between the waves and the youngster, coaxed the tiny
creature on with delicate touches of his shining wet muzzle
against its neck.
I cannot sleep and am sitting writing. With a sudden
fierce slap in the face of the island, the wind has again risen;
a cloud slams across the moon, and the rain is driven inland in a
solid sheet. A bad outlook for to-morrow, when we have to
go in a canoe and flag the little steamer which passes on its way
to the north of the main island somewhere about dawn.
p. 219
We have actually made the steamer. It was very cold
coming out to her. There was a wild wind blowing, the sky
was heavy and leaden with great clouds, the gray sea torn with
white-topped waves. But Ratu Pope had lent us his heaviest
canoe and his strongest boys to paddle us. Looking back as
we came away from the island, we p. 220saw our host and his son and wife
waving to us, with his sister standing farther off, in the green
street of the village. My heart ached as it had never ached
since I saw my own son go away from me, and I was glad that the
day was gray; that the rain, which had ceased to fall in sheets
as it did last night, wept solitary spots, heavy as tears.
I was very much concerned as to how I should ever get on board
the steamer when I saw it come, plowing its way through the deep
troughs of the sea, while we went to meet it, our own canoe like
a leaf upon the water. For I am no good whatever at
anything like a jump.
Luckily, the lower deck of the steamer was very low, and with
hoisting from below and pulling from above I tumbled on to
her. She is twenty-five tons and there are close upon two
hundred passengers aboard her, crowded upon the upper and lower
decks so closely that it seems as though, should one of them
sneeze, the greatest number must go overboard, for it has no
rail. The width of the deck round the deck-house is no more
than four feet.
We go north, close in against the coast with its interminable
mountains, peaked and jagged mountains showing that queer twist
at the top which I have seen nowhere save in Fiji; rounded p. 221hills, and
steep cliffs as much as three hundred feet in height, hung with
long creepers falling like green waterfalls in unbroken streams
from top to bottom of them; and innumerable bays, the names of
half of which are unknown to the captain. If any of the
passengers wish to go on shore, however, he is obliged to stop
the steamer and send them off in the boat which we drag behind
us, while the little steamer itself—more like a
stage-property vessel than anything I have ever seen
before—spins and twists like a leaf in the wind. This
process is repeated every half-hour or so during our passage from
Mbau to Viti Levu Bay, a distance of but sixty-four miles,
costing each of us thirty shillings: surely the most expensive
sea-voyage per mile in the whole world, though maybe the charges
are in relation to the nine hours which it takes.
When we at last reached our journey’s end, Epeli Gavidi
Ganilou, Roku Tui Ra and Buli of Viti Levu Bay, came down to the
shore to meet us, out of sheer courtesy, as he would have come to
meet any stranger, and I handed him a letter of introduction from
the Colonial Secretary. He seemed, however, to think very
small beer of that, looked at us proudly and distantly, but when
my p.
222companion followed it up with a note from Ratu Pope,
his whole demeanor changed, and it seemed that he could not do
enough for us, sending messengers to his house with our luggage,
telling them to ask his wife to make ready for us.
We are staying with Ratu Epeli now, in his house high on a
terraced hill above the village, looking down on the great
sweeping Viti Levu Bay with its island, and landward at each
side, on range upon range of mountains, betwixt every two peaks a
paler and more distant range, and between these other ranges,
swept and hung with veils of mist crossed with the continual
broken arcs of rainbows. The fresh cool air is filled with
the scent of honeysuckle, falling in thick wreaths from the trees
around the wide smooth grass terrace in front of the house, which
is more European than Ratu Pope’s, with a wide veranda, a
central sitting-room, and two bedrooms. In the larger room
I sleep with Ratu Epeli’s wife and baby, while my
fellow-traveler, of much the same age as p. 223my own son,
and amazingly wise in all the ways of the Fijians,—wise and
grave as only the very young can be, the most perfect companion
in that he is the quietest,—shares the other bedroom with
our host, with whom in the quiet of the evening we have great
talks and discussions.
The Labor Government is in power in England, and Ratu Epeli,
who takes a keen interest in European politics—a chief and
the son of a chief of an unbroken line of chiefs, an aristocrat
to his backbone—is entirely amazed that we should submit to
such a thing. To his mind it seems incredible that warriors
and chiefs should sink so low—or so he regards it—as
to allow themselves to be dictated to by commoners.
I got up very early this morning, and walked round the garden
and am now sitting in the veranda, writing. The moon is
still up and it is very cold, but the wind has ceased and the bay
lies like a sheet of glass beneath me.
The ground falling away from the terraces dips so sharply that
there is no slope to be seen, nothing beyond the feathery tops of
ironbark and cocoanut palms, and one large bush of coral
hibiscus, its deeply serrated petals, its long streamers and
tasseled pistil hung with dew. Far below p. 224me I look
down into the brown-roofed village where the fires are beginning
to be lighted, thankful to think that we have made arrangements
to stay here for this entire day, waiting for the horses which
the one Englishman in the district, who runs a cattle ranch some
fifteen miles away, is sending over to meet us.
An old man, with but two teeth left in his head, has been
sitting on the veranda recounting to me, in a sing-song voice,
one of those interminable epics of great fights which have all
the swing of pages straight out of Homer.
“For all the wars there are five sorts of men needed:
first, the Vunivalu, or Tui, the Root of War, and
Chief of the Ruling Tribe; secondly, the Santuraga, those
who see to it that reverence is paid to the chiefs; thirdly, the
Bete, or Priest—the priests being of the tribe of
those who are all priests—with their long beards; fourthly,
the Matanivanua, or spokesmen; fifthly, the Bati,
or Warriors. Before the people make war they must lay p. 225their
purpose before the Bete, meeting him if possible upon the
Nakauvadra, or Sacred Mountain. [225]
“In the war between Natauya and Nalawa, Marama, many
were killed; the chief of the Naroko, he also was killed; I
myself saw it. The fighting swept up the hill here, swept
up it like a raging sea, and many men were killed, for Ratu
Pope’s grandfather had sent a boat bringing rifles and
powder. Also many of the Sesse were killed. Those who
were captured were put in a house, and the house was burned, and
they burnt with it; I myself saw it, Marama . . .”
