overhead sang the trade-wind in the palms and giant trees, and the
sunset died away and the mysterious glooms around became deeper
mysteries. Hot and dejected I followed those stalwart bare men, twenty
behind me and twenty in front, as their naked feet hurried in single
file toward the terrible “place” where that “thing” was to be cooked!
And I, the hired musician, trembled as the hot breath of the tall savage
just behind me blew down my neck as he dragged his burden along on that
sweltering hot night. I have played the violin in many ball-rooms and
fêtes since that long-ago night, but never once have I played without
that terrible picture (which I am now going to tell you of) rising
before my eyes. It seemed miles to me before they stopped. Great heaven,
they were dressed up for the occasion! Some of them were smeared with
whitish stuff, and three of them—women!—were got up like idols. One was
a young and attractive-looking type of South Sea womanhood. She walked
two ahead of me and I remember her well as she did not look so fierce as
the others and the thought came to my mind that I could look to her for
sympathy if they wanted to kill me. Women are women the world over, and
down in my heart I blessed the soft curves of that female frame as she
moved along in front of me, turning her head from time to time to gaze
steadfastly into my eyes. Several times I thought of making a sudden
dive into the forest. If I had done so I feel quite sure the reader
would never have read this autobiography.
In between two great plateaux they stopped and the chief that led them
gave two bird-like calls among the hills, and presently the bush parted
gently and out poked frizzly heads. More of them to attend that feast!
One was a terrible-looking fellow; his head looked like a huge coco-nut
with fat lips on it and a tuft of quills on the top. He glared at me and
spoke viciously to the others. How my heart thumped! I felt my face turn
grey and my lips go dry as I gave a sickly smile to that awful man to
let him see that I was perfectly agreeable to all that they were doing
and to all that they might do, and in an inspiration I started to play
the fiddle and laughed hysterically. I do not mind telling you that I
was in a terrible funk and to this day I do not like the look of men who
have coco-nut-shaped heads, so horrified and cowed was I by that chief
who muttered to the others and swayed his club to and fro and several
times half lifted it as though to brain me! And all this I am telling
you is so terribly true that I don’t know how to proceed with all that
happened, whether to describe my feelings or what my eyes saw. But
there, whoever you are, you can place yourself in my predicament, and if
you have a good imagination feel a faint echo of my despair of that
night of long ago.
Overhead hung the bright moon in the vault of night as the busy hands of
that fierce tribe gathered and piled up the wood fire as in the hot
embers frizzled the “Long Pig.” There are some details of cooking odours
which I must leave out. I cannot describe all, it was too hellish to
describe. Round and round that terrible fire they whirled like some
ghastly nightmare of the dead in hell, lifting their chins skywards and
chanting thanksgiving to their ancient gods, and I heard the rattle of
the threaded shells that adorned the bodies of the wild women as they
too sang in shrill voices. I played away as fast as I could on my violin
the repeated intervals of those minor strains, keeping time to that
terrible dance, the perspiration pouring down my face as I tore away at
the only two strings on my instrument. There they were, a ring of
swarthy faces around me, as they suddenly stopped all hushed as the
nightbird in the forest said “Wail-wail-tu-tu-wail-wail,” and they
started on their haunches to devour their “meal.” And as the forest wind
blew the dying, flickering firelight over their faces I thought I would
presently awake from some ghastly nightmare, so terrible was the sight
and so unreal-looking were the surroundings conjured up in my own brain
by the knowledge of what that big dish joint consisted of, for they
themselves as they sat there swallowing away looked quite innocent and
peaceful, and they even offered up a prayer to their gods in devoted
thanks for that supper, just the very same as tiny white children who
put their hands together and thank God for their feast of the poor
murdered four-legged creatures of the field. I pretended to join in the
prayer and muttered out some noises, but I could not under any pretence
eat. I really think that I would have died sooner than eat of that
joint. How I got out of it I don’t know, but I did, and I put down my
escape to the quantity of diners at the festivity and their greediness.
