pillars, which is the Samoan fashion, though I did not know it, another
tall creature entered, and giving us her hand with the “_alofa_” sat
down against another pillar--also the proper dignified Samoan way. We
did not notice her much; she was quieter, less pretty than the pretty
one, with a longer face, a nose more curved at the end, a longer upper
lip, and more quietly dressed in the same way. Then entered another with
a disk-shaped face, her hair all plastered white with the coral lime
they use to redden the hair, and dressed as the others, with the same
bare arms and legs. She was heavy and strong below, and less developed
above, with the same splendid walk and swing, the same beauty of the
setting of the head on the neck.
And we drank cocoanut milk, while _kava_ was being prepared for us in an
enchantment of movement and gesture, that I had just begun to feel, as
if these people had cultivated art in movement and personal gesture,
because they had no other plastic expression.
The movements of the two girls preparing the stuff would have made
Carmencita’s swaying appear conventional; so, perhaps, angels and
divinities, when they helped mortals in the kitchen and household. As
the uglier girl scraped the root into the four-legged wooden bowl set
between the two, in front of us, and before the central pillars, she
moved her hand and body to a rhythm distinctly timed; and when her
exquisite companion took it up, and, wetting the scraped root from
double cocoanut shells, that hung behind her, moved her arms around in
the bowl and wiped its rim, and frothed the mass with a long wisp of
leafy filaments, she tossed the wet bunch to her companion, as if
finishing some long cadence of a music that we could not hear, too slow
to be played or sung, too long for anything but the muscles of the body
to render. And she who received it, squeezed it out with a gesture fine
enough for Mrs. Siddons or Mademoiselle Georges. I use these names of
the stage, of which I have no fixed idea; those that I have seen could
never have given, even in inspired moments of passion, such a sinuous
long line to arm and hand. Then in a similar repetition of conventional
attitudes the cups were presented to us, one after the other, with a
great under-sweep of the full-stretched arm, and we drank the curious
drink, which leaves the taste filled with an aroma not unlike the
general aromatic odour of all around us, of flowers and of shrubs. For
all was clean and dry about us, house and surroundings and crowded
people, at least to the senses that smell.
* * * * *
In the slow hypnotism produced by mutual curiosity, by gazing with
attention all centred on movement, while pretending to notice all the
social matters as they went on about us, I could not disentangle myself
from the girl who had bewitched us; and as she sat clasping her elbows,
with her legs crossed in her lap, like the images of Japanese Kwannon
and of Indian goddesses, I tried to copy a few lines. But the original
ones flowed out again like water, before I could fix them. My model was
conscious of the attention she called up, and from that moment her eyes
always met ours, with a flirting smile, half of encouragement, half of
shyness.
And now the tall girl that sat beside me, with the quiet face and
unquiet eyebrows, put out her hand languidly to reach for my
sketch-book. She was the “virgin of the village”--doubly important by
being the old chief’s daughter, and elected to this representative
position, which entails, at least, the inconvenience of her being always
watched, guided, and intimately investigated by the matrons appointed
thereto. The lines of my sketch, that would have puzzled the ordinary
amateur, were clear to her: “See,” she said, “here is Sifá, clasping her
elbows, but her face is not made. Draw me,” and she moved away the
hanging mats that obscured the light. The sketch I made was bad,
representing to my mind a European with strange features. I don’t know
what she thought of it, but she recognized the chemise with ruffles on
edges, that covered her shoulders, and made the motion of lifting it
away, which I was slow to understand. Her eyebrows moved with some
question for which I had no English in my mind. At last the word
_misonari?_ as she looked toward Adams, explained what was meant; I said
“no,” and looked approval. She rose, passed into the shade, and sat
again before me, her upper garment replaced by a long, heavy garland of
leaves and the aromatic square-sided fruit of the pandanus, that partly
covered her firm young breast, and lay in her lap against the folds of
the bent waist. But my drawing was scarcely better for all this, and I
gave it to her, with the feeling that what made it bad for me, its
resemblance to a European, might give it value for her. All the time
the temptation was strong to treat this child of another civilization as
a little princess. She had the slow manner, the slightly disdainful
look, the appearance of knowing the value of her sayings and doings that
make our necessary ideal of responsibility. What though the Princess
puffed at my pipe, meanwhile having secured a cigar, less cared for,
behind her pretty ear; what though she pressed two long, slender fingers