For a moment or so the old man broke off, puffing at his
cigarette, a black ribbon of tobacco and twisted pandanus leaf,
gazing out before him with fierce old eyes, re-hearing God only
knows what sounds, re-seeing, re-tasting.
“The people that were burnt in the house were eaten,
Marama, for it was in the bad old days, when there were
cannibals.” He gave me a sly sidelong glance as he
said this, speaking of the bad days, though I could almost swear
that the old villain licked his lips as he said it.
“There was another fight later on, Marama, a small and p.
226unconsidered fight, with the people up the coast.
We brought back one of them bound hand and foot, and slew him; we
took off his legs and his arms and took out his
entrails,—for these were in the bad days, Marama, the days
before we were educated,—and filled him up with taro, and
baked him in hot stones for two hours, and cut him up and ate
him.”
Ratu Epeli and my friend and companion are on the veranda with
me. We have a bowl of kava in front of us and other men of
high caste gather round it; all together they talk of witchcraft,
and the ritual of Luve-Ni-Wai, the practice of which is now
forbidden, any man found practising it being punished and liable
to six months in jail.
We speak in a low voice, almost whispering, not because we are
afraid of being overheard, but for the reason that terror and
mystery hang about the very name of Luve-Ni-Wai (“Child of
Water”), a devil no more than three feet in height and yet
so powerful that all alike tremble before him, even the Dau
Vakadrauni Eua, or witch doctor, into whom Luve-Ni-Wai
himself enters, and who is fated to die if he fails in the least
iota to follow all the rules set out for him.
“If you wish to practise the ritual p. 227ofLuve-Ni-Wai, you must go into the bush, taking a
yangona (kava) bowl and a cup made of ai-bo with
you,” said Ratu Epeli.
“That is what you must do,” repeated the others,
“and find the banyan tree.”
“Yes, you must find the banyan tree,” said Ratu
Epeli; “a wide-spreading banyan tree in an open space in a
wild and secret place. Then having prepared your
yangona, you must make a litany to Luve-Ni-Wai, a
kerekere, or request, that he will be good enough to allow
two or more to be chosen to help you.
“At this, if Luve-Ni-Wai approves, he will take
possession of two of your companions; if he enters into them by
the feet, their feet will tremble so it is with difficulty they
can keep upright on the ground, while, if he enters into their
heads, their heads will tremble so that it seems as if they would
shake off from their bodies; after which, Luve-Ni-Wai himself
begins to speak, expounding the rules.”
Up to this we have all sat perfectly silent, almost
breathless, weighed down by the oppressive sense of something
dreadful drawing close to us, listening to what we are saying,
hanging over us with a hot fetid breath, for the wind has ceased
and there is not the slightest stir among the trees, p. 228while the
almost full moon hangs right above us, ringed and distorted by
some queer twist of clouds.
Ratu Epeli, as though half forgetful of what he was saying, or
frightened of saying more,—sitting with his hands pressed
down against his knees,—drops to silence, while the old man
takes up the tale.
“Every night after this, the one who is being initiated,
he with the desire, and his two companions, must take themselves
to this lonely spot. During this time he must touch no
woman, nor must he drink any strong drink. But once that
the devil has appeared to him and spoken to him he has this
power. He can take any woman and no one can know; he can go
into a house or a store and steal anything he wishes, and though
it is full of people no one will see him.
“If during this time,” said the old cannibal,
weightily, nodding his head, “anybody cuts off his head,
the Luve-Ni-Wai will put it on again, and there will be no harm
done to him.”
The talk went on from tale to tale. Ratu Epeli told me
of Koro, the island where you can go up on to a high cliff and
call three times to the Turtle-ghost, who will come up and answer
you. “If he does not answer you at first you call
into the bush, p.
229for he may be planting, and upon that he will come down
into the water where his attendants are waiting for him, with the
big shark which is his guard, and, rising to the surface, listen
to what you have to say to him, answering your question.
“Some say,” put in the old cannibal, who seemed to
act as a sort of Greek chorus to all that Ratu Epeli told us,
“that at one time some men caught the Turtle-ghost and made
a fire with stones in a hole in the ground and put him in there
to cook him; but when they opened the fire they found nothing
there but one stone. And these are the words they call to
the Turtle when they wish him to come to them, ‘Tui
Naikasi, Ko iko ha Vie Viei, vio iko na
eguege.’”
He ran on and on with the soft-syllabled Fijian words, in a
sort of chant which might, indeed, have conjured the fish out of
the water; so that I seemed to see them ranging up in rows, as
St. Francis saw them, around the magic turtle.
Another five miles, going at the slowest possible
pace,—for our horses were absolutely exhausted and there
was no road or track of any sort to be seen,—and we heard
in front of us the loud, incessant roar of yet another river, to
which the sound of the last had been nothing more than the cry of
a puling child: a roar so deafening that while we were yet about
half a mile away it seemed as though we must be at the very edge
of it. When we did reach the margin—for it ran flat
through high marshland—we realized that here we were at
last beaten. It was in wide flood, the water flecked with
yellow foam, running like a mill-race, filled with the trunks of
trees and broken boughs, swirling round and round in it.
It was impossible even to think of crossing upon horseback,
and queerly enough my one feeling was that of an intense relief;
for by this time I had reached a state of mind akin to that of
Sir Roland upon first sight of his Round Tower, thankful for any
sort of an end. As I slipped p. 238from my horse and plumped down upon
the swampy ground, the mere fact of being out of the saddle, of
even a momentary cessation from the stab of pain in my leg, was
all I asked for; though goodness knows that by this time the
outlook was dark enough, dark as the fading day, for it was as
impossible for us to turn back as it was for us to go on.