As I sat there in that den of the forest I thought of my people in
England, in a respectable London suburban home, calmly going about their
household duties, singing and playing the piano, and the afternoon “At
Home,” small talk and whispering, while I sat on a little dead tree
stump in the South Sea Isle with my heart thumping like a funeral march
drum, as about fifty naked savage cannibals gnawed the bones of that
inhuman and yet human feast! I thought of my father’s offices in London,
as he sat editing the adventurous books for that publishing house
wherefrom sprang out to the hands of the schoolboys the _Highway Men_,
_Red Indians_ and _Spring Heeled Jacks_, etc.,[2] that fired the heads
of the boys of my schooldays with the mad adventurous spirit to go to
sea and seek adventure in far lands, and I cursed these books, for it
was through them that I was sitting there, wondering every moment if
those terrible men would suddenly take a fancy to me, knock my skull in
and prepare me for the next meal!
Footnote 2:
Work which was very distasteful to my father. He, having a refined
literary taste, was a critic of poetry, and wrote several critical
works, including _Shelley and his Writings_.
But no such thing happened. As soon as they had finished they all crept
silently away into the forest to their several homes to sleep off the
effects of that orgy. They were men of the interior, and even the true
Samoans do not agree with cannibalism, but the Island was in a fever
then; they had been prepared for war some time before and those
cannibals had come over from some other group.
I took my first opportunity and leapt away into the wooded country and
arrived next day at Hornecastle’s hut. I kept my mouth closed, for had I
told of that terrible night they would have known that I had split and I
should have been doomed; and so I followed the good old proverb that “a
still tongue shows a wise head.” And I was pleased that I did hold my
tongue, for while I was drinking in a saloon in Apia with Hornecastle,
the night following my terrible fright and dread of being eaten, a
German started cursing and told us how he had hung a prize pig up in his
store and, when he went in the morning, to cut it up for joints, he
found it missing; the natives had stolen it, and crept into the forest,
and probably roasted it and had a glorious feast, and as I listened to
his details I started to wonder if the load that my friends of the night
before had dragged through the forest to the midnight feast could have
possibly been his stolen pig!—and all the horror of that secret feast
the outcome of my own suspicions. I said nothing, and to this day my
suspicions each way are equal.
Thank goodness that under the influence of education and the work of the
missionaries the terrible appetite which I have just described has long
since died out. The white man in the South Seas has done that much good.
You must remember that I am writing under the still clinging atmosphere
that my mind inhaled when I was a lad, of an age when we are apt to look
upon those who are mediators with the Supreme as men who are, or should
be, very different to other men, and consequently their natural failings
were greatly magnified to my onlooking eyes. And so my remarks and
musings, considered from this aspect, do not treat harshly the men who
went out to the South Seas to reform their brethren, but simply show the
futility, the uselessness of mortals attempting to reform, to better the
spiritual conditions of those who are born of Mother Earth as they
themselves are. After all we are all of us only like little children
clambering and crying at the skirts of creation, some with white faces
and some with black faces, and if the black-faced children, in their
innocence, laugh and cry over their little idol-dolls and are pleased
with them, why should the white-faced children try to steal their dolls
and smash the lot up and make them unhappy by offering them an idol in
exchange which they cannot see and which is too big for them to carry if
they could see it. And moreover, what more do the white children know
than the black ones?
I knew a Samoan chief who was a kind of philosopher of his race, and I
was much struck by his remarks and wisdom as he used to sit squatting by
his hut and talk to me of the old days. He was not a true-blooded
Samoan, but came from the Marquesan group and had once been a king
before the heavy tramp of civilisation came his way. He would tell me
wonderful tales of his time, many of which, when I think of them now,
seem almost incredible, but they were true enough and some day I intend
to devote my time to writing them down for publication. They alluded a
good deal to cannibalistic orgies and terrible battles for the love of
the women of those times, wild dances round their monstrous idols, idols
that sang and voiced forth terrible prophecies, that made the warriors
of those Isles do most outrageous things to their enemies and to their
children and daughters. As he sat there squatting and told me many
things I would turn “all chicken flesh,” as people say, and watch his
grim wrinkled face and twinkling eyes reveal the smouldering passions
that flamed in the dark age of his time. Under the influence of that old
king’s memories I wrote the following poem just as he would have written
it, and approved of it too if he could only see it; in fact it is just
what he really said, word for word, but I have rhymed it in my own way.