against her lips, and spat through them, according to some native
elegance, she knew that she was a personage and never was familiar, even
when she pressed my arm and shoulder, and said, “_alofa oi_,” “I like
you.” Her forehead was high and gently sloping, her eyebrows thin and
movable, the eye looked gently and firmly and directly; the nose was a
little curved at the heavy end, the upper lip a little long (and pulling
on the pipe, if she used it, would lengthen it later yet more), the neck
and back of the head had the same beauty of line and setting that I had
seen in Hawaii, and her shoulders, and breast, and strong, lithe arms
would have delighted a sculptor. She wore her hair gathered up by a
European comb, and in front a forelock reddened to the tone of her face,
with the coral lime they used. Her legs were strong and fine and her
feet only as large as one could expect, with the soles hardened by use
over stones and coral.
But she was not the pretty one; her sister, Sifá, was that. The charm of
the older one, “the virgin of the village,” was in this incomparable
savage dignity, that gave a formality to our visit. What to us was an
amusement was to her evidently one of the necessities of hospitality,
while Sifá could not move about or look without a ripple of laughter
that undulated through her entire person. Occasionally, however, our
“chiefess” looked at me with a gentle smile, and said “_alofa!_” and by
and by, after showing me that she could write, and doing so in my album,
(where she dated her inscription _Oketopa_, our October), she gave me a
ring with her name Uatea--or Watea as she wrote it. She partook of
lunch, eating after us (along with the captain who appeared again on
time), and she refused to taste of some apples we had until we had some
of her own fruit, all I suppose according to some proprieties well
defined. Then Sifá, her sister, met with a little adventure in unpacking
our food for us. The captain of the steamer had given us a block of ice
on our leaving, telling us that it was the last we should see in this
part of the world, and that it might comfort us during our long, hot
sail under the tropical sun. In unrolling it, and taking it up, Sifá
dropped it with a cry of “_afi!_”--“fire!” and for a few moments we
struggled in an unknown tongue to explain what it might be. But I took
it for granted that she must have had some Bible explanation of the
places where the Bible comes from--that is to say, England and Scotland;
hence about winter and bad weather, and perhaps snow and ice.
While the family arranged for their meal we took a walk, “now and
again,” as our captain expressed it--almost all the words he knew. We
walked across what appeared to be the village green--a space of grass
neatly cared for--edged by huts and trees, the palms thickening in the
distance and hiding the sudden and close slope of the mountain right
above us. Bread-fruit trees were planted here and there near the houses,
the large leaves making a heavy green pattern against the innumerable
shades of green, the spotted trunks were dark; even the cocoanut trees
were only white by the sea. We passed a tomb, of a moundlike shape, one
lengthened cube placed upon another, and the upper surfaces sloping to
an edge like some of the early sarcophagi or Italian tombs--a shape as
simple and elegant as one could wish in such an ideal landscape. I shall
have to find out if this most typical shape has originated with them, or
has come from some foreign influence. However that may be, it made
another classical note. Had Ulysses in his wanderings left some
companion here, some such monument might have well marked the tomb of a
Greek. There it was, all covered with lichen; and another newer one,
made also of coral mortar, still white, near trees, and by former
homes, in this little shady “_agora_.” As we passed into the path that
seemed to run up the hill, young men went by with wreaths on their
heads, draped to the waist, like the statues of the gods of the family
of Jove; their wide shoulders and strong, smooth arms, and long
back-muscles or great pectorals shining like red bronze. All this
strength was smooth; the muscles of the younger men softened and passed
into one another as in the modelling of a Greek statue. As with the
girls we had just left, no rudeness of hair marred the ruddy surfaces,
recalling all the more the ideal statues. Occasionally the hair reddened
or whitened, and the drapery of the native bark cloth, of a brown ochre
colour, not unlike the flesh, recalled still more the look of a Greek
clay image with its colour and gilding broken by time. Never in any case
was there a bit of colour that might rightly be called barbaric; the
patterns might be European, but no one could have chosen them better,
for use with great surfaces of flesh. If all this does not tell you that
there was no nakedness--that we only had the _nude_ before us--I shall
not have given you these details properly. Evidently all was according
to order and custom; the proportion of covering, the manner of catching
the drapery, and the arrangement of folds according to some meaning well
defined by ancient usage.