The moon had by now risen, appearing and disappearing between
scuds of clouds, and the rain had ceased. Not that that
mattered, not that anything on earth mattered, for by this time I
had no inclination for life left, felt a little contemptuous of
my companion and the black boy, who stood on the edge of the
river, which we now knew to be the Wai-ni-buka, with their hands
rounded to their mouths, endeavoring, childishly as it seemed to
me, to shout down the flood, pitch their voices toward the unseen
village, which the native boy declared to be Little Nausori,
lying within a fold of the hill, almost immediately opposite to
us.
So altogether fatalistic was my attitude of mind, indeed, that
I could scarcely believe my ears when loud shouts were returned
to us, and looking far up the stream we saw men pushing off in
two large canoes, guiding them with their p. 239paddles and
allowing them to drift down to where we stood out upon a spit of
land, having dully and indifferently enough taken the saddles and
bridles off our horses, tethered them, and left them where they
were when we saw the canoes coming. Two beautiful,
well-bred, and well-trained horses whose owner must have known
that this was the only way in which they could pass the night,
after a long day with two complete strangers who might well have
broken their knees or given them a sore back. And here,
indeed, you have p.
240an epitome of the most complete hospitality in the
whole world, the hospitality of the horsey man willing to lend
his horses.
As my companion and I crossed the river in one canoe, and the
native boy, who was to take back the two horses the next morning,
in the other, they spun like leaves upon the water, whirling
round and round as the stream drove them, making land upon the
far side close upon half a mile farther down, so that we had all
that distance to scramble back through the bush. I, for my
part, made my way up the steep hill to the village—and all
Fijian villages are, if possible, built upon hills, to keep them
clear of the flood—more or less upon my hands and knees;
for the moon was already hidden behind clouds, and such a path as
there was no more than a steep slide of mud.
When we did at last reach the village we found to our surprise
that it was in complete darkness, while the people who came out
to stare at us, holding their lanterns high and peering into our
faces, plainly had no idea who we were or whence we came.
Directly the buli came out of his house to welcome us,
however, we discovered why. The note sent on by our boys
from Ratu Epeli had been so sopped with rain that it was
unreadable, so that p. 241he had no idea whom the baggage
belonged to, from which direction the owners of it were coming,
or when they were to be expected. Not that this greatly
mattered, for in any case we should have been given the best
which the village afforded.
I am writing now in the village council chamber, the biggest
native house I have ever seen; I have just stepped it, and make
it roughly seventy feet in length. Large fires had been
lighted and new mats laid down. The buli himself has
carried off my companion to his own house, to change into such
dry clothes as he can lay hands upon; while the buli’s wife
and some of the other women have helped to get me out of my
dripping garments, clinging round me like an eelskin, and into an
old jumper which I have found dry in the heart of my pack.
I unwound the pajama trousers, still mercifully dry, from my
waist, and got into them, to the surprise of the feminine
community. They raised their hands and their eyes, glancing
from one to another with loud clucks of astonishment: for though
they have never seen a white woman here before, apart from the
fourteen-year-old daughter of a doctor who once passed through
here with her father,—were thrown into transports of
amusement and fear when I drew off my p. 242sopping gloves and threw them on the
ground, running toward them, touching them with the very tips of
their fingers or toes, running away again, clinging together,
laughing and screaming,—they realized at once that my
costume was not at all what it should be. They described me
among themselves, with all sorts of curious conjectures, as being
half a woman and half a man, christening me at once as “The
One with Shells in Her Ears,” on account of the small stud
pearl ear-rings which I always wear.
My traveling mate and I are sitting on the floor now beside
the fire upon which fowl and yams are being cooked for our
supper. Or, rather, I am sitting cross-legged with my
writing-pad on my knee and he is lying upon his side
smoking. At the back of us, far away in the dim distance, I
have hung up my mosquito curtain over the little platform which
is to serve as a bed, while my pillow is propped up in front of
the fire to dry; and all our clothes are hung on strings across
the room.
It is close upon ten o’clock and I am drunk with sleep;
but as yet there is no prospect of supper, for the fowls here
take an inordinately long time cooking,—and even then one
can, in general, only p. 243drink the broth in which they are
stewed, mingling it with the yams,—while a meke is
in progress, especially arranged in our honor.
There is one lantern on the ground at my side and the red
twinkle of the fire beneath the cooking-pot. In addition to
this there is the buke (fire) for our cigarettes,
twinkling like a small red eye between us. For the rest the
vast room is in darkness, though every now and then as the fire
springs up one realizes from the flash of white teeth, the
turning white of an eye, that the walls are lined with people
silently p.
244watching us, utterly spellbound and scarcely
breathing.
Immediately in front of us and not more than four yards away a
line of young girls, almost naked, wreathed with green
creepers,—which hang round their bodies and are braceleted
round their wrists in long streamers like ribbons,—their
bodies freshly oiled and shining, are seated, swaying to and fro,
moving their bodies as though dancing, with expressive
Egyptian-like gestures of their hands, with the mimicry of
paddling a canoe, of beckoning, of embracing, of repulsing.
As they dance they turn their heads from side to side, throwing
them back so that one sees no more than a line of smooth throats
in the oasis of gold and umber light cast by the
hurricane-lantern immediately before them; enwrapped in the
rapture of a dance in which they never once rise to their feet;
in which the hands and bodies, arms, neck, and head, alone are
occupied. And all the time that they dance they make songs
for us: songs of Russia and France,—these girls who have
never been away from their own village, who have never before
seen a white woman,—songs of the war and of Germany; songs
of battle-ships and steamers coming and going; songs of the
climbing of mountains and the swimming of rivers and the passage
of rapids in canoes. p. 245One after another starts upon a
fresh theme, and the whole party of girls catch it and carry it
on, tossing it as though it were a ball, from one to another,
throwing it over their shoulders, their heads thrown back, to the
long line of men who kneel to their dancing behind them.