Let him shout on, pass me the full nut-bowl,
I’m old, would I trust to his wretched creed?
I, with my fifty gods, that soothe my soul,
Must fail them all—trust to one god—indeed!
Look you—I’m wise, a dead white man is dead
Should he offend his Heav’n while ’neath the sun—And
we?—well, at the worst, when our soul’s fled,
If fifty fail, we’ve still his Mighty One!
He’d steal our souls, curse him, his lying race
Claimed my blue seas and this my ancient isle!
Remember well do I that first white face
That blessed my head, with hand t’wards heaven did smile,
Pah! I believed that grin!—had I known then
Those eyes gazed from the spirit heart of Hell
I’d slain him!—faith, ’tis true these strange white men
One virtue have when cooked—yes, they eat well!
Pass me the bowl, time ’tis to grieve, at most,
When in sick dying eyes the last stars sleep.
We’ve won our battles too, enjoyed the roast
Of what sweet foes! ’tis even so we reap
Sweet vengeance! They, those prating white men skunks,
Our wives defiled, our land made one vile hell;
Cursed missionaries, and traders on night-drunks—
Ah! I’ve a tale, when dead, their God to tell!
He’s dead now and the day is not far off when the whole race will have
passed away before the tramp of the Western whites, vanished for ever,
for all men know that as soon as the white race creeps into the
household of the dark race of the South Seas race extinction commences,
and so the Fijians, Marquesans, Samoans, Tongans, indeed all the
original inhabitants of the South Sea Isles, are diminishing before the
civilisation and Christianising work of the whites, which means
annihilation of the brown race and brings before us the inevitable
thought that it would have been better for the race and its posterity
for the Islanders to have eaten all the whites instead of cohabiting
with them. But it is too late, they are now completely in the power of
the “great white hand,” as I heard an old chief express it, and soon the
half-caste of Chinese, niggers, exconvicts and the ne’er-do-wells of the
Australian cities will tramp over the graves of the dead men and women
who sang by forest huts and danced by the glimmering fires in the days
when the white surfs ran up the shores singing into foams and silence.
Personally I do not believe that the drastic change to other conditions
has anything to do with the diminishing population of the varied races
of the South Seas, and all men who have experienced life in those
clinics know that rum and syphilis, putrefying the milk of the South Sea
babies, and the preventives to motherhood are the sole causes of race
extinction, and these causes have of course been introduced by the
whites and all the other semi-civilised races. I am simply stating facts
as I know them, and I have not the slightest idea in my mind that
railing against those evils will better things; indeed to attempt to
better the conditions might lead to more disastrous complications, like
the sailor who went down into the hold of the ship’s magazine to find
where the leak was, struck a match and blew the ship up. And so things
are best left as they are; as useless to attempt to change them as to
seek to revise a man’s temperament. I myself have made many attempts to
change my own temperament, but I think till I die I shall dream and
dream and always be under the control of that unfortunate impulse that
does the very thing which at that particular time I should not have
done. How often do we embrace with affectionate trust our enemy and
scorn the advice of our best friend! And so the world jogs along, always
busy righting the wrongs of life and more often than enough writing
beautiful epitaphs on the tombstones of men who cannot read them.
Such is my experience of life, and I have been obliged to be pretty
observant and have not travelled this world over without noticing the
special points that influence existence. It is really wonderful how
observant some men are and how unobservant other men are. I knew a man
who had done nothing but roam his life away over the seven seas to the
mountain peaks of the world. “What is Rio like?” I said, “and the
Amazon?” “All right I guess,” he answered. “What’s it like in Pekin?” I
ventured to ask again. “All right I guess,” was the growled reply as he
squirted out of his grizzly mouth an eggcupful of tobacco juice. I
probed him all ways to get a glimpse of his views of the world and
experience, but never got him beyond the “all right I guess.” Another
time I came across a young fellow who had passed through the same places
like a race-horse. “What’s Rio like?” I asked him. At once his face lit
up and we had to hold him down as the flood of description he poured
into our ears overwhelmed us. So you see it’s a matter of the observant
temperament that makes the tale-teller and it’s ridiculous for anyone to
think that a man has to camp on the top of a mountain or up a palm-tree
for twenty years before he can describe the surrounding country or the
height and character of the tree. Nature is very easy to scan and
appreciate; it’s only men and women that it takes years to understand
thoroughly, and then you may be wrong.
