SOCIAL CUSTOMS
THE first time that I went to a high-rank social entertainment of
theirs, I broke into a hearty laugh at the spectacle as I entered; but I
came to regret my imprudence. There were the select of the marble city,
including the royal family, turning Catherine-wheels round the room in
pairs to the sound of quick music; even fat old dowagers with bombasted
breeches on kept up the frantic exercise, the perspiration pouring from
their brows. It was a large room lit with hundreds of lamps, and round
it again and again each pair had to roll, and as I looked at the stately
nobles and dames head downwards my thoughts turned back to the street
arabs of my native land and their cry, “Stand on my head for a penny,”
and I burst again into a laugh. My guide and introducer ignored the
first; but at the second he turned round on me with questioning
surprise. I was soon sobered, and turned away to smother my amusement.
Another friend came up to greet me, and he at once burst into loud
admiration of the scene. “Was it not noble? It was the finest flower of
all art to see the most beautiful and high-blooded of men and women
letting their souls forth in harmony, glowing with colour and life;
surely this was the sight of sights; it was the very poetry of motion;
what grace! what beauty and roundedness of calf! was it not joy to see
the fair twinkling feet in the air, and in a moment so the solid floor
again, pair with pair? It was indeed the music of the spheres, this
revolution of the extremities round the centre of gravity; it was a copy
of the motion of the great universe, sex with sex in unison pointing
alternate head and feet to the zenith. Where else in the world could
such a spectacle be seen?”
I acknowledged with as much gravity as I could command that I had never
seen anything like it. And I must concede that after a time the whirl of
bodies, as the music quickened, half intoxicated my judgment and made me
almost long to join in the general somersault; the rhythm of so many
feet and heads flying through the air fired my blood to fever heat, and
as I looked on, my sense of the absurdity of the scene entirely
disappeared; I became a partisan of the exercise and could see nothing
but grace and harmony in it. I felt almost ashamed of my burst of
laughter, though afterwards, when I retired to my hostelry and cooled
down, the sense of incongruity returned, and I laughed heartily at the
memory of haughty aristocrats standing on their heads, and the legs of
shrivelled dowagers revolving like spokes of a wheel.
I found on inquiry that a considerable portion of their youth was spent
in acquiring ease at this indoor exercise. Women especially gave the
best of their days and nights to “fallallaroo,” the name by which they
called this art of rhythmical gyration, for they found it was their best
means of ingratiating themselves with the promising young men; and most
of the resolves to marry were formed in the meetings for fallallaroo. It
was said by some physicians to produce certain common diseases, but the
gilded society held that it was productive of health; they knew so from
their own experience. Even the old men and women with grey hair and
shrunken shanks kept up the exhausting exercise, for to leave it off was
universally considered the sign of approaching age. It had been
introduced by a monarch who had suffered from vertigo and St. Vitus’s
dance, but tradition had hallowed it and poetry had surrounded it with
romance. And now it would have been like tearing up the roots of society
to abolish it.
Another custom that was considered almost sacred tried my nerves still
more. The men usually wore a bamboo behind their right ear, and whenever
they were at leisure, and as often when they were not, they would take
it out and fill one end with the dried leaves of a vile plant called
kooannoo, not unlike a coprosma, and in smell pure assafœtida, and
lighting it, stick the other end into one of their nostrils. Every
expiration of breath sent forth a cloud of smoke and every inspiration
drew some of it in; but they had grown so expert in the practice that
they could always prevent it getting into the mouth or the throat, even
when they were talking vigorously. The smell was something intolerable,
and reminded me of burning heaps of rubbish and manure. In their more
candid moods and when they were not themselves engaged in the practice,
they acknowledged the likeness, especially on going into the lower
quarters of the city; for there, in order to produce the fashionable
flavour and smell, the kooannoo-sellers were accustomed to steep broad
leaves in mire for a time, and drying them make them up as kooannoo;
nay, some of the poor, when they could not afford to buy the leaf,
openly stuck pieces of dried earth into their bamboos and lit them, and
many of them adhered to the practice when they were better off,
preferring the flavour and smell to those of the fashionable leaf.
I was surprised at the agonies the young men underwent in learning the
loathsome habit, such nausea and pallor and misery overspread their
whole frame; and it was only by the loss of all delicacy of smell and
taste that they at last mastered the loathing and qualms; no refined
senses could live within reach of the smoke. It was undoubtedly one of
the acts of heroic stoicism on the part of the nation; they assured me
that it was one of their disciplines for the subjugation of the body.
But it acted, as most of their disciplines did, in an altruistic way; it
had destroyed the fine sensations of the kooannooers themselves; but
their neighbours, who had not learned, and especially women, suffered
daily the agonies of disgust. And the agonies were undergone without a
murmur, nay, with a smile upon the face, for the practice was almost
universal amongst the highest class and in the royal family.
The origin was difficult to get at. But it seems that in some past age a
number of the younger sons of aristocratic families had gone out in
search of adventure; and during a period of great straits they had
learned from a tribe of savages to eat and burn kooannoo in order to
subdue the pangs of hunger. When they got food at last, they felt proud
of an accomplishment that they had learned with so much agony, and, as
they had ceased to suffer from it, they brought it home with them
amongst other practices copied from the wild men. Their wonderful
adventures made them the fashion; and all the youths set themselves to
copy this, the most striking of their habits, counting it as the truest
mark of manliness and courage. Having acquired it with so much suffering
and difficulty, they would not easily give it up when it had ceased to
disgust them. When kooannooing, they could sit silent with dignity
whilst others talked; and it gave them a certain semblance of
superiority to others, as they kept the red in their cheeks whilst
others around who did not use the bamboo grew pale and sick. They felt
masterful and heroic as they kooannooed, like the voyager who can resist
the approach of sea-sickness when his fellows succumb. So the habit
carried with it a certain overbearing rudeness and want of consideration
for others. Generation after generation of youth had come to count it as
the distinctive mark of manhood; and having learned the practice with
great suffering they could not forego the sense of triumph over those
who had not learned it; they were the braves of the nation; not to
bamboo was a sign of womanliness and delicacy of feeling; and men who
indulged such refinement and weakness ought to be disciplined along with
the women; they were intolerant with their fine sensations; the world
would not be worth living in if they had their way; it was time
something was done to bring them into order. And these kooannooers felt
most heroic and manly as they followed their loathsome practice. And
most of the women endured their stinking breath and clothes and the
agonies of nausea and headache in silence, or rather with the pretence
that the habit was most delightful. There was something in what they
said, that it soothed the men and put them into better humour; for when
a kooannooer had a bamboo in his nose he wore a self-complacent smile;
he felt manly and superior without the expenditure of any effort; his
vanity was flattered. Of course a number who did not bamboo showed that
the leaf acted as a poison and slowly sapped the health. But scientific
kooannooers replied that small doses of the poison killed nothing but
the germs of disease. They bambooed for the good of the public; they
were the national sanitarians and fumigators. It showed how patriotic
they were, when they persevered in the practice, though they knew that
it tended to destroy the germ of manners as well as of diseases. These
kooannooers were the most self-denying of philanthropists.
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