The buli sits by my companion’s side and talks to him;
he cannot understand how we ever crossed the mountains and rivers
to come so far in such weather, along such a terrible road.
Above all he is overcome with what he calls my courage. He
himself is a young man, thirty at most, but with the utmost
gallantry—glancing sideways at me as I sit nodding over my
writing-pad, looking like nothing on earth—he remarks:
“I am an old, old man, and she is but a
child.”
It seems to me that the meke will go on and on
forever. It is, indeed, a day of eternities; the ride
itself was an eternity; it is more than an eternity since we left
the shelter of Ratu Epeli’s house; and it seems to me that
now we have, indeed, reached a point at which nothing ever ends;
that the fire will go on burning forever and the food cooking,
the meke dancers swaying to and fro in dreadful
monotony. An added note of inevitability is to be found in
the fact that the rest of the audience, who at first gathered
around the p.
246walls, are now ringed around us, line upon line of
them, lying flat upon their stomachs with their elbows on the
ground, their chins cupped in their hands, perfectly
immovable.
A sort of end has at last come, but only a sort. We have
eaten the yams soaked in broth, and drunk all that remained over;
the great house is cleared of men, and my companion has gone off
to the buli’s own private dwelling, while I myself am lying
with half the mats on my bed pulled over me,—for the
blanket in my pack is still sopping wet,—shivering with
cold and trying to sleep, with but poor success. For though
all the men have been turned out of the room, the women and
children are still here, talking, talking, and talking and
talking, as the Fijians can, and do, talk throughout the entire
night. The rats rustle and squeal in the loose straw
beneath my bed, and a horse crops the grass so close against my
head that I can hear its heavy breathing, catch an occasional
puff of warm breath through the openwork bamboo wall.
At last I can bear it all no longer, and rising in my majesty
of very large borrowed pajamas, walk the length of the room
toward the staring women. Demonstrating by every possible
sign that is p.
247known to me that I am longing for sleep, that it seems
a good thing that they also should rest, I seem to have reduced
them to, at least, temporary silence.
The night has passed: it is five o’clock. The rain
has ceased; but the mountains and valleys around us, the river
below us, still yellow and turbulent, are hung in a veil of light
silvery mist.
This village, with its goldy-brown thatched roofs, is set upon
a series of very smooth green sugar-cone-like hills. The
children and grown people come and go around me, bringing in
wood, carrying up water from the river, taking very little notice
of me sitting on the doorstep writing. They appear to have
got entirely used to me, as well they might; for throughout the
entire night—after I was supposed to have settled to sleep,
did, indeed, sleep in short, heavy spells—it seemed as
though the whole village came and went through the great room,
men and women, boys and children. I was conscious of a
continual whispering, a rustling, apart from the rats; the
flicker of a little taper floating upon oil, breaking through the
sleep into which I sank back and back, as though drugged; while
every now and then some small portion of me was picked up between
p. 248the
finger and thumb by some more daring explorer, determined to find
out whether I was altogether real or not—a liberty which I
was too dead with sleep to resent by anything more than a grunt,
a half-hearted twist aside.
We are a day late, but we have at last reached Wainimala, just
before sunset, toiling up a steep hill to the little village, at
the farther side of which is a deep ravine filled with the
tree-ferns and myrtles edged with brilliant crimson and yellow,
green and spotted crotons. Around it are more cone-like
little hills, each with its cluster of three p. 252or four
pale-brown houses and a few wind-twisted cocoanut trees.
Beyond and below these are the river valley and mountains of
every shade, the more distant a clear pale gold against the clear
pale-gold sky.
We have come steadily downhill during our journey, not only
actually but socially; starting with the highest chief in Fiji,
going on to a lesser chief, then to the most important buli, then
to a lesser buli. It is always to the buli’s house
that any visitors, whether expected or not, are shown. New
mats are laid out, or the best the village owns in the way of
mats, a fire lighted and water p. 253and yam boiled upon the very first
sight of any newcomer. We are now the guests of a man who
is in reality a commoner, and, though he has not yet appeared,
the difference in his house shows plainly enough the lowness of
his rank.
There are a great many girls in the village, and they gather
round us as we sit on a bench at the gate of the buli’s
house, openly wooing my companion, making eyes at him, laughing
and joking; tall, finely developed girls with clean, smooth brown
skins and very white teeth, wearing skirts of different colors
and thin muslin bodices, very negligently open in front and in
any case showing every curve.
The buli and his wife are very late coming back from the
fields, where they are planting out their yams, and we have our
supper, yams and tea and the remains of a tin of salmon, out upon
the bench, with a nearly full moon, deep gold like an apricot,
rising almost immediately above us.
It is close upon ten o’clock before our host and hostess
get back. They do their best for us, but there is no spare
house in the village, and so, for the first time, I have to sleep
with the entire family, though they hang up a mat to screen me as
much as they can from the public gaze. Bed, however, is out
of the question, for the present at p. 254least, for it seems that the buli, a
rather surly peasant, having penetrated as far as Suva some
months back, has returned with a sewing-machine for his wife; a
machine which he must have imagined to be possessed of some
gnome-like quality of doing everything that was required of it
without any human aid whatever, for neither he nor any one else
in the village has the faintest idea of how to work it.
Half dead with sleep, I am required to lie flat on the front of
myself, upon the none too clean mat, tinkering with the wretched
thing by the light of one miserable lamp, half blinded with the
smoke, for the buli’s wife is cooking the supper for
herself and her family inside the house itself—the first
time I have seen such a thing done.