[Illustration: PREPARING COPRA]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
X
A Cockney and his Fijian Bride—Nature’s Lady—South Sea Dress
Fashions—Idol Worship
AFTER the exciting experience which I related to you in the last
chapter, when I think I was within an ace of being eaten by that
cannibal tribe, I started off cruising with “Castle” and my friend the
Danish poet. We made a happy trio and many were the subsequent
adventures which we had together. Hornecastle hired a sloop and made a
good bit of cash at times by trading around the Islands, and I was
delighted to go off with him. It took us several days to reach the Fiji
Islands. I shall never forget the times we had together and the strange
people we came in contact with. The Fijians struck me as a very
different type of people from the Samoans, who are much more
intellectual-looking, and when Hornecastle and the poet and I went
ashore we soon found plenty to interest us. There were plenty of whites
there, half-castes and Indians who worked on the plantations.
I chummed in with an Australian fellow and we went up towards the
mountains and saw the Fijians in their homesteads. They were neat little
thatched homes; some of them shaped something like a haystack as seen in
English fields. I and my friend, who could speak a bit of their
language, went inside one or two of these and watched them squatting on
their haunches at dinner eating steaming stuff out of earthen bowls,
using their fingers as knives and forks. I made friendly signs to a
Fijian mother and her eyes quickly brightened up as I took her baby in
my arms and examined its tiny wild face, its jewel-like eyes twinkling
with fright. I never saw such pretty babies anywhere in the world as the
mites of the South Seas. Their little plump bodies are as soft as velvet
and the expression on the face like that of a baby kitten, and the
mothers are as proud as Punch when you admire and kiss them, as I have
often done, but you have to be careful that you kiss them all—I mean the
babies—because mothers are just as jealous in the South Seas as in the
Isles of the English seas. And so after I had committed myself and held
up that little Fijian kid, I went from one mother to the other and did
likewise to their offspring, and those dark naked mothers (for they were
only dressed in a loin-cloth) all admired me and even the eyes of the
men looked pleased as they offered me food, and the native youths
clambered around us as we crept out of the door, and tried to steal the
buttons off our clothes. They are all terrible thieves and the thieving
instinct is so strong in all of the Islanders of the Pacific that they
only place half the value on goods which are given them and jealously
guard and over-estimate all that they steal.
I shall always remember vividly that ramble in the mountains of Fiji,
because we came across a white man who had married a native woman. I
suppose the marriage was something after the wild bird marriage act,
anyway there he was sitting by his dusky beauty on the slopes that
rolled seaward, quite as proud as any English father of his two tiny
half-caste brats. His wife, dressed only in an old red flannel skirt,
smoked a cigarette by the hut door, and every now and again gave the
little whitish beggars as they romped and quarrelled with each other a
terrible spank. I never saw children turn head over heels as those two
nippers did; over and over they went down the slope like two big brown
balls, uncurled themselves and came racing up to us again and then off
once more as I stood sweltering under the tropic sun fanning myself with
a large palm leaf speaking to their proud father. He was a Cockney from
Mile End! You can imagine my astonishment when he asked all sorts of
questions about my own birthplace and sighed as he said, “The dear old
smoke,” meaning London Town. From the little that he let out I could see
that he had previously been to sea as a coal trimmer on a tramp steamer.
He was a man of about thirty-eight to forty years of age, but looked
older through growing a scrubby beard, possibly to disguise himself from
the English police! He seemed happy enough sitting there under his big
umbrella hat, with white pants to his waist, and beyond those two
articles of dress quite bare and cool.