Children played about in the open space; they were then at a game of
marbles; when we returned, this had turned to some kind of
blind-man’s-buff; there was no roughness, only a good deal of soft
laughter; one youngster, draped to the chest like a Greek orator, too
big for the children, too young for the men, leaned upon a long staff
and looked on gravely, exactly like the figures on the Greek vases, or
the frieze of the Parthenon.
We walked along into the forest, in the silence of noonday, but the
abruptness and slipperiness of the path as it rose rapidly to walls of
wet rock, stopped our feet. From the intricate tangle of green, we saw
the amethyst sea, and the white line of sounding surf cutting through
the sloping pillars of the cocoanuts, that made a mall along the shore;
and over on the other side of the narrow harbour, the great high green
wall of the mountain, warm in the sun, and its fringe of cocoanut grove,
and the few huts hidden within it, all softened below by the haze blown
up from the breakers. All made a picture, not too large to be taken in
at a glance; the reality of the pictures of savage lands, in our school
books, filled in with infinite details. From dark interiors of huts, as
we returned, came gentle greetings of “_alofa_.” Awoki, our Japanese
servant, had remained with our hosts, had been fed with bread-fruit and
cocoanut milk, and was busy writing out, under the direction of the
black mate, certain names and words of the language; for the mate could
be understood, while the captain
[Illustration]
had only one certain phrase, “now and again” with which he punctuated
everything loudly, so that I could barely understand him. The mate had
his own punctuation of frightful oaths and damnatory epithets, evidently
mere adornments of speech, for he was most gentle, a kindly and
good-natured cannibal, contrariwise to the surly captain; so that I was
glad that he had ventured up from the cutter. The girls had taken kindly
to the other brown skin, my servant, and were busy helping him make up
his list of words, whose sounds he wrote in Japanese, to my later
confusion, when he passed his dictionary to me. (Yet curiously enough,
in this first half day, we learned full a hundred words--almost all that
I have retained.) So we sat down and rested; the flies, attracted by the
bread-fruit, and occasional mosquitoes hovered about the openings; ants
crawled about on us--my princess had occasionally on her feet a black
bunch of flies, which she brushed away slowly--evidently she did not
feel them much--their skins are hard--“now and again,” as the captain
might say, a woman passed the openings of the hut, bare to the waist,
holding a child against her hip. Soon one of the girls, tired of
cross-leggedness, stretched her feet politely under a mat, pulled up for
the purpose (for it is not polite to sit otherwise than cross-legged).
The older women slept on the Samoan pillows at the further side, closed
in by palm curtains. All but one--who had worked all the time, her great
brown back turned toward us--engaged in smoothing and finishing a piece
of what we white men call _tappa_. “_Siapu_” I think they call it--the
inner bark of the paper mulberry, hammered out with a mallet, which in
so many of the islands has been long their cloth. She never stirred from
her work; as long as the light held, I saw before me this upright form,
strong as a man’s, smooth and round, and the quiet motion of the arms in
the shadow, made deeper by the sunlight on our side. Later, another
shower made us shut down more curtains, but we were safe and
comfortable, protected from sun and rain alike, in this most comfortable
and airy housing. Then Sifá began beating her thighs and moving her
shoulders coquettishly to her humming of a tune, and I thought that I
recognized the _siva_, the seated dance of the Samoans, about which I
had been told in Hawaii. Such a graceful creature could do nothing that
was not a picture, but there was a promise of something more, so that we
applauded and said _lelei_, “beautiful,” with the hope of a full
performance.