It has been a perfectly horrible night. There was an
open doorway just opposite the end of my platformed bed.
When I shut it I was almost choked by the smoke and the smell of
the many people, talking and eating and drinking throughout the
entire night, crowded together in the hut; leaving it open, I was
chilled to death by the damp, cold mist which drifted in so that
even my hair was wet and I thought I should die until the idea
came to me of getting under the two upper mats p. 255of my bed
instead of lying on them. Upon getting up this morning I
bitterly regretted not having taken my clothes in with me, for
when I dressed, between five and six, I could have wrung the damp
out of them. However, the sun is now shining, growing every
moment hotter and hotter, so that I and my companion send out
great puffs of steam. Our boatmen, who were gray with
cold,—dulled and colorless, as all bronze men when they are
not feeling well, or are depressed,—glow and darken and
shine, breaking into songs.
The sun is immediately overhead, the river like molten lead,
colorless and shining; all the moisture has gone out of both us
and our clothes, and I feel as though I might literally crackle
with dryness. We have finished all the water we brought
with us and all our food save a few cold yams, morsels of which I
turn round and round in my mouth, finding myself unable to
swallow. It is ridiculous for any one to say that when you
are really hungry you can eat anything, the fact being that you
get to a stage when without fat or any form of grease you find
such food as yams, so like moist wood, impossible to swallow.
It seems now as though we have been traveling for half a
lifetime. I am not unhappy, I don’tp. 256want to go
back, and not for one single moment do I wish that I hadn’t
come; but, for all that, I’ve reached a state where time is
absolutely non-existent, and I rather wonder if other people are
like that, losing all sense of time, realization of
place—at least any place apart from that in which they
happen to be at the moment, seeing even that through a
haze—when they are really hungry or absolutely
exhausted.
I am altogether myself again, for I have eaten and
drunk. A couple of hours ago a twist in the river showed us
a small red-brick house, with outhouses and grazing cattle, on
the top of a bank a quarter of a mile or so above us.
As the ground at the edge of the river was a swamp of black
mud, my companion volunteered to go up to the house and see what
he could get. But he seemed to be so long gone, and I was
so frantic with hunger and thirst, that I tumbled out of the
canoe, plumping into the mud over the tops of my shoes, and
clambering up the hill,—for the most part on my hands and
knees, too completely done to battle with the achieved habits of
humanity,—flung myself down upon the veranda of the strange
house. I offered no explanation whatever to the owner of
the place,—anp. 257elderly one-eyed Dane who came round
from the back and stood over me, stolidly staring down at
me,—nothing on earth beyond a hoarse and piteous
beggar’s whine:
“For the Lord’s sake give me some
bread.”
For this is what it had come to after days and days without
the staff of life; the very thought of p. 258bread
blocking out the sky, smothering my horizon, no other idea in my
mind, no other desire in my heart.
Now we have had bread and coffee and cheese,—hard,
yellow cheese, of which I have eaten what would at any other time
have seemed an impossible quantity,—with lashings of fresh
butter; for by some happy accident we have chanced upon a dairy
farm, and are sitting waiting for a letter over which the Dane is
laboring, and which he wishes to send on by us to meet the launch
which we shall pick up in a few hours. Meanwhile his only
companion, a half-caste Maori, one of the most completely
villainous creatures I have ever seen,—just the sort of man
who might have stepped right out of one of Joseph Conrad’s
books, and fully capable, to judge by the look of him, of
murdering his white companion,—sits and brags to us, with a
living stream of lies.
I am back again in the hotel at Suva. A very gay and
cheerful Suva, for the fleet is in and the whole town en
fête. This morning I’ve had an experience I
would not have missed for anything. For all the Fijian
chiefs sent out their war canoes to meet the incoming
ships,—canoes so large that it takes twenty men to launch
them,—and Ratu p. 259Pope allowed me to go out in his,
the greatest and leading canoe,—with George Seniloli and
his chief boatmen,—the only European, apart from a couple
of boys, in the whole flotilla.
These canoes have one great three-cornered sail made of mats,
woven out of palm-leaves and sewn together. There is a mast
and a swinging boom, and another boom down the farther bunt of
the sail,—at least that is the only way that I can find to
express it,—the junction of these two booms being held
jambed against the small cross-beam on p. 260the
taffrail either at the stern or bow. When the sail is
shifted, one of the boatmen,—and it must be a feat which
calls for the greatest strength,—lifts it and, taking the
whole weight of the sail with it, runs along the extreme edge of
the canoe and drops it into the V-shaped junction of the two
curved beams against the ledge of the opposite side. The
canoe is balanced by an immense outrigger, formed of long slender
beams running at right angles out from the canoe to what is
virtually the trunk of a tree—across which we all had to
hurl ourselves when the wind heeled over the canoe, bringing it
down with a slap upon the water.
All these mat sails are a pale golden brown, and what the
fleet of canoes must have looked like from the land I cannot
say. But we were leading,—for though we started last,
we very soon shot ahead,—and as I looked back at them they
seemed to me like nothing more than a fleet of shining brown
butterflies, driven sideways by the wind, not in the water at
all, but just scudding over it, light as air.
It is a divine morning, so exquisitely fresh that it might be
the very first that the world has ever known. As I sit upon
the shore, writing, a great tree above me which the natives here
call futu is dropping down masses of bright rose-colored
stamens from a creamy white flower,—of which each petal is
tipped with rose-pink,—so thickly that it lies like a
velvet carpet upon the sand beneath it and mantles my shoulders
with pink. At the back of me the black cliff is hung with
ferns: asparagus and maidenhair, and dozens of others of which I
do not know the name. The smooth golden sands are spread
with fragile and beautiful shells, thick as though it were the
counter of a shell shop, punctuated by the small, upright bronze
figures of the native children, with their long lavender-gray
shadows, who run in and p. 277out of the sea. They come to
me with what they call “eye-shells,” the rounded
portion of a shell precisely like the porcelain of an artificial
eye.