His wife could speak English very well indeed and I must say I admired
her husband’s taste, for though she was the descendant of South Sea
savages, cannibals, she would have put nearly all the Mile End women of
his native land into the shade, and the West End ones too! She had a
fine head for a woman, a voluptuous soft curved body, earnest dark eyes,
darkish high-bunched hair, and a freedom of manner and modest exposure
of the upper part of her body and lower limbs which was very
fascinating. She would have created an enormous sensation could she have
been transported just as she was to Piccadilly or the Strand. I am quite
sure that the Mile End Cockney would have been envied and would have had
to keep his weather-eye open too, as the Christians of London Town came
into contact with the innocence of the heathen South Seas.
“You come England?” she said, as I spoke to her husband. “Yes,” I said,
“same country,” and she smiled with approval that such as I should have
had the honour of hailing from the same country as her children’s
father, and going into the hut brought my chum and me both a drink. I
don’t know what it was, but English beer tastes like poison compared to
it. I have been to many afternoon teas since that time, but never have I
had a sweeter hostess or seen softer eyes, and all those things that
make Nature’s lady. I have heard a lot about “Nature’s gentleman,” but I
tell you this, Nature’s lady is nicer to meet and as rare, and I’ve
found her just as she was turned out of the Garden of Eden and just as
beautiful and innocent, as she sat on that little stump, bare as at her
birth, excepting for her lava-lava, with her pretty one-month-old baby’s
tiny mouth toiling away at her breast for all it was worth. As the
sunset faded out seaward the Cockney sailor, his “savage” wife, my chum
and I sang all together, to the sailor’s accordion, “The Old Rustic
Bridge by the Mill,” also “White Wings they never Grow Weary,” and I can
never hear those songs now but I see that scene again, the half-dressed
sailor, my freckled lanky Australian chum, the Fijian beauty, singing at
the top of her voice on the Pacific slope by the Island hut.
We only stayed at that Island two days and then sailed off to Lakemba
and other Isles of the same group. We carried Hornecastle on board and
dropped him in his bunk when we left Suva. I do not know what he had
been drinking, but it made him pretty bad. We set the jibs and big
mutton sail and the trade-wind took us along at a splendid pace. I was
the second in command, and though she was a rotten old tub I was the
proudest officer on the high seas! Hornecastle kept me awake that night.
The poet and I got a bit worried; we thought he’d got a touch of the
d.t.’s, and from what I could gather by his delirious mutterings he’d
actually got married during that short stay and was frightened out of
his life of being pursued by his irate bride!
Next day he was on his legs again and looked better than ever. I tried
to pump him and find out what he had done to get so drunk and look so
worried, but he would not budge an inch, and to all my innocent queries
only told me to mind my own business and look after the wind!
I cannot for the life of me tell you the correct name of the Isle we
next called at; they all had native names and I never could understand
half of them. I think it was called Mulooka; anyway it was a fine place
and well wooded. I shall never forget the beautiful sight of the
forest-clad country and the intense loneliness of the wooded depths away
from the tracks. I stood in the wood alone and gazed up at the branches
overhead. They were covered with big breathing blossoms that had beaks
on them; they were big fat parrot-birds chuckling away to themselves as
the trade-wind swept across, blew the top branches aside and revealed
the deep blue skies. I turned round and looked west; there through the
trees far away stretched the dark blue crinkling Pacific, dotted here
and there with native canoes, paddled along swiftly from shore to shore.
On the beach far below were groups of dark men and half-castes by our
little sloop.
I must tell you of the fashions of those times. Some of the chiefs wore
a dirty white collar only, and a waistbelt wherein was stuck an
old-fashioned revolver and rusty knife. Another stood on the shore as
proud as possible attired in a waistcoat. Men and women seemed to vie
with one another at making themselves look ridiculous and outrageous
too. Of course, most people were amused by them. I shall never forget
how the Dane laughed; he was a real good fellow that poet. I laughed
too, but not like him; I was getting a bit used to sights of that kind.
As for Hornecastle he simply looked on and yawned. Finding that he was
staying the night and did not intend leaving till late the next day, I
made up my mind to have a look round and go into the interior, so off I
went alone. I am constituted that way and am never so happy as when I am
completely alone with no one to ply me with questions or tell me their
experiences while I am keenly interested in my own at that precise
moment.