But the Princess said nothing; she smoked more and more, as every one
joined her, so that I foresaw that our small supply of cigars and
tobacco was doomed, especially as other damsels entered, and made more
ravages; girls more or less good looking, mostly heavier, one of them
called “Tuvale,” who knew bits and parcels of English such as _pilisi du
na iti mi_, _pilisi esikusi mi_, “Please do not eat me,” “Please excuse
me.” And one of the largest, leaning affectionately against my shoulder,
absorbed my silk handkerchief, and tied it around her neck--saying to
me, in her language, “Look how pretty it is!” Our matches and
match-boxes had long ago disappeared--most little things had left my
pockets, but had been replaced. In every way my fair and strong
companions seemed inclined to dispute an apparent preference for Uatea
and Sifá. Good-natured girls all (but one--the thief of
handerchiefs--who seemed to me jealous)--and we were certainly beamed
upon, as I never expect to be again. More rain outside brought on the
evening, as we took our last meal; the “chiefess” and the captain, who
again appeared sullenly out of the dark, eating after us; the captain
now, with an apology to us, appeared naked to the waist, a big heavy
mass of bronze, covered below with a gorgeous drapery of purple, and
yellow, and red. We lay more and more at ease, stretched out, the girls
prone, and occasionally giving one of us an affectionate pat; all but
Uatea who still preserved her usual reserve, and even tried hard to
substitute another ring for the one she had given me--as if her name on
it was too much for a first acquaintance. And occasionally in following
her face, the only one that seemed capable of complicated ideas, I asked
myself whether she was asking herself what equivalents her hospitality
would receive: for instinct told me that through her our gifts or our
payments should be made; even if it were all to go to others according
to barbaric custom. So seeing her rather laden with things, and having
had one experience of the excellence of a white silk handkerchief, I
offered her another, and wrote her name in the corner, to see her thank
me in her usual condescending way, and then toss it over to the old
woman who appeared occasionally--to my mind, her adviser and guardian,
for from time to time, “now and again,” she crept up, between us, like a
chaperon or duenna, to see that all was proper.
Then many of our girls disappeared with Sifá, whom we missed at the
moment and asked for over and over again. A light was brought and set
down upon the matting. Uatea slipped out between the hanging screens and
the pillar behind me, and slipped back again, rid of her upper garment
with a sort of _poncho_ or strip of cloth with opening for head,
patterned in lozenges of black, white, and red, that hung down her back
and chest, leaving arms and shoulders bare, and the sides of her body,
so that as she bent, the soft line that joins the breast to the
underarm, showed under the heavy folds. Then, in came our missing pet,
Sifá, with Tuvále and two others, into the penumbra of the lamp. They
were naked to the waist; over their tucked-up drapery hung brilliant
leaf-strips of light green, streaked with red; a few leaves girdled the
ankle; around Sifá’s neck, over her beautiful bosom, hung a long, narrow
garland of leaves, and on the others garlands of red fruit or long rows
of beads interlaced: every head was wreathed with green and red leaves,
and all and everything, leaves, brown flesh, glistened with perfumed
oil. From the small focus of the lamp, the light struck on the surface
of the leaves as upon some delicate fairy tinsel, and upon the forms of
the girls as if upon red bronze waxed. But no bronze has ever been
movable, and the perpetual ripple of light over every fold, muscle, and
dimple was the most complete theatrical lighting I have ever seen. Even
in the dark, streaks of light lit up the forms and revealed every
delicacy of motion.