The people out of the village come round me and talk to
me. They are more primitive than any Fijians I have yet
seen, but they are smiling and pleasant, and I cannot for the
life of me imagine why I had such a sinister impression of them
and their village last night. The chief, too, is quiet and
dignified and very polite, sitting on the floor of the hut,
counting out small piles of money to pay for a load of bananas
which he took into Navua.
The cutter is still hung far out in the bay and, as there is
not enough wind for sailing, the chief is going to take me up the
coast and round the island in his long boat with six pairs of
oars, directly he has finished his business.
We are at sea again. Just because we do not particularly
want it, a stiff wind has risen, the sky is a clear dark blue,
piled with silver-white cumulus clouds, the sun is shining.
As the men bend to their oars the chief sits in the stern of the
boat just behind me and tells me tales.
“There is a tree on the shore called the fau ceva
tree; you can see it there with bent boughs and a p. 278bent trunk,
like an old, old man. If you cut a bough of that tree you
will not be able to go to sea, because of the wind which will
arise and last for eight days. If you want the wind to
cease, all you can do is to go to the wise man of Dakuni, who
will make a bow and arrow, and shoot at the wind so that it drops
dead.”
All the chief’s stories are of the ways of the wind and
the sea, and of magic which is used in the controlling of
them. When he ceases telling stories he starts to sing a
long-drawn monotonous song, of the ways of a boat and of the
sails and the helm; of boat-building, and of battles at
sea. From this he goes on to sing of me, myself, calling me
by the same name as they gave me in Mbau, Dauvolavola—The
One Who is always Writing. The men who are rowing the boat
are not his own men, but come from Dakuibeqa. After he has
told them of my writing, in a song with a chorus where they pick
up the last line of every verse,—repeat it again and again
in a swinging chant to which they keep time with their
oars,—he starts off upon another song in which he tells
them how I steered the cutter over from Navua, tying myself with
a rope so that I should not be washed overboard; tells how the
wind stormed and the waves p. 279washed over and the rain fell,
finding a new name for me—“The One Who is Never
Afraid.”
Toward the middle of the day the wind rises so that the rowers
are unable to make any way against it, and we turn into a little
bay, where the men carry me on shore to a village. Here we
go into the buli’s house, and when my pack is on shore make
some tea, while the women give us fresh oranges. All the
village seems busied over the making of dancing skirts out of
long streamers of the fine, silvery inner bark of trees, so
beaten and polished that they are as thin and shining as ribbons;
dyeing them every sort of color—pink and blue and magenta
and purple, yellow, brown, and russet—with vegetable dyes;
hanging them across strings from tree to tree to dry.
Bega is all mountains and deep valleys, and thick and
luxurious vegetation. Sitting on a bank this morning I
counted what I took to be sixteen different ferns within reach of
my hand. When I brought them home, however, and showed them
to the chief, he laid them out upon the table and separated them
into pairs, pointing out to me that nearly all of them were male
and female, so that there were only six or eight different
varieties, in all.
“And that is the way with everything,” he
said. “There are always men and women among the trees
and the flowers, the birds and the fish in the sea; no one is
altogether alone.”
Last evening he took me for a walk through the village which
lies in an amphitheater of hills, all alike crowned to the very
top with forests; excepting for one single sugar-cone hill half a
mile away, which is smooth green, like a field, with a fringe of
dark trees running up one side of it and down the other.
p. 283From
the village we mounted a steep hill high above to the right of
it, with a wonderful view of jutting bays, and here he showed me
the schools which he is building for the boys of Bega: four large
native houses in which there are already forty boys and three
teachers. In time, however, he intends to make room for one
hundred and forty, being determined that the boys of his island
shall be well educated. And yet what is education? He
himself had never been to school, never learned to read, and yet
he could tell me what he had about the ferns. Imagine any
uneducated man at home being able to differentiate between the
male and female of the same species!
We went into one of the school-houses, really a
boarding-house, and sat upon the bed—one long platform
running the whole length of the room, and divided into sections
by the different boys’ mats, with their vividly colored
woolen fringes. Here there was, as in most houses, a
clearing made in the coarser mats which covered the floor, and a
large wood fire burning there. Some of the boys were paring
and cooking a vast pot full of taro for their evening meal, while
others came and went with wood and water.
At that height the air was fresh and sweet with the scent of
burning wood. From where I sat the p. 284coast with
its three bays enwrapped a trefoil of smooth sea reflecting as in
glass the pale daffodil sky above it; while the fire in the
corner of the room was red and gold, flickering upon the dark
faces of the boys, who divided their attention between their
cooking and us: boys with shining bronze skins, bright dark eyes,
and white teeth, wearing nothing more than the whitest of
sulus.
The chief began to sing—the song of the shipbuilding and
the sailing, the song of the fighting men in their canoes, and
the song which he had made about me; while his small son of three
years old who sat upon my lap beat upon my chest with his hands
in time to the music, and his mother, sitting upon the floor
beside him, smiled pensively.
As we toiled up the steep path to the school she had carried
the child on her back; but as we walked down it he walked like a
little chief by his father’s side, holding his hand, while
the mother followed behind us.
This island of Bega is different from all the other islands,
because here the men have the gift of being able to walk over
red-hot stones without being burned.
To-day the chief took me to see the immense amphitheater where
the ceremony takes place. p. 285I saw the burned ground, the ashes
and charred wood, the blackened stones, and the marks of fire
upon the trees all around it which show how intense the heat must
be on such occasions. But as it is a great performance and
requires a great deal of time to get it ready it could not be
done for one person alone; or, at any rate, without several
days’ warning, so that it is impossible for me to see
it.
Whenever we are walking about the village the chief walks in
front of me. If I want anything carried when we first
start, he calls a man to follow with it; but if I take off my
coat and carry it he waits till we are well away out of sight of
every one, then he takes it from me. Very often when I am
sitting sketching he will fan me with a large leaf to keep away
the mosquitos and flies, but if any one passes he drops it at
once, like a shy, proud school-boy, terribly embarrassed.
I keep on trying to settle when, and how, to get back to
Navua; but he wants me to stay and teach him more English,
threatens to cut off a bough of the fau ceva tree so that
I shall not be able to get away. He promises me that if I
stay he will take me over to the other side of the
island—show me there upon the coast a great rock; a rock so
sacred that if you lay your hands upon it three great p. 286waves will
come sweeping up out of the sea, one after the other, and it will
be a wonder if you escape with your life.
Across many of the paths here are creepers with thick twisted
stems like ropes. I persuaded the chief to attempt to
measure one for me to-day; but after he had measured it to the
length of sixty-two fathoms it lost itself among the other trees
and he was obliged to give it up. He had not, indeed, much
liked touching it at all, for it, also, is sacred, and if any man
cuts it he will die within the month.
I am back again in Navua, where it is still raining.
Though thank Heaven I am leaving this afternoon, having crossed
over from Bega yesterday, a Sunday. And in this lay the
root of all my trouble, for the Fijians do not like starting any
enterprise upon that day, though it did not seem to me that the
captain of the cutter had any religious scruples about going as
far as he wished, which was to the second village along the
coast, where he happened to have a wife.
The chief himself was not able to come over with me, and he
put me in charge of this captain, the man with elephantiasis, and
two younger men. From the very beginning everything went
wrong. p.
287The engine would not work and the wind was so light and
fitful that it seemed as though we should never get out of the
land-locked bay. Then when we did get out of it, the men
kept so close into the coast that we lost what wind there
was. It was useless to expostulate with them, for they knew
scarcely any English and were sulky and obstinately fixed in
their own way.
At the first village the cutter was run into a bay, and one of
the men, going on shore, sent out a young boy in his place.
Coming over we had had the so-called captain, the chief, and
two other men; now there were only three counting the boy; and
though I steered I did not know enough about the coast, the
opening in the reefs, to take the matter entirely into my own
hands.
As the wind rose still more the youth whom we had started
with, and whom we had originally brought over from Navua, went
below and started tinkering with the engine; while the captain
and the new boy talked together, shaking their heads and saying
that it was impossible that we could ever reach Navua that night,
that the winds were against us and the time wrongly chosen,
plainly performing for my benefit; though it was only when we got
level with the village, where we had p. 288stayed the night we came over, that
the trouble really began, for here the captain took the tiller
out of my hand, and, shouting to the boy to shift the sails, ran
the cutter right up into the bay.
At this I became furiously angry, going for the captain so
fiercely that he went below into some mysterious little cubbyhole
up in the bow and shut the hatch over himself, leaving the tiller
to me.
At first I was glad enough to be rid of him. But after
we had passed the Bega Passage, out of the reef, the wind got up
and blew so heavily, in such fierce gusts, with blinding torrents
of rain, that it seemed impossible for us to manage the sails, p. 289and I sent
first one boy and then another to tell the captain to come on
deck, cursing my own trust in the Fijian character; for if I had
only taken a revolver with me I could have frightened him to his
post.
All this while the seas grew higher and higher, and the pull
upon the tiller was such that I had to hold it with my legs flung
over it at my knees, as well as my hands, lashing myself round
with a rope to keep from being washed overboard. Still, for
all our difficulties, short-handed as we were, we succeeded in
running across to the mainland reef; had made the passage and got
through it; were a good three quarters of a mile on the landward
side, when the captain came up on deck and said that he would
steer.
So great was my distrust of him, however, that I would not let
him touch the tiller; and, turning away, he went and stood in the
bow of the cutter, on the steps of the tiny hold, with his head
just out of the hatch, a monstrous and sinister figure wrapped
round with mist and rain.
The Navua boy, Mau, said that he must try to persuade the
auxiliary motor—at which he had been hammering on and off
throughout the whole passage—to go, or else we should not
be able to get up the river. He disappeared below and the
Bega p.
290boy, who had never stopped grumbling about the wet and
cold, followed him, leaving me alone on deck to manage the cutter
which had taken four men on the voyage over. Though I
shouted down the hold, furiously telling him to come up on deck
again, he took no notice whatever, while the captain remained
immobile in the bow.
Then, quite suddenly, things began to happen. The
captain clambered up on deck and shouted to the Bega boy, who
immediately came shouting up out of the cabin. For a moment
or so they bellowed furiously at each other, over-shouting the
wind, the thresh of canvas; then, before I knew what they were
about, the captain came toward me, wrenched the tiller out of my
hand, and unshipped the rudder; while the boy ran down the sail,
leaving it loose and flapping with the boom, swinging so that it
was with the greatest difficulty that I could keep from being
swept overboard.
At this I was strung up into such a rage as I think I have
never been in before. It is impossible that the men could
have understood the language that I used, and, indeed, I was
amazed at myself, at the sound of my voice hurtling it out; but
something in the way I used it or the look of me—for I
always get a dead white when I am p. 291really angry—frightened them
so that they ran forward and began to hoist the sail.
Rather, they pretended to hoist it, getting it all twisted in a
way that no Fijian who had not some ulterior motive of his own
would ever do, for these people are the most wonderful seamen in
the world.
Hanging on as best I could, I picked up the tiller, which had
dropped upon the deck beside me, and was trying to fix it into
its socket when, happening to glance round, I saw to my horror
that we had drifted back within half a dozen yards of the reef,
white with foam, overhung with thick clouds of spray.