So those lovers of form, the Greeks, must have looked, anointed and
crowned with garlands, and the so-called dance that we saw might not
have been misplaced far back in some classical antiquity. The girls sat
in a row before us, grave and collected, their beautiful legs curled
upon the lap as in East
[Illustration: SIFÁ DANCING THE SITTING SIVA]
Indian sculptures; and Sifá began a curious chant. As all sang with her
together, they moved their arms in various ways to the cadence and in
explanation of the song; and with the arms, now the waist and shoulders,
now the entire body, even to the feet, rising apparently upon the thighs
to the time of the music. Indeed, Sifá spoke with her whole tremulous
body undulating to the fingers--all in a rhythm, as the sea runs up and
down on the beach, and is never at rest, but seems to obey one general
line of curve. So she, and the others, turned to one side and stretched
out their arms, or crossed them, and passed them under the armpit and
pressed each other’s shoulders, and lifted fingers in some sort of tale,
and made gestures evident of meaning, or obscure, and swayed and turned;
and, most beautiful of all, stretched out long arms upon the mats, as if
swimming upon their sides, while all the time the slender waist swayed,
and the legs and thighs followed the rhythm through their muscles,
without being displaced.
I cannot describe it any better; of what use is it to say that it was
beautiful, and extraordinary, and that no motion of a western dancer but
would seem stiff beside such an ownership of the body? Merely as motion,
it must have been beautiful, for the fourth woman was old and not
beautiful, but she melted into the others, so that one only saw, as it
were, the lovely form of Sifá repeated by poorer reflections of her
motion in lesser light.
Meanwhile Uatea sat to one side of them, near me, and in front, one leg
stretched out, the other tucked under, beating time with a stick,
disdainful of it all, as poorly done, perhaps incorrectly, “_lelei_,”
“beautiful,” I said--“_leanga_,” she replied, with a curl of her lip,
hardly looking at the girls. Perhaps she should have led in person, as
the official maiden--and I still felt that something was not right. The
girls rose and came to sit beside us, while Uatea disappeared in the
darkness, behind the three masts crossed with curved beams, that
supported the centre of the roof. These, with the shining, polished
cocoanut bottles, filled with water, that hung from the beams, and the
rolls of mats and bark cloth which were placed upon them as upon
shelves, had served as a background or scenery to our theatre. Along all
the edges of the big house, in the darkness, were other visitors, and
guests, small children, boys and girls, neighbours, and even the two
gentle blackies, from Cannibal and Head Hunting isles, with white rings
in their noses, that made our crew. But I saw none of the splendid young
men, who, crowned with garlands, girdled with leaves like the Fauns and
Sylvans of the Greek play, had startled me over and over again, during
the day, with a great wonder that no one had told me of a rustic Greece
still alive somewhere, and still to be looked at. So that the old
statues and frescoes were no conventionality--and the
[Illustration: THE FLUTE PLAYER. SAMOA]
sailor, the missionary, and the beachcomber, were witnesses of things
that they did not see, because they had not read. And if one reads, does
he care to-day? Had I only known, years ago. Even now, when it is too
late, the memory of all that beauty which we call Greece, the one beauty
which is to outlast all that is alive, comes over me like a wave of
mist, softening and putting far away into fairyland all that I have been
looking at. From out of the darkness, as if from out of the shade of
antiquity, Uatea stepped out before us, naked to the waist, crowned with
leafage, garlands around her hips, a long staff like a sceptre in her
hand, and danced some heroic dance, against another girl, smaller than
she, as her adversary; it looked a mimicry of combat; the tall form, the
commanding gestures, the disdainful virginity of the village Diana,
challenging her companion to battle; something as beautiful and more
heroic than the Bacchanals that are enrolled on the Greek vases. The
girl was in her true element and meaning, more than she could have been
in the previous _sivá_ dance; only an occasional touching of the knees
together detracted from the beauty of the movements. I could scarcely
notice the other dancer, nor the third one, an old woman (who
represented, apparently, a suppliant), for fear of losing a parcel of a
picture that I shall never see again, certainly never with such
freshness of impression.