At this I gave up all idea of steering. Crawling to the
little mouth of the engine-room, I shrieked down it to the boy
Mau, who ran up on deck, took the loose iron bar of the tiller
out of my hand, and then,—realizing how hopeless it was,
for of course we had no steering-way on us,—called to me,
bellowing through the wind, the roar of the waves, and the loud
flapping of the sails, with his hands to his mouth, though it was
no more than a yard away:
“Marama, come away with me in little boat. These
men very bad men. Me row Marama.”
The dinghy trailing behind us was more than p. 292half full
of water, but, pulling her up a little, he took a running jump
into her and drew her level with the cutter, which had now swung
round so that she had her nose almost on the reef. I made
the other boy and the captain, who by now looked thoroughly
frightened, throw in my suit-case and bundle of
bedding,—for I knew I could not trust them once I was out
of the cutter,—then scrambled overboard as best I could,
horribly hampered by my lame leg and the tossing of the little
dinghy—for the sea ran like a mad mill-race through the
opening in the reef, spreading out all fanways beyond it.
By this time it must have been six o’clock, and was
almost dark, while the rain fell in torrents which no words can
describe. The boy, Mau, said that it was only three miles
to the mouth of the river, two or more up it; but, while it might
have been no more, it seemed endless; seemed, indeed, after the
first hour’s battling with wind and tide against us,
impossible that we should ever even reach the shore.
The water in the dinghy was half-way up to my knees and deadly
cold. I bailed the whole time, but it was impossible to
lessen it. When we did reach the river mouth we
found—hearing and feeling it, for by now it was too dark to
see p.
293anything—that the river was running in just such
a flood as it had been when I left; while the mangrove swamps and
rice fields were so flooded upon each side that it was only by
the rush of water that we could judge where its right course
lay.
Ultimately we did, however, reach the hotel at Navua, between
eight and nine o’clock; though for the last mile or so I
had to keep Mau, who was nearly exhausted, going by a running
series of questions and promises; my own voice, hoarse as a
crow’s, sounding oddly far away to myself.
When he told me that he was about to be married, I drew a
vivid fancy picture of his future happy state, and the family
which he would have; told him of my own son in Africa and how
there were lions and elephants, and Heaven only knows what,
there. The poor fellow’s voice sank to a hoarse
whisper over the oft-repeated words, like a sort of desperate
chorus: “Me get Marama to Navua. Me get Marama
there”; while he kept missing strokes so I thought that
every moment he must collapse.
Never in my life have I been so glad of anything as I was when
I saw the lights of that so-called hotel, inhospitable as it
proved. For when I streamed up into the veranda, with the
water literally sluicing off me, the few wastrels gathered p. 294there
stared at me without the slightest movement to help me with the
baggage which I was pulling after me; for by this time Mau was so
utterly exhausted that it was all he could do to drag himself up
the river bank and through the thick belt of scrub to the
hotel.
In the one sitting-room the landlady, playing cards with two
of her male boarders, glanced up at me sullenly. When I
asked her for food for Mau, who was my first thought, she
answered, “We don’t serve niggers here,” and
went on dealing without a second glance at me; while the two men
in dirty and bedraggled white clothes, with unshaven faces and
bloodshot eyes—one of them, to his shame, an English
public-school boy—stared stupidly without so much as rising
to their feet.
As I rapped out an order for whisky, however, the landlady
hoisted herself out of her chair, slopped with bare slippered
feet into the bar, measured out two tots,—of which I gave
one to Mau, though it is altogether against the law,—then
returned to her cards, licking her thumb as she dealt. And
if Somerset Maugham could only have seen that room and that
party, the dirty flaming lamp, its blackened chimney hung round
with insects, the flying ants lying among their own p. 295fallen
wings upon the spotted table-cloth, the filthy cards, the
derelict specimens of civilization playing at some unknown game
with that shapeless woman; been deafened by the deluge which
poured down unceasingly upon the tin roof, he would have realized
afresh the frightful truth of his own masterpiece,
“Rain.”
I asked the landlady, quietly enough, if I might have
something to eat. But when she grunted out sullenly that it
was too late, saying, “There is no night service
here,” my short patience came to a sudden end and I flung
round at her savagely, declaring that if she did not find
something for me at once I would go off and complain to the
Resident Magistrate. Then, making out some sort of
acquiescence, more like a grunt than human speech, I went up into
my room and changed my things, feeling that I would give anything
on earth for some hot water to put my feet in, or, best of all, a
hot-water bottle and bed. I pottered about miserably for a
good half-hour, trying to get my hair dry, thinking that I would
give the slut downstairs time to prepare something for me to eat,
but when I did get down again I found her still at her cards and
got nothing, in the end, beyond a plate of half-raw cold meat
with pickles and some p. 296sodden bread for my supper.
And this from one white woman to another in a far-away
country!
Throughout the better part of that night I lay awake, too
chilled to sleep,—for my rug was sopping wet, like
everything else I had taken over to Bega with me,—listening
to the persistent thrash of rain upon the iron roof, the
torturing drip, drip, drip where it soaked through the weak
places and splashed down on the floor.
Once more I am back in the hotel in Suva, wallowing in hot
baths and linen sheets, telling myself that there is nothing on
earth that I could wish for. Though, even now, I am
perfectly aware, at the back of my mind, that in no more than
another twenty-four hours I shall be mad to be off on the trail
again.
I hear from the magistrate at Navua that from all he hears
that rascally captain from Bega got up his sails and raced back
to his own island directly I was out of sight. As for Mau,
he is enshrined forever in my memory, together with all the
hospitable and courteous Fijians I have known. Goodness
only knows what would have happened to me if it had not been for
him, as nothing on earth would have persuaded me to give in to
the captain’s demands. It would have been p. 297by no means
a pleasant night at sea, with no choice between the open deck and
the one tiny hold used to carry bananas, shared with that swollen
parody of man